David Hewson - A Season for the Dead

“Get the fuck out of here. And go sign this thing off whatever way you want. We both know what happened. Some crazy, personal tragedy to do with a rather fine-looking young woman with lax personal morals. Don’t turn over stones for the sake of it. Sometimes those little creatures underneath can bite.”

Thirteen

What do I think? Michael, Michael."

Neri couldn’t stop laughing, couldn’t stop slapping Denney on the shoulder.

“You make a good cardinal. Why’d you ever think you could make a good banker too?”

“It was what was asked of me,” Denney replied sharply. “I know my duty.”

Neri’s big face became serious. “And I know mine. You truly believe this money, this hidden crock of gold, is news to me.”

Denney turned to Crespi, astonished. The little man’s face flushed.

“I said nothing,” he complained. “He’s making this up.”

“I don’t lie,” Neri grunted. “I’m too rich to have to lie these days. I told you: This place leaks like a sieve. I’ve known your little secret for weeks, Michael. I’ve had time to consider it. Carefully. To talk about it with my associates too. What I have to say to you now is painful, but say it I must.”

The door opened. Hanrahan walked in, making his excuses. Denney looked at him in despair. This was all going wrong. Neri had advance knowledge. Denney couldn’t begin to guess how, or what this might mean.

“The choice before me,” Neri continued, “is simple. Do I lose a friend? Or do I lose a fortune? Do I throw good money after bad for old times’ sake? Or do I take what I can and be grateful for that?”

“This is a pittance,” Denney complained. “It’s a fraction of what we could earn if we go back in business. And you need a bank, Emilio. You can’t live without that.”

“Banks, banks,” Neri snarled, waving a dismissive hand at Denney.

“You live in the past, Michael. It’s the secret, small corporations that attract the interest of those cold-blooded lawyers in the first place. Why waste all our time and money on them when it’s simpler just to go to someone more established and pay him for a mutual relationship? It’s in the nature of the world we live in now that men like us may hide more easily in the light of day. Scurrying around in dark corners merely calls attention to ourselves. Sadly”—Neri seemed genuinely surprised by this insight—“that’s what seems to come naturally to a man like you. Perhaps it’s in your background. Perhaps it comes from this place. If the latter, then more fool you, because they’ve abandoned you, Michael. Even if you don’t know that yourself.”

“What?” Denney knew he was out of favor. But a renewal of his business interests, some clearing of debts, these were actions that would surely begin to clear his name…

“I want my cut of this money,” Aitcheson said. “I want it now and I want it based on what we invested in the first place.”

“You’ll walk away with pennies,” Denney repeated.

Aitcheson stabbed an angry finger at him. “I’ll walk away with something. Listen to me well, Michael. I was on the phone to someone in the Justice Department only yesterday. This present state of limbo isn’t going to last. They’re closing Lombardia for good soon, not just suspending us. They’re preparing the warrants. Your name’s on the top. No one else’s right now, and as far as the rest of us are concerned that’s the way it’s going to stay.”

Denney glared at them. “You knew this? All of you? You didn’t think to tell me?”

Crespi stared at the table. Neri looked bored.

Aitcheson sighed. “You’ve been living in la-la land these last six months, Michael. Thinking you can bribe your way out of this mess. It isn’t going to happen. Even if it were possible, Emilio’s right. Letting you back into the game would just mean we open up a black hole again. You’re finished. Face it. We have nothing left to discuss. I wash my hands of you.”

Neri glanced at Hanrahan, then nodded at the ceiling. “They do too. He doesn’t know?”

Denney felt hot, confused. He looked into Hanrahan’s eyes and saw the future begin to fall apart.

“You don’t have a deal?” Hanrahan asked. “After all this work? All this time?”

Neri shook his head. “My dear Irish friend. Please don’t act so surprised. Do we look like fools?” He paused, enjoying this. “Well. Tell him…”

Hanrahan grimaced, then pulled out his phone. Denney heard him calling the janitorial staff, asking them to send a couple of men around. “If there’s no deal,” he said, “things are very different.”

“What are you doing?” Denney demanded. “What the hell is going on here?”

Neri smiled at the apartment, appreciating the Murano glass, the mirrors, the paintings. “Nice place,” he said. “They’ll be scratching each other’s eyes out to see who gets it next.”

Fourteen

Teresa Lupo, Crazy Teresa to the Rome police department, sat in front of a varied collection of animal body parts: veal hearts, cartilage, pig thymus glands and a tangle of cow intestines with milk still inside. She was ecstatic and was joined in her joy by Luca Rossi, who wore, for the occasion, a Lazio baseball cap, placed backward on his balding head, and ate with a noisy, open-mouthed enthusiasm. This was, it transpired, Rossi’s favorite food, cucina romana, the traditional working-class fare of the city: the offal which, by tradition, the proletariat had been left after the clergy of the Vatican had picked from the best cuts of meat.

The restaurant was a cheaper clone of the flashy, expensive Checchino dal 1887 around the corner, the city temple to the eating of guts and glands. Its sixteen simple tables were fully booked and heaving with cooked organs which Nic Costa could not begin to identify even if he so wished. This was the big man’s joke: to bring a vegetarian to a place where the consumption of arcane flesh was a religion. Or perhaps he didn’t even think about it.

Costa watched the way Rossi looked at Crazy Teresa as they prodded and poked at some tripe and hoof jelly and wondered if there was the prospect of love in the air. They made an odd pair. Rossi, with his big, sad face and sprawling body, looked like a man who would stay single all his life and had probably forgotten when he last slept with a woman. Crazy Teresa had run through endless affairs in the department, all of them brief, all of them encounters which tended to leave the male party wan and glassy-eyed afterward. A little taller than Nic Costa, powerfully built, with a handsome face that smiled constantly as it examined every last thing that fell under its gaze, she was an astonishingly skilled pathologist who had worked as a successful hospital surgeon before something—the craving for excitement was her excuse—drove her into the morgue.

Costa never really swallowed that line. Her work wasn’t exciting. She was so painstaking and exact she found herself working long, tiring hours just to extract every last shred of evidence. The bodies Teresa Lupo called her “customers” were, in spite of her easy way with them, still the remains of human beings. Her relationship with them went beyond the forensic. At times she was able to offer the kinds of insight that failed the best of cops and that, he thought, was what drove her. She liked playing detective, and often was very good at it.

Rossi and the woman sat together opposite him, picking at the plates, guzzling the cheap house red and sucking at cigarettes when a gap between the delivery of the flesh and the booze allowed. Costa had arrived late, on purpose. He waited until the waitress, a surly-looking girl with rings in her nose and ears, came up with a pad, then ordered salad and a glass of Cala Viola, a young Sardinian white which was the only wine he recognized on the list.