A Cold Flame
AIDAN CONWAY

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Copyright

KillerReads

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www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2018

Copyright © Aidan Conway 2018

Cover design by Dominic Forbes © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2018

Cover photograph © Shutterstock.com

Aidan Conway asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Ebook Edition © March 2018 ISBN: 9780008281182

Version: 2018-06-20

To the Memory of

Matthew Francis Fadden

1929–2016

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Part Two

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty-One

Chapter Thirty-Two

Chapter Thirty-Three

Chapter Thirty-Four

Chapter Thirty-Five

Chapter Thirty-Six

Chapter Thirty-Seven

Chapter Thirty-Eight

Chapter Thirty-Nine

Chapter Forty

Chapter Forty-One

Chapter Forty-Two

Chapter Forty-Three

Chapter Forty-Four

Chapter Forty-Five

Chapter Forty-Six

Chapter Forty-Seven

Chapter Forty-Eight

Chapter Forty-Nine

Chapter Fifty

Chapter Fifty-One

Chapter Fifty-Two

Chapter Fifty-Three

Chapter Fifty-Four

Chapter Fifty-Five

Chapter Fifty-Six

Chapter Fifty-Seven

Chapter Fifty-Eight

Chapter Fifty-Nine

Chapter Sixty

Chapter Sixty-One

Chapter Sixty-Two

Chapter Sixty-Three

Chapter Sixty-Four

Chapter Sixty-Five

Chapter Sixty-Six

Chapter Sixty-Seven

Chapter Sixty-Eight

Chapter Sixty-Nine

Chapter Seventy

Chapter Seventy-One

Chapter Seventy-Two

Chapter Seventy-Three

Chapter Seventy-Four

Chapter Seventy-Five

Epilogue

Acknowledgements

Keep Reading …

About the Author

About the Publisher

One

The few flowers left in the chipped vase had withered to dry brown stalks in the searing August sun.

“You’re still sure this falls within our brief?” said Carrara as they stared at the cold, charred remains of the ground floor flat. All the bodies had now been removed but their presence lingered.

“It’s another fire, isn’t it?” said Rossi. “Probably arson. Why not?”

It was not the first fire in the city to bear the hallmarks of foul play, but it was the first fatal one since they had been moved off their normal duties.

They were standing in the welcome shade of the elevated section of the tangenziale flyover, on a side street off the busy, grimy Via Prenestina. It was hot, cripplingly hot. Thin rivulets of sweat were meandering down Rossi’s neck despite the shade.

“Even if there’s a file on this one already?” said Carrara. “A file that’s as good as closed.”

Rossi shook his head and continued to gaze into the blackened ruins.

“It’s August. You can get away with murder in August. Who was on it again?”

Carrara leafed through the case notes.

“No one I know. A guy called Lallana. Had a racial homicide’s brief. Seconded to us in June and then transferred out again, at his own request, now buzzing all over the place with Europol. I got hold of him by phone but he wasn’t keen on talking. Says it’s all in the reports and he’s got nothing more to add.”

“Giving you the brush-off?”

Carrara shrugged.

“He had it down as a hate crime – seems the victims were all foreigners – but not a single, solid lead. No witnesses, just the one guy who survived it.”

“A survivor?” said Rossi.

“Was. Dead now. Had 60 per cent burns. Should have been long gone but somehow hung on for nearly a week.”

“And all while I was on holiday,” said Rossi.

“You can’t be everywhere, Mick,” said Carrara glancing up from the notes. “I mean a break was merited, after Marini.”

Rossi’s thoughts turned then to the events of the previous winter but as his shoes crunched on the ash and scorched timbers he was still struggling to comprehend the present horror. Shooting, strangling, stabbing – that was one thing – but burning to death. They must have been locked inside when the fire started. Some might have woken but had been unable to get to a door or a window, the security grilles put there ostensibly to keep them safe from intruders thus consigning them to their fates.

“But why wasn’t anyone able to get out?” said Rossi. “Because they locked their room doors every night?”

“Correct,” said Carrara. “Normal practice in bedsits, but no keys for the security grilles were found, not even after a fingertip search.”

“What about the front door?” said Rossi. “Couldn’t they have got out with their own keys? They all had one, right?”

Carrara took out a blown-up scene-of-crime photo.

“The lock. Tampered with, the barrel and mechanism all mangled up. Some debris was found inside. It could have been someone forcing it – an attempted break-in – or it could have been sabotage. The occupants might have been able to open it from the inside to escape, if they had managed to reach the door, but the bolts were still in place. Nobody could get in until the fire guys arrived and then it was too late.”

“And their forensics?” said Rossi.

“Well,” said Carrara, “significant traces of ethanol – one version of the facts is that there was a moonshine vodka operation – and they did find the remains of a timer switch next to the burnt-out fridge. Lallana maintained it could have been foul play, or just as easily some home brew electrical set-up that shorted. He didn’t exactly go all out for the former theory. In the absence of a clear motive and witnesses the coroner delivered an open verdict. Have a look for yourself.”

Carrara handed Rossi the relevant report.

“Open?” said Rossi noting now with near contempt the irony. “Someone locked those poor bastards inside.”

“Like I said, no keys for the window bars were found but no one lived long enough to tell any tale.”

Among the scorched masonry and fallen timbers, one of the grilles lay across the small desert of debris, like the ribcage of a once living and breathing being strewn across a bleak savannah.

“Any names?” said Rossi.

“Just the one,” said Carrara. “The tough nut. Ivan Yovoshenko. He was found in the communal bathroom and had dog tags from his conscription days. But for them he would have been a zero like the rest. It seems he had at least tried to get out, got severely burnt in the process and maybe finally sought refuge in the bathroom. He could have struck his head and collapsed. Judging from the amount of alcohol they found in his bloodstream, he had to have been blind drunk and wouldn’t have realized just how hot the flames were. It was enough for him to survive as long as he did.”

“And nothing on the others?”

“Nothing,” said Carrara.

“Well, they can forget checking dental records,” said Rossi. “These guys could probably just about afford toothpaste.”

Carrara pulled out another sheet for Rossi.

“Presumed missing persons in Rome and Lazio for the last six months, but no matches with this address. The word on the street is that they were five single men, probably illegals, but anymore than that …”

“Sounds familiar,” said Rossi. “But no friends, no workmates?”

Carrara gestured to the desiccated blooms and a brown, dog-eared farewell note or two.

“Paid their respects then made themselves scarce, I suppose,” said Carrara. “If it’s a racial hate killing they were probably thinking ‘who’s next’?”

“But a landlord?” said Rossi, sensing an opening. “Tell me we have an owner’s name.” But Carrara was already quashing that hope with another printout from the case folder.

“Flat sold to a consortium two months ago as part of a portfolio of properties, a sort of going concern with cash-in-hand rents through an established ‘agent’ who hasn’t been seen since the fire.”

“That’s convenient,” quipped Rossi.

“Says here they always sent an office bod to pick up the cash in a nearby bar and the go-between got his room cheap as well as his cut. No contracts. No paper trail. No nothing.”

“And no name for the agent?”

“Mohammed. Maybe.”

“That narrows it down. And the bar? Anyone there remember him’?”

“Nada.”

“A description?”

“North African. About fifty.”

“Great,” said Rossi. “Well, it looks like the late Ivan’s our only man, doesn’t it? Let’s see what the hospital can give us.”

“And then a trip to the morgue?”

“You know, Gigi, I was almost beginning to miss going there.”

Two

“Yesterday was yesterday,” the checkout girl declared as Rossi, making one of his regular top-up shops, tried to pay the ten cents lacking from the previous evening.

Time to forget.

Time to move on.

After lunch and a short siesta he’d spent an hour in a bar, leafing through the papers thinking things over and watching the more popular TV channels to see their take on the Prenestina fire. The mayor had shown up, looked contrite, made a bit of a speech. A local priest was more outspoken, calling it ethnic cleansing. But it wasn’t as if there was any great rallying cry to get to the bottom of it, to trace and compensate the victims’ families, whether it was racially motivated or down to some underworld grudge. While the space being dedicated to the story was rationed after the initial reports, it was almost as if some sections of the media were giving the tacit impression that it had been, if not a necessary culling, then almost an occupational hazard for “illegals”.

As he left the supermarket a figure flashed past in the crowd. Was it? It couldn’t be. She was dead. He stood and watched as the dark-haired, athletic silhouette melted into the crowd, and then shaking himself back into something like rationality he proceeded homewards.

But the doppleganger had set him thinking – thinking about her again and the fallout from the Marini affair. It was almost unimaginable now to think that this same baked, arid city had been wreathed in snow and thrown into chaos while he and Carrara pursued a serial killer dubbed ‘The Carpenter’, trying to halt his murderous crusade against the city’s women.

It had been dubbed ‘The Carpenter’ case, but Marini had been at the centre of everything, playing an ambiguous role on the fringes of a coterie of obscure, occult power brokers in the Church, the state, and big business. For her own ends, she had played them both like violins almost all the way, before coming on board with him and Carrara as they made a pact to use her secret service skills to nail the killer. Her contorted rationale had been a part of a broader strategy, so she could control everything. They discovered that Giuseppe had had a history of working for the services and her cronies all along, and even if in a ragged way Rossi and Carrara did eventually get their man, the circumstances and the consequences still rankled.

He knew that the work of the dark, deep state, the powers-that-be, was not finished. It was an ongoing concern.

And then a decomposed body had turned up in the spring. Hers presumably, in the car she had escaped in through the snowstorm following that last encounter. The corpse had been buried in an unmarked grave, and Rossi and Carrara alone remained the custodians of the whole complex secret. But with no one having stood trial for either The Carpenter’s crimes or Giuseppe Bonaventura’s own murder and no one looking likely to, and while a file remained technically open, the case was considered as good as closed unless new evidence came to light.

All despite the misgivings and rumours that rumbled on in some quarters.

There was no shortage of paranoid speculation on the more radical fringes of the political world and within the world of crime investigation itself. No one but Rossi and Carrara knew the guilty truth. The tangled webs we weave, thought Rossi. They wouldn’t even believe it if he ever did try to come clean. Either way, he would go down for malpractice, perverting the course of justice, you name it. They would make sure of that.

But the dominant, accepted narrative was that the evil had been exorcized, the murders had ceased and The Carpenter had met a justified violent end.

One day perhaps it would all come out. One day.

The domestic political upheavals remained largely on hold now as the MPD faced up to its being so near yet so far from obtaining anything like real power. A general election was far off, unless the government were to fall, but that seemed unlikely. So little had changed in the city in terms of its politics and the penchant for corruption at every imaginable level. On the park walls, on the apartment blocks, the far-right graffiti, however, was fresh, with new variants and vile, resurrected favourites.

HONOUR TO THE FATHERLAND.

DEATH TO PERFIDIOUS JEWRY.

GYPSIES TO THE INCINERATORS.

The comments too that Rossi might hear from disgruntled older citizenry could be strikingly un-PC. “It’s an Islamic invasion, mark my words,” was one familiar refrain. No, the race issues had not gone away, as immigration, religious extremism, and the global terror threat continued to dominate the fear agenda.

He dropped his shopping onto the kitchen table and picked up one of the newspapers he hadn’t yet opened. He flicked through to the letters page, where citizens continued to rail against buses that still didn’t come, roads still full of holes, and, depending on how the breeze blew, the rubbish putrefying on the streets that continued to sour the evening aperitivo. He tossed the paper aside and set about about fixing himself a decent drink.

***

Rossi looked down from his balcony, his after-dinner sambuca and ice still holding its own against the enveloping evening heat. With the sun down, the city had begun to breathe a little. Traffic was almost non-existent, with only the odd revving motorino whining and yelping its horn from some unseen side street. Cut-price tourists, escaped from the throng, ambled about off the beaten track in mismatched summer clothes. Oblivious. Oblivious. Yes, thought Rossi. A state-within-the-state has its own people killed in the name of a perverse agenda and there’s nothing you can do about it. Just count yourself lucky it wasn’t you getting the bullet or the bomb. After all, these days you got it easy. The days of bombs in banks and train stations were long gone, buried under the rubble of the Seventies and Eighties. Of course they were.

Yana, his Ukrainian girlfriend of several years standing, was already in bed. He had cooked dinner and then they had chatted a little. She had seen, however, that he was distant, newly involved with a case. Tired herself after a busy day in the health centre, she had left him to ponder. Since going back to work full-time in the Wellness Centre, she had hardly had a moment’s rest. She lived, ate and slept work now, as if surviving the attempt on her life only a little more than six months earlier had left her leading a charmed life – every day and every moment was precious. She knew it and she was going to make it count and was even talking of expanding the business.

But it still chilled Rossi to the bone when he remembered it all and he still feared for Yana. Giuseppe had taunted him, letting him know in no uncertain terms that he had crossed Yana’s path in the dark days when she had arrived in Italy and fallen victim to traffickers. It had unsettled Rossi profoundly. But who else knew Yana’s secrets? Who else might crawl out from under a rock and want revenge? Perhaps the snakehead of the trafficking ring who had evaded Rossi all those years ago, thanks probably to a tip-off from a rat in his own Rome Serious Crime Squad, the RSCS.

The same rat who was still on the force now and, though he had his suspicions, remained unknown to him.

