Authors: The Sacred Cut
"He's
fine." She sighed. "For an idiot. She's a messed-up immigrant
kid, Nic. I talked to the social people on the phone when you were asleep. They'll
have to take her into care. You can't just"--she formed the
words very deliberately--"transfer the way you feel about your own
kids to someone else. However much you need to. Gianni just wants to be home
with his own family. I know that. I don't blame him."
Costa
wondered if it was really so simple. "The girl looks happy, Teresa. Maybe
it works both ways. She's seeing a little of her own father in him. Besides,
he's doing his job too. She refused to say a damn word until he began
clowning around."
"It's
not the girl I'm worried about," she said with sudden severity. "He's
not the big, invulnerable hulk he looks, or haven't you noticed?"
"I
know."
"Good.
Now you take that coffee to your guest."
He
did as he was told and was unable to suppress slight nervousness when he
knocked on the door of the guest room. It was now just before eight. Emily
Deacon had slept solidly from the moment they took her back to the farmhouse
and probably remembered little about the confused hour or so after she fainted
in the Campo. She was going to wake up with plenty of questions. Costa took a
deep breath. Then, when there was no response, he entered.
This
had been his sister's room before she went to Milan to work. It had an
uninterrupted view back to the old Appian Way. The outline of the tomb of
Cecilia Metella sat, a drum-like shape, on the horizon. He placed the tray on
the bedside table, coughed loudly and waited as the American woman stirred
slowly into consciousness, watching, with no little fascination, the way she
was transformed from slumbering innocence back to the taut, alert FBI agent of
the day before.
She
looked around the room and frowned.
"Where
the hell am I?" she demanded, then gulped at the glass of fresh orange
juice.
"My
house. With the girl. She's downstairs with Peroni right now. You
remember our pathologist?"
"I
remember."
"We
got her to take a look at you after you fainted. We were worried you might have
been concussed. You banged your head when you went down like that. You
were... mumbling."
"A
pathologist? Thanks."
"She
used to be a doctor," he said.
She
felt her head. "You could have taken me home."
"We
didn't know where home was. Your friend Leapman wasn't exactly
helpful when we spoke to him. He seemed more interested in the man."
"As
was I," she grumbled.
"I'm
sorry. We just didn't know what else to do. We wanted Laila somewhere
safe. It seemed to make sense."
She
swore quietly. "My, won't I be in his good books now?" Then
she looked at him and Costa could see she was remembering something afresh from
the previous night. Something she didn't care to explain just then.
"I need to go into the office. Can you drive me?"
"Of
course. The bathroom's through that door. When you're done, come
downstairs. Peroni's cooking breakfast. You might find it interesting.
Also..."
He
wanted to laugh. She was looking at herself, still in last night's
clothes, wrapped in the bedsheets, trying to clear her head.
"This
is like being a student again," she complained. "
"Also" what?"
"You
might be able to forget about the bad books."
MONICA
SAWYER LAY STILL on the floor, arms hugging the coverlet he'd placed
around her the previous night, the cord tight in her flesh, chestnut hair
strewn around her face. She looked like a shattered doll dressed in a gaudy
nightgown, mouth open, blank eyes staring at the ceiling. Purple thumb marks
had turned livid on her neck. A line of dried blood stood on her lower lip.
It
wasn't a dream. In truth, he'd known that all along. Kaspar looked
at her and felt something approaching regret. It hadn't been planned.
He'd lost control and that was bad. He fetched the bag and automatically,
without a conscious thought, turned her over, sliced the scalpel down the back
of the nightgown, then the scarlet slip, and stared at her back. Not bad for a
woman in her forties. Smooth skin, barely blemished.
He
wondered what he would have done if he'd got the chance to lead a life of
dissolution. If there'd been the space inside the last thirteen years to
do anything but think of survival, a way of getting through the meagre day,
then getting even.
"You'd
be as fat as a pig, Kaspar." It was another voice inside him. They just
kept getting noisier all the time, all the more so since this last, unexpected
misadventure. This was the guy from Alabama, whose name was lost to him now
through the mist.
"You'd
be wearing pinstripes, working in a bank, screwing your wife once a week just
to keep her happy." Uptight New England WASP, speaking through the back
of the nose. There'd been many an officer like that, Kaspar thought. Or
maybe it was just a movie. Or Steely Dan Deacon himself. He'd got it.
That was
his
New England whine, brought back from the dead by seeing
his girl the night before. And letting her live...
"I'd
be me," he murmured, and that was a voice he only distantly recognized,
one that had no accent at all because it was him. As close as it got these
days.
"I'd
be me, Monica," he said again, stroking the side of her dead cheek with a
single finger. "And you know something? You wouldn't like me.
Because I'm not like Peter O'Malley. Or Harvey. Or anyone you know.
I'm just a piece of dry shit blowing on the wind. A part of the elements,
like rain or snow, looking for the right place to fall."
He
straddled her buttocks, took the back of her scalp and turned her dead head
around.
"You
hear me, bitch?"
It
was the guy from Alabama again. Maybe this one would hang around a lot today. He'd
been a vicious bastard. He could be useful too. Black as hell, muscles like
steel, a vocabulary that rarely strayed from A-class obscene.
Monroe
. That
was the name. Monroe had been the first to catch a bullet when they'd run
from the Humvee, got pinned down with no option but to try to make a break to
the most obvious place of safety. The shard of burning metal had come clean
through the man's head, tore off most of his lower jaw, left him running
round with half his face off till a second shell came and finished the job. The
guy was a moron too. Thought he was immortal, could just bark his way through
anything, catch a piece of red-hot iron with his fist and fling it to the
ground.
