Authors: The Sacred Cut
Falcone
briefly touched her long jet black hair, then turned to watch the snow coming
down and the way it was beginning to bury her anew.
"Don't
lay a finger on a thing," he said. "I shouldn't have done as
much as I did."
"No,
sir," Costa whispered, his head reeling.
"Well?"
Falcone didn't even seem put out by this. It was as if everything were
normal, just another everyday event that the cold, distant inspector could take
in his stride.
"Well,
what?" Costa snapped back.
"Well,
how about you sit down on that chair over there and write down every last thing
you remember. You're a witness here, Costa. Interview yourself. And
don't skip the awkward questions."
FALCONE
PLAYED IT BY THE BOOK. HE SEALED THE Pantheon and the immediate vicinity. He
called in every officer he could lay his hands on and marshalled the best
scene-of-crime team available. When the crew from the morgue arrived they were
led by Teresa Lupo, who'd been dragged out of bed and, when she saw the
reason, glad of the fact. Then Falcone supervised an initial search of the Pantheon's
interior, uncovering enough evidence to ascertain the identity and American
citizenship of the dead woman, and set in train the sequence of events needed
to inform the American embassy and Mauro Sandri's relatives. Finally,
along with a string of more minor requests, he'd ordered the recovery of
the tape of every last CCTV camera in the area, including several inside the
Pantheon itself.
When
Falcone was satisfied that the crime scene was effectively preserved in aspic,
ready for a more thorough and searching examination come sunrise, he'd
walked through the continuing blizzard to one of the empty squad cars parked
next to the frozen fountain. There, exhausted, he had reclined the passenger
seat all the way back and tried to get a little sleep. It would be a long day.
He needed his rest and the energy to think. And even that was denied him
because one thought kept running through Leo Falcone's mind. When
he'd reached the portico of the Pantheon he had been about to climb the
very steps where Mauro Sandri stood. All that had stopped him was the phone
call, the nagging, drunken tirade from Filippo Viale, which had begun when he
entered the square and went on, pointlessly running through the same question,
over and over again.
Are you with us, Leo
?
Falcone
hadn't understood why Viale felt the need to come back to this tedious
issue so quickly. He'd put it down to the drink and the SISDE
officer's curious mood. The call was still in his head, every precise
second of it. Viale's voice had become so shrill in his ear that he had
paused just short of the portico, and in doing so had avoided walking into the
space created by the two central pillars and outlined by the light from the
interior, which formed the perfect frame for the gunman on the fountain steps.
Without
Viale's call, he would have gone on to join the photographer. And perhaps
he would now be the one lying in the black plastic body bag stored on a metal
gurney, safe inside the Pantheon, parked like a piece of luggage in front of
one of the building's more hideous modern accretions, the gross and
gleaming tomb of the first king of a post-Roman united Italy, Vittorio
Emanuele.
Professionally,
Leo Falcone met death and frustration frequently and never gave them any more
consideration than the job required. On the rare occasions they had touched him
personnally, he found himself less confident of his response, and this lack of
certitude became itself one more unfamiliar, unwelcome intruder into a life he
tried to regard as sane, ordered and functional.
In
the space of one evening an officer of the security services had given him a
curious warning that his career had, at the very least, stalled and was,
perhaps, already in decline. Then, in short order, almost in response to this
very idea, the black veil of the grave had swept against his cheek, so closely
he could feel how chill and empty a place it truly was.
Sleep,
real sleep, was impossible in such circumstances. When Leo Falcone was woken by
the rapping of a gloved hand on the window, just after sunrise at seven on that
frozen Roman morning, he had no idea whether he'd slipped fully into
unconsciousness at all during the preceding hours.
He
wiped the condensation from the window and realized there was no time to worry
about the loss. Distorted by the condensation on the glass, Bruno
Moretti's stern, moustachioed face was staring at him from the white and
chilly world outside. Falcone's immediate superior, the commissario to
whom he reported on a daily basis, had found a reason to drag himself out of
the office and visit a crime scene. It was a rare and unwanted event.
Falcone
climbed out of the car, trying to fathom some reason for this departure from
custom.
"This
is a nice way to start the holiday season," the commissario moaned
immediately, glancing at the lines of uniformed men blocking off the Pantheon
and most of the piazza. "Just what we need, Falcone. The tourist people
are screaming at me already. They've a lot of people on their books who
thought they were coming here today." He scanned the square, full of
cops. "Now this..."
"We
have two deaths, sir," Falcone replied patiently.
"That
was more than six hours ago."
Moretti
was a bureaucrat. He'd worked his way up through traffic and
intelligence, branches of the service that had their merits in Falcone's
opinion but left the man with little feeling for investigation.
Falcone
glanced at the scene-of-crime officers and wondered if Moretti had any idea how
important their work was, how easily it could be spoiled by a hurried search. "I
can't expect the SOCOs to make a serious effort in the dark. It's
impossible. Particularly in a place like this."
Moretti
sighed and said nothing. That was, Falcone thought, the closest he was going to
get to some sign of recognition that there really was no other way to proceed.
"We
have to do this very carefully, sir. It's the only chance we have. Once
we leave there the hordes are going to be climbing over everything. If
we've missed one small piece of evidence, it's gone, for good
probably."
Moretti
was glowering at the building, as if he wished it weren't there. The snow
had stopped now but the sky was the colour of lead, pregnant with more. The
great dome of the Pantheon wore a picturesque mantle. The rest of the square
was a hideous sight, frozen slush churned to a grey mess by the constant
movement of emergency vehicles and the tramp of feet.
