David Hewson - A Season for the Dead

“What happened then?” Costa asked.

“This is all conjecture,” Teresa warned. “I’ve tried to come up with a way in which I can estimate the exact sequence of events but it’s impossible. I guess he turned him sideways somehow, went down the back, all the way along the spine, lifting a little on each side, then gradually opened it out, up to the shoulder blades, out to the waist until most of the back was off.”

The party at the adjoining table stood up, mumbling, and went to the counter to pay.

“And he’d still be alive?” Rossi wondered.

She shrugged. This was all hypothesis. “He might have blacked out from the agony, if he was lucky. But then he’d probably come to later. After the back, the knife would work round the groin, the arms, work round to the front. Just very slowly, until he could bring it all to the chest, like a sheath.”

Rossi pushed away the plate in front of him.

“How long?” Costa asked. “From beginning to end?”

“An hour. Maybe more. And you don’t just need a strong stomach for this. You need a lot of physical strength too. This Rinaldi man was in rotten shape. He ate terribly. He drank too much. He had the kind of liver you’d see on a French goose. I don’t know… This may be all wrong.”

Costa and Rossi waited. Crazy Teresa was about to say what she had wanted to say all along.

She leaned over the table and spoke softly, so that no one beyond would hear. “My feeling is this: The average surgeon wouldn’t have the strength for that. Someone who worked in an abattoir maybe. Someone who had watched a procedure in a hospital could too. But a flabby, out-of-condition university professor? No. I can’t give you any hard scientific fact to put down in a report. But I don’t believe it. Not for one moment. Sorry… I know you thought you had this one fixed.”

The two men looked at each other.

“On the other hand,” she said, “you’re listening to Crazy Teresa. So maybe you should take that into account.”

Rossi put a hand on her arm, shocked. “What do you mean? 'Crazy Teresa’?"

She refilled her glass again. “I gather that’s a nickname some of them are using now.”

“Who?” Rossi demanded. “You let me know! You give me the names!”

Costa said nothing and wished he didn’t face the drive ahead, wished he could order another glass of the good wine.

“This is a professional organization,” Rossi continued. “We don’t countenance behavior like that, do we?”

Nic Costa raised an empty glass to his partner.

“Sweet man,” Teresa said, flattered. “Excuse me now. I need to go.”

They watched her large, happy frame squeeze through the restaurant and head for the corridor at the rear.

“I think you’ve found the perfect partner, Uncle Luca,” Costa said.

“One who can drink, smoke and eat at the same time.”

Rossi was offended. “She’s a good woman, Nic. Don’t you say otherwise. And she’s not crazy either.”

Nic Costa took the small knife and stabbed at the raw joint of pork on the table. It was tough. She had a point. The waitress returned and looked at it too.

“Are you done with this, sir?” she asked Rossi. “Or would you like a bag to take it home? I mean, it is going on your bill.”

Rossi sighed as she cleared the table. When she was gone he looked Costa in the eye.

“So what do you think?”

Costa frowned. “I hope to God she’s wrong.”

“Yeah,” Rossi nodded. “All that work. All that nagging from Falcone.”

“That wasn’t what I meant.”

“Well?”

This change in their relationship seemed permanent now. For some reason the big man seemed to look to him for a lead. Perhaps, in spite of his greater experience, he felt lost in these complexities.

“If it wasn’t Rinaldi, if it was someone else, Luca, we don’t have a clue to his motivation. And if we don’t know why he did it, we don’t know why he shouldn’t do it again.”

He hesitated before going further. Rossi’s long face was beginning to droop toward the empty plate in front of him.

“All we have,” Nic Costa said carefully, “is that number to the man in the Vatican.”

Teresa Lupo was coming back from the toilets, smiling, happy, ordering grappa from behind the bar. Rossi was right. She was a smart woman, not crazy at all. And she was correct in her analysis. Costa knew it instinctively.

Fifteen

When Jay Gallo came to, it was night. Lying on his back on the hard sand, he could see the lights of the planes descending into Fiumicino airport, hear the roar of their engines. It was the only sound around him. He awoke knowing full well where he was: by the banks of the dead river, with its stink of chemicals, and worse, miles from anywhere. It would be a long walk back to the road and, perhaps, a long time before any motorist would pick up a hitchhiker in his present state.

Gallo’s mouth was full of blood. His head felt as if it had been split open. His nose was shattered and his face ached like hell. But he was alive. His hands moved around his body, feeling for broken bones. He raised himself from the sand on a single arm. He could see only through one eye. He could taste the dead river in his mouth. The water seemed stagnant, poisonous with the scum of algae.

“Bastard,” Jay Gallo spat through broken teeth, wondering who, of the many people he had pissed off over the years, had arranged this particular lesson. It seemed rather pointless without that piece of information.

Gradually his senses began to return. His sight improved, enough to see the lights of the coast at Ostia. He began to hear the shriek of seagulls, the far-off sound of a dinghy’s weak motor. And, behind him, breathing.

“Oh, Jesus,” Gallo groaned, and began to turn.

The man was still sitting there on the bank, looking as if he had been waiting patiently for hours. He no longer wore the dark glasses.

He had removed the jacket to reveal a plain white shirt. There was a reason for this, Gallo thought. The night was desperately close, so hot it was hard to take in sufficient air in a single breath. Then he cursed his own stupidity. The man had shrugged off the jacket because it was part of some disguise, a way of concealing his identity when they had met, in the presence of others. Now that they were alone, and his intent was clear, it was no longer needed.

Gallo fixed his attention on the figure in front of him. He was much younger than he first thought, possibly about his own age. He was muscular too, in a way that spoke of workouts and gyms. Oddly, there was sympathy in his face, as if some part of him regretted what was happening.

It was a face that was familiar somehow, which both surprised and irritated him.

“Who the hell are you?” he croaked.

The seated figure looked closely at him. The hint of compassion was there. “Just a cog in the wheel,” he said. “Just a part of the mechanism.”

“We’ve met.” His head hurt too much to think straight. But the memory was there. He’d done something with this man. Picked up a package maybe. Or delivered one. “If I ever offended you in some way…” Gallo wanted to plead with this odd, taut figure in the dark, though he knew it was useless. And there was another thought in his head, one that kept getting bigger.

If the man intended to kill him—and Jay Gallo could think of no other reason why they had come to the dead river—why had he waited? Why had he sat hours by his unconscious figure on the sand, risking discovery, just to see him wake? Was there something he wanted? Something Gallo could still provide, maybe barter with?

“You want to trade?” Gallo asked.

The seated man turned. His face came into the harsh moonlight. It was an exaggerated face, one that would turn from beauty to ugliness with a simple change of the light. He had dark, alert eyes glinting in the moonlight, pale skin and full cruel lips. The face of a bit player in a canvas by Caravaggio, Gallo thought randomly.