And the calls still came to his house or to Yana’s when they were together, sometimes months or even a year apart. Sometimes in the dead of night to torment him, or them. No voice. Just silence, a barely perceptible breathing. Someone he knew, he was sure, keeping tabs on him, making sure of where he lived and who he was with.

His thoughts turned to Yana again. The August-induced insomnia had left her feeling jaded, and the combination of heat-disturbed sleep and the effects of her cocktail of medication were wreaking havoc with her natural rhythms. Still she had astounded every doctor that had examined her. It had to be something to do with her inherent athleticism and her Ukrainian resilience or the will to live that he had seen all those years before when he had played his part in freeing her from the nightmare world of drugs, violence and exploitation that she had been sucked into as a naive young immigrant.

Apart from that, all in all, Rossi had to admit he was quite enjoying their, albeit temporary, cohabitation. Perhaps because it was temporary. So far, so good at least. He had even proposed the arrangement himself when Yana, having improvements made to her flat, had found herself in limbo. Their busy schedules meant that the time spent together was only ever a few hours in the evening. Yet, he felt it was a start and steady progress in uncharted waters.

He looked towards the Roma hills and the flickering yellow lights as he sipped on his drink and the rubbish collection truck made its slow, lumbering progress along Via Latina. It was the Prenestina fire that was beginning to occupy his thoughts and perhaps already to obsess him. He knew the signs. He knew too that it had come from on high when he and Carrara had been moved “temporarily” from homicide to arson. Why else, when by anyone’s standards they had got concrete results in the Marini case? It was dressed up as something else, of course – we need your expertise on this one, we think you’re the men for the job, and all that bullshit. And Maroni, his boss, in his best don’t shoot the messenger guise, had assured him that it all fell under the Serious Crime Squad remit.

He looked back into the lounge. His phone was buzzing on the coffee table. It was Carrara.

“Gigi.”

“Another fire, Mick. Initial reports indicate it could be of interest.”

“Where?”

“Parioli.”

“Parioli?”

It was one of Rome’s more well-to-do suburbs.

“Yep. They think there’s a family inside. Nigerians. You’d better get here quick.”

The fire brigade were still dousing sizeable pockets of flame in the detached two-storey villa’s badly scorched shell. The worst seemed to be under control but it had spread quickly with the hot summer air and a light breeze exacerbating matters.

A large crowd had assembled for the spectacle, but there was no hard fast news on who the occupants might be and so far chaos seemed to be reigning. Rossi and Carrara began to apprise themselves of the situation, only to find that no one could give them a simple, unified version of events.

What they knew was that flames had been spotted about about an hour earlier, and a passerby had raised the alarm. Others had then hammered at the door to rouse the presumably sleeping occupants, but all to no avail. Attempts to kick the door in had also failed.

Rossi walked over to a fountain and splashed his face, trying not to imagine the worst that could be about to greet them when they finally got news about the occupants’ fate. As he looked up again, Carrara was returning. He’d got something.

“Registered in the name of a prominent local politician, the Honourable Mimmo Carducci,” he said. “But some of the neighbours are saying there’s an African family living there, fairly recently arrived.”

Rossi pondered the information.

“But no one’s been calling for help from any of the windows, back or front,” he said finally. They both knew what that meant: that smoke inhalation could have done for them already.

The fire crews were gathered and assessing the level of danger. Nineteenth-century building. No reinforced concrete, a lot of wood in the ceilings. Parts of it could collapse at any moment.

“Family of four. Nigerian asylum seekers,” said the chief fire officer.

Behind him a squadron of four men had begun donning breathing apparatus.

“I’m sending them in,” he continued, “if there’s half a chance of finding anyone alive. But it doesn’t look promising.”

Rossi put an anxious hand to his face.

Carrara, who had dashed off again, was now concluding a rapid discussion with another local family who had pulled up in a car. There was a lot of nodding of heads, then some cries of either pain or happiness. It was hard to be sure. Then Carrara turned back towards Rossi and raised a hand in what appeared to be a sign of victory and as a signal to call off the search.

“A lucky escape,” said Carrara, the relief on his face clearly visible.

The house had been empty. When Carrara had finally spoken to the absent occupant, a Nigerian university professor in exile, it emerged that as the dramatic scenes had been playing out on the street in Parioli he, his children and their friends had been playing blind man’s buff in someone’s converted cellar in Trastevere where there was no cell phone signal. Friends of theirs had organized a surprise party. The guy hadn’t had even an inkling of the plan and they had all left the house at the last minute. The father had seen the missed calls only when he went out for a cigarette.

Rossi tried to rub the stress out of his face as Carrara dialled a number.

“I’m calling the professor now.”

The fire crew were removing their apparatus as they awaited further orders. This one at least had turned out for the better and their cold beers would go down a lot easier when this shift ended.

The Parioli fire had now pushed the Prenestina case off their agenda. Rossi and Carrara had driven back to the office in the Alfa Romeo to weigh it all up.

“Initial findings say that the house was torched,” said Carrara. “Accelerants and a relatively sophisticated timed incendiary device were used. The occupant has been confirmed as being the exiled Nigerian writer and professor – Chini Okoli – and his family, living there as guests of the Honourable Mimmo Carducci, who had given them the run of one of the houses he had in his portfolio.”

“Portfolio?” said Rossi sitting up. “What do we know about him?”

“Ex PCI, Italian Communist Party. Now part of the wobbly left-of-centre alliance. Well-to-do Roman family, connections with the university, family law firm. Active overseas in human rights work. The usual story. Seems there was a network of friends of friends in academic circles. They helped out with solidarity missions for Palestine and Brazil.”

This was certainly different to the Prenestina fire but whether or not it was connected he didn’t know. Racial, maybe, but if they had targeted an intellectual, given the context – Nigeria, asylum seekers – it had political written all over it.

“So, technically, it was a bomb. An incendiary. When can we speak to Okoli?”

“I think he might need a night off first, don’t you?” said Carrara.

Rossi nodded but knew he would need to see him as soon as was practicable, to get a handle on any motives, but there were other elements which were already interesting him.

He got up and opened the door of the office’s mini fridge. No beers left. He went then to the bottom drawer of the filing cabinet and pulled out a bottle of Jameson’s twelve-year-old reserve.

“What have you got?” said Carrara. He could see Rossi might already be onto something.

“First up,” said Rossi, pouring a large and a disgracefully small measure for himself and Carrara respectively, “the surprise party. It was so well concealed that any intelligence the firebombers might have had didn’t reveal it either.”

“Go on,” said Carrara, warming to it now. Rossi took a bottle of water from the fridge for his whiskey, a few ice cubes for Carrara and pulled up a chair for himself.

“So, either they hadn’t been tapping the phones or they hadn’t employed the sophistication necessary to monitor, record, and translate from their private conversations in Okoli’s native language.”

“Which suggests a lack of sophistication on the part of the assailants.”

“Or plain sloppiness,” said Rossi. He took a meditative sip on his whiskey and water. It was too hot for it but he needed the kick.

“Improvised far-right aggression?” said Carrara. “A warning by way of a relatively high-profile figure?”

“Or an attempted assassination under the cover of a spontaneous race attack.”

“Riding on the back of the Prenestina business,” said Carrara.

They both considered the significance of their theorizing as they sipped on their drinks. Some unifying strategy could have been behind it. Attacking minorities, blacks, immigrants. That was Nazi-style. It also grabbed the headlines.

“Or what if we’re talking some kind of Unabomber?” said Carrara. “A lone wolf carrying out random strikes, varying his technique, leading us all a merry dance as we try to come up with some ideological motive behind it all?”

They both knew the story well. The Italian Unabomber had never been caught. He, and a he it almost certainly was, as far as the psychological profiling went, had terrorized the north of the country for over ten years with random attacks, planting pipe bombs and incendiary devices in public spaces – park benches, beaches, bus shelters and the like. He had caused only one direct fatality but had maimed and traumatized numerous members of the public. He had once booby-trapped a child’s chocolate egg.

The theory went that since the last attack some six or seven years before, he had either died, or was on an extended cooling-off period, serial-killer style. That there might be more than one, other emulators, could not be ruled out either. That he might have moved south or spawned an imitator in Rome was also a possibility.

“Perhaps someone with military experience,” said Rossi. “Someone with a generalized grudge. PTSD from Iraq or Afghanistan. The race-hate agenda might be right up his street.”

“Maybe” said Carrara. “Have you seen this?” he said then, holding up a printout.

Rossi reached across the desk. Another “potentially relevant” incident had come up on the radar from earlier in the evening. A lot of motorbikes had gone up in flames in a car park in the affluent Prati area and their none-too-pleased and, in some cases, influential owners had already been harassing the local cops.

“No casualties, no homicide,” said Rossi.

“But they want answers,” said Carrara. He was scrolling through the latest headlines and news on social media. “And those with a bit of weight to throw around are calling for ‘deployment of resources, protection of Italian interests. Get the police out of the ghettos and back in the heartlands’.”

Rossi was now beginning to toy with the idea of there being some link there too, but knew it was early days. What if someone was trying to sow chaos, stretch their resources? Crazy environmentalists maybe. There were nuts everywhere in Rome, especially when the mercury was rising. He got up and went to the window to get some air. There wasn’t much.

“Priority goes to the house fires for now,” he said turning back to face Carrara. “Send out some uniforms. Get statements, check for witnesses and CCTV. Then we’ll see.”

The others would get their precious insurance eventually. He was going to nail the real cowardly scum who got their kicks out of burning working men, women, and children in their beds.

Three

Yana was going in late to the Wellness Health and Fitness Centre, so Rossi had let her sleep. She was her own boss and could do as she pleased, but she had a business head and a work ethic that put others to shame. Plans were afoot for expansion and her hunger was plain to see. He steered clear, not understanding a thing of that world. He hoped they would find a balance, however, as his own obsessive approach to cases was not always ideal for those around him.

He laid the table for them both and then allowed himself a quiet, meditative breakfast before the sun began to emerge from behind the apartment blocks, extinguishing with all its gathering fury the night’s last vague hints of coolness. It was relentless, sapping. He lowered the shutter a few notches to keep the heat minimally at bay and then finished his coffee, leaving enough in the pot for Yana. He did a couple of yoga stretches that Yana had taught him, just so as to render the exercise not wholly perfunctory. He was sweating already and headed for the shower.

She was waking as he slipped on his lightest summer jacket.

“Don’t make yourself too beautiful,” she said through her sleep-infused languor. A strap had slipped off one shoulder of her ivory silk camisole and her smooth body was again calling, siren-like, to Rossi. He knotted his tie as loosely as decency would allow and leaned over to kiss her, his lips straying then along her neck and shoulder and into the warmth of her breasts. As Yana flopped back onto the bed the sunlight fell across her body evoking the promise of long carefree hours. But he stopped and tore himself away.

“Have to go,” he mumbled. “Gigi will be waiting.” He didn’t say where. On a morning like this, when life seemed to burst from every pore of his and their being, it was neither the time nor the place to talk of mortuaries, death, and carbonized corpses. She flopped back down onto the bed. Her strength seemed neutralized, and he couldn’t help feeling protective again, even now. A good deal of time had passed since the winter’s events but Rossi knew that doing the job he did and having the enemies he had would always mean she was vulnerable. They could always hit her to get to him. Always.

“Don’t forget to lock the door,” he said then, trying to assuage something of his guilt. As if that action would lock off his darkest and most persistent fears. As if that could stop the worst they could ever do, if they chose to.

He felt tense. The relief after tracing the professor and his family had worn off and he had slept badly, fitfully, in the near-tropical humidity, his thoughts looping as he turned over the various scenarios again and again.

The city was tense too and that same heat wasn’t helping. Grievances often rankled in the punishing summer torpor, especially in situations where numbers or circumstances created a critical mass – a crowded bus, a queue in the post office, a traffic jam. People didn’t move on with their problems here and in the stifling humidity they could fester. They were oversensitive, their assailed and worn-down egos were fragile. And August in the city was also the time of the forgotten and marginalized – the loners, the rejects; those who didn’t or couldn’t get away to summer retreats to enjoy the fruits of their year-long labours. They too had their own axes to grind.

Only the other day Yana had dared to remind a dog walker not to let his animal foul the street outside her building, and the owner in question, once he had quickly established Yana’s non-native status, had subjected her to a tirade of the most venomous abuse. Racist, misogynist, vile and frightening. A few phrases echoed now in Rossi’s mind as he remembered Yana’s stunned retelling of the event.

We wanna be the bosses in our own country!… Italy for the Italians … Burn the lot of ’em!

In another part of the city, as she stepped into the bathroom, Tiziana Belfonte amused herself by thinking again of the extra touches and final details she might add to a well-deserved holiday she had been planning. She had stayed up late the night before to profit from some of the cooler air that had finally wafted in over the city and onto her balcony. She had been organizing the vacation for months now and had decided to take it in September with a good friend in similar circumstances – happily single, feisty and ready for whatever may come, be it fair or foul.

She was also one of the tribe who liked to work through the hottest months, drawing comfort and real benefit from living in the city when it was at its most arid and deserted. True, the sleep-impaired nights could be torrid and also, being a fairly strict ecologist in her outlook, she didn’t use any artificial air-conditioning. Only adding to the source problem, wasn’t it? Heating up the atmosphere to keep you cool. It was against nature. The summer heat meant you had to slow down, find natural solutions to combat its toll on the body. As such, she enjoyed these months when an ice-cold shower before breakfast was like plunging into the waters of some imagined crystal lagoon. That would soon be a reality and the thought gave her a frisson of anticipated pleasure as the water rushed against her lightly tanned skin. She glanced at her own reflection in the misted mirror panelling, patting and caressing herself a little with satisfaction. Not bad. Not bad at all considering she’d been doing the daily grind for nearly twenty years now. Ready for action in mind and body, whatever the bastards might throw at her today.

