David Hewson: A Season for the Dead

The terrified Guido Fratelli had immediately assumed that Costa was some kind of Vatican official, which was good enough for the three other Swiss Guards who had come to the room, established there was no imminent danger, and now awaited further orders. Costa had no early desire to disillusion any of them. He had, in four years on the force, seen plenty of dead bodies and even a couple of shootings. But finding a corpse and the epidermis of another, and in the Vatican, was a new experience, one he was unwilling to relinquish.

His mind was working overtime. He let it race. The effort almost pushed the smell of the room from his consciousness, making the stench of blood and the way it mixed with the hot, arid air from the open windows just a little less noticeable. He let Fratelli babble out his story, unable, all the time, to take his eyes off the woman who sat on a chair, back to the wall, watching everything.

She was something short of thirty, modestly dressed in a tight, gray business suit. She had shoulder-length dark hair, expensively cut, large green eyes and a serious, classically proportioned face, like one in some Renaissance painting. Not Caravaggio, she was too beautiful for that. No one had that kind of radiance in his work, not even the madonnas. It wasn’t supposed to exist. She looked, too, as if she were holding everything that had happened inside her, trying not to let it explode.

When the guard was done she stood up and walked over to him. Costa noticed that her gray suit was spattered with blood. She seemed unworried by it. Delayed shock, he thought. Sometime soon she would realize how close she had come to being murdered, how a man had been shot to death in front of her after displaying this strange and gruesome trophy on the desk.

The skin still lay there, looking like the castoff from some bad Halloween party. Nic Costa found it difficult to believe it had once belonged to a human being. “You’re city police?” she asked, in a voice which had some odd tinge of accent to it, as if she were half English or American.

“That’s right.”

“I thought so.”

The Swiss Guards looked at each other and groaned but had yet to find the courage to argue. They were still waiting for someone. Rossi, who had been content to let the kid do the talking, smiled at them. The big man was willing to stand back. It felt a touch weird but Costa had got there first. He already seemed to be in control. All the same Luca Rossi felt a touch gray around the gills. Which he did more and more recently.

The woman said, “I think Stefano was trying to tell me something.”

“Stefano?” Costa asked. “The man who was going to kill you?”

She shook her head and Nic Costa couldn’t stop himself watching the way her hair moved from side to side. “He didn’t try to kill me. That idiot”—she indicated Guido Fratelli, who went red at her words—“didn’t understand what was going on. Stefano wanted me to go with him somewhere. He didn’t get the chance to explain.”

The guard muttered something in his own defense and then fell silent.

“What was he trying to tell you?” Costa asked.

“He said…” She was trying hard to think. He could understand why it would be difficult. There was so much crammed into such a short period of time. “He said, ”she’s still there.“To think of Bartholomew. And that we should hurry.”

Nic Costa watched her deliberate these points and he revised his opinion of her. Perhaps it wasn’t delayed shock. Perhaps she really was this cool, this detached from what had happened. “Hurry where?” he was about to ask when a man in a dark suit elbowed his way into the conversation, stabbed him hard in the shoulder with a fat index finger, and demanded, “Who the hell are you?”

The newcomer was about his own size, well built and middle-aged. His suit stank of cigars.

“Police,” Costa replied, deliberately cryptic.

“ID?” He took out his wallet and showed the man his card.

“Out,” the suit ordered. “Out now.”

Costa looked at his partner, who felt similarly incensed, judging by the small amount of color that seeped back into his cheeks. Rossi bent down to the truculent newcomer and asked, “And we are?”

The newcomer looked, Costa thought, like a boxer who had just found God: a big face with florid, pockmarked cheeks and a broken nose. He had a crucifix in the lapel of his black wool jacket which, as far as Costa was concerned, meant nothing. “Hanrahan,” he grunted, and again Costa tried to place the accent: Maybe there was some gruff Irish touch and a little American in there.

“Security. Now you boys just walk along, eh? Leave this to us.”

Costa tapped him on the shoulder and was amused by the anger that flared in his gray eyes. “You want to know what we found out? I mean, we were just here to help, Mr. Hanrahan. This could have been a very nasty thing. Someone shooting in the Vatican. Let’s face it, you took a while to get here. We could’ve been stopping something pretty bad.”

The woman looked at the three men fiercely. Costa knew what she was thinking: They lock horns at a time like this? She was right too. “This is a Vatican matter,” Hanrahan said. “We’ll look into it. If we need your help, we’ll call.”

“No, it’s not,” Costa insisted. “This is our business too.”

Hanrahan said just one word: “Jurisdiction.”

“You mean,” Costa asked, “your dumb guard here killed the man on your turf so that’s it?”

Hanrahan glanced at Guido Fratelli. “If that’s what happened.”

Costa walked to the desk; he picked up an edge of the skin. This had once covered an arm. It felt damp and cold. And more human than he had expected. “And what about this?” he asked.

Hanrahan glared at him. “What’s your point?”

“My point?” The man was not a cop, Costa realized. He wasn’t even a Swiss Guard, because they always wore some kind of uniform. Security maybe, but he was about defending things, not interested in the slow, careful process of discovery. “My point is that somewhere there’s got to be a body this fits. And for the life of me I don’t think that’s going to be here.”

“Detective—” the woman interrupted.

“Please. Bear with me. What I’m saying, Mr. Hanrahan, is that we’ve got two murders here and if you’re a betting man I’ll give you good money one of them took place in our jurisdiction. And you”—he cast a withering glance at the miserable Guido Fratelli, now close to tears—“you don’t. Now we’re cooperating, we’re being nice. Do you think there’s some small chance we might get the same in return?”

Hanrahan shook his head. “You really do not know what you are dealing with.”

“Hey!” Costa’s voice rose. He put a hand on Hanrahan’s shoulder. “Are we after the same thing or what?”

“No,” Hanrahan said instantly with a grimace. “Not at all. Now…”

The woman pushed between them and looked Nic Costa in the face. “Do you have a car?” she asked.

“Sure.”

“He said to go there quickly. Can we do that, please? Now?”

Once again, Costa was puzzled by how calm she was. All the time they had been arguing she had been thinking, trying to work out the riddle the dead man had left her. “You know where?”

“I think so. It was stupid of me not to realize earlier. We need to go now. Please?”

Nic Costa patted Hanrahan on the shoulder as they left and said, “See? You just have to know how to ask.”

Three

Costa thought about the abbreviated story Sara Farnese told them in the car. It raised a host of questions. He wondered too about her reasoning. Maybe the woman was already in shock, only inwardly, and this was just some crazy wild-goose chase.