David Hewson - The Sacred Cut

“Is that so?” he asked.

SWEET, SWEET, SWEET, Billy Kaspar. You’re doing OK for a white kid .

He’d watched the car roll down the Spanish Steps (straight on the line that led past the Pantheon, across the river, on to the Vatican, perfect in its flaming, smoking trajectory), still hearing the voices, baffled by why they refused to leave him, why they’d taunted him all night long, ever since he’d killed the woman. The voices played a part in that, too, Kaspar thought, not that he was trying to evade any of the responsibility. Something was wrong. The last piece of the jigsaw should have fallen into place. All of Steely Dan Deacon’s team were dead now. The Scarlet Beast had died when he killed Deacon himself back in China. He’d been sure of that. He’d worked out the story, pieced it together in jail. There were pieces to be cleaned up. A couple of minor scores to be settled and now some property, important property, precious, sacred memories, to be recovered.

But the voices…

You can hear me, Kaspar. Loud and clear. What did Dan the man say that time ?

The voices wouldn’t go away. They sat on his shoulder, whispering, like cartoon demons.

What’d he say, boy ?

The same thing, Kaspar recalled. Twice. Thirteen years apart. When they were working on the Babylon Sisters, he’d established a routine with Deacon. They’d meet in the Pantheon, Deacon and he, sit together in a quiet corner. No one could eavesdrop on them in a place like that. And just once Deacon had let slip some doubts.

Say it .

Kaspar spoke the words out loud, “Did you meet the man from the Piazza Mattei?”

It was November 1990. A month before they were due to go in. Kaspar hadn’t understood a damn word. He’d told Dan Deacon so. There wasn’t time to bring anyone else in on the act. It was dumb. Insecure. And a part of him had, at the time, had to quell some rumbling suspicion, some little whisper inside that said Deacon seemed to be checking him out on something.

Then the conversation had gone awkward, went dead. For thirteen long years, until Kaspar had his cord round Dan Deacon’s scrawny throat in Beijing, trying to strangle some last, cathartic confession out of him.

It never came. Dan Deacon just shook his head and said…

What?

“You should have met the man from the Piazza Mattei.”

And he’d tried to. Later, when he’d got free, though it all went wrong, damn near got him caught.

There were two ways to find a secret. You could look for it out in the plain light of day. Or you could keep chipping away at what you didn’t know, waiting for the truth to emerge from the lies. A certainty was growing inside his head, solid, reliable, like the patterns on the floor of the ziggurat all those years ago. It had to work. Otherwise the voices would never go away.

How long we got to wait, Billy K ?

“I don’t know,” he whispered between gritted teeth.

The old black voice kept rising up to bait him. Kaspar didn’t like remembering things. Remembering got in the way. There were more important matters to consider. Money, for one thing. Without it he was impotent. All the crucial tasks… buying airline tickets, finding fake passports, weapons, tools, information. Without money they just didn’t happen, and he was running out, fast.

Since coming back into the world, fleeing that burning jail outside Baghdad, he’d salted away $35,000 in seven different bank accounts in the UK, France, Italy and the Bahamas. Small sums always, originating from some equally small crime, then turned into cash and paid in through a street moneychanger. It was more than enough for his needs, if only he had easy access to it. That wasn’t simple. After 9/11 the American and European authorities had started to change the rules about foreign exchange movements. When the first transaction rang alarm bells and he’d been forced to leave San Francisco in a hurry he’d used the Net to pick up information about how the new world order of money control worked. They watched cash movements as much as they could. They tried to heavy-hand information out of the small foreign banks that allowed just about anyone to open an account. Even with legitimate institutions, quite modest movements of money now attracted attention. It was a constant challenge to transfer a few hundred dollars around here and there, always to another ghost account to hide the trail if someone latched onto what he was doing. The result: only a trickle of cash came safely into his hands each week and he needed another source of income to cover sudden, unexpected expenses.

Like equipment. Three bugs and a receiver alone had cost him two thousand euros, almost all the ready money he had, from some crook out in Testaccio. With the block placed on his funds by the bureaucratic banks that left him virtually broke.

He’d used the grubby Internet cafe in the Piazza Barberini before. It was big enough for him to be anonymous. All he need do was pay for a few hours online, type in a fake Hotmail address to validate it, then access his accounts, try to shift a little cash around, do some research, read the news, from CNN to La Stampa , keep ahead of the pack. The place was perfect. You could sit on a PC all day doing anything. No one asked a damn thing. When he was done he just hit the reboot button and the machine wiped out every last keystroke, every place he’d been. It was more anonymous than a phone, more secure than a personal meeting, a place that seemed designed for what he wanted. Once he’d even picked up a woman there, a Lebanese housewife e-mailing back home, and stolen her handbag as she waited for him to emerge from the bathroom of one of the fancy Via Veneto cafes across the road.

Today the place was almost empty, the piazza close to deserted. Snow continued to paralyse the city. He’d read on the Net about the problems the authorities faced: a lack of ploughs since none had been needed for twenty years, an unwillingness by municipal workers to tackle jobs they’d never had to face before. The bus lines were running a quarter of their normal schedule and at a tenth of their usual capacity. The subway was largely unaffected, but in Rome the subway went mainly to the places people didn’t work anyway. It was as if a cold white coverlet of torpor had fallen from the sky and now sat on the city, daring it to move.

There were opportunities here, surely. If only he could understand how best to use them.

He’d found some hair dye in Monica Sawyer’s bathroom, washed it in, waited, washed it out, used her dryer, looked at himself in the mirror and liked what he saw: grey turning chestnut. Just to make certain, when he went out he bought a tube of fake tan and a pair of cheap sunglasses from a shop in Tritone. Change was good. It helped keep him on his toes, made him work to fit inside a new skin, forget who-what-he really was.

Now he stood in the toilet of the Net cafe working the tan into his face. It was a little exaggerated, a little too dark. That was good. It meant people wouldn’t look at him too hard. The glasses fitted only loosely. He peered at himself in Monica Sawyer’s hand mirror, hunching up his shoulders like a punk. This was better than the hair dye alone, much better. Now he could pass as an idiotic hustler, the kind of man who hung around outside tourist restaurants trying to coax the unwary inside with a menu and the promise of a warm, Roman welcome. The kind of man most people would want to avoid.

Then he went back into the deserted main room, sat at a dusty PC out of sight of the moron at the counter, who just might be smart enough to register the change in his appearance, and started wasting time until his head cleared.

How long ?

The damn question and the old black voice wouldn’t go away and now he knew he couldn’t stop himself looking, couldn’t help himself when it came to punching the keys, trying out the combinations. All this was new when he first got out. It was amazing how much the world had changed in little over a decade. And it was useful too. A stored global memory you could log into anywhere, provided someone sold the key.