And then she shuddered, but not because of the water as she recalled the anonymous note that had arrived just a few weeks before.

N***er lover. Bitch. Whore. We know where you live.

But she was tough, she had to be. But she was human too, and even her skin was only so thick. She also knew that the events of the previous winter – especially the body of the murdered African that she had tried so hard to get identified – still weighed on her conscience. She wondered again what might have become of Jibril, the young immigrant she was sure had some connection to the corpse he had viewed in her presence. But he had just disappeared then and the body had remained unclaimed.

As she thought about it, it stung her conscience and the holiday suddenly seemed like another cowardly attempt to flee her responsibility, an extravagance she did not deserve.

Driving in Rome in August was as close to a pleasure as it could ever get. Traffic was down to its annual minimum and a hint of space could finally be seen and felt. As Rossi looked out at the sky and its default-setting of blue, a little of his tension fell away. The air too felt cleaner, while colourful, carefree, smiling tourists seemed to mop up some more of his previous negativity with their languid sweep through the city. Tradition dictated that the lion’s share of the citizenry would be out of town for the whole month and the pervading feeling was usually one of mild and welcome liberation. In the suburbs away from the well-worn tourist trails every second shop had its shutter lowered. Closed for holidays. See you in September. But then there was also something final and obstinate about those shutters – like the sealed lips of a witness who will never speak, holding the secrets back, the unstated “Fuck You” if you want an answer. Try as he might to let the spirit of summers past dominate his thoughts, Rossi knew his work was just beginning.

Carrara was waiting under a tree as Rossi approached. He held out his newspaper so Rossi could check the front page. They’d got their story but not all the facts. “A possible electrical fault” was one theory, and Rossi had made sure they kept a lid on the forensics, at least for now. As usual the man from Puglia was looking fit and focused in an apparently laid-back way. The years in undercover anti-mafia work had kept Carrara sharp and adaptable, and family life with kids had scarcely seemed to sap his energy.

“Coffee?”

Rossi glanced at his watch.

“Why not?”

The corner bar was the only one open within walking distance and catered mainly for the skeleton staffs of the nearby public offices and time-killing locals. Most offices had coffee machines on every floor and any employee worth their salt knew which was the best. Some had their own bars too, but there was nothing like leaving the office behind for the dark gunshot of an espresso to banish the morning lethargy. Some, however, lingered over a cappuccino or a caffè latte. There were even those that didn’t bother to go back to the office at all, having clocked in, and then went about their daily tasks with complete nonchalance until they saw fit to put in at least a token appearance before lunch.

In the bar there was the usual hubbub and high-octane gossip; at peak times there would be the kind of crush more typical of a British pub on a Friday night than a café at ten o’clock in the morning. Fallen and discarded napkins and cornetti flakes littered the floor as Rossi and Carrara edged and nudged their way towards the counter to catch the bartender’s eye. Once they had been served their respective macchiato and espresso, they established themselves at a standing-only table in the corner.

“So, do we have an appointment at the morgue or do we just walk in?” said Carrara stirring his espresso with energy. “Lallana will have been already, of course. Do you think they might consider it irregular?”

Rossi stirred a half sachet of brown sugar into his macchiato.

“We just say we have a wide brief to investigate all acts of arson and we’re cross-checking facts. Thoroughness never goes amiss and Lallana’s off it now anyway. Maroni’s busy with some internal audit business. I say we press ahead until we encounter an obstacle.”

Carrara finished stirring his espresso.

“But have you got a theory about this or are you going on instinct or what?”

Rossi knocked back his coffee and waited for the rush.

“The more we know the better. I don’t like taking the easy way out. All this open verdict stuff. That’s a gift to criminals and an affront to investigative police work. We have to eliminate any doubt about this being accidental, which it can’t have been, and then find out if there was more than blind racial hate behind it. So we need to get down to the hospital before they’ve forgotten all about this Ivan guy. He might have said something. Seen something. It has to be worth a try.”

“And last night’s business? I’ve had some more info through on Okoli.”

“Set up a chat with him. What does he do?”

“Playwright, investigative journalist. Rubbed the government up the wrong way it seems.”

“So a target or a coincidence?”

“See what he has to say for himself,” Carrara replied. “I’ll give him a call.” He glanced at his watch. “Should be up and about by now.”

He moved away from the babble and noise of the bar.

A slim but strong woman, perhaps approaching forty but easily passing for five years younger, had seated herself at the bar to Rossi’s left. Her off-white summer dress was elegant without being provocative, thus going against the dominant Roman trend which saw the season’s clothing often resembling more négligées than daywear. The dress’s broad straps framed a rich, evenly tanned rectangle between her shoulder blades.

“He’s going to swing by the Questura later,” said Carrara returning to the table. “Any news on Iannelli, by the way?” he said, recapturing Rossi’s attention.

“Iannelli?” said Rossi with a pronounced exhalation. “It’s going to be a steep learning curve for Dario. Life under 24-hour police escort. I don’t know if he’s realized yet how tough it will be.”

Dario Iannelli, investigative reporter, Rossi’s long-time friend and confidante, and now with a Mafia contract out on his life. He had made it big with his scoop on high-level corruption during The Carpenter case, but had fallen foul of Cosa Nostra and had been fortunate to escape a car bomb with his life.

The woman had finished her coffee and, rising from her stool, appeared to make for the exit, but then stopped, as if struck by some sudden realization.

“Excuse the intrusion,” she said, moving back and then coming alongside Rossi and Carrara’s table. “But I couldn’t help overhearing something. You mentioned Dario Iannelli. The journalist.”

“Yes,” said Rossi. “Is there anything I can do for you?” he began and reached out to take her hand. “Inspector Michael Rossi. And this is Inspector Luigi Carrara.”

As Carrara turned to take her hand, he too was struck by her unostentatious elegance.

“Well, yes. Maybe there is.” She glanced around at the chattering clientele. “Could we talk somewhere, in private. But perhaps not in my office. I work at the hospital of legal medicine. The mortuary to be exact.”

Four

“If I don’t get the job this time then we go, right?” said Francesco. “We pack our bags and leave Italy for good.”

Paola replied on the other end of the line with the usual consternation.

“Where?” she said. “Where do we go? I mean do you have an idea, a plan?”

Francesco let out a sigh.

“To Spain, to Ireland, or Germany, or anywhere a researcher can make a decent living. Anywhere where they appreciate and value me for my knowledge and experience not just my loyalty and my contacts or my family connections.”

It was the old story. She knew it but didn’t want to hear it, and he was tired of telling her.

“But what about Mum and Dad? And your mother on her own?” she shot back.

It was true that it would be a wrench, a sacrifice for him too, but he had decided.

“Paola, I’ve had enough! I’m going to grow old here trying to get a job in the university, don’t you see? I want to settle down. I want us to settle down and have children. Then we see. And I want you to be able to choose whether or not you want to go back to work, not get thrown on the scrapheap at forty because you’ve had a kid. If we go abroad you can have that chance.”

There was a long pause. He could hear the random noises of a train station in the background. She’d called to wish him well but the conversation had turned sour. But he had to get it out in the open.

“I’ll call you later, when it’s over,” he said, with little real conviction. He wanted to be alone.

He finished his coffee and bit on a breakfast biscuit then went over again the possible questions they could ask him, trying to conjure the unforeseen from thin air, the unseen questions in the envelopes they would proffer him, smiling at him from behind the desk they so loved to interpose between themselves and the mere mortals in the other, real world. The uninitiated, the hopeful, the desperate.

So this was to be the last Concorso. He had decided. The Concorso or “public competition” was, in theory, an open, transparent method of selecting candidates for positions in state bodies or for publicly funded research projects. You applied, sending off the forms and all the relevant paperwork and then you were called to take an exam. Then you got to the interview, which was when they could do what they wanted.

He had been from pillar to post, to deliver conference papers, often at his own expense, to take low-paid temporary teaching positions in this or that university, to win a research grant, which meant he could live just above the breadline for a year. And then when the money ran out? Back to square one. In and out of offices. Up and down the country. Moving. Moving back. Working for free. This was the life of the researcher who could not count on patronage, or a powerful relative, or a favour due from on high. This was the life of that singular and sorry category of person who was not a raccomandato – not “recommended” for a job or a grant. Not useful for someone. Not worthy of being a token to flip across the baize in their feudal game.

He didn’t want to leave Italy, but he had tasted freedom once and had liked it. For the six month post he had been awarded in San Francisco, after he had completed his PhD, the university had contacted him! They came looking for his expertise after they had seen his research. They had decided to go to the States together, and Paola had then had to persuade her parents, old-style Catholics that they were, that the cohabitation abroad would be a prelude to marriage. They went. The wedding, however, had remained on hold.

They had not committed themselves to a longer stay as Paola was less keen to tear up her roots in the old country. So they had come back, hoping to make a go of it and use the experience gained to get a leg-up. He had been obliged to make the expected compromises – working for free, waiting, biding his time. But he had believed that it might just be worth it. That there would be an outlet in Italy for his ideas. Now the nagging fear always at the back of his mind had become the simple realization that he had been wrong.

And it could all have been so different. He had done his compulsory military service in the carabinieri, the military branch of the police, and had enjoyed it, thriving on its culture of rigour and seriousness and dedication to duty. He’d also been drawn to the increasing use of technology, science, and psychology for the solving and prevention of crimes. So much so that after his initial one-year conscription he had signed on for another one as a paid, working recruit. He hadn’t wanted to fall back on his parents again. That would have been the easy way out; whereas he enjoyed a challenge, like when he was in the mountains with his friends and he would head for the highest peaks. He wasn’t content with the view of the top from halfway up.

Francesco got up from the breakfast bar in the kitchen and began closing all the windows despite the heat. He was cautious, prudent, suspicious of the opportunist ready to exploit any weakness in their defences. His family had always expected him to pursue an academic career, their view being that the police force and the army were for those who didn’t have it in them to go any further. They were also institutions tainted by their association with the “regime”. They had been a well-respected and quietly influential family until the fascists had seized power before the war, something which had set in motion their gradual decline towards irrelevance. Yet they had clung on to some of the trappings, the values, the pride, the culture. As for what had actually happened back then, Francesco didn’t know the details but, according to his mother, it was something that had continued to rankle, at least for his father, while he had been alive.

Five

They left the bar and walked across the almost-deserted Piazza Verano, the nearby cemetery not visible but always a presence.

“The park, perhaps,” she suggested, walking slightly ahead. “There are tables and it’s quiet now.”

They stopped at a dark green art-deco kiosk and a wide esplanade where cast-iron tables occupied the space under the shade of several tall eucalyptus trees.

“May we?” said Carrara, addressing a white-shirted and tieless employee moving about without particular urgency while a mop in a steaming bucket stood propped against some flower pots. The bar seemed in general disorder with teetering piles of ashtrays and cases of mineral water dumped here and there. His grudging nod of assent meant they were technically open for business.

“The coffee’s not the best and gossip doesn’t travel well if it’s not in a confined space,” she commented. “So you can always count on getting some breathing space.”

Rossi imagined that it was a commodity she was in need of.

“Here?” he said, indicating the most isolated corner and the cleanest-looking table and chairs. Their new guest gave her approval and Carrara was first to pull out a chair for her.

“Well, gentlemen, I suppose now I should introduce myself,” she said, placing her light, coffee-coloured handbag on the table. “My name is Tiziana Belfonte. And as I said, I work in the hospital.”

“And you have something you would like to tell us?” said Rossi. “With regard to Dario Iannelli.”

“Well,” she began, “yes, but indirectly. It concerns a murder victim. An as yet unidentified murder victim.”

“Do you mean from the Prenestina fire?” said Carrara.

“No, actually. An earlier victim. The African murdered last winter. I have reason to believe Dario Iannelli may be in some way connected.”

“Go on,” said Rossi. “We know something of the case, among others. It was a busy time.”

“Well, it all goes back to the winter and when your colleagues were trying to identify the victim. His body has not been identified or claimed but sooner or later he will have to be buried: in a pauper’s grave, if no one comes forward. It’s policy I’m afraid and it’s all to do with the demands of cost and space.”

“The fate of many,” said Rossi. “In this day and age.”

“Yes.” She nodded. “I am afraid so. And not only migrants or foreigners. But the point I want to make is that someone did come forward to identify him. At least I thought he would make an identification but, as it turned out, it wasn’t to be.”

An accumulation of guilt, perhaps, or unresolved doubts seemed to surface now, as her voice began to betray more emotion. Rossi knew the signs. The secret knowledge that could devour the thoughts of the well-intentioned and conscientious, just as it could eat away at the souls of the remorseful. This had been backing up for God knows how long and he wondered what trap she might have felt she was in.

“Could you perhaps clarify what you mean by ‘it wasn’t to be’?” said Rossi.

The waiter had begun his slow walk towards their table.

“Perhaps we should order something,” said Rossi, noting the approach and sensing the need to ease the tension.

“Tiziana?”

“Oh, just water for me, thank you,”

“Solo un’acqua minerale per la signora,” said Rossi dismissing the waiter before he could materialize.

