A Season for the Dead (18 page)

30

Alicia Vaccarini spent the night tethered to the chair against the upright wooden beam in the curious octagonal chamber where Gino Fosse had left her. There had been a sound outside only once; the noise of a drunk going home, singing. She was gagged. She was tied. There was nothing she could do, nothing she could hope to achieve. He would return soon, she knew, and then there would be no more delays. This madman believed, in some demented way, that he was doing her a favor. The manner of his “apology” left her full of dread. There was no avenue for persuasion, no prospect of clemency. He was set upon this path, and was distraught that something—something on the television—had disturbed his well-planned sequence of events.

She had slept, for how long she could only guess, and woke when daylight began to filter into the room through the narrow, slitted windows. There had to be people nearby. There had to be someone who would come, she believed. Even in August, when the heat had depleted the streets, this was still Rome. The city was alive beyond these crumbling medieval walls. The guards would soon be opening up offices in the Parliament building. Secretaries would be delivering mail. Staff at the small neighborhood café where she drank her morning
macchiato
would be wondering why she was absent. Alicia Vaccarini was a woman of habit. There would be those who noticed her absence. By lunchtime, she believed, someone would question it. She had been scheduled to attend a reception for a visiting party of Brussels bureaucrats at ten. It was unknown for her to miss such events. She was diligent. She had nothing else to do.

So by two, three at the latest, there would be someone checking her apartment, discovering she had never returned home the previous day. The police would be called in. Questions would be asked, with no ready answers.

She tried to convince herself there was hope in this slow, muddled series of small discoveries. It was impossible. He would be back and when he did he would achieve what he wished. He would be anxious to be done with her and move on to whatever came next.

The book was still open on the floor. She refused to look at it. The patron saint of musicians deserved to be a brighter, happier figure, she decided. Not a white marble corpse lying in a shroud with three visible wounds on her neck. Alicia Vaccarini had only one, and it was shallow and ceased to bleed soon after Fosse had raced from the room. One wound was enough, she thought, and closed her eyes, wondering if there was somewhere, within her, the ability to pray. It was a time for desperate measures.

Then there was a sound from downstairs. Her heart leapt in hope. She heard footsteps rising. Familiar ones: determined and heavy. She closed her eyes and wept.

When she opened them, Gino Fosse was standing in front of her looking confused. He was wearing a checked shirt smeared with dirt and torn at the front. His mouth hung open as he gasped for breath. She was unable to decide whether his odd appearance was good or bad. Then he started to speak, a rapid-fire babble of insane nonsense about the Church and the perfidy of women. The phone rang. It was on a sideboard next to the window opposite her. He walked over and picked it up. She listened intently. There was a shade of subservience in his voice. It was the first time she had ever heard it. He had seemed so confident, so capable of acting individually.

He went quiet, his head bent. This was bad news. Alicia closed her eyes for a moment and prayed someone would come, that soon there would be the sound of the police beating down the doors to this odd monastic prison.

“No,” he said insistently into the phone. “It’s impossible. You can’t ask that. Where will I go?”

He fell silent then, listening. His shoulders hunched over and his face contorted with grief and fury. But he would do as he was told, Alicia realized, and there, perhaps, lay salvation.

“Shit!”
he yelled.

He threw the phone to the floor. He kicked it across the carpet. She watched as he dashed around the tiny, airless room, snatching at curtains, ornaments, anything he could lay his hands on, smashing these objects to the ground, screaming obscene nonsense.

They’ll hear,
she thought. Someone knows. Someone is coming.
And they will hear.

He went behind her. She shuddered. Two clammy hands came around her neck and clasped her cheeks. He turned her head to look up at the disgusting, frightening photographs arrayed on the ceiling, photographs she had avoided up to that point. All were black and white. The women in them looked back, their faces impassive, as if they didn’t care or wanted to wish themselves out of the camera’s eye.

“See what happens,” he murmured into her ear, half crying. “See what’s done and can’t be undone.”

