David Hewson: A Season for the Dead

She looked at Stefano’s head. It lay on the floor, resting on the ancient copy of Apicius, staining the page with thick, black blood. They stood in the shade of the colonnades in St. Peter’s Square, Luca Rossi wondering how badly the sun might have burned his bald head already that day.

Two

Acouple of rocks were rumbling around his stomach from the previous night’s beer and pizza feast. Then, to make matters worse, he had that very morning been given the kid as duty partner for the next four weeks. It was a kind of punishment, for both of them, he guessed. Neither fitted in well with the Rome state police department at that moment, for very different reasons. Rossi’s problem was simple: He was under a cloud.

The kid’s was more complicated. He just didn’t look right, period. And never even knew.

Luca Rossi eyed his partner and groaned. “Okay. I know you want me to ask. So do the trick then.”

Nic Costa smiled and Rossi wished the kid didn’t look so young. Sometimes they had to arrest the random vicious type in the hallowed precincts of the square. Rossi couldn’t help but wonder how much use this slim, adolescent-looking character would be in those circumstances.

“It’s not a trick.”

They had never worked together before. They came from different stations. Rossi guessed the kid had no idea why some old, overweight cop had been made his new partner. He’d never asked. He just seemed to accept it, to accept everything. Still, Rossi knew something about him. They all did.

Nic Costa was one of those cops the others couldn’t quite believe. He didn’t drink much. He didn’t eat meat. He kept fit and had quite a reputation as a marathon runner. And he was the son of that damned Commie the papers used to go on about, a man who had left Nic Costa with one very unusual habit. He was a painting freak, one particular painter too. Nic Costa knew the whereabouts and the provenance of every last Caravaggio in Rome.

“Sounds like a trick to me.”

“It’s knowledge,” Costa said, and for a moment looked more like his real age, which Rossi knew to be twenty-seven. Maybe, the older man thought, there was more to him than met the eye. “No sleight of hand, big man. This is magic, the real thing.”

“Give me some magic then. Over there…” Rossi nodded toward the walls of the Vatican. “I guess they’re full of the things.”

“No. Just the one. The Deposition from the Cross, and they took that from its original location too. The Vatican never much cared for Caravaggio. They thought he was too revolutionary, too close to the poor. He painted people with dirty feet. He made the apostles look like ordinary mortals you might meet in the street.”

“So that’s what you like about him? You get that from your old man, I suppose.”

“It’s part of what I like. And I’m me, not someone else.”

“Sure.”

Rossi remembered the father. A real troublemaker. He never stood to one side for anything, never took a bribe either, which made him one very odd politician indeed. “So where?”

The kid nodded toward the river. “Six-minute walk over there. The Church of Sant’Agostino. You can call it The Madonna of Loreto or The Madonna of the Pilgrims. Either works.”

“It’s good?”

“The feet are really dirty. The Vatican hated it. It’s a wonderful piece of work but I know of better.”

Rossi thought about this. “I don’t suppose you follow football, do you? It may give us more to talk about.”

Costa said nothing. He turned on the radio scanner and plugged in the earpiece.

Rossi sniffed the air. “You smell those drains? They spend all this money building the biggest church on the planet. They got the Pope in residence just a little walk away. And still the drains stink like some backstreet in Trastevere. Maybe they just chop up bodies and flush them down the toilet or something. As if we’d get to know.”

Costa kept fiddling with the damned radio scanner. They both knew it was supposed to be banned.

“Hey,” Rossi growled. “Don’t you think I get bored too? If Falcone hears you’ve been messing with that thing, he’ll kick your ass.”

Costa shrugged his narrow shoulders and smiled. “I was trying to find some football for you. What’s the problem?”

Rossi stuck up his big hands and laughed. “Okay. You got me there.”

They watched the thin crowds shuffle across the square in the enervating heat. It was too hot for the bag-snatchers, Rossi decided. The weather was doing more to reduce the Rome crime rate than anything a couple of cops could ever achieve. He could hardly blame Costa for playing with the scanner. None of them liked being told there were places in the city where they weren’t welcome.

Maybe Costa had some anticlerical thing in his genes, however much he told everyone he was apolitical, the opposite of his father. And the Vatican was part of the city, whatever the politicians said. It was crazy to think some thieving little bastard could snatch a bag in front of them then scuttle off into the milling masses inside St. Peter’s and suddenly become untouchable, the property of the Pope’s Swiss Guards in their funny blue uniforms and ankle socks.

Costa was never going to hear anything of import on his little pocket scanner. Too little went on in the Vatican for that. But just listening was a form of protest in itself. It said: We’re here.

Rossi eyed a long crocodile of black nuns who followed a woman waving a little red pennant on a stick. He looked at his watch and wished the hands would move more quickly. “Enough,” he announced, then, to his surprise, felt Costa’s hand on his arm.

The young detective was listening intently to a squealing racket in the earpiece of the radio. “Someone’s been shot,” Costa told him, suddenly earnest. “In the Library Reading Room. You know where that is?”

“Of course,” the older man said, nodding. “Might as well be Mongolia, as far as we’re concerned.”

Costa’s sharp brown eyes pleaded with him. “Somebody’s been shot. We’re not going to just stand here, are we?”

Rossi sighed. “Say again after me: 'The Vatican is another country.' Falcone can put it more clearly for you if you want.”

Falcone could, Rossi thought, put it very clearly indeed. He didn’t even want to imagine what that conversation would be like. He’d been very glad that the last five years had been spent outside Falcone’s reach. He only wished it could have been longer.

“Sure,” Costa agreed. “But that doesn’t mean we can’t look. They never said we couldn’t go in there. They just said we couldn’t arrest people.”

Rossi thought about that. The kid was right, up to a point. “That’s all you heard? Someone’s been shot?”

“Isn’t that enough? Do you want to go back and tell Falcone we didn’t even offer to help?” Rossi patted his jacket, felt his gun there, and watched Costa do the same. They looked down the Via di Porta Angelica toward the entrance to the private Vatican quarters. The Swiss Guards who were normally there checking visitors’ papers were gone, doubtless called to the event. Two Roman cops could walk straight in without a single question being asked. It seemed like an invitation.

“I’m not running,” Rossi growled. “Not in this damned heat.”

“Your call,” Costa answered, and was off, out of the square, through the open gate, legs pumping.

“Kids…” Luca Rossi grunted, and shook his head.

By the time Rossi arrived at the Library, some seven minutes later, Nic Costa had quietly established that the man who lay on the floor, head ripped apart by at least three bullets, was indeed dead. He had watched the injured attendant being taken away by two scared-looking medics. He had quietly, carefully, made a few inquiries. The room was in utter chaos, which suited Costa just fine.