“There’s no rush, Tiziana,” said Rossi. “Just tell me what you remember and then we’ll see what we can do. But when you are ready,” he added, placing a reassuring hand on her shoulder.

She almost smiled and some of the rigidity in her elegant form softened. Plenty of men had put their hands on her in plenty of other situations, something she neither sought nor appreciated, but she didn’t find Rossi patronizing or threatening. He seemed genuine and she was warming to him already.

“My job is very important to me, Inspector. I have considerable responsibility and I am the only woman in my department. I oversee the clerical side of things but I have become a de facto factotum, if you will.”

“A sort of Girl Friday,” said Rossi. “The go-to person.”

“It’s frequently the way, in the public sector.”

Rossi gave a knowing nod. He sensed she didn’t have any sounding board in her work life.

“Otherwise,” she continued, “nothing gets done and we would be doing a disservice to the citizens we are supposed to be there for. It doesn’t go down well with everyone, however, my attitude to work and duty, and I’ve had to put up with my fair share of bitching.”

The water arrived, and Carrara filled her glass but Tiziana didn’t drink.

“Anyway, that day, last winter, a young man came – I don’t remember the exact date but it’s all recorded in my diary. He was African and he said he was looking for his friend who he feared might have been murdered. He had no form of identification and the front office staff had given him the brush-off, while neglecting to inform me of his presence. It was common practice on their part. Trying to isolate me, trying to get me to slip up, withholding information, that sort of thing. However, I happened to be passing through the office – I had come to find a file or something – and I noticed the gentleman still waiting. I enquired as to who he might be and asked him to come with me and then I assessed the situation on the merits of his story. He seemed to have a genuine interest.”

“Did he give you a name?” Rossi enquired.

“Yes,” she replied. “Jibril. I didn’t press him for a surname as I had gathered that he was an illegal, but my conscience would not allow me to throw him out. I could see it in his eyes, Inspector. He was biting back the tears.”

“So you let him see the body, at his request?”

“Yes, but I first asked if there was anyone who could vouch for him. I had no reason to believe he himself might be criminally involved. Surely no criminal would go back to see the victim if he had been his killer.”

“Stranger things can happen,” said Carrara.

“Go on,” said Rossi.

“Well, I just felt that I would be more comfortable if there were someone who could corroborate his story. And that’s where Iannelli comes in,” she continued, with greater composure now.

Rossi knew that what she was saying tallied with his own recollection of events at that time – his old journalist friend’s investigation into high-level corruption, the mysterious attempt by some emissary of the powers-that-be to buy him off, and then the attempt on his life in Sicily, which had sent him into hiding and the life under 24-hour armed escort he now lived.

“The gentleman, Jibril, produced a business card – Dottor Iannelli’s business card – and said that he knew him personally. I assumed that it had come into his possession by pure chance and that he hadn’t the slightest idea who it might belong to. The card was professional, of course, and said Dottor Dario Iannelli, The Facet. Enough perhaps for a naive young migrant to think it could serve as some temporary passport to acceptance. I had also just heard that the journalist had been caught up in an ambush and was feared killed. I didn’t take it any further. I assumed it was a desperate last-ditch attempt to circumvent the obstacles that bureaucracy put in his way, and I could only feel pity for him, not suspicion.”

“And you then took him to view the corpse, I presume,” said Rossi.

“Given the circumstances, I waived normal practice. I followed my conscience, feeling that he and the victim had likely been acquaintances or even relatives. They were, as far as I could see, both of West African appearance and I deduced they could easily have been co-nationals.”

“And yet the identification was negative,” said Rossi.

“Well, that is the central issue here, Inspector. As I pulled back the cover, apart from the reaction of shock you might expect – you know, of course, how he was killed.”

Yes, Rossi knew. His throat had been cut, almost to the point of decapitation.

“The reaction I witnessed was consistent with recognition. I have seen it enough times to be reasonably confident. He was restrained, yes, but when I asked him to confirm whether or not he could positively identify the corpse he gave a firm ‘no’ and that was that. He then asked to leave and began to get rather agitated. I think he also feared that he might be detained or reported to the police. I let him out through a side door as I didn’t want him to have to face the other staff and I didn’t want anyone asking me awkward questions. I would be able to manage that better by myself. I’ve had plenty of practice.”

Rossi looked at Carrara.

“So, if he did recognize him, why didn’t he say so?”

“As I said, presumably fear of being detained, as an illegal, even if that hadn’t stopped him stepping into the lion’s den in the first place. He took a big chance.”

“Are you sure he was a migrant?” said Carrara. “How did you know?”

“I presumed he was. I suppose from his clothing. I mean he really wasn’t dressed for winter. He looked itinerant, tired, and he wasn’t streetwise yet, not in the Roman sense. He seemed fresh out of Africa. It was the impression I got, but I’ve met many such people in my work and in my voluntary activities too. I help out sometimes with a group providing assistance to refugees and migrants.”

“So,” said Rossi, “Iannelli was or wasn’t connected? You said you thought it was a ruse, the business card, a stratagem on his part. What makes you think differently now?”

“I just think that maybe there was something important, something more to it than I first thought. When I heard Dottor Iannelli had survived the attack in Sicily and when the stories began to emerge about corruption in the Detention Centres, I thought that maybe their paths could have crossed in some way. I didn’t give it serious thought at the time, but later I wondered if I’d been hasty in dismissing it out of hand. And then there was the fire on Via Prenestina. All those people. At least one of them was West African too. Call it intuition or instinct but it has continued to prey on my mind, every day – the thought that there could even be a connection. And when I heard you talking about him this morning, it seemed like I had to seize an opportunity to put things straight. I had thought about going to a police station but I was concerned for my position. I didn’t know what to do. It could have come out looking very bad for me. Do you understand?”

Rossi could see she was taking a chance, putting trust in him. It was courageous, a quality he admired.

“Well,” said Rossi, “as luck would have it, we were on our way to the hospital to pay a visit to the pathologist. Our paths may well have crossed anyway.”

His comment raised a more relaxed smile. She had a conscience, he reflected, but she didn’t look like someone who put much stock in fate. Compassionate but practical, realistic. She had to be.

“Did Jibril have an address for the person he was looking for?” asked Carrara.

“He gave me one but it was false. I checked it but I let it go. You have to understand how emotional and how trying all this can be. He needed to know and as far as I was concerned there was no ulterior motive, no other reason for his being there. You know, it did even occur to me that they might have been lovers.”

“Well,” said Carrara, “he was clearly covering all bases if he didn’t want to give a real address. He wanted to appear credible without leaving any trail. As you say, probably the illegal immigrant’s preservation instinct.”

“And his name?” said Rossi. “Do you think he gave you his real name?”

“Like I said, it was Jibril, but more than that I don’t know.”

“Well, it looks like we will have to get on to Dario,” said Rossi to Carrara. He turned back to Tiziana; she was taking restorative sips on her water like a witness granted time to collect herself during a cross-examination.

“What you must remember here, Tiziana, is that this is a murder investigation. Anything that could lead us to the killer could help save lives. We don’t have reason to believe that there have been other victims but we can’t rule it out either. But whoever killed him was ruthless and could do it again. This body was meant to be found. Others may not have been. Your biggest mistake here, if there is one, is not dishonesty or dereliction of duty but simply that of having let time pass. In our job, time is everything. It is a little late in the day.”

She first nodded with something like contrition but then rallied.

“What you say is, of course, perfectly true, Inspector, and I realize that I fell short of certain obligations. However, if I hadn’t intervened in the first place, if I hadn’t set aside normal practice, he would have walked out that door. He was being turned away by my colleagues. I too could have done the same. At least now you have something to go on, even if it is, as you point out, ‘a little late in the day’.”

Carrara was nodding his agreement while Rossi, taken aback first by the steeliness of her retort, couldn’t help then but smile. He sensed he might have the makings of a dependable ally in Tiziana, and allies were hard to come by at the best of times.

“Could you leave us your number, please,” Rossi said. “Mobile and office.” He slid his notebook and pen across the table. “I think we’ll need to be seeing more of each other, Tiziana. But you can rest assured that for now, at least, you have nothing to fear.”

Tiziana wrote down two phone numbers, then Rossi slipped the notebook back into his jacket pocket.

“Perhaps we could accompany you to the hospital,” he proposed.

“Thank you, Inspector,” she replied. “If it’s no trouble.”

“Not at all,” said Rossi. “As I said, we were on our way there.”

Six

At the reception area, Tiziana waved them through the security checks despite the burly security guard’s evident displeasure.

“These gentlemen are with me,” she said. “They are senior police officers.”

The additional information seemed to make the necessary difference as the guard acquiesced and went back to studying his phone.

“I think we know the way now,” said Rossi.

“Wait,” she said, “let me ring ahead first. It will make things easier.”

She unlocked a door on her right in the dim, impersonal corridor in which they now stood. “My office. The back door.”

She emerged a moment later holding out a slip of paper. “Doctor Piredda. First floor, corridor 2, room 209. He’s not busy, so ask him as much as you want. He’s usually pretty straight up actually. Sardinian.”

They thanked her with firm handshakes all round and made their way along the eery passageways. While there was nothing to see, what lurked behind the doors and the nature of the traffic that went through the place was enough to overload the dark side of the imagination.

“Always prefer to come here in the morning,” said Rossi. “Gives me time to forget about it during the rest of the day.”

“Bad dreams?” said Carrara.

“Bad memories more than dreams,” Rossi replied. “I can deal with the dreams. You wake up from them.”

Doctor Piredda was sitting waiting, his hands joined on a writing pad in front of him, a clunky monitor and a computer keyboard yellowed to a soiled ivory colour to one side on his sparse, largely unencumbered working space. He reached across to shake hands with them both, his white-coated bulk straining against the edge of the desk.

“A bad business,” he began. “And still none the wiser, are we?”

Who we was supposed to be, Rossi couldn’t quite be sure.

“I went through it all, you know,” he continued, “with your colleague. He looked down then at his notes in an open Manilla folder. “Lallana.”

“Yes,” said Rossi. “He’s in homicide, specifically. We, Inspector Carrara and I, are from the Serious Crime Squad. We are investigating acts of arson in the city, and we were wondering if there was anything else that may have come to light in the intervening period. Apart from the identification, of course. Any anomalies, for example? We are fairly certain it was intentional. Could you give us something that might indicate intent?”

Piredda shook his head. Rossi knew the signs: that he wasn’t going to stick his neck out on the motive behind the fire.

“Death was due to asphyxiation in primis. The absence of oxygen. It would have been relatively rapid, in the circumstances, with the confined space and the volume of highly toxic smoke.”

“Even with the windows open?” said Carrara. “It was hot. There were locked bars on the windows but the windows themselves must have been open, for ventilation.”

“I think that’s beside the point. The oxygen coming in would only have fed the flames further. They would have quickly lost consciousness, in minutes, and the burns would then in a sense have been secondary factors. Horrendous though they were. I’m sure you know that most victims are not actually burnt to death. What’s more, they will have been asleep and the chances are they were already inhaling the fumes as they slept. They were, I believe, in all but one case found close to where they would have been sleeping. It was night. You can’t orientate yourself in such conditions, and the heat would have been completely overpowering.”

“The ethnicities?” said Rossi feeling already that it was going to be a wasted visit. “Age? Nothing you think you might be able to add?”

“I provided my estimates for age, considering a margin of error of around three to five years either way. I also provided the racial profile. Nothing has changed, Inspector.”

“You said African. Black African. And North African.”

“That is correct. Three black African corpses. One North African. The other victim, of course, was identified by his jewellery. His ‘dog tags’.”

“Could you hazard a guess as to a country, a more specific region?” Rossi asked. “South or West African? You see we’ve had very little in the line of witnesses who had even seen the occupants.”

“Seems like we’ve run into a bit of omertà,” Carrara chipped in. “No one’s saying a goddam word.”

The doctor gave a weak smile.

“That’s more difficult without DNA tests, but I’d venture that the two black Africans were likely sub-Saharan, possibly West African.”

“But we could run those tests,” said Rossi. “If necessary, and get something more definite on age. It could help narrow the search considerably. It might give us something more to work on.”

“Teeth can give excellent results. Carbon-14 dating and crown dentin analysis, without blinding you with the science, Inspector. Of course it takes a little time and it’s rather expensive and there are budget constraints to consider. But if it’s required …,” he trailed off without appearing to exude any great enthusiasm at the prospect.

Carrara meanwhile had whipped out his phone. He nudged Rossi.

“We’re going to have to adjourn, I’m afraid,” he said.

“Now, what?” said Rossi. “Another fire?”

“No. Look,” he said showing Rossi the screen on his wafer-like smartphone. Codice Rosso. Tutte le unità. A red alert. For all units.

“You will have to excuse us, Dottore,” said Rossi, rising with as much decorum as was possible but already making for the door. “Maybe we can talk about that DNA again soon, but it seems we have a major incident in the city. I think it would be a good idea to alert the hospitals. Perhaps all of them.”

