The Night of Rome Read online

  The trout lay motionless, in the rigidity of death.

  Danilo turned to look at Malgradi.

  He smiled.

  Now he’d understood.

  He knew what remained to be done.

  Malgradi smiled back at him. He’d dropped the bait in the water. Now there was a good chance that the fish would take the bait.

  XXIII.

  ONE MONTH LATER

  SATURDAY, MAY 23RD. BOTANICAL GARDENS

  Saint’s Day: St. Desiderius, Bishop

  Polimeni and Giovanni were strolling in the Botanical Gardens. At the edge of a field of iridescent irises, Adriano felt as if he were appreciating the irresistible perfume of springtime for the first time in his life. He filled his lungs with air, and finally made up his mind to open his heart to Giovanni.

  He told him that he felt uneasy about the surreal calm that reigned on the Capitoline Hill. After the terrible week of Easter, when everything seemed on the verge of tumbling over the brink at any moment, and there were even those who were calling for a state of emergency and the invocation of martial law, the waters had suddenly grown still. The attacks on the mayor had ceased. The organization of the jubilee was proceeding in an orderly manner. Malgradi had stood aside. Sebastiano Laurenti had vanished from the scene. In place of the completely unpresentable Danilo Mariani, the Consortium of Builders had chosen a young technician from the Ciociaria area, just south of Rome, a new face and, according to all the information that could be gathered, squeaky-clean and above suspicion.

  “Then what are you complaining about, Adriano?”

  “It’s all too easy, Giovanni. It smacks of a Mafia truce. You know, when an old system has been eliminated and it’s being replaced by a new one. It always takes some time to realize what’s happened, and in the meantime the new power structures stabilize, and by the time the problems emerge, it’s always too late to do anything about it.”

  His secret fear was called Chiara Visone. By now, she held the Roman party firmly in her grip. She had saved Martin Giardino. She was the secret mastermind behind the peace. Chiara had taken his advice and had lined up on the side of the “good guys.” But he didn’t have any illusions about Chiara. She’d played the game that way because it had been to her advantage. She’d given Martin his jubilee but, when the time came, she’d return to the charge. That, however, wasn’t what left him uneasy. That was politics. There was something else that was troubling him.

  All that peace.

  That some kind of deal had been struck was evident. He’d tried to draw Chiara out on the point. But she avoided the line of questioning. Was there some new deal? And with whom, if not with Sebastiano Laurenti? Was the reconquered rule of law the new face of corruption?

  “We’ll stand watch together,” Giovanni consoled him, after listening to his outburst, “you and me.”

  “Who? The two of us? Don Camillo and Peppone, two-point-oh?”

  “Well, those movies weren’t actually all that bad.”

  “I hated them. The priest was a sly dog and the Communist was an idiot. Anyway, I don’t know, Giovanni, I just don’t know. I really feel like handing it off to someone else.”

  Their stroll had led them to the Japanese gardens. The gentle noise of the little waterfall that slid over the little rocks irregularly arranged along the walking trail was a bright Asian symphony. A few large carp swam placidly in the little pond.

  Behind them, a couple materialized. The man might have been in his early forties. The woman, a little younger. He had short, graying hair; he wore a pair of shorts, hanging down to mid thigh, and a pair of trail runners with short ankle socks. He had a belt around his waist with a fanny pack attached. She wore a skimpy, flowered dress, brunette hair, freshly shampooed, high high heels, an aggressive perfume. Borgatari, hicks from the outskirts of town.

  “Look at that yellow one! Look how big it is!” she shrieked, all excited, pointing to the carp in the pond.

  “If it’s yellow, it must be Japanese,” Polimeni commented, ironically.

  The man came over, with something helpful and didactic in his voice with its heavy Roman accent.

  “You’re right! It’s called a ‘Japanese carp,’ and precisely because it’s yellow! It’s a very rare fish, and in fact, at the Trigoria lake, when you catch one, you have to give it back. They put them back in the water, and in exchange, they give you a pole.”

