David Hewson - A Season for the Dead

He thought about Sara. She was an extraordinary woman. It was not just her beauty. There was some luminescent quality that made him need her, made him feel that her presence provided some form of completeness for his life. Gino Fosse could have felt this way. It would have been easy. Still, it wasn’t enough to kill for.

“None of this makes sense,” he said. “The way she slept with these people. Fosse’s reaction.” He recalled the tiny tower on Tiber Island, with its smell of meat and blood. And the cryptic message that was still running around in his head.

“I’m an idiot,” he said. “Even Fosse told us this wasn’t all it seemed. That’s why he wrote that on the wall. He was laughing at us all the time. He knew we’d look the wrong way. He’s been taunting us all along.”

She looked into his eyes, not liking what she saw there. “You want some advice? Go home. Pour yourself a drink. Read a book or something. Falcone’s put you out of this for a reason. There’s nothing more you can do.”

He reached inside his jacket, pulled out the service pistol and put it on the table. It was a Beretta 92FS semiautomatic, the matte-black police workhorse they all carried. The fifteen-round clip was full.

He’d fitted the sight on the end of the barrel to make it more accurate. Not that it made much difference. He was a lousy shot and knew it.

“So you’re going to take on the world with that?” she demanded.

“I went into this job for a reason.”

“They all do, Nic! Luca probably said the same thing when he joined. Falcone too. Then you see the world for what it is. You learn to bend, before you break.”

“Bend enough to conspire in a judicial murder?” He touched the black metal. “Because, if I’m right, isn’t that what’s going on here? Falcone doesn’t plan to arrest Cardinal Denney. He just wants to step aside when some hood moves out of the shadows and does the deed. What’s the betting Fosse never makes it out alive either? What does that do for Falcone? One more feather in his cap. He gets to close all the options on the case, put a few corpses in the morgue he feels belong there and probably pick up some money on the side. Is this the first time? Did Luca know that already? Am I the idiot around here? The only one who doesn’t know what’s going on?”

She didn’t argue and that gave him his answer.

“The gun won’t do you any good,” she said.

“I know. I was just going to hand it in. I quit. I threw my card at Falcone this morning. Enough’s enough.”

“Wonderful,” she groaned. “I imagine that really made an impact. How many men do that to him in a week, do you think? He adores that kind of thing. You can take it all back, Nic. Think of it as part of the initiation.”

“Initiation?” he asked, astonished. “Into what? A world of compromises? A world where you’re willing to cut deals with crooks, of all kinds, because that’s the easiest way to get what you want?”

“There are people who’d say that’s just being pragmatic.”

“I know,” he said. “Falcone. Our man in the Vatican. The people it suits to think that way. Not me.”

“So what do you think you can do?”

“Something. Maybe.” The words sounded lame even as he said them.

“Try to make sure this crap doesn’t happen again.”

“And if you’re wrong?”

“Then I look a fool. So what’s new?”

She closed her eyes. “Is there anything I can do to dissuade you from this madness?”

“Doubt it,” he shrugged.

“You’re a stubborn kid.”

“I’m twenty-seven. I’m not a kid. Not anymore.”

She pulled out a pack of cigarettes and lit one. The smoke curled out toward the open window, out into the smoggy heat of the morning.

“No,” she agreed. “You’re not. You know what worried Luca most about you? He couldn’t understand why you couldn’t let things go. Why you just hung on like a terrier when any rational person would just say enough’s enough. Luca knew what Falcone is. We all do. Listen to me, Nic. That doesn’t make Falcone a bad cop. This has all gone wrong for him now but you don’t think for a moment he would have countenanced any of this if he knew his own men would get killed, do you?”

“I don’t know.”

“I do.” She said it firmly. “And he doesn’t take money either. In his book, he’s as honest as they come. He just happens to think the ends justified the means. When you think that way, sometimes it all goes horribly wrong.”

He thought about that. She was probably right. He could see the pain etched into the inspector’s bitter features. “So what if you’re right? Doesn’t bring Luca back. Doesn’t put me on Falcone’s side either. Blame my old man. It must be in the genes.”

“Oh, God.” Teresa Lupo looked at him, then picked up the folder in front of her. “Hell, let’s live dangerously together. Here…”

She took out two one-page reports and put them both on the table, turned toward him.

“What’s this?” he asked.

“You wanted a reason why Fosse did what he did. You wanted his trigger. There it is and it isn’t anything any one of us could have guessed. Even Falcone, I think, though someone else knows because they must surely have used it.”

He looked at the pages. They were both DNA analysis reports from Fosse’s home in the Clivus Scauri. It took him a little while to understand. When the revelation came, it was, somehow, a relief too, the final and welcome piece of the puzzle falling into place.

He checked his watch. In ninety minutes Michael Denney would get into the car that would, surely, take him to his death. Then a memory entered his head: of the day he stood outside the church of San Clemente, with Jay Gallo’s drowned corpse inside, listening to Sara recount the tale of the fake Pope Joan and how she was torn to shreds by the mob once they understood her true nature.

Teresa watched him, waiting for his response. “We just assumed what they wanted us to assume all along,” he said. “That she was Denney’s mistress, sleeping with these people to try to help him. We never began to think there could be some other explanation.”

“No,” she said, with some regret. “Not that one.”

He ran his fingers across the report. His brain was fighting to get all this straight. There were so many answers here if he could put his finger on them. Explanations that tied up everything, and left Sara as much a victim as anyone. “This couldn’t be some mistake, Teresa?”

“DNA doesn’t lie. Sara Farnese is Denney’s daughter. Gino Fosse’s sister. Nonidentical twin. I checked their birthdays through the driving license records. Same day. Him supposedly in Palermo, her in Paris. God knows where in reality, but they’re twins, Sara and Gino. There’s no other explanation.”

He remembered what she told him about growing up in a convent in Paris. While she’d been surrounded by nuns, Gino Fosse must have been fostered by two Sicilian peasants, then shipped off to church school as soon as he was old enough, perhaps because his true nature was already apparent. All the while Michael Denney had kept tabs on them both. Somehow Denney had managed to bring both close to his side, never telling one about the other. Perhaps he judged Fosse was too unstable to handle that knowledge. Perhaps the old man just liked playing these games. Whatever, he wanted his family near. Costa could only guess at the reasons.

“Sara’s doing this because he’s her father,” he said. “She knows the trouble he’s in. She knows he’s frantic for a way out. So she’s sleeping with anyone he tells her to, letting Fosse take pictures, just to give him some hope, a chance, maybe. And none of it works. In fact, it just makes things worse because someone’s been watching the games Gino’s been playing. Someone with a reason to get Denney out of there. So this someone tells Gino who Sara really is, knowing this is the trigger. Gino realizes Denney’s been… pimping his own sister and using him to make the delivery. Getting him to take pictures of her. Christ…”