Costa 08 - City of Fear by David Hewson Read Free Book Online

you many unpleasant names, Officer, and deservedly so.”
    She took the point about the potential evidence and dumped it on the floorboards.
    He stepped up the dusty, creaking bare steps leading to the story above. Three officers, two of them young, one a rank junior, the othernot as smart as she sometimes thought. The old cop checked himself. He was getting jittery in his dotage.
    The odd smell that was just discernible when they entered the ground floor was becoming stronger. He glanced back and waved them to a standstill. Rosa was second, naturally, right behind him, setting out her rank above Mirko Oliva.
    Peroni stood there, puzzled by the pungent, resinous odor. It reminded him of hippies and foreigners.
    Then Rosa tugged at his arm and mouthed the word he was hunting for.
    Incense
.
    Joss sticks. The talismanic odor of freaks and squatters. