He aimed for the sound and it wasn’t easy. The place was a complex of dimly lit chambers, interlinked, set in a chain from the entrance, which was, Costa suspected, just one of many, eaten into the hill like giant rat holes. The site should have been on Randolph Kirk’s list. Maybe it was and Regina Morrison just hadn’t got to hear of it. Or perhaps, if it was Kirk’s most private sanctum, his holy of holies, he kept it private for his own good reasons.
Costa passed through four small chambers, each barely lit by a single bulb dangling from a wire in the centre, just like at Ostia. In the shadows he could make out more rooms and corridors, stretching into the gloom. The place was a subterranean labyrinth, an ancient maze cut into the rock. He wished now he’d waited for back-up. He wished he could hear what the man in the darkness was saying.
He tried to picture what lay ahead of him but it was impossible. When he thought he was heading for the sound, he would turn a corner and find himself floundering in an impenetrable darkness. After a while he couldn’t work out which way was forward, which back. His legs dragged across the rough stone floor. His head hurt. More than once he tripped, and was aware of the noise he made. The distant voices rolled incomprehensibly around him from every direction.
Then he ducked to stumble through a low opening and found himself dazzled by the intensity of what lay beyond.
Three bulbs dangled from this ceiling, burning like miniature yellow suns. On the rock walls around him, plastered everywhere, covering each other like an overlapping skin of living images, were colour photographs, all of the same two faces in the same two poses: Suzi Julius, happy and smiling, bright blonde hair waving around her face, and Eleanor Jamieson, this photo slightly faded from the years, still shocking in its similarity. They could have been sisters, he thought, not for the first time. No wonder Kirk saw her and began to remember.
He turned around, feeling giddy, wondering where to look next, where to go, clutching for the gun instinctively, feeling his hand wander to the wrong places.
“Oh, Jesus,” said a frightened female voice floating out of the darkness. Then the breathy words faded, were replaced by the sound of something sweeping through the air.
Nic Costa felt an agonizing pain crash into the back of his skull. He was aware of falling, still dazzled by the bright intensity of the room. Then darkness.
Liberalia
SOMETHING STIRRED AT THE BACK OF TERESA LUPO’S MIND, rumbling around the darker corners of her sleep, buzzing, shifting position, now near, now far. She swore, felt her heavy eyelids start to stir, then rolled awake at her desk in the morgue, just in time to see an equally sleepy honeybee lurch through the air then head off back to the open window.
It was morning. A warm spring morning, just after seven. The city was already alive beyond the window, cars and people, sounds so familiar, so normal that it took her a moment to remember this was no ordinary day.
She’d called in help, from the carabinieri and the health department, from anywhere she could think of, old, retired colleagues, med students looking for some experience. For the moment it had been a question of coping rather than discovering, filing material as she thought of it. Then, sometime after three, she’d placed her head on the desk and fallen fast asleep. Silvio Di Capua had had similar ideas. He was still curled up in a crumpled, foetal heap on the floor in the corner of the morgue. A couple of admin people, only one of whom she recognized, were busy with paperwork. A bunch of medic types were working at the tables: the little accountant had just reached his place in the queue. Barbara Martelli’s father was next.
“Any more signed up for the ride?” she asked the admin men.
“No.”
“Thank God for that.” She wasn’t sure she could cope with another damned corpse. She wasn’t sure she could cope with the ones she’d got. Her nose felt as if someone had jammed a couple of wads of leaky cotton wool up each nostril. Her throat was like sandpaper. Sweat soaked her hair. Teresa Lupo looked a mess. She knew it and she didn’t care.
Then a figure came through the door, Gianni Peroni, so fresh and alert it was unnatural.
He walked over and peered into her eyes, curious, a little judgemental perhaps.
“What drugs are you on that make you so bright and chirpy?” she asked. “And do you have any for me?”
“Let me buy you a coffee. Outside this place. By the way, have you seen Nic?”
“No…” The question puzzled her. She’d almost forgotten she belonged to a world beyond those shining tables.
“Come,” he said, and took her weary arm then led her down the corridor, out into the waking morning.
It was the beginning of a beautiful day. She could even hear birdsong. Or perhaps, she thought, her mind had some preternatural acuity after the recent shocks. Her head didn’t feel right. It hadn’t for a while. Something was different after the sleep, though. She felt exhausted, drained, physically and mentally. But there was a measure of control inside this state too, and that was welcome.
Peroni led her to the café around the corner, ordered two big black coffees, stirred some sugar sludge from the glass on the counter into his cup, then did the same for hers.
“When you work vice,” he said, “you come to know about getting through the night. You get to like it after a while. The world’s more honest then somehow. People don’t have to look you in the face when they’re lying. You get to know about the value of coffee too. Here…”
He held up his cup and, instinctively, she clipped it with hers.
“What do you want?” she asked.
“Tidings of joy. Information. Enlightenment. For one thing, I’d like to know who Professor Randolph Kirk phoned to start all this crap.”
“Nic asked me that too,” she said. “Tell you what. I’ll ask old Randolph when I get back.”
“You do that. Any further gems for me?”
“Stand in the queue. It’s a long one. How’s Falcone doing? How’s that woman of his?”
He made a tilting motion with his hand. “She’s still in intensive. She’ll pull through. That woman’s made of stone. As for Leo, I dunno. He’s not looking lovelorn anymore. Maybe that pisses him off too. Who cares? We got work to do. Big work, Teresa, maybe bigger than even we can handle. We need to get somewhere fast. So you see why I’m here? We need all the help we can get.”
She found herself thinking seriously about Gianni Peroni for the first time. He wasn’t the arrogant, bent vice creep she’d first thought. Underneath that curiously ugly exterior he possessed some stiff, unbending spine of integrity that made his disgrace all the more poignant, all the less understandable. Falcone and Nic Costa were lucky to have him around, although she wondered how much the older man appreciated that.
“When are you going back to your old job?”
Peroni winked. It was a comic gesture. She almost found the energy to laugh. “Between you and me? As soon as this shit is over. I bumped into my old boss in the corridor during the night. They drafted him in too. Nice guy. Understanding guy. He had some warm words for old Gianni. Thank Christ. This detective stuff is not my scene. It brings you into contact with the wrong sort of people.”
She waited a moment to make sure she understood that last statement correctly. “And vice doesn’t?”
“In vice you just meet people who want to mess with your body. These guys are forever hanging around those who just can’t wait to mess with your head.” She didn’t say anything. “But then I think you know that already.”