Seven

The Libertas Language Centre was on a side street off the road running south away from the centre and parallel with the Brutalist concrete bulk of Termini station. Here, at only two or three minutes’ walk from the station’s buzz, it was already far enough away from the bars and shops to attract very few tourists. Just beyond the school, there was an improvised stall selling pornographic magazines and videos for the remnants of the pre-digital generation. Staff smoked and idled outside a Chinese wholesaler of knick-knacks and costume jewellery, and there was a knot of middle-aged men chatting intently outside a cut-price Indian takeaway. The language centre served as a focus, especially on hot afternoons in summer, for various nationalities who loitered on the footpath and against the railings on the raised walkway leading further away from the station. Some had improvised a marketplace underneath its slope where, on tarpaulins and rugs, they laid out second-hand clothes, shoes, kitchenware and dated household goods and furnishings.

Olivia Modena had already stacked up her books, the unmarked homework, and the register. The money a non-profit cooperative paid her for the few hours a week she taught Italian to immigrants was hardly worth the effort but she wasn’t there for that. She was there because she needed the experience, but also because she enjoyed making a difference. She enjoyed seeing the barriers between herself and the others coming down as their trust in her grew. She took pleasure too from seeing some of those same barriers crumbling between people who would never have had occasion to meet in other circumstances.

For some the dream of making something with their lives was still fresh and real, and their vigour and optimism could be uplifting, especially on mornings when the weight of her own existence sometimes dragged her down. Even when you liked what you did and couldn’t imagine doing anything else, getting up every morning, criss-crossing the city and juggling work commitments was draining.

For others it was not so easy. She saw the hope dwindling in their eyes as the obstacles they encountered day after day began to sap their energy and their belief. Work with anything like a decent contract was not easy to come by. For those who worked in agriculture, the gangmaster was king. A call could come in at the last minute and they would be expected at an often ungodly hour to get to the appointed meeting place on the outskirts of the city from where they would be picked up and driven to a remote destination. If they didn’t want to accept the going rate it was too late then to turn back. Take it or leave it – there’s a queue of workers outside the door. Add to that the back-breaking work under a searing sun for twelve hours or more, and maybe the promise of more of the same the next day. Maybe.

When they weren’t working, they were killing time, getting by, and other exploitative figures sought to draw them into criminal and other informal money-making ventures. Drugs, prostitution, the running of prostitution. Protection. Punishments. Contracts. There was always an outlet in a city with a hunger for sex and chemical oblivion that never wavered, and weed and coke were the best earners.

In front of her, in the cramped and stuffy improvised classroom, her adult pupils were either still grappling with, or else putting the finishing touches to, a grammar test. She was ready to go but knew she would probably end up hanging around outside to chat. In fact, today she wanted to chat.

One of the brightest of her students deposited his paper on the mounting pile of completed tests on her desk. As he did so, she raised her hands to indicate to the others that there were ten minutes left and she followed him outside. She knew a little of his story – that he was Nigerian, a Muslim, had come up from Sicily, like so many, that he was without papers but that he had plans.

“So, Jibril,” she said, once they were out of earshot, “are you coming to the intercultural picnic on Saturday?”

Jibril shook his head and smiled. A short distance away, Olivia glimpsed the various groups of non-students and occasional or former students who also chose to congregate outside the centre. It was handily near the centre but the police didn’t bother them much here.

“I am sorry, Olivia,” he continued, placing his hand on his heart, “but on Saturday I must attend to other matters in my community.”

“All work and no play,” Olivia quipped, “makes Jibril a dull boy!”

He smiled again. “Next time. Next time, I promise. Farò del mio meglio.”

“Bravissimo! You see? You will soon be fluent! And I will do my best,” she replied, echoing the promise he had made in near-perfect Italian, “to convince you. And why don’t you bring some of your friends?” she added, indicating the tight-knit group itching now for Jibril to terminate his extracurricular discussion.

“If you change your mind, let me know. You have my number, don’t you?”

He nodded.

“I will try,” he said. “Arrivederci, Olivia.”

“Arrivederci, Jibril.”

She watched him walk away and glanced back through the window at the rest of the class as they continued to do battle with their past perfects, subjunctives, and indirect object pronouns. As friends, she and Jibril had already shared enjoyable chats over coffee, but whether there might be more, as yet remained to be seen. She watched too as one of his companions put an arm around his shoulder and squeezed it tightly as the group walked away; the direction, if not the actual destination, known to Olivia and always the same. She picked up his test paper and toyed with the idea of making an early start on the corrections. This one would be easy. The neat, clear hand. Scarcely an error. Even the accents were in place. Jibril was good. No. He was very good. And why did he have to be so charming? He was definitely going to be one to watch.

Eight

Paola walked away from Trastevere Station towards the tram stop. A number 8 was already approaching from the direction of the San Camillo Hospital, descending the curve of the long road skirting round the base of the Gianicolo Hill. It had been ages since she’d been there, and she reasoned that she could get home just as quickly going this way and then taking the 3 to San Lorenzo rather than changing trains. Besides it would be nice to have a wander. Easy come, easy go, she always said, when she had time on her hands.

Her fingers toyed with her phone. Francesco would be in there now, with the commission, or maybe still waiting. He would call when it was all over, so there was no point hassling him anymore. She would send a message later just to let him know they had cancelled and that she’d be home early. Perhaps they could do something together, now that the studying was over, regardless of what happened with the damned interview. She took out her phone to write a message.

Hi Mom. OK if I swing by in half an hour? I’m in Trastevere.

The response was almost immediate.

Great. Will be waiting.

She got off at Piazza Mastai, where office couples and homeless alike had taken up their appointed spots on benches around the hexagonal fountain. To the left she could wander away into the winding streets of Trastevere. It was easy to lose yourself there, but you’d soon pop out somewhere recognizable. She passed a shop front and checked her reflection. Early lunchers were filling the outside tables of the pizzerie and trattorie. Tourists mainly. As they waited, some of their eyes strayed towards her. So, she was looking good. Well, she was a part of the city they had come to see. Better live up to their expectations then and she put an added spritz of elegance into her step.

She continued to walk until she came to Piazza Trilussa. By day, its steps hosted workmen on their breaks and sightseers taking in the scene. The traffic tearing along the Lungotevere, the road running parallel with the course of the river below, was as noisy as a race track. She too was completing a circuit of sorts but at a human pace as the road would bring her first past the Israeli university and then to Ponte Garibaldi.

The narrow footpath along the river was crowded with parked cars randomly slicing the pavement and bullying for space wherever it could be found. She moved into the road to avoid an oncoming mob of students. Her own student days were long gone but she still remembered them fondly.

Back then, she had sent out hundreds of CVs to companies; she too had done concorsi, and she had taken whatever work she could find to get a foot on the ladder, to get away from home and eke out an independent existence. Now she sold textbooks for a publishing house, a job nominally related to her literary studies, but she may as well have been selling cars or insurance for all it was worth. Her own literary efforts were gathering dust in boxes or on a hard drive of an ageing computer.

As she approached the university, armed military personnel stood cradling their automatic rifles and scanning the passersby near the entrance. There were bikes outside, chained to the waist-high railings providing an unobtrusive security cordon of sorts. A soldier began waving in an agitated manner at a white jeep that had pulled up.

“No, no, signora. Via! Via! No parking here. No parking.

At least someone was doing his job. Paola glanced at the selection of new and innovative bicycles she presumed must have reflected the considerable spending power of the students. One had a sophisticated-looking kilometre counter and all of its expensive-looking lights still attached. Lights, at this time of the year? And risky that, in Rome. If it wasn’t nailed down it was a goner.

Her thoughts moved again between the present and the past. This place where they would come on Friday nights and where they used to meet foreigners and students from all over the globe. It was a window on the world, and it had been a time of fun. But that was gone. People were settling down. She thought of the melancholy and so true line from a Joyce story: “Everything changes”.

But does it? thought Paola as she passed. Does it?

Then, unseen to her and the smoking, chatting students, the seconds on the digital, liquid crystal display flipped from 58 to 59 to 00 and, as the detonator nestled deep in the explosive charge packed into the bicycle frame did its brief job, everything did.

Nine

“… which, over time, would radically reduce our dependence on oil and be a real step forward in reducing levels of atmospheric pollution linked to cancer in our cities and beyond. Besides that, the initial cost would soon be offset both by savings for the consumer and the provider. I have some figures here, if you don’t mind.”

Francesco began to reach for his briefcase leaning against the leg of his chair.

“That won’t be necessary, Dottor Anselmi,” the president of the commission said before Francesco had managed to extract the relevant file. “Really, time is against us, as always, but it was, I think we all agree, a most interesting presentation. Even if I’m not sure it’s what our friends in ItalOil would want to hear,” he added, leaning back and laughing out loud. The three other members gave knowing smiles and also nodded their approval as the president craned his neck slightly to make eye contact with each in turn.

The clerk too, who had been hunched over his papers recording the candidates’ names and cross-checking documentation and identity cards all morning, would now have his small increment of institutional glory.

“The results of the concorso,” he announced, “will be published at the end of the week on the university’s website.”

“Ah, yes, just one thing.” The sole female interviewer was scanning the first page of Francesco’s CV through her bifocals. “If I may, it says here you are fluent in English.”

“Yes,” Francesco replied.

“I was wondering, could you envisage overseeing a course, or courses, for the faculty in the medium of English? How would you go about organizing, for example, training the stuff?”

“I’m sorry?” Francesco replied.

“How would you train the stuff,” she repeated.

“The staff,” the president said with careful emphasis and exhibiting only minor irritation.

“Oh, sorry,” said Francesco.

It was the one he hadn’t prepared for.

“Well,” he began, buying time. A helicopter’s unmistakable whop-whop overhead and a swirling emergency siren beyond the drawn blinds took everyone’s attention hostage for a moment.

“Do go on, please,” the president enjoined Francesco.

“Well, I would first assess their competences and then put out a call for the most suitable candidates to fill the vacant positions.”

“And the staff not ‘up to the job’?” said the bespectacled interviewer.

Francesco knew he had to answer, but he was fumbling.

“They could be moved to positions better-suited to their competences, and then offered training, in the long term, to get them up to speed.”

“Ah. I see.” She turned to the president of the commission. “I think that really is all now.”

“Very well,” he replied. “And unless there are any other questions.”

But something told Francesco it probably wasn’t what they had wanted to hear. And then maybe none of it had been. And his English was better than hers by a country-fucking-mile. Yet she was sitting there.

There was a knock at the door. A minor office flunkey clutching a piece of paper popped his head round. He looked, apart from his general obsequiousness, more than a little shaken.

“Presidente Bonucci, Dottori, scusate. C’è una communicazione.”

Allowing his glasses to slide down his nose, Professor Bonucci scanned the note while conveying its salient points. “‘Major security alert in City of Rome. Possibility of further explosions. All universities, places of worship, public buildings and schools to remain on high alert until further notice. Senior management to evaluate the situation and assess the practicalities of executing evacuation or effecting security lockdown.’”

He looked up.

“Dottoresse e dottori, to use the popular contemporary lexicon, it would appear that we are ‘under attack’.”

Ten

An entire stretch of the Lungotevere – the one-way road system and footpath following the Tiber’s snaking course through the city – had been cordoned off. There were army bomb disposal units and armed personnel carriers, police vehicles with their lights flashing. Black-clad snipers crouched on the roofs of five-storey buildings and on balconies high above onlookers’ heads and at the strategic angles of Viale Trastevere overlooking Ponte Garibaldi. The municipal police had rejigged the one-way system so that nothing could pass if not with strict authorization. Even so, an animated discussion had broken out between a plump, wheezing traffic warden and a baby-faced carabiniere about the evident breakdown of communication between the various forces. Where all the diverted vehicles were going was anyone’s guess. But it was like leaving a tourniquet on the city. It stopped the bleeding but at what cost?

Rossi was standing in the middle of the road and assessing the extent of the bomb damage to the university’s facade when an old friend emerged from among a small crowd of uniforms and plain-clothes operatives.

“Well, surprise, surprise! How the hell did you get here?” said Rossi. “You’re Italy’s most wanted journalist. What happened to the security drill?”

Ever since he had escaped the assassination attempt in Sicily, Dario Iannelli had been living in hiding with a 24/7 armed guard. Collusion between politicians and organized crime in drugs and other profitable businesses had been at the root of his investigation, and it had all come to a head just as Rossi had been closing in on The Carpenter. Iannelli saw complex, sometimes wild, conspiracies everywhere but his insights gave Rossi frequent food for thought. What’s more, he trusted him. Rossi’s opportunities of seeing the journalist were infrequent now and usually involved first discovering his latest address via a strict protocol and then arranging for a rendezvous in the utmost secrecy.

Dario Iannelli lowered his dark glasses by the required number of degrees to look Rossi in the eyes before opening both arms and giving his old friend a firm embrace.

“Good to see you,” said Iannelli. “We weren’t far away, in transit, and I managed to persuade the guys here that it was about the safest place I could be in now. Given the traffic chaos, it seemed as good an idea as any other.”

He gestured to the civilian desert around them. Only uniforms and hardware to be seen. The other press guys had been forced to wait, but Iannelli had special security clearance.

“My somewhat anomalous state confers the occasional privilege on me.”

“So, surviving captivity?” said Rossi then.

“Next question,” Iannelli replied, the strain clearer in his face as he fully removed his designer shades.

“Well at least you’re getting to stretch your legs,” said Rossi, giving him a firm slap on the shoulders. “How are you bearing up?”

Iannelli gave a sigh.

“You can get used to anything, Mick. That’s what they tell me, but I have to stay alive.”

“Well, I was going to call you,” said Rossi, “to see if we might get together, but it seems events have got the better of us.”