Her bladder failed and a warm stinging stream ran down her legs. The hands moved again. The gag relaxed. He untied the knot at the back of her head and let the gag fall from her. Alicia Vaccarini moaned, pleased she could breathe easily again.

Then he came back around her once more and she looked into his eyes. He’d altered again. This was a different person, one full of conviction and cruel determination. His hand came up abruptly, slapping her across the face. She yelped. The hand swept backward, his knuckles slammed against her lips. She tasted blood. She sensed something new now: an intense, personal hatred for her.

“Whore,” he yelled. “You’re all the same. The doorway of the Devil. You know that?”

“Please . . .”

“Shut up!” His fist came up again, hesitated. She got the message. She said nothing.

He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, thinking. She watched him, silent. It was beyond protest, beyond pleading. The decision now was his, and he was insane, violent one moment, repentant, or at least uncertain, the next.

“They’re coming,” he told her. “
Here!
To my home.
My
home.”

She spoke very quietly, very calmly. “Don’t make it any worse than it is.”

He stared at her, wondering. “It could be worse? How?”

There was some light in his eyes. Some kind of doubt. There was room for her to work. “I can help you,” Alicia said. “I have friends. I can tell the police you’ve been kind. That you didn’t mean it. We all make mistakes.”

“We all burn in Hell.”

“No,” she said. “That’s an old story. Even the Church doesn’t believe that anymore.”

“Then they’re stupid.” He sighed. “I’m sorry. Truly, I’m sorry.”

She breathed deeply for the first time in hours, finding a flicker of hope in his apology.

“It’s all right,” Alicia Vaccarini promised. “Everything will be all right.”

His face was so odd. In some light he would be handsome. In another, not hideous but
exaggerated
somehow, like a character painted by Caravaggio.

“You don’t understand, Alicia. I’m sorry because I can’t do you justice. The church in Trastevere. The means of your death, a holy means. Something that could help wash away your sins. Save you perhaps. All of this is impossible now. They’re coming to take away my home. They think they can trap me. They’re very, very stupid.”

“It can work out. I can help.”

“Perhaps.” He was thinking. He was as rational now as he had appeared in the restaurant. Something occupied him. He went over to the pile of jazz CDs strewn on the floor, sifted quickly through them until he found what he wanted, then put it on the hi-fi. The wail of a high, sweeping electric violin filled the room. Then he came back to her.

“Have you ever watched a man smash a brick with his hand, Alicia? The martial arts place I go to, they show you how to do that. They teach you the secret.”

“No,” she answered quietly, not wishing to excite him.

“The secret is you don’t try to hit the brick. What you aim at is something imaginary a little way behind it. That is what you’re trying to destroy. You get the result you want by focusing on that hidden place, by making that your target. And in doing so you smash the brick. Do you understand?”

“I think so. Could you untie me, please? I’m very stiff. I need to go to the bathroom.”

He shook his head, annoyed she appeared to miss his point. “This is important, Alicia. Our true goal’s beyond. It’s not something that we see. What we do along the way—what we touch, what we destroy—is irrelevant. It’s the end point that matters. Being able to see the end with your inner eye. To know you’ll get there.”

She looked up at him, not liking what she saw. “They’ll be here soon. It would look best if they didn’t find me like this. You can understand that, can’t you?”

“Of course,” he said, and walked behind her. The earth began to shift. The chair moved through ninety degrees as Fosse tilted it forward until Alicia Vaccarini was on her knees, head hanging down, eyes fixed on the worn, stained carpet.

She waited for his touch, waited to feel him working on the rope. It never happened. Gino Fosse returned to stand in front of her again. This time he was holding the sword, the bright, glittering sword that had cut her once already.

“Jesus Christ.” She looked at the blade and felt the breath squeezing from her lungs. “Don’t,” she whispered.

But Fosse didn’t seem to hear. His eyes were on the chair to which she was tied and the curve of her neck.

