David Hewson - A Season for the Dead

“Tell me,” he murmured.

She wiped her face with her arm, then gathered up the sheet around her, ready to leave the room.

“Tell you, Nic? I’ll tell you. I promise. When Michael Denney is out of the Vatican and gone from Italy. There. Is that what you want to hear?”

It was the last response he was expecting. No words formed in his head, only thoughts and images of Sara with the old, gray man trapped behind those distant walls in the ancient city.

“No,” he said finally, with a bitterness which surprised him.

She got up from the bed, clutching the sheet to her body. “Then I’m sorry but it’s true. And you’ll hear nothing more from me, not a word, until that’s happened.”

He gripped her arm, refusing to let her go. She forced his fingers from her wrist. His head was working overtime, a whirl of ideas, connections.

“Is that all I am?” he spat, shocked at his own unfamiliar fury.

“Just another random fuck in the night like the rest?”

There was the coldness in those green eyes again. Nic Costa knew he’d broken the spell with his own stupidity.

“You sound like you’re back on duty,” she whispered.

He wanted to strike her. “Maybe I am. Maybe I should have stayed there all along.” The cop in him was waking. He took her by the arms and forced her into the bedside chair. “Let’s talk, then. Like we’re supposed to. Did you sleep with Rinaldi to get that expert opinion to go Denney’s way? Did Denney ask you to do that?”

Her eyes were fixed on the floor.

“Okay. Don’t answer. Either way, it doesn’t matter. It explains something. And the American, Gallo. He never knew Denney at all. We found nothing to link them. What happened there?”

His mind raced in the silence. “You used him. Denney needed something. A messenger perhaps. Someone to take a package someplace, pay someone off maybe. You slept with Gallo to get him to do favors. Denney didn’t even specify him by name. He just asked you to find the right person. Was that what happened with the Englishman too? He was something big with the EU. Did that make him useful to Denney as well?”

“Hugh Fairchild was my lover,” she whispered. “He came to me for what I am. Don’t judge me with your guesswork.”

“Fairchild was a married man looking for a warm bed in a strange town. I’m not guessing. I’m just working my way toward something that makes sense. I believe—”

“Believe what the hell you like.”

She got up, pushed brusquely past him. He watched her slim figure disappear through the doorway, into the corridor, toward the room at the end of the house, torn by his own warring emotions. He wanted to know; he didn’t. She was right. This was all guesswork. It left so many questions unanswered.

Nic Costa lay back on the crumpled bedclothes, still damp from their bodies, and closed his eyes, wondering if he could sleep. His head filled with such possibilities. His mind ran with images he never wished to imagine. Beyond the window, in the hot darkness, owls called through the night. He could hear, far off, the chatter of the men on the gate, their radios crackling in the darkness, alive with some news from beyond this small, cherished haven. He felt a fool.

He’d let Marco’s magic, and Sara’s sudden gift of a startling, physical ecstasy, steal away his concentration. Gino Fosse would surely not be sleeping. There was a cycle in motion beyond this fleeting sanctuary his father had tried to create. It would not be broken yet.

He thought of Michael Denney again, pushing aside the insidious vile images that wanted to rise inside his imagination.

Then, after a fashion, he slept until the phone woke him with a start.

He looked at the clock. It was now nearly six. Almost three hours had disappeared in the jumble of some half-waking nightmare.

He listened to the voice on the phone, Falcone’s familiar cold monotone, and was immediately dragged from his anguished reverie, back to reality.

The livid stain of a new dawn was breaking over Rome as Nic Costa drove along the deserted road, toward the looming, illuminated shape of the gate of San Sebastiano. There was scarcely a soul on the streets. The city seemed to have died in the dry August heat. It was hard to imagine life ever returning.

Then he pulled onto the main road that led through to the Lateran and on to the police station. As he did so the phone rang.

“Where are you?” Falcone barked.

“On my way to the Piazza Navona.”

“Don’t bother. He’s been busy again. Meet me in the Via Corso, the church on the little piazza, halfway along. You know it?”

“Yes.”

Falcone paused for a moment. Then he asked, “Did you get anything out of her? Anything we can use?”

“What?”

“The woman. That was the idea. Remember?”

“No,” Costa said, wondering how much Falcone could hear inside his voice. “I got nothing.”

He heard the familiar bitter sigh.

“Oh, well,” said the voice on the line. “And me with two men dead. The bastard’s going to pay for that. Nobody kills cops in this town. Not my men.”

“He was my friend,” Costa said. “He…” The words wouldn’t come out. Falcone seemed more offended by the personal affront than the loss of Rossi and Cattaneo. Costa had to fight to stop himself from pulling onto the side of the road and falling apart.

“I know,” Falcone acknowledged. “He was a good guy underneath it all.”

Even at that point Falcone had to make some judgment. Costa wondered why he worked with the man, why he did as he was told.

“One more thing,” Falcone ordered. “Don’t eat breakfast. Even Crazy Teresa couldn’t smile through this one.”

Nic thought about that, recalling the evening the three of them had spent together in the restaurant in Testaccio, in what seemed like another lifetime. There were other reasons, ones Falcone couldn’t imagine.

“Hey. A question,” Falcone added. “You come from farming stock. How many brothers and sisters you got?”

“Two.”

“You ever meet another peasant family smaller than that?”

Costa was baffled by the question. “I don’t recall.”

“Think about it. Farmers breed kids like they breed livestock. They need them to make the whole thing work.”

“So?”

“So where’s Gino Fosse’s siblings, huh?”

“Fosse didn’t have any. He was an only child. Maybe the mother had a medical problem or something?”

Falcone’s dry laugh echoed in his ear. “We got someone to talk to the local doctor about that. You’re right. According to him she was barren. So what happened there? A miracle?”

He was headed for the big junction in the Lateran square. Here the traffic was starting to get heavy: Trucks and buses hustled each other for position at the lights. He felt his concentration fading.

“No such thing,” he said, then turned off the phone. He didn’t want to hear Falcone anymore. He didn’t want to think about Gino Fosse’s family background. There was a picture in his head: of Sara beneath him, naked, a half-musical sigh emerging from her lips. The taste of her returned. Somehow, and this made him feel ashamed, it even obscured the image of Luca Rossi, the big man, now dead on some slab in the morgue.

He stopped a little way off from the church and watched the circus growing in the piazza. The media pack was out in force beyond the railings. Who could blame them? Valena was a celebrity, a fading one too, which, in some strange way, made the story even better. He was beginning to recognize the reporters now. These were some of the people who’d staked out the farm until the hunt had moved on. One, a woman with one of the seedier dailies, caught sight of him and walked over. She was about thirty, pretty, with fiercely hennaed hair and a determined face.