Iannelli’s escort had maintained a discreet distance, but the journalist gestured for them to come over.

“Let me introduce you to my shadows,” he said, presenting the four plain-clothes officers of his escort, now his permanent companions. “They allow me ‘to live an ordinary life’,” he added drily. “Really looks that way, doesn’t it?”

“Well, you’re still with us, aren’t you?” said Rossi.

“No comment.”

“So, who’s here?” Rossi continued. “Might save me some time if you tell me what you’ve got on all this.”

“More like who’s not here,” Iannelli replied. “Good time to do a break-in, I’d say. It’s very Italian, isn’t it? You know, the stable door after the horse has bolted and all that.”

“C’mon, Dario! Were they supposed to predict this? Is that it?”

“Intelligence? A security plan? This is a prime target in the capital and they managed to put a bomb outside? And the synagogue’s just down the road,” he added, gesturing across the river to where the four-sided dome could be glimpsed through the trees.

Rossi was looking in the other direction now to the tarpaulins shielding an area around the university entrance of some 60 to 70 square metres, while a wall of ambulances provided further cover.

“So, how bad?” said Iannelli.

“Maybe six dead, twenty plus injured,” said Rossi, who’d already had a provisional briefing. “No names yet. It wasn’t huge but it was nasty. A nail bomb. It wasn’t term time but there were summer schools going on. These places never close now, and everyone was off guard.”

“I still say you’ve got to see these things coming,” said Iannelli.

“Well, it’s not as if it’s the first time, is it? I mean Jewish, Israeli targets.”

“They shot up the synagogue a couple of times,” said Iannelli. “But this, this here can only be Islamist. Or be meant to look Islamist.”

“I see you haven’t changed your outlook on the world, Dario,” said Rossi.

“Got to keep an open mind on these things, Michael. You of all people should know that.”

“Well, perhaps we can be open-minded enough to start with the facts before we go down the rabbit hole of conspiracy theories. No one’s claimed it yet. Unless you know something I don’t.”

Iannelli shook his head.

“Early days. They’ll wait. See the reaction then see who wants to take it and how useful it will be.”

Carrara was approaching from the far side of the road.

“What’s the story, Gigi?” said Rossi. “Not a car bomb I take it, or a suicide?”

“It’s a mess but it was no suicide. The AT unit’s are on it and Forensics. Working hypothesis of an IED – some sort of large pipe bomb left outside the building. There’s a lot of burn and blast damage. Shrapnel wounds. It just depends where it hits you in these cases.”

“Any witnesses, CCTV?” said Rossi.

“They’re going through the recordings now.”

“Who’s they?”

“The university president’s there. He’s freaking out. I think he’s more worried about the parents wanting to pull all their kids off degree courses. He’s called his press officer back from vacation to work out a PR damage-limitation strategy. Then there’s the assorted services, if you like. ATU. Military and civil. I also have it on good authority that there were undercover guys in the building too. They won’t confirm but you can put money on it.”

“Who are we talking about?” asked Iannelli. Carrara looked at Rossi before getting the nod to go on.

“CIA, maybe Mossad. Whoever they were, they can’t have seen it coming either.”

“And who’s your good authority?” said Rossi.

“The Hare.”

The Hare was a hard-to-pin-down figure. An informer, a fixer, an elusive go-between of Boston Irish stock; he had gone native so long ago that his origins hardly mattered and were barely noticed as his information was always spot on.

Rossi gave an approving nod. He knew the way it worked. The aircraft carriers, the Nato bases, the embassies, the multinationals and then the cultural centres. From Italy to Egypt to Lebanon to Saudi Arabia, US higher education establishments were a way of maintaining a presence, keeping an ear to the ground, and a way of shaping politics, culture and business too. You could send recruits there; you could make new recruits there too.

“Any chance of us mere mortals getting to see those recordings?” he said then.

“Maybe, if you’re very quiet and sit at the back and don’t ask questions. Want to try?”

Rossi gave a nod.

“Dario, how about using strength in numbers? Can your guys create a bit of a diversion or something? I say just flash a badge and keep going. That’s my usual approach.”

“Anything for you, Michael. Come on. But I’m out of here in five. I don’t like getting snapped by the paparazzi, if you know what I mean.”

“Well, while you are here,” said Rossi. “Does the name Jibril mean anything to you? Sicily by chance?”

Rossi was watching for a reaction, but the mention of Jibril didn’t seem to stir much in Iannelli, other than his usual journalist’s suspicions as to why Rossi might be asking.

“Anything I should be interested in?”

“Just working on a lead,” said Rossi. “Or you might say we’re clutching at straws.”

Iannelli’s escort were looking keen to get them off the street, despite the cordon extending around them for a kilometre in every direction.

“Let’s go inside and see what we can get,” said Iannelli, taking the hint. Rossi followed. The name Jibril was not high on Iannelli’s agenda. He would try to jog his memory later.

Eleven

Francesco hurried down the fire escape and out of the university building with some of the other candidates and the various office workers and public servants who shared the ten-storey complex with them. For most of them, the drill provided a welcome chance for an unexpected break, and the bar across the road was already filling up. As false alarms were frequent, few seemed to be giving any credence to the idea of there actually having been a major incident, but Francesco took out his mobile and called Paola anyway. He was sure she would have done the same if she had heard the news; it was the way she was and some of her attitude had clearly rubbed off on him too. But there was no answer.

There was a temporary lockdown in place in the building but hard news was still at a premium. He ordered a coffee, and as he half listened to the gossip and looked up at the rolling news on the small TV in the corner over the fruit machine, fragmentary accounts began to emerge of an explosion with possible loss of life at or near the Israeli university in Trastevere. So they at least were safe, but they had hit somewhere else, another university. Others were watching the screen now and the jocular tone dropped an octave or two. Then he heard a rumble of talk and a few low, hissed “murdering bastards”.

When the all-clear came, Francesco darted back into the building to dot the i’s and the t’s on some outstanding administrative procedures. He exchanged a few quick words with the other candidates, most of whom knew each other in one way or another, either through work or the periodic ritual of the concorso. One of the candidates had unsettled Francesco. On his own admission, he’d only been in the university sector for some six months, was much younger than any of the other candidates, and yet seemed to exude an air of slightly embarrassed certainty about “the job” and what it would entail. All the others had CVs stretching back to the beginning of the previous decade and they exhibited the worn exteriors to prove it. But what worried Francesco more now was Paola.

As he stepped back out of the building he tried again and as he did so he noticed her text.

Going to see Mom then on my way home. Had a cancellation. Will ring later. XXX P.

The timestamp meant it must have come through late. Network problems, probably, he reasoned. Everyone calling at the same time. So maybe that was why she hadn’t rung and why she wasn’t answering either. He tried again. Still nothing. He closed the phone and looked about and thought about getting a bus, and he was just slipping the phone into his pocket when a call came in. “DadP”. it said on the ID. It was Paola’s father, and he never called but Paola had insisted they swap numbers, just for emergencies.

Francesco felt a sudden hot surge of fear as his thumb hovered over the icon. Her dad must be checking too, like he was. He must have seen the news. He took the call.

“Yes,” said Francesco, ready to rise to the unlikely occasion.

“Francesco,” came the reply, firm, familiar but in a tone he had never heard before. “It’s Paola, she’s not answering her phone. Have you seen the news? She was in Trastevere. Did you know? Has she called?”

***

Francesco walked on in a daze. After the initial call, there had followed a to and fro of frantic phone conversations as Paola’s father had drawn on all his available contacts to get access to the crime scene and confirmation of what had happened. They had hoped that in the initial confusion the story might prove to be the fruit of a misunderstanding, but soon the evidence relayed back to them had been crushing. The formal identification would still have to be made but it was as good as there in black and white.

Was he going in the right direction? What direction? What was the point? She was dead. There was no doubt. Her date of birth. Her height. Her hair colour. It was all there on the card she carried. The identity card they all carried like convicts in their own country. The card that said he was a citizen of the Italian Republic with its most wonderful constitution; the best in the world, so they said. The card they carried so that they could be stopped and checked and identified at any time of the day and night to ensure that they were not enemies of that same Republic, enemies of the patria. The card that could be used to trace them to their house, to their staircase, to their apartment so the knock could come in the middle of the night. So they could always be found.

He wandered on up the incline of Viale di Circo Massimo. Past the fruit sellers. Past the teenage tourists playing in the middle distance with joyful abandon in the old amphitheatre. They were climbing on each other’s backs, playing at being charioteers, like Ben Hur, the Jewish prince who took on the might of the Romans in this very place. Their cries carried to him as they surged across an imaginary finishing line acknowledging fictional crowds and falling then to the ground in mock scenes of death and slaughter. Then, like parents giving children piggyback rides, they got up again. A joyous resurrection.

He came to the crest of the hill from where he could look down to the Tiber. Behind him and towering above him was the monument to Mazzini, the father of the patria. High up in his chair, on his plinth, he seemed to be dozing in old age. Venerable, noble, yet atop his verdigris bronze head, the city’s seagulls perched one after another, as if to take their bearings, only then to foul his likeness with impunity.

He had not been able to accept it. He was sure, first, that there must have been a mistake. Any number of women could have the same name. It was a common one in Italy. Paola Mancini. But with the same date of birth? But the details they gave him were final. He and her father had discussed the formal identification briefly, but it was a father’s job to identify his own daughter no matter how close they had been. The police said she had not been caught by the full force of the blast but that she had been “unlucky”. Already, he was appropriating the lexicon of disaster as his own.

From the Municipal Rose Garden a rich, variegated perfume battled with the acrid summer smog of urban pollution. Good and evil, past and present, youth and age were tearing each other apart now in his own mind too, but beneath the surface. He wondered why he didn’t feel tired. He had instead a feeling of bizarre elation as though he had been chosen for something, been elected. Something was telling him that life now would be lived on a new level. The old life, like a bridge collapsing into a gorge, was still visible but gone for good. He moved nearer to the railings and sat down on the narrow wall. An ambulance approached from Viale Aventino, fleeing then past the Bocca della Verità in the direction of the Tiber. Maybe she was only injured. Maybe this ambulance was for her. Flowers protruded from between the railings above his head, and as a sudden light breeze lifted from over the Palatine Hill, it stirred a shower of petals, and he watched as one by one they fell to the ground before him.

Twelve

“So what about Maroni?” said Carrara, stirring his coffee. They were in the university canteen situated on the side of the building furthest from the Lungotevere, where the explosion had occurred. One corner had been transformed into an incident room until the usual suspects had finished clearing up outside and hosing down and gathering the necessary minutiae for Forensics. The university was an imposing building and while the bomb had torn through the soft tissue of passersby and disfigured the facade of the eighteenth-century palazzo, its structural integrity had not been compromised.

Meanwhile, inside, all available officers had been charged with interviewing every imaginable person that had been inside or in the vicinity of the building.

“He’ll be turning his boat around now, I reckon,” said Rossi. “And wherever he is, he’ll want to be informed of the facts as they happen. You know he brings a satellite phone on holiday.”

Carrara knocked back his espresso.

“So I’ve heard. Prudent man.”

“Likes to know. Doesn’t appreciate getting ridden roughshod over when he’s out of the picture.”

“That’s a polite way of putting it. Better not to take a holiday.”

“Don’t worry,” said Rossi, “there won’t be any for the foreseeable future.”

Carrara scratched his head as he recommenced scanning papers and spreadsheets and maps of the building.

“Are you sure there’s much point trying to interview all these kids and staff today without proper interpreters?”

“I brought that up already,” Rossi replied, “but certain individuals are convinced of their language skills.”

“You mean the ones whose evidence then gets torn apart when the lawyers get stuck into them?”

“That sort of thing. Anyway, not my orders, Gigi. The call goes out and we answer. This is one major security shitstorm. You realize there’s an international summit coming up, and the word from very on high is that they want answers sooner rather than later. It’ll be the Americans. You can count on it. They’ve got a shedload of interests plugged in here.”

“But you know as well as I do that the evidence is inadmissible without a lawyer present,” Carrara insisted.

“Well, they want ‘facts’ that might help point us in the right direction. I don’t think they’re counting on the bomber still being among us. It’s intelligence gathering.”

“Intelligence? They might perhaps have made a better job of gathering before it all kicked off, especially if they had agents in there.”

Rossi nodded.

“And he managed to plant a device without anyone checking? Either the guards were sleeping or they thought it was someone who studied or worked here.”

“What did you make of the footage?”

“You mean the footage they let us see?”

“You’re saying Anti-Terror were being ‘selective’?”

“Playing it very close to their chests,” said Rossi. “Like in any good story, it’s what you choose not to reveal.”

“But the guy in the hat walking away a minute or so before the blast? Well covered up for the time of year, don’t you think?”

Rossi shrugged.

“Could be anyone. But from what I saw of it, it looked like a bike bomb. There was no other vehicle in the vicinity, no cars, only passersby and students, no visible packages. They should have found a few fragments by now, so they’ll be able to put some meat on the bones.”

“It wouldn’t be the first time,” said Carrara. “You can get a lot of plastic inside that tubing. At least a kilo, maybe two. And it only takes one to obliterate a vehicle.”

“It was a taster, if you ask me,” said Rossi. “Small but nasty. Nails and bearings. But we’ve got six corpses in there and maybe more to come.”

“A spectacular?” said Carrara. “In Rome? That’s turning the clock back forty years.”