He walked to one side of her. Only his ankles were visible: white socks in black trainers. She heard the hiss of the sword cutting through the hot, dank air of the octagonal room and a strange memory came to her from a history course long ago: Anne Boleyn going to her death at the hands of the French swordsman, a bitter kindness on Henry VIII’s part, to save her from the conventional executioner’s axe. The man had been brought in for the occasion because of his reputation. The sword had a clean, deadly efficiency impossible with the axe. He’d hidden the blade beneath the straw, stood behind the condemned woman, listened to her last words then decapitated the disgraced queen with a single blow.

Alicia could hear it: unseen, the silver blade dashing at her back as her executioner made his practice strokes. Then there was silence. She could picture him drawing the sword to his shoulders, turning in a lethal, powerful arc.

Without thinking, she lifted her chin and squeezed her eyes shut. She didn’t wish to see this. She didn’t want to think of the blade missing her neck, smashing into the back of her skull.

In the curious practicality of the moment she recalled something further of the history lesson: Anne’s last words, “To Jesus Christ I commend my soul.”

It was impossible to say them. It would be an insult, Alicia thought.

The music ended, then looped back on itself. The wailing violin began to dance again.

31

San Giovanni, once a refuge for fourth-century pilgrims, was now a modern hospital that sprawled through countless buildings covering a vast parcel of the Caelian Hill. The complex stretched from the old narrow road that led to the church of San Clemente across to the traffic-choked highway that fed streams of cars, buses and trucks into the piazza from the south. Only minutes away was the Clivus Scauri, where Falcone and his men were engaged in the discovery of a further victim and the disappearance of the priest who once, albeit briefly, worked the corridors of the place where Nic Costa now lay on a table in a small cubicle, his head hurting like hell.

Luca Rossi and Sara Farnese had only just argued their way into the room. They sat on the bench seat watching the nurse bandage him, watching the way he listened to the doctor talk about concussion and how, all things being equal, he ought to spend the day in a ward just to make sure there were no lingering aftereffects. His knife wound was minor. The blow to his head when he fell and hit the rock had left a livid but compact bruise on his right temple. Still, Nic Costa was alive and maddeningly ignorant of the reason for it. He waited for the doctor to go away, then turned to the big man.

“I don’t like the look on your face, Uncle Luca. You got him?”

“We wish,” Rossi replied miserably.

Costa was wide-eyed with amazement. “Christ. What more do you need?”

Sara Farnese looked at her feet. Rossi glowered at him from across the room. “Hey, kid. Don’t get precious with me.”

“There were how many men there?”

“Enough!”
The big man’s flabby white face turned an ugly shade of angry pink. “Eight. Maybe ten. Think about it. They were there to protect the farm. Which was where you were supposed to be. None of them knew you were running around doing this crazy stuff somewhere else. Falcone is going to tear the skin off my back for letting you go out there. Except, of course, you weren’t even where I thought you were going to be. Remember the deal? You stay in the drive? Where we could be close by?”

Nic’s head ached. He did remember now, and Luca Rossi was right. He’d no one to blame but himself. He remembered too his glimpse of Sara at the window and the terror on her face.

“I’m sorry, Luca. I was an idiot.”

“Yeah, well . . .” The big man cast a glance at Sara next to him. “You survived. No thanks to us. And we’ve got a name. And another body. Enough there for Falcone to get happy about or crucify us with, depending on his mood.”

“I’ll check myself out. I have to go there.”

“Nic, the doctors . . .” Sara began to say.

“This one’s even less pretty than the others,” Rossi grumbled, taking it as a given that Costa would leave the hospital. “What can you do?”

Nic moved his shoulder and was pleased by the small amount of pain that resulted. “It’s not bad. Besides, Luca, you need me. I saw this man, remember?”

Rossi looked at the woman again. Nic couldn’t work it out. There was something Luca Rossi disliked about Sara Farnese. It was so powerful he seemed to hate even sitting next to her in the hospital cubicle.

“Doesn’t matter that you saw him, Nic. Weren’t you listening? We’ve got his name. Ms. Farnese here provided it once we’d got you into the ambulance. Seems she had it all along.”