  “Well, don’t just say pole,” the woman jumped in, helpfully. “A fishing pole, honey.”

  “Okay, anyway,” the man cut the conversation short. “Let’s go, we’re bothering these nice gentlemen.”

  Adriano tracked them with his eyes as they moved off. He watched as they exchanged a brief kiss. How much did he really know about the Italian people he’d been pursuing all his life?

  Later, he and Giovanni exchanged a hug. The bishop was expected at a private audience with His Holiness. Adriano had a few tasks to take care of in his office on the Capitoline Hill.

  They had no way of knowing they’d never see each other again.

  CAPITOLINE HILL.

  His meeting with Giovanni and, to an even greater extent, the vision—yes, vision, because that is exactly what it had been—of that couple at the Botanical Gardens had convinced him once again that the time really had come to return to that cone of shadow from which he had been yanked. Or, perhaps, it would be more accurate to say, from which he had enthusiastically allowed himself to be yanked. As he made his way up the long climb of the cordonata—half lane, half staircase—of the Capitoline Hill, Adriano Polimeni felt an urgent impulse to stop and stare at the Senatorial Palace and the bell tower that, like a mirage, slowly emerged from the perspective of the grand staircase designed by Michelangelo Buonarroti, guarded on either side by the two statues of the Dioscuri—Castor and Pollux.

  That Palace was empty. Irremediably empty. That Palace, by now, was just a hollow shell.

  The Capitoline Hill no longer needed him. But, more importantly, he no longer needed to offer his face and his political past to a new coalition of power about which he knew nothing, but about which he sensed much, to his deep misgivings and trepidation. As for what the right thing to do might be, he could sense that in the relief he felt, a wave of consolation that had immediately swept over him at the mere thought of making that decision.

  He turned, looking down at the Piazza dell’Aracoeli, Palazzo Venezia, the slow stream of Saturday morning traffic. And in the teeming crowds of tourists, he paid no attention to the man who stood thirty feet or so below him, motionless, staring up at him, along his same line of sight. What’s more, the man was bundled into a raincoat that was completely out of keeping with a warm spring morning.

  If it hadn’t been for that glaring trench coat, in fact, no one would ever have noticed Danilo Mariani. He’d lost almost forty pounds, a neatly trimmed beard shaped his taut face, and he wore sunglasses under a baseball cap, out from beneath which tumbled long but neatly combed locks that made him look at least ten years younger.

  Motionless at the center of the staircase, Danilo stared at Polimeni until he could start climbing again uphill, toward the equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius and the center of the piazza atop the Capitoline Hill.

  In those endless moments, Danilo tried to guess what thoughts might be going through that bastard’s mind. The man who had ruined his life for good. The obsession he needed to rid himself of, not in order to even the score of a game he had long since lost. But in order to start living again, as he had finally understood on that mid-April afternoon on the lakeshore, with Malgradi.

  At the very instant Polimeni started climbing again, Mariani took off his sunglasses and slipped them into his pocket. He lowered his right hand beneath the hem of his trench coat and caressed, for a few scant seconds, the butt of the tactical crossbow hooked to his belt by a light harness. He whipped it out and leveled it, laying h
is eye against the sights. He aimed at the back of that man’s neck, the man who had turned his back to him, the man who was fifty or so feet away and whose pace had seemed to accelerate, as if he were seized by some sudden sense of urgency.

  He wouldn’t call out that man’s name.

  He wouldn’t give him the time to think, or even to look death in the eyes.

  No one had given him that opportunity when he’d been judged and found guilty.

  He took a first deep breath, then another. His forefinger squeezed the trigger. He felt the 180 pounds of thrust release the aluminum arrow and send it hurtling toward the target.

  The back of Polimeni’s head exploded in a porridge of bones and blood. His body crumpled face forward onto the stairs.