“Well, someone’s opened the betting. It all depends if the stakes rise. And who’s playing the game. Look,” said Rossi, “Bianco’s here.”

The sergeant was approaching their table with his customary heavy tread now even heavier. He flopped down into a chair.

“Relatives,” he said. “In the mortuary. What a fucking job.”

He gave them the low-down on things. A temporary mortuary had been set up in a ground-floor classroom. The air-conditioning helped. Despite being August, the road diversions and massive security clampdown combined with a general heat-stoked hysteria was wreaking havoc on the city’s traffic. The scene-of-crime magistrate had agreed with the City Prefect to keep the bodies at the scene until things calmed down and until they could get next of kin informed, at least in the case of the local victims. Then they would see to the overseas students.

“Dario’s forming his opinions already, isn’t he?” said Carrara, waiting then for Rossi’s reaction.

“He’s going through hell! A guy like him cooped up 24/7 with an escort, as good as living on the run. There are Mafia scum who’ve got more freedom to walk the streets. The least he should be doing is concocting another conspiracy theory.”

“As far-fetched as the last one wasn’t? I mean The Carpenter case turned out to be just about as fucked up and twisted as you could imagine. Faked deaths, suicides, triple bluffs. You couldn’t have made it up.”

“Take every case on its merits, Gigi. Follow the facts until they prove you were right not to believe somebody’s wild theorizing, or until what you do see begins to eat away at your long-held notions of the rational and believable. Otherwise you lose your direction. There’s a place for instinct, for gut feeling but it’s the catalyst, not the constituent in the equation. Or the angle; the right kind of lighting that illuminates what you hadn’t noticed before.”

“So how do you see this one shaping up? Us against the bad guys in a nice straight fight? Do you see a tall dark stranger?”

Rossi gave a nervous look over his shoulder to the tables behind him in the canteen nearest to the coffee machines and the free food. They were all there. Known and unknown. Uniformed and non. Some friends and a sprinkling of well-seasoned foes. Yes, thought Rossi, it took events like this to really shake up the law and order establishment. It was like some sort of world cup and everyone was suddenly going for glory and sensing the opportunity to get their hands on the trophy.

“Or another one where we’re watching our backs and wishing we were on traffic detail again?” Carrara added.

Rossi flicked a used sugar sachet into his cup. “I predict interesting, Gigi. That’s what I see. As in very ‘interesting times’.”

Carrara had set up a meeting with Dr Okoli. The professor was waiting in an interview room but without any of the accompanying security. Rossi noted that unlike the usual suspects they had to face across a desk in there, he seemed quite unperturbed by the surroundings.

“So, it seems I am a lucky man,” he said with a broad smile as he rose to greet Rossi and Carrara with a powerful handshake.

“I tend to agree,” said Rossi as he introduced himself. “We’ll keep this as brief as we can, Professor. I’m sure you have a lot to attend to.”

Okoli nodded and sat down again. He had the relaxed air of a writer for whom ideas come easily and in abundance. No tortured soul here. Rossi was getting the feeling that this was a man who had probably seen worse on many occasions. Much worse.

“Enemies?” said Rossi.

“How long do you have?” the professor chuckled. “That part of the Nigerian establishment which is corrupt to its rotten core and in cahoots with the petrodollar touting rabble and the foreign ‘investors’.” He made his own inverted commas for Rossi and Carrara’s benefit. “Speculators, predators, depredators of our country would be a more accurate term. But investors is what they like to be known as.”

He reeled off a list of names. Carrara took notes.

“Some of these people have form as they say. Nothing proved, of course. There never is. But take it from me, they would like me out of the way. Ever since I resurrected the ghost of my old friend Ken Saro-Wiwa, when I called for his name to be cleared, for a state pardon and recognition of his innocence, and for his murderers to be finally brought to justice. I went too far for my own good it seems.”

Rossi knew the story well. The writer who had championed the cause of the oppressed and exploited in the Niger Delta, where the oil companies and their friends in government were the kings. He had finished up on the end of a rope, widely believed to have been convicted on trumped-up charges. The whole thing stank.

“So do you think they could be pursuing you?” said Carrara. “You may have heard we’ve had some race-related incidents in the city. Hate crimes we think. Far-right groups targeting foreigners. That kind of thing. Did you receive any threats? Any signs of intimidation?”

The professor listened and pondered for a moment. He shrugged. Non-committal but open.

“Someone let down the tyres on my car once. Someone else lets his dog shit outside my house every day. Maybe the same person.”

“That could just be Rome,” said Carrara.

“Apart from that,” Okoli continued, “the attack on me and my family was out of the blue, gentlemen, but not, shall we say, entirely surprising.”

“Did you lose much?” said Rossi. “In the fire. Your work?”

Okoli shook his head.

“Some possessions, but I left Nigeria in rather a hurry, you know. The possessions I had I knew I would not have much chance of holding on to, so I sold or gave away what I could before leaving.”

He put his hand in his pocket and took out a USB drive.

“Everything else of real importance is on here,” he said. “My research. My sources. I never part from this. They’ll have to kill me first if they want it.”

Their eyes locked for a moment in understanding before Rossi moved things along.

“We’ll see to it that you get the right security. Do you have some work lined up?”

The question had come out spontaneously and was inspired by goodwill, but as soon as he had said it, Rossi realized it made him sound like some sort of fake-casual immigration official.

Okoli smiled.

“I was thinking of selling my body, officer. I have heard it’s all the rage among the Nigerians in Rome. Haven’t you?”

Thirteen

Rossi stood on his balcony watching the cloudless sky as the sun’s first rays began to cancel night’s all too brief dominion. It was an implacable scene, like a Cyclops’s blank stare. The temperature gauge in his living room had dropped by two degrees overnight. Small comfort. No breeze. Nevertheless, as he drank his cool coffee and looked out at the still-sleeping metropolis, his mind felt fresh, at least for now, and he reflected on what had emerged from the previous day’s events.

They had not kept Doctor Okoli long. He had his life to reorganize, again. He had not been able to put any substantive leads their way other than to indicate that plenty of well-protected diplomats in Rome were probably just as likely as any fascist organization to have been trying to kill him. He seemed perfectly credible and their background checks matched his own story. But his final wisecrack about male prostitution had set Rossi thinking more than a little. Okoli had not elaborated, had backtracked even and glossed over it, but the suggestion was that his reluctance might have been because he was working on something and may even have had confidential sources to protect.

Responsibility for the bombing at the Israeli university had been claimed by an obscure, as yet unheard of organization. An e-mail from one of the galaxy of fundamentalist Islamist websites operating from within the safe havens of the Dark Web had been sent to Iovine, Iannelli’s Editor-in-Chief at The Facet. The organization proclaimed itself the Islamic Caliphate in Europe. ICE. Despite the heat, the effect was rather less than soothing. Iannelli too was able to confirm that it had been received. As for establishing the veracity or other of their claim, that was another story. These days anyone could and would put their name to an unsolved or unclaimed attack, if only for the headlines it would generate, or as a quick shot of publicity for some plan they had hatched.

In this case, the details furnished by ICE did at least tally with what the Anti-Terror Squad had been able to ascertain from their analysis of the damage inflicted, the recovered bomb fragments, and their assessment of both the size of the device and its method of manufacture. There were also enough elements of novelty to suggest a different supply line to that of any known groups operating either in France or the UK where there had already been attacks. Neither was the hardware homemade. Military-grade explosive had been used, hence the compact nature of the device; all of which pointed to a strong possibility of a Balkan connection, as the best-case scenario. But that was reserved information.

Then there was nothing. Rossi glanced down at his empty cup, unsatisfied and wanting more coffee. Where they were now was at that point of heightened and uneasy hiatus which accompanies any terror attack. Saturation news coverage, heavy doses of human interest stories – the near misses, the shattered lives, the solidarity of a nation and the wider civilized world. Security is ratcheted up as the media machine evokes the blitz spirit, encouraging, even lauding it as the irrepressible manifestation of a city or a people’s collective character. And yet to the jaded eyes of the cynical, it appears to be some futile attempt to follow the ball rather than get inside the mind of the playmaker and second-guess his next move. Like a gambler always seeing the number he was going to bet on coming up trumps for another. It’s too late.

Rossi went back to the kitchen, and as he unscrewed the moka to make another espresso he began to prepare mentally for the day ahead.

In the light of the high-level summit, the City Prefect’s office was planning a press conference to put on a united front and allay the fears of a jittery public and business community. The relevant ministers had convened the heads of police, the mayor, as well as the prime movers in the secret services and wider intelligence community, charging them with formulating a new, coordinated response. Without a clear road map, and without comparable past experience to go on, the Minister of State for Home Security had demanded a shake-up. In other words, he was saying they’d been caught napping or looking the wrong way on this one and they’d better get their act together or heads would roll. The blame game again.

Maroni had summoned Rossi and Carrara and a handful of the most promising and senior operatives on the RSCS. Following a torrid crossing, their long-time chief had dropped anchor at Civitavecchia the evening after the bombing, having left Corsica only half-discovered. He was, to say the least, irascible when he finally pinned Rossi down to a telephone conversation. The meet was to be today and he wanted everyone to bring “something worth hearing”. Hence Rossi’s prompt start with hopes of getting some inspiration in the relative cool and quiet of the early hours.

He placed the compact, bomb-like machine on the gas and stared into the quietly hissing flame.

Maroni was an old hand. He’d been a raw recruit on the hunt for the last cells of the BR, the Brigate Rosse or Red Brigades in the late Eighties. Rossi had heard the stories, second-hand, and despite the ambivalence he sometimes felt towards his superior he had to give him some credit for past glories.

As was to be expected, he’d suggested Rossi and Carrara drop the arson investigations. “Keep an eye on things, you know. Set up some standard surveillance op, but it’s hardly a priority now, is it? I mean, a pyromaniac with a grudge against motorists.”

Early release for good behaviour, thought Rossi, but hadn’t Maroni been forgetting something?

“And the attempt on Dr Okoli’s life?” Rossi had ventured, at which Maroni had paused then let out a sigh which Rossi knew all too well. Rossi’s consternation had inadvertently betrayed his growing interest in the Prenestina fire and its victims as well as Lallana’s apparent reluctance to probe deeper, not to mention the question of the timer, the locked security grilles. “Am I to presume you are trying to tie all that in with the Prenestina fire too?”

“I think it’s a possibility,” Rossi had replied.

“And who the hell gave you the authorization to dig around there?” Maroni had blurted back down the line.

“Arson’s arson, isn’t it?” Rossi had countered. “And what if we’ve got a maniac on our hands who only needs a can of petrol and a box of matches to hold the city to ransom? Sooner or later we could be mourning another massacre.”

There had followed another Maroni pause. Rossi had made his point but knew he was up against a brick wall.

“The real point here, Rossi, is that you just can’t keep your nose out of another bloke’s patch, can you? The case is closed. If only you could summon up the same enthusiasm for what you’re supposed to be doing.”

Rossi had let the relatively minor storm blow itself out, judging it wiser to withhold the details of his meetings with Tiziana and Dottor Piredda. But he still had to get Iannelli to spill the beans on Jibril, if there was anything to spill. With the chaos of the bombing, and the journalist’s reluctance to court publicity, they’d had to postpone their tête-à-tête. He’d get on to him today, after the meeting, if that didn’t throw up another mega work fest. Then there were the handover reports to do, which he hadn’t even started. And Yana wanted him to help her get settled back into her flat again.

The sun came up over the rooftops and began to unleash its fury. Rossi felt he had rather too many irons in the fire.

Fourteen

The brothers were sitting cross-legged in the living room of the first-floor apartment in Torpignatarra. Newspapers and other printed materials lay strewn around the flat, on the floor on kilims and the cheap sofa draped with Arabic-style throws. A computer screen showed the fluttering black flags and the looping images of black-clad commandos tramping through dust against a brightly sunlit desert backdrop. Islamic chanting came from the soundtrack as Ali’s hijab-wearing wife left the room, backwards, curved over as if with age and with her eyes to the floor, having served the menfolk their refreshments. She closed the door behind her without making a noise. Ali, the Tunisian, unfolded a real black flag and placed it before them then began to speak.

“My brothers. You all know the seriousness of your vow of allegiance to this flag and this organization. As your emir, under the guidance of Allah, I shall take all the final decisions. I am responsible for you but you are all, as I am too, willing to die for Islam in the name of vanquishing the infidel and freeing the Islamic people from tyranny in the lands not yet returned to the bountiful and just order of the Grand Caliphate. I will ask you soon, one by one, to speak your minds. We are all from different lands but in Islam we are one. This is our strength. This, and our faith. Soon, it will be our turn to act. The moment ripens day by day. Look around you my brothers at the iniquity and the filth. And they say this is a religious city. It is a den of infidels. It is a rat hole, a sewer. And the vermin must be expunged. We must crush them until, on their knees, in the blood of their children, they acknowledge Allah as the one and only, just as we have knelt in our own children’s blood cursing the unbeliever and the collaborators for their crimes.

“Now, brothers, I ask you to speak. How shall we act? Where must we strike? Share with me the fruits of your wisdom. Who will put himself forward for the supreme and wondrous act of martyrdom and take then his reward in paradise, where he will be served by angels and his fifty virgin wives will attend to him as is his right, as is written by the Prophet, peace be to his name, in the Holy Qur’an.”

One of the company raised his hand.

“Yes,” said Ali. “Speak, Jibril.”