His head hurt even more after that. Sara was staring at the white wall, intent on nothing. Her hair was tousled. It made her look different. She’d left the house with him, unable to put on the mask she normally wore to keep the world from touching her.

“I’ve got some calls to make,” Rossi said. “Your father decided to stay at home once the ambulance people said you’d be fine. I’ll let him know things are okay. I’m outside when you want me. Two minutes away, max. They can take her someplace else. Falcone says the protective custody thing is still on. I’m guessing you won’t want her back at the farm, so they’re making other arrangements.”

He patted the pack of cigarettes in his pocket. “Smoking time too.” Then he was gone, out into the long corridor illuminated by cold fluorescent lights.

Nic Costa pushed himself upright off the hospital table. The cut in his shoulder was minor. His head would get better. It was all a matter of time.

She still wouldn’t look at him.

“Thanks,” he said softly.

Sara turned. Her eyes were scared. Astonished too, he thought.

“What?”

“I don’t know what happened out there, Sara. But you stopped him. Thanks.”

Her head moved from side to side, her long, unkempt hair swaying with the motion. “I saw him from the window, Nic. I knew something was wrong. When I got there he ran away. I imagine he was scared everyone else was turning up. He didn’t want witnesses.”

That was a lie. He knew it for sure. He’d heard them talking.

“You spoke to him.”

“Of course I did! I screamed at him to stop. What do you expect?”

“No.” His memory was hazy yet there was something fixed there: He recalled the tenor of their conversation. “You spoke to him. He answered you. It was more than that. You knew who he was.”

“Enough to know his name. He used to hang around the Vatican Library when I was there. We’d talk sometimes.”

“You didn’t . . .” There was no easy way of asking.

“What?” she demanded, suddenly furious. “Sleep with him? No. Believe it or not, there are men in Rome who’ve been denied that privilege. I hope that doesn’t come as too much of a shock.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Oh, God.” She shook her head, eyes closed, miserable. “I’m the one who’s sorry. You don’t know what you’re saying. I saw him. I yelled at him until he ran away. Then as soon as he was gone I yelled until the police came. For you and that photographer. He’s hurt more badly than you, they say. He’ll be in here for some time.”

It was possible she was right. He could have imagined the entire exchange.

“Someone else is dead?”

“So they say.”

“You know this one too?”

She picked up her purse and put it on her knee. “I think I should leave. They want me to stay somewhere else. They say they’re sending another police team to pick me up.”

Costa got up off the table and walked, a little shakily, across the room. He sat next to her on the bench, very close. He wanted to make a point: that she couldn’t chase him away so easily.

“Do you know him?” he asked again.

The old Sara looked frankly at him, unafraid. “It was a woman.”

He thought about the bold, unabashed way in which she said it. He said, “So did you know her?”

“I think I slept with her once. Is that what you want to hear?”

“You think?”

“No. I did. They showed me a picture. She was a politician apparently. I slept with her a few months ago. I can’t be certain when. I don’t keep that kind of diary. I apologize. It happened once. It was her idea. Not my kind of thing really.”

He sighed. She could still hurt him, even though he knew this was what she intended.

“I don’t understand any of this, Sara. I don’t understand why you do it. I don’t understand why you never gave us her name.”

She laughed, a dry, deliberate laugh, one that was supposed to make him hate her. “You’re so old-fashioned, Nic. You and your father. I love him. Really. I could talk to him for hours because it’s like talking to someone from another time. But the world’s not the way you two imagine it. Maybe it never was. You ask me why I never gave you her name? What makes you think I knew her name in the first place? It was just one night. That’s all.”

It made no sense. It couldn’t be the whole story. “But why?” he insisted.

“Because . . .” She had to hunt for the answer. “You’ve your kind of love. I’ve mine. We’re different, you and I. What happened satisfied me. Then it’s gone, with nothing lingering, nothing to go stale. No awkward attachments. No bitterness, no pain.”