Sometimes,
when the memories came back, Kaspar wanted to cry, to hold his face in his
hands and bawl like a baby. Mostly, though, he could keep that away these days.
He'd done enough bawling for one lifetime. He could keep it at bay by
thinking of the pattern, the magic pattern in his little black bag, carved into
the living, waiting to be complete.
"See,
Monica," he said, back in the old voice, the
real
one. "They
never read Shelley, my dear. Can you believe that?"
My name is Ozymandias, king of kings
He
did a good Englishman--
posh
if you please.
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair
!
He
laid the scalpel on her back, got comfy on her plump ass and called into his
head the sacred cut and its magical subset, that shape burned on his
consciousness, so set there now he could carve it out of anything without the
pattern he had needed to begin with.
Shapes
made sense of things, shapes told you there was sanity and truth somewhere in
the universe. So he carved the first line, quickly, easily, and it didn't
feel right.
"Look
on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!" he whispered, but it was still the
old voice. He couldn't quite find the tone.
Because
it didn't work this time. There were tears in his eyes. He couldn't
just run through the same procedure again. She wasn't right. She was like
Little Emily Deacon, only not so lucky. She didn't belong there, not at
all.
Screeching
quietly to himself, the way he'd done when the guards used to come
through the door and drag him back to the room with the electric poles and
whips, he rocked from side to side, wildly slashing the scalpel across her waxy
flesh, back and forth, back and forth, making marks that looked like the talons
of a giant, crazy bird.
This
went on for a while. How long he didn't know. He was looking for those
voices in him: Dan Deacon, Monroe, the big black sergeant with half a jaw, one
of the women even. Anyone, anyone--it didn't matter who, so long as
it didn't sound like him, the old him.
The
voices wouldn't come and he knew why. He'd offended them. They kept
whispering something in his ear, Dan Deacon loudest of all. He'd been a
fool. The list was incomplete. One final set of skin remained to be added to
the pattern, the most important one, from someone he couldn't begin to
guess. And what did he do when he was supposed to be looking? Get distracted by
some horny California gal who couldn't keep her hands out of his private
belongings.
Thinking of rutting when you shoulda been cutting, forgetting who you
truly are
.
"Bitch,"
he murmured, and found the scalpel flying in his hand again.
Also,
he thought, she stood in the way. He could be here for days if he wanted. She
could start to stink and he hated that stink. It carried so many black memories
with it.
Haul her onto the terrace, boy! It's like an icehouse out there. You
won't smell a thing
.
Smart,
Alabama boy. They had helicopters hovering overhead all the time, cameras on
rooftops, mikes in the walls, people spying everywhere these days, listening to
the words you whispered in your sleep. They had to do that because they knew he
was among them, knew he was close to finishing the job.
Then KISS my ass, remember
?
Keep
It Simple, Stupid. The black guy said that all the time. Sometimes he had a
point.
This
was a place with a kitchen you could film a cookery show in: big knives, little
knives, meat saws, cleavers. Monica Sawyer had brought two large,
expensive-looking suitcases with her. They still sat in the living room with
Delta's business class stickers on the side. It would be a crime to let
them go to waste.
THE
VIA DEL BABUINO ran from the Spanish Steps to the Piazza del Popolo, a narrow,
cobbled medieval lane in permanent shadow from the high buildings on either
side. The shutters were still on the designer stores and the newspaper vendor
next to the Greek church had only just opened his bundles that bright sunny
morning as the three-car team rolled past.
The
Fiats squirmed on the slippery cobblestones, scattering a flock of black-coated
nuns like fleeing crows, hurrying across the snow towards the outline of the
familiar twin staircase winding down from Trinita dei Monti. Leo Falcone
sat in the back of the first car with Joel Leapman by his side, and wished the
sound of the sirens could drown out his growing misgivings. What Teresa Lupo
had revealed the previous night continued to bug him, all the more because
he'd decided to keep the information to himself and to defy Filippo
Viale, at least for the moment. It was hard enough dealing with his own grey
men without a bunch of FBI agents thrown into the mix. Falcone had tried to
discuss this with Moretti earlier that morning, only to find the grim-faced
commissario
already sharing his office with Leapman and Viale. The spooks had the smug look
of people in charge. It was a pointless meeting, relieved only by Costa's
phone call with a possible address for them to search. Not that they were under
any illusions. The idea that the man would stick around at the apartment seemed
ludicrous in the circumstances.
Leapman
wriggled in his black winter coat as the car approached the address Costa had
given them. He shook his scalped head, shot Falcone a disapproving glance, and
laughed.
"Something
wrong?" Falcone wondered.
"You
guys kill me. It's all so damn
casual
. What if he didn't
wise up? What if he's still in there? You gonna knock on the door and ask
him to come out for a talk?"
"Maybe."
Falcone knew this area well. The houses were identical: terraced properties
that fetched a fortune in spite of the constant roar of traffic from Spagna to
Popolo. They were apartments now, all with a single shared door at the front. There
was just one way out. At this time of day it was easy, too, to gain entrance to
any place like this in the city.
The
car pulled over. Falcone got out, walked to the intercom, pressed a couple of
buttons simultaneously and waited for the electronic lock to buzz. When it did,
he held open the green wooden door and let his team of six walk into the narrow
communal passage.
Leapman
couldn't believe his eyes.
"It's
what we do to let the trash man in," Falcone explained, nodding at the
pile of black plastic bags behind the front door.