David Hewson - A Season for the Dead

There was only one photo with Rossi in it. Brother and sister were seated in a long open-topped Bugatti 57 in a vintage-car museum somewhere. Rossi had his hands on the steering wheel. Maria laughed from the passenger seat. He looked like a different man, someone in control of himself.

“That was before he had the breakdown,” the woman explained.

“He looks happy.”

“Don’t be fooled,” she answered with a bitter laugh. “He was always on the brink, to be honest. For as long as I knew him.”

He touched the photograph. “I can’t take this. It belongs to her. It’s too precious.”

“It’s my photograph. I was on the trip. I can get another made. Take it.” She looked around the little room. “He hated me coming in here. It was his secret place, I think. Somewhere he liked to hide sometimes. Still had to be cleaned, though. I’ll leave you for a while.”

She walked out, closing the door. Nic Costa sat at the small, neat desk and looked out of the window, out at the rows of cars and the apartment blocks running away from the motorway. This was a life he could never have associated with Luca Rossi: an ordered existence with responsibilities no one in the department could have guessed at.

He opened the desk diary and immediately felt guilty, ashamed. It was apparent from the moment he looked at the page that this was where Rossi put the other side of himself: the black and gloomy side that always threatened to lead him to the edge. The writing was unbalanced: sloping and too small. There were doodles, tiny scribbles that could have been the faces of demons. And a small line of doggerel, one Costa knew by heart…

As I was going to St. Ives I met a man with seven wives.

He read more. This was the private place where Rossi took his inner fears for a walk and everyone was in there: Falcone, Teresa Lupo, Sara, everyone. No one was spared. No small detail went unrecorded.

No wonder Rossi kept the care worker out of the room.

Costa read two more pages, then tucked the diary under his jacket, went back into the living room, said a polite, terse good-bye and was gone.

Forty-Nine

"You made a sound. When…" He was reluctant to finish the sentence. She laughed at his embarrassment. It was midmorning. The traffic outside made a low roar. Gino Fosse had returned at eight, showered, slept a little, not disturbing her. Then she had woken him slowly, gently, touching his strong, naked body with keen fingers, arching over him, letting her breasts fall into his face until his teeth fastened on a nipple and she felt his growing interest stir against her legs.

“When you what?” she asked him. They were still locked lazily together, she above him, rolling gently, feeling his physical presence subside.

“You know.” His eyes went dark for a moment. There was so much inside him she didn’t understand. Where he went to all night. What he did. Robbing, she guessed. It wasn’t such a bad thing. Needs must.

But if all he did was steal, why would they want her to watch him like this? Why would they demand, so insistently, with threats only barely concealed, that she had to call them every time he left and tell them everything they had discussed?

“Say it,” she ordered.

The pinkness in his cheeks, the result of their mutual exertions, flushed a little brighter. “When I come. You felt it.”

“Of course.” She laughed. “What do you think?” There was a sheen of sweat on her soft, young skin. “Those others. I make them wear something. But you’re special, Gino. You’re safe. With you I want to feel when it happens. Not that I wouldn’t know anyway. I’m good. Aren’t I?”

“You’re good,” he agreed. “Why? Why me?”

She frankly peered straight into his eyes. “Because you didn’t expect anything. Because you were gentle.”

There were so many mysteries for him here. He’d never wanted Irena, not in the beginning. Then something had changed, in him, not her.

“What do you feel when it happens?” he asked.

She thought for a moment. No one had asked before. He saw this in her face and felt some small, warm surge of pride to think he was the first. “That there’s something of you just blooming inside me. Something that could stay if I wanted it to. Stay and grow. Become a child maybe.”

His face went white. Abruptly he withdrew from her, shrinking back under the damp sheet. She hated to see him like this, the sudden shock, the strange, internal grief that seemed to be masquerading as fury.

“I told you,” she said, stroking his matted hair. “With the others I make them wear something.”

He refused to look at her. She wondered once again what he did, thought about the curious smell on him when he came back that morning. A stink that suggested he’d been near cooked meat.

“But it won’t happen, Gino. It can’t.”

He looked into her pale, young face, struggling to make sure she told the truth.

“I got pregnant once back home. You can go places. You can get rid of the problem before it arrives. They made a mess of it. I can’t have kids, not ever. I just make them wear these things so I don’t get their diseases. But I can dream. We can both dream if we want.”

He let her fingers run down his cheek, play with his lips. She bent down and kissed him, hard.

“Families kill you,” Gino Fosse said. “Families tear your life to shreds.”

“Sometimes,” she agreed. “What else is there?”

He was unable to think of an answer.

She leaned into his ear, her breath hot. “When you come inside me I feel something warm and alive, where it’s supposed to be, as if you were bleeding out your life for me, Gino. I take your gift and it sits there, wondering, making me grateful.”

Not once, not in any of the brief, aggressive encounters he recalled from the past, had he considered the idea that this was a mutual event. The act had always been about his own efforts to achieve some brief, cathartic satisfaction. It had never occurred to him that there could be pleasure on the other side too. You’re the doorway of the Devil. That was what Tertullian had said and he’d always interpreted this literally, that a woman was the receptacle, an unfeeling, unresponsive place into which he could cast his lust.

He looked around the room. It was grubby. Their clothes lay on the floor. His bag, now depleted of most of his tricks, sagged on the stained carpet. All that was left was the gun and some ammunition. It had to be enough.

“Tell me about yourself,” she said. “Tell me about your family.”

He looked at her with those cold, dead eyes and she wished she could keep her mouth shut sometimes.

“Why? What do you want with them?”

“Nothing.” His anger annoyed her. It had been a reasonable request, not the kind he ought to resent. “I want to know about you. I want to hear what they did to make you this way.”

“I was this way without them,” Gino Fosse said. It was foolish, dishonest, to pretend anything else was to blame. No family, no colliding set of events, had made him what he was. He recalled the fat TV man roasting on the grill, thought of the look of terror in his eyes. This was no one’s doing but his. It was a conscious, deliberate act with a specific purpose in mind. Just like skinning a live cat had been twenty years or so before. The dark seed had been growing inside him all along. It just needed someone to nurture it.

Before the work began he’d stared for hours at those haunting, grisly depictions of martyrdoms in the churches, watching the saints meet their fate, wishing he could hear the words on their lips. But they were different. In his agonies, Arturo Valena screamed nothing but curses. Alicia Vaccarini went weeping, unenlightened. He tried to remember the Englishman, losing his skin, tied to the beam in the church on Tiber Island, tried to decode the noises that issued from his gagged throat. And the Rinaldi woman, so stupid, so baffled by what was going on. These were now distant memories. What happened that day was not his doing alone. Hanrahan had made the arrangements.