"
"Probably," " the commissario snorted. "When will you
be out?"
"Mid-afternoon
at the earliest."
"Make
it noon. You've got the manpower. You managed to requisition half the
Questura without my knowing last night. You could have called."
Falcone
nodded. He could have done that. But he chose not to. Nothing got past Moretti
easily. There was too much explaining to be done and all for no reason. He'd
worked for better bosses, and worse. With Moretti it was simpler for both of
them if they both stuck to their own particular skills. In Falcone's
case, investigation. For Moretti, the behind-the-scenes management of internal
and external relations, the marshalling of budgets and staff.
Politics
.
"I
didn't want to disturb you, sir. Not until we knew who she was."
Moretti
laughed. The sound shocked Falcone. There didn't even seem an edge inside
it. "She's an American. That's all. I find it a little
insulting you think it's worth calling me over for her but not for that
poor bastard who was taking the photos. He was at least Italian."
"I
don't make the rules," Falcone murmured. "Sir."
It
was a standing order these days. Verbal and physical attacks on Americans were
rare and usually had nothing to do with nationality, but the previous October
an American military historian had been badly beaten up in the centro storico. Had
a couple of uniformed cops not stumbled on the scene the man could have died. The
brutal assailant had escaped. No one had claimed responsibility. Initially it
was assumed that the Red Brigades were behind the attack, and everyone waited
for the customary anonymous phone call citing it as a blow against American
imperialism. But it never came. No one--not the police, not SISDE, not
even the military spooks as far as Falcone knew--had come up with a shred
of evidence to suggest who was really responsible, or whether this was part of
a concerted campaign against US citizens. Nevertheless, the order had come down
from high, in all probability from somewhere in the Quirinale Palace itself:
all incidents involving Americans had to be reported to a senior level
immediately.
"Just
another tourist, huh?" Moretti said. "Woman on her own? Well, I
suppose I can guess what happened there. Probably met some complete stranger.
Thought it was just a little romance. Throw a few coins in the fountain, then
walk here for a little fun. It's just another sex crime, right?"
Falcone
checked his watch, then looked at the activity inside the building. "You
tell me," he replied, and began walking towards the Pantheon door,
knowing the commissario had no choice but to follow.
The
lights of the Pantheon burned brightly, supplemented by a forest of police
spots. Half a dozen SOCOs in white bunny suits were now scouring every last
square millimetre of the patterned floor. A makeshift canvas tent had been
erected over the corpse in the centre, with a set of lights tethered at the
corners. Snow had continued to fall steadily through the night. Teresa Lupo and
her team had built the contraption to keep the body from being buried ever more
deeply by the continuous white stream that worked down through the oculus
directly above them. From the moment Falcone saw the corpse emerging from the
ice under Teresa Lupo's care, he understood the body was in good hands. She
was a wonderful pathologist, the best, even if his relationship with her was
often strained. She had seen immediately that it was important to preserve any
shreds of evidence that might be hidden in the ice as it melted under the heat
of the lights. There was another reason too. The body had been arranged, quite
deliberately, on the circle which marked the exact midpoint of the building,
arms and legs outstretched to their limits in an angular fashion Falcone
recognized, though he was unable to remember from what. The pose of the
body--there was no other way to describe it--possessed meaning. It
was, somehow, a cryptic message from the woman's murderer and one they
needed to try to understand as quickly as possible.
Carefully,
Falcone wound his way through the clear area marked by tape that had been set
up to allow safe access in and out of the building. Moretti followed in
silence. They reached the mouth of the tent. Falcone stopped and gestured
towards the body. Lupo and her deputy, Silvio Di Capua, were on their knees
moving gently around it, poring over the dead woman with painstaking, obsessive
deliberation. He had watched them get to work in the early hours of the
morning. Teresa Lupo had ordered her people to erect the tent the moment she
saw the scene, but it had proved a long and difficult job in the bitter cold of
the Pantheon's interior under a constant whirling downfall of snow. It
was almost an hour before they could crawl beneath the covering to examine the
ice funnel, slowly sweeping away the snowflakes with tiny brushes, revealing
the horror that lay beneath, millimetre by millimetre.
Moretti
looked at the naked woman, then fired a disgusted expression somewhere into the
dark corners of the building. "Sex crime, Leo. As I said."
"And
the photographer?"
Moretti
scowled. He didn't like being put on the spot like this. "That's
what you're supposed to find out."
Falcone
nodded. "We will."
"Make
damn sure you do. The last thing this city needs is something that scares off
tourists."
Falcone
reached into his pocket and took out the woman's passport. They'd
found it in a bag in a corner of the building. It named her as Margaret
Kearney, aged thirty-eight. The next-of-kin details weren't filled in. Her
driving licence had been issued in New York City six months before.
"We
don't actually know she was a tourist. All we have is a name."
"This
is going to be messy, isn't it?" Moretti grumbled. "The
Americans are asking questions already. They've got some resident FBI
people up at the embassy who want to talk to you."
"Of
course," Falcone murmured, trying to decode what Moretti had said. "I
don't understand. You're saying these are FBI people who are
resident here in Rome?"
Moretti
emitted a dry laugh. "Well, isn't that wonderful? Something you
don't know. Of course they've got FBI people here. Who the hell
knows
what they've got here? They're Americans, aren't they? They
do what the hell they like."
"What
do I tell them?"
Moretti's
dark eyes twinkled with delight. "Welcome to the tightrope. You tell them
just enough to keep them happy. And not a damn thing more. This is still Italy
as far as I'm concerned. We police our own country, thank you. At least
until someone tells me otherwise."