Fifteen

“We’ve been given a pretty open brief here,” Maroni continued leaning forward again over his notes. One document was headed in bold lettering “Combined Security Committee”.

“CSC want us to approach it intellectually and operationally, given the abundant expertise we have in both those fields. Which, as far as I’m concerned, means keeping your eyes and ears open and doing proper police work.”

He sat back then and looked up, scanning the faces gathered round the oval table in the conference room. He forced a wry smile. “I prefer the operational side myself but as you know I am always ready to hear your suggestions.”

“Ah, glad you could make it,” he said then as Rossi made his way into the meeting and grabbed a chair, more than a little late. “You know everyone, I’m sure. If not, get acquainted during the break.”

Rossi sat down opposite Carrara on the other side of the table.

“I had just been telling everyone here that you’re one of our top languages men, but Arabic’s not on your list, is it?”

“Not as yet, sir,” Rossi replied.

“Any suggestions as to how we might approach surveillance and intelligence gathering on the ground? The question’s open to you all,” Maroni continued, eying the gathered operatives one by one now over his rimless reading glasses.

“I was wondering,” said Carrara, “about the tech side. Is that all in the hands of the usual crew? The Telecoms Police and their, shall we say, ‘subsidiaries’? I assume their GIS mapping is going to be central, but what about our role? Do we have any added capabilities?”

“Well you can forget about ClearTech for now,” Maroni said, looking to close quickly on that score, “Judicial inquiry’s out on that one, as if you don’t remember.”

Rossi and Carrara remembered very well. They hadn’t been able to prove it but, during The Carpenter case, they had found enough to suggest that the outsourced computer forensics had been manipulated to keep them off the trail. Silvestre, an integral part of the RSCS but never one to see eye-to-eye with either Rossi or Carrara, had been seconded to assist ClearTech just before. They didn’t think it had been any coincidence.

“The problem,” said Rossi, cutting in, “as I see it, and from what I’ve gathered from Europol, and our French counterparts in particular, is that these groups, the radicalizers and the potentially radicalized, initially get together via chat rooms and forums. They sound each other out first and then they move onto secure encrypted platforms, things like Telegram. There’s very little you can do to intercept the coms.”

“Well at least you’ve been doing some homework, Rossi,” said Maroni. “But I think our lot are on to that and aware of the limitations of straightforward phone taps.”

“If they’re any good at all, they hardly even use phones,” said Rossi. “They use word of mouth, trust and community protection, couriers.”

“So what’s the big idea then? I assume you’re going to get to your point.” The surprise contribution had come from Silvestre. He had popped up at the corner of the table where he’d been slouching, lying low as usual. “I say we pile into the ghettos and stop and search till they’re sick of the sight of us. See a car with a couple of Arabs in, we turn it over. Send ’em a message, the murdering scum.”

“You’re assuming we’re dealing only with Arabs then Silvestre?” Rossi countered.

“You know exactly what I mean. Come down heavy on the lot, I say. Show ’em who’s boss. Take no prisoners. Flush ’em out of their holes.”

“But you use your head first,” said Rossi, “like Dalla Chiesa did with the Red Brigades. He played a long game, and he didn’t take any innocent lives doing it. If we go in like you’re proposing there’ll be an exponential growth of home-grown terror.”

“All right, gentlemen,” said Maroni, “let’s keep on an even keel here. This is neither the Wild West nor the Seventies or the Eighties. I was there for some of that and I knew the general, personally. So let’s leave it at that.”

“You can’t go antagonizing a whole community, if you don’t want a war,” said Rossi unable to resist the parting shot. “If you target them as Muslims it will be wholly counterproductive. That’s how their recruiters work, telling these kids that their religion is their common bond, regardless of their nationality. We’d be doing their job for them.”

“And the government doesn’t want the city in a lockdown scenario either,” said Maroni. “It’s bad for the economy, and God know’s it’s already on life support. The moment is delicate, gentlemen, very delicate. And there’s the Olympic bid to consider. There’s a lot of pressure on that front too, I don’t mind saying.”

Rossi shook his head.

“We need to think like they do,” said Rossi. “Try to understand what these young guys want, and they will be young, for sure. Then we can isolate them within their communities, get them to rat on each other once they realize it’s in their interests. And we can take advantage of the fact that there aren’t any true no-go areas in Rome yet, at least not like in Brussels and Paris. We can still manage this situation.”

Inspector Katia Vanessi had raised her hand to speak. New to the team, and the only woman on RSCS, she was an as yet unknown quantity as far as Rossi was concerned.

“Every domestic terrorist act is underwritten by a prevailing sense of social injustice validating if not the means then certainly the end.”

Rossi adjusted his position from a half slouch to interested. He could see Maroni was growing impatient.

“Ladies and gentlemen, I get the point but we are not the UN here. We are not delivering global solutions for the hard done by. We are trying to stop Islamist extremists planting bloody bombs in our city!”

But Rossi wasn’t going to let it go yet.

“In its day,” said Rossi, “the Red Brigades had a wide support base, and they did have a certain Robin-Hood quality, at least initially. But is that the case here? Putting bombs in public places?” he said, letting his own open question hang in the air like incense. “To me, it smacks more of fascism – the disdain for the masses for the advancement of a private agenda.”

Katia appeared to have let her attention wander for a moment. Rossi waited, expecting a personalized response that didn’t come as she continued to make unhurried but assiduous notes.

She had heard a lot about Rossi and was working out as she wrote how best to comment on his little speech. Yes, she’d heard about his intellect, his unusual background, his barely concealed disdain for authority, and his reputation for getting results, often against the odds. Well, she reflected, dotting a final i on her notepad before laying down her pen – he seemed to be able to talk the talk at least. She raised her hand.

“Well, Inspector Rossi,” she said, giving him her firm and confident attention now, “that’s a nice little story but, given your experience on the ground, what do you propose we actually do about it?”

Sixteen

Jibril wiped the steam off the mirror to make sure he didn’t cut himself with the new razor. Olivia had been surprised. Yes. Very surprised. So, she was finding out that he wasn’t quite as shy and reserved as she had thought him to be. And he had made the first move. Well, really the first move had come from her and not just the invitation. That had been an open invite. But giving him her phone number as she had a few weeks earlier. Then the other stuff. Picking him out with her eyes every time there was a question that needed answering. She was drawn to him. And he’d let it happen whether he had needed it or not. It was true that she would be part of his cover but he realized he had wanted it too. So, in a corner of his battered heart, perhaps not all hope was lost. Some innocence maybe still thrived. And the others must have known too. But what of it. The class favourite? The teacher’s pet? He’d already learnt about that from his own school days in the village and after. Days that had finished so abruptly, so cruelly.

He stopped himself. Have to keep focused. He rinsed and wiped his face with a towel then slipped his shirt on and adjusted the collar so that the chain hung around his neck against his skin just above the topmost fastened button. He smoothed his chin with one hand. His beard was gone but he’d never really got used to having it. When the rebels had first tried to reimpose the old ways on the men in the village, his father and uncles and many others had laughed at their attempts, calling it out as the harking back to some failed distant ideal, their new-found love affair with ideology, with ancient Wahabist rules and certainties.

Yet things had changed somewhat since then, and Jibril had also lived a little in the true believers’ shoes. Now that his journey had brought him to the point where he’d understood the need for decisive action, such symbols were only that: symbols and nothing else. He’d made his case and made it well. He had bided his time with the brothers. In his hour of need they had been there for him. This much was true. He was strong, had always been, but embracing his religion and its comforts had helped him to be stronger. He had felt weakness when he had first come to Rome. Fatigue and hunger, but the strength of true brotherhood had quickly lifted him. There were decent, honest brothers who acted in good faith, but there were those, he knew very well, whose minds and hearts dwelt elsewhere. Such was life. But he was taking control in that regard too and the younger ones knew it.

So, as he had explained, first, you had to fit in. Be like those of the country where you are a guest, or be their idea of how you should be. Play to your strengths, exploit their weaknesses. Ali had protested strongly and some of the others hadn’t been so sure either at first, but as he spoke, building an argument with patient explanation, he had begun to convince them even as he had convinced himself. The more attention you bring to yourself by your difference and your separateness, the more chance they will have of hunting you down, spotting you against the horizon. It was urban camouflage, brothers. Then you could strike unseen when the time was right. But only then. Haste was a fool’s game. Our revolution wears no watch, so it can come at anytime, when least they expect it. Let them sweat it out while we, with cool heads and focused determination, construct the perfect plan.

He walked back across the hall into his room and picked up his phone off the nightstand. It was new. New second-hand. A decent model about whose provenance he hadn’t been encouraged to enquire. It would give him relative anonymity, linked as it was to a new identity. He would need it for everything legitimate now. There was work lined up, hopefully. He would talk to Olivia about that tonight. She would help and had already proved invaluable as a key to opening the intricacies of Italian society. She was always keen to know how he was “getting on” and whether he was going to get his permit to stay. Well, the story he would recount was that he had every intention of making a go of it and she was an attractive young woman with many of the qualities he admired. Somewhere, behind it all, if he hadn’t been at war, she might have even truly touched his soul. But he had no time for that. Not now. Not after what they had done to him.

Perhaps they made an unlikely couple: an Italian woman and a Nigerian man. A teacher and an illegal immigrant with false papers? But he was also a care worker now, a social assistant. Once that was his identity it would not seem so strange. And that was where he was heading, on a fast track, and there was plenty of work to be had. These Italians didn’t lock their old people away like they did in some countries, but instead paid carers to shoulder the drudgery of looking after them. And yet they complained about the numbers of foreigners, the hordes of stranieri they had to put up with.

This Christian nation. Love your neighbour, said Christ. But where was their gospel now? When I was sick, did you care for me? When I was in prison, did you visit me? He thought then of Victor, his friend murdered in Rome some six months before. He recalled their many long discussions before they had been separated. But in those days, so much of it was theory while theory had now become practice. Reality now had grown harsh. “Remember, Jibril,” Victor would say, “when the day comes, what He will say to those on his left. ‘Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels’.” Well, they had killed him – his own Christian brothers – and they would have to pay for it.

“So, my friend,” he said out loud, as if someone might be there to hear him, “who is the devil now?”

Seventeen

The atmosphere in the conference room was tense. The press wanted answers, wanted a story, but they weren’t getting much change out of the eight-strong panel of stony-faced city officials and law enforcement chiefs facing them in the grand hall of the prefettura’s renaissance palace. Security was high and the press had arrived in numbers, among them Elena Serena, sent by Iannelli to do the public work he couldn’t risk undertaking. She had taken up a position near an exit and had set up a tripod stand with a video camera to stream the whole proceeding back to Iannelli. She had opted to use the local WI-FI but it was just her luck to have found the only spot where the signal was shaky.

“So, we are under attack?” The question came from a staff reporter on The Post. The journalists were hammering the same nail again and again, but the panel was resisting.

All eyes turned to the City Prefect, Roberto Cavalleggio. It was his job to guarantee public safety and coordinate between the Home Office and local government.

“As I think my colleagues have already made clear, it was an attack,” he replied, adjusting and leaning into the microphone almost as if in an attempt to find some shortcoming in the hardware that might distract attention from his own. “A vile and cowardly attack, I might add.” He paused, perhaps to weigh his words or to emphasize some greater gravitas. “It is not clear whether this is part of any concerted campaign or an isolated incident. I can say, however, that the police and the security services are working flat out, night and day, to find the perpetrators and bring them to justice.”

“What do you know about the level of technological sophistication of the device?” a reporter called out from the back of the room. There was another brief pause as, after comments off mic and various sideways glances, the prefect indicated that the question would be taken by the head of the state police, Fulvio Martinelli.

“From what the forensic police have been able to ascertain so far, it would appear that it was a fairly rudimentary device but lethal nonetheless. It was designed to inflict maximum casualties without requiring a major logistical operation.”

Elena looked up from where she had, until then, been jotting random notes. Rudimentary? It certainly wasn’t the impression she’d had, and she’d got the low-down from Iannelli who had been on the scene early. He had said all the evidence pointed to C4, high-grade military plastic explosive and a high-spec timing device. He and she had kept that to themselves for now, though. From the front row, it was a RAI TV journalist’s turn to quiz the prefect.

“We’ve been hearing from the Police Federation recently that in the last few years there has been a chronic lack of funding for the security budget to face an increasingly sophisticated terrorist threat. In the light of these comments, are you able to provide assurances that the public’s safety will be guaranteed? In concrete terms, what is being done?”

An ashen-faced prefect suppressed something akin to a stifled yawn or a sigh as he prepared to speak.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” he began, assuming a tone both informal yet recognizably patrician, “as I continue to reiterate, everything in our power is being done. Rest assured,” he continued, glancing up at the crowd just long enough for the flashes’ brief frenzy, “that no stone will be left unturned and no effort spared. With specific reference to the question regarding our resources, let me say this.” He reached for a pair of reading glasses, then taking a sip from his glass of mineral water, he looked down to where he appeared to have a speech of sorts prepared. “Regardless of the resources and hardware at the disposal of its law enforcement personnel, no city can ever be 100 per cent safe, just as no other daily action we take can be in 100 per cent safety. The moment you set foot outside your apartment you are inevitably exposed to risks. You are, incidentally, statistically exposed to a great many more risks within the four walls of your home. However, when you do venture out onto the streets of your city, what we can do and what we are striving to do is to reduce

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