David Hewson - The Fallen Angel

There’d been a time when he thought that Robert Gabriel might have been in line for this fate. But Gabriel was different, and had been from the start. Wily, cowardly, unpredictable — all the things Riggi loathed. But someone who could shift huge amounts of dope too, come back with an empty stash and pockets brimming with money, always ready for more.

Too much money sometimes, Riggi knew. The arithmetic of pushing dope was simple. Gabriel was beating the numbers and the Roman narcotics cop couldn’t quite work out how. By skimming from the proceeds? That seemed unlikely and dangerous. By working for two masters? Riggi wondered about that and knew it was a conversation he and the English kid had to have. There’d been rumours of late of a new player in the centro storico , someone Italian, not Turkish. That idea gave him a chill. It spoke of wars, of blood, of messy public revelations.

Also. . Riggi tried to remember. But the beer, and he’d drunk a lot of it lately, seemed to cloud his recollection.

He recalled the first time he and Robert Gabriel had met, and a curious memory returned. In a way he felt it was almost as if Robert Gabriel had recruited him. Not that this was possible. The young English kid hadn’t needed bending to Riggi’s will. He was there, in the mental place they both wanted, already, willing to shuttle between him and the Vadisi henchman, Cakici, without a second thought, as if this duplicitous and risky existence came naturally.

There was something about Robert Gabriel that Riggi had mistrusted from the start. Now, with a talented and tenacious cop like Leo Falcone on his tail, Gabriel was beginning to look like a serious liability. He had to get the kid out of Rome, quickly. Riggi would even buy the airline ticket himself if need be. If that didn’t happen — if the kid was an idiot and insisted on staying. .

Gino Riggi didn’t see himself as a dishonest man. He’d never enriched himself much from his time working both sides of the street. A holiday in Thailand. A decent hi-fi system. Some money sent back home to his widowed mother who lived in a humble back-street apartment in Castello, too proud to ask for help. That was all this meant. It wasn’t for personal gain, not really. Riggi had rationalized this time and time again, usually late at night with a belly full of beer and a stomach complaining that a little food wouldn’t go amiss either.

In a world that was fractured to breaking point the best a decent man could do was to try to keep a little equilibrium around him. He allowed the Vadisi to deal to the dumb and feckless foreign kids whose tourist dollars, largely donated by doting parents intent on giving them a brief European education, kept the economy of the Campo and Trastevere alive, if barely. In return the Turks kept away from the places where real Roman kids went to play, stayed out of prostitution and some of the nastier sides of the drug business. There was an accommodation, an awkward, illicit one that could put him in jail if it became known.

And if that happened? If the house of cards around him really tumbled down one day? Not a single gram of coke would disappear from the streets. No dealers would get busted. Nothing much would change.

He snatched the bottle of strong Moretti beer to his mouth and downed some. No one had ever been hurt in his little territory over the years. Not seriously. He didn’t want that on his conscience. But if Robert Gabriel wouldn’t take the hint. .

‘Stupid English kids,’ Riggi said.

He glanced at his watch. It was eight thirty. At least the English were usually punctual.

A tall, dark-haired figure was bouncing down the cobblestones of the little alley with the jaunty punk walk so many of these dumb, drug-pushing adolescents thought was cool. Washed-out denim jacket, black T-shirt, jeans. The same thing a million other kids in the city liked to wear.

The morons all looked the same after a while, Riggi realized, and knew, from the sinking feeling in his stomach, he had to get out of this mess. It was wrong. It was dangerous. And one day soon he’d no longer be able to keep this creaky world afloat.

‘What the hell. .?’ Riggi began as the kid got nearer.

He stopped. His voice was being drowned out by another noise: the roar of a powerful motorbike echoing off the tall tenement houses around him, going too fast to be acceptable, even in the rough and rowdy neighbourhood this had become.

There was a shriek of brakes. The lanky figure ambling down the street cast a glance over his shoulder, surprised, a touch angry too. The bike rider had slowed and was now edging along at a snail’s pace, booted feet rhythmically walking the cobbles as his right hand twitched on the throttle, bouncing the power of its big engine off the walls.

Riggi slammed down the beer on the table, waiting for the machine to get past, all those old phrases running through his head, the ones his uncle used to mutter before he took the tourist dollar and ran.

Kids, kids, kids. Who the hell do they think they are?

He couldn’t hear himself think. Couldn’t hope to exchange a word with the lean, black-haired youth approaching him, not till this deafening machine had got past.

Then the bike came close and stopped altogether, engine purring, settling into a low, happy rumble. It was a huge red Ducati, powerful and expensive. The rider was all in black, a leather suit, the kind old-fashioned racers wore. His head was enclosed in a full shiny helmet the same colour as his gear, with an opaque visor that made the man look like some kind of gigantic insect.

‘Oh my,’ Riggi declared, and began to clap his hands slowly, sarcastically. ‘What’s it they say? Big bike, little dick. Piss off out of here, moron, before I pull you off that stupid thing and give you a damned good. .’

The cop stopped and blinked. The figure in leather had pulled down the shiny silver zip on his chest and removed from beneath it a long-nosed pistol as black and as shiny as his own artificial skin.

‘Cakici?’ he asked, so quietly he realized no one would have heard, not even the youth in front of him, whose face was now as white as the newly painted wall outside the bar where Riggi had bought his overpriced Moretti. ‘ Cakici. .? ’

The rider stretched out his hand and loosed a single bullet into the kid’s head. A noise like muffled thunder rang round the walls of this shady, constricted Trastevere alley. The shot figure in front of him let out a brief, pained cry of outrage then jerked to the ground, body contorted and twisting as if hit by an electric shock. Two more bullets got pumped into his T-shirt.

Riggi stared at the blood and the way the kid bounced with the impact of the shots, wondering if this was real or some kind of waking nightmare.

A mess of this scale would come back to haunt him, he knew. It had to.

‘Oh, wonderful. How the hell am I supposed to clean up this one?’ He looked up at the helmeted figure and wanted to drag the idiot off the bike, punch him hard, scream at him. ‘How the hell. .?’

Riggi shut up. For the first time in years he was scared, and it felt oddly vivid, as if something he’d been missing for ages had suddenly walked back into his life. Just for one last time, to say good-bye.

‘Don’t be so stupid. .’ he started to say.

Costa had just crossed the Ponte Garibaldi, past the spot where a few days earlier he’d embraced Agata Graziano, when he heard the shots and saw a cloud of dusty grey urban pigeons scattering into the blue sky against the Gianicolo hill.

Rosa Prabakaran clung to him more tightly on the pillion as he tried to twist a little more power out of the Vespa’s weedy guts. He broke over the lights on red, weaving through the slow-moving cars heading south-east, away from Trilussa, ignoring the blare of horns and the angry shouts. Rosa had to tighten her grip around his waist as the Vespa mounted the pavement, scattering a couple of bums who tugged at grimy lengths of rope to get their dogs out of the way, then rattled down the cobbles of the tiny horseshoe piazza.