  Mariani hung the crossbow back in its harness inside the trench coat, put his sunglasses back on, and without turning around again, while a few people standing next to the victim’s body began to call out for help, he trotted down the short stretch of the long staircase toward Piazza dell’Aracoeli, and there he climbed onto an oversized scooter. He was already far away by the time the helicopters rose into the sky and dozens of squad cars sealed off the Capitoline Hill and Piazza Venezia.

  Danilo was standing at the check-in counter, booking a flight for Malpensa, when Chiara Visone learned that Adriano was dead.

  Malgradi grabbed his cell phone and called the mayor. Martin Giardino was sobbing.

  “A terrible thing, Martin, incomprehensible. An immense loss for Rome, for all of us. I’ll be right there. You can count on me.”

  And so—he thought, as he selected a dark suit and a tie that went well with it—and so the lure that he’d tossed into that little Swiss lake had actually resulted in the death of the biggest fish. There could be no doubt about the identity of the assassin, not to his mind, seeing that already the first websites were staring to mention the “anomalous weapon.” Danilo Mariani’s crossbow had hit the target that he had suggested to him. Now he’d have to deal with the wrath of Sebastiano. Poor old Danilo.

  With cold clear logic, there were excellent reasons for wishing for that death. It wasn’t about the jubilee. Something much more profound demanded the elimination of Polimeni. With a mayor you could play a refined game, but not with people like Polimeni. Men like him were dangerous because they could serve as the foundation for a reconstruction of that damned holy alliance between incorruptible officials, the Franciscan church, honest cops, and let’s even throw in the good judges. The hurricane that cyclically bore down on public life. Nor could Chiara Visone, with all her alleged modernity, or Sebastiano, with his grip on the street, or even Samurai, a great general and strategist, certainly, but still just a renowned thug, hope to control the tempest all on their own. Only someone like him, Malgradi, could do it. It was a question of nobility, if you like. The nobility of the arcana imperii constantly threatened by the hordes of the various Robespierres that come along and vanish. “Communists” was too bland a definition, because with many Communists sooner or later you could come to an understanding. Moralists. There, that’s a term that renders the idea. Moralists. In short, it was for all these reasons that Polimeni had to die.

  Before leaving, heading up to the Capitoline Hill, Temistocle Malgradi dictated a brief dispatch to the ANSA news service:

  The barbaric assassination of Adriano Polimeni deprives Rome of one of its finest and most resonant voices. This is an injury inflicted on the entire city and upon me personally, because I was a friend to Adriano.

  Chiara Visone swallowed the umpteenth tranquilizer. Her eyes were stinging from hours and hours of unbroken weeping. It had been a struggle to get out of the bed in her residential hotel, where the news had caught her unawares, and where she had desperately clung to the idea that no, it couldn’t be true. In the darkness, in that bed whose sheets she had pulled and clutched at until she’d torn them, she’d shouted that name—Adriano—first as a plea, and then as a lullaby, a nonsense rhyme. Chased by the ghost of herself, by the phantom of Sebastiano. She’d unsuccessfully tried to call him on the phone. She couldn’t even remember how many times. Thirty, fifty, a hundred? Then, in the early afternoon, she’d made up her mind to go over to the apartment house on Via Ludovisi where the former Future Consulting had its offices. The only address where, perhaps, someone might be able to tell her something about him. Because she had to find him. There was just one question she had to ask Sebastiano: Was it you?

  When she rang the buzzer on Via Ludovisi, a male voice replied and, without even asking her who she was, invited her up. She found herself face-to-face with a handsome, very young man, with short black hair, who politely waved her in. Given the furnishings and the sheer quantity of papers and files, it looked like the offices of a company doing booming business. Though the company itself no longer existed—as documented by the traces of a plaque that had recently been removed from the front door—and there seemed to be no sign of staff, except for the young man. And not because it was Saturday, but because the desks were bare and clean, the cleanliness that usually denoted abandonment, and the air was stale, the way it usually is in premises that are seldom if ever aired out.

  The young man welcomed Visone into a large conference room and walked over to a Bose stereo to lower the volume of the music.

  “Wagner, right?” Chiara asked.

  The young man looked greatly surprised.

  “How do you know my name?”

  “Actually, I was referring to the music you were listening to.”

  “Ah, The Flight of the Valkyries . . . great, isn’t it? But Wagner is my nickname. My name is Luca. Luca Neto. But now, let me guess. You’re Chiara Visone, right? The Honorable Visone.”

  “Exactly. Maybe you recognized my face from the pictures in the papers, I imagine. Even if this isn’t much of a day for it.”

  Wagner observed her in that moment of coquettishness, explored the beauty of her body and her features. He perceived in her an instinctive hardness. Images surfaced in his head of crystals and fury, diamonds and volcanoes. Who could say where those thoughts even came from. It certainly wasn’t anything he’d picked up in Casal del Marmo. It’s just that with all the time he was spending with Sebastiano, he was starting to resemble him a little. He’d even started to think about reading a book or two, and he’d tried a few, and would go on trying out others.

  By now, Kessel was feeding the worms. They’d caught Ring immediately, because where his twin was, he was too, and with a hole in his shoulder, too. But he was a tough kid, a solid one, and he kept his mouth shut. Fabietto had proved to be a straight shooter too: he’d picked no one out of the photo gallery, a week in the clinic, and then he was gone. Sebastiano had given orders to search for him; this chapter had to be dealt with, settled, and shut down.

  Sebastiano was always in a bad mood, harsh, brusque. He just kept saying: Find him, this last hit, and then . . . He wouldn’t finish the sentence. There was something of the living dead about him, he’d dwindled away till he was thin as a beanpole. Every time they met, Wagner got the shivers, worse than when he’d huffed glue as a kid.

  Chiara grabbed him by the arm, impatiently.

  “I don’t want to waste any more of your time. Let me get to the point. I need to get in touch with Dottor Laurenti as urgently as possible. I was hoping you had a phone number for him. Or that you could tell me where he is.”

  “I’m afraid I couldn’t say. Dottor Laurenti went away several weeks ago, and since then, I haven’t heard from him. If I can be useful to you in any other way . . . ”

  Chiara stared into the boy’s face. She was capable of spotting a lie from a number of details, many of them seemingly insignificant. And she knew that that Luca, or Wagner as he called himself, was lying. She was certain of it. But if he was lying, then it no longer even made sense to ask the question that had been tormenting her since the moment she’d first learned of Adriano’s death
.

  She thanked him with a quick handshake and walked out the door.

  She heard Wagner’s voice from the landing, wafting down after her as she descended the stairs.

  “If he were to call, should I give a message of any kind to Dottor Laurenti?”

  Chiara didn’t reply. There was no need.

  Sebastiano was behind that murder.

  “C.V. just came by.”

  Wagner’s text message reached Sebastiano on the cell phone with a Swiss SIM card as he was putting yet another signature on the Hertz car rental agreement at the counter in Linate airport. He took the keys to the Mercedes convertible, and set up the GPS device. He looked at his watch. He was right on time.

  In the café of Il Cardo clinic, with its large plate-glass windows, Danilo Mariani gulped down a bracing, revivifying celery-and-carrot smoothie and decided to go for a walk down by the lake. While he waited for a sunset that the spring season had pushed much later. He’d just returned from Rome, a few hours earlier, and he had done his best to insulate himself from any and all news about the Polimeni murder.

  He’d gotten rid of the crossbow, he’d shaved his beard, and he’d trimmed his hair.

  He was starting his new life. His latest exams showed that he was now completely clean. In his blood and in his head. They were going to release him inside the week. The pact with Malgradi was that he’d start again, in Zagreb, Croatia.