“So it’s not a kind of love at all?” he said without thinking. “And it isn’t gone, Sara. Something stays behind. Something that may go wrong. Then people get hurt. Sometimes horribly.”

Her eyes widened. “So this is my fault?” she demanded furiously. “You think I’m to blame for what’s happened?”

It was a stupid thing for him to say in a way but she had misread his point. “Not for a minute.”

He stood up, trying to convince himself he didn’t feel too bad. His head was clearing rapidly.

“I knew you wouldn’t stay here,” she said bitterly. “Why can’t you just leave it alone?”

He watched her rise and collect her purse, organize herself for whatever lay ahead.

“It’s what they pay me for.”

“No they don’t. No one pays you to risk your life.”

“Next time I’ll be more careful.”

Sara Farnese stared into his face. Then, gently, she touched his cheek with two slender fingers. It was a deliberate act, one he could not mistake.

“Nic,” she said carefully. “If you asked, would they take you off this case?”

“I guess so. But why would I want to do that?”

“Because I want you to? This is about
me
. There may be things you’ll find out that I don’t want you to know. Things that will make you loathe me.”

“I’m a cop. They give cops drugs to make us unshockable.”

“This is not a joke.”

“I know. Don’t worry about it.”

She glanced at him, uneasy. “Then you’ll ask for another assignment?”

“Are you kidding? This is shaping up to be the biggest thing of my career. What would I look like if I backed out now? I don’t give up on things. Not just because they might be hard or awkward or make me face decisions I’d rather avoid. That doesn’t get you anywhere.”

“It makes life easy,” she said.

“It makes life dull and boring and . . . perhaps pointless even.”

She nodded. “I thought you’d say that.”

“Thank you. Now, you face a decision. I have to go back to the team. You can stay in this safe house of Falcone’s. Or I can make the case for you to go back to the farm. Not for my sake you understand. For my father’s. He enjoys your company.”

She didn’t recoil from the idea. He was glad. “Will he agree?” she asked. “That awful boss of yours? I don’t like him. He’s too . . . hard.”

“Falcone thinks that’s what’s required of him. If I ask him to let you stay, I don’t think he’d object. Let’s face it: Your security can’t be much at risk. You met this man. He didn’t harm you. Did he?”

“No,” she answered quietly. “But what about your safety?”

He’d thought about that already. “I’ll be more careful. Besides, I don’t think he’ll come back. It’s as if he has an agenda. I wasn’t really on it. And I told him the truth. That we just set this up for him, the idea that something was going on between us. I told him it was all a lie.”

Was that the way a psychopath really behaved? Nic Costa wondered. Being so picky about who he killed? A chill, dark suspicion surfaced. What if this lunatic had seen him there on the ground, spared his life, then wondered afterward: What was the point? Would he make the same choice again? Or did he just let the innocent off the hook once and then, the next time, think . . . to hell with it?

There was a sound outside in the corridor. Luca Rossi poked his big white face around the door and looked pointedly at his watch. Costa waved at him for one minute more. Sara waited until the big man retreated, then said, “You’ll find him, won’t you? He’s sick. He needs help.”

“We’ll find him.” Nic hesitated, wondering whether he dared ask. “Sara?”

She didn’t like the tone of his voice. She knew, he guessed, what was coming.

“Yes?”

“Are there more names we ought to know? Are there more people like this woman? People who aren’t names, just faces?”

“A few. Not recently. I don’t know who they are. I don’t know how you could reach them.” She said it with such conviction. He wanted to believe her.

“There’s a man in the Vatican. Cardinal Denney . . .”

“Nic!” She was the real Sara again. He could see the tears starting in her eyes. “Is this you talking? Or the policeman? How am I supposed to know who I’m dealing with when you do this to me?”

“You mean the answer would be different depending on if I was asking as a cop?”

“Not at all,” she replied immediately. “I mean that I want to understand what your interest is. Whether you’re asking as a friend. Or because you think it’s your job.”

“As a friend.”

“I don’t know him,” she insisted. “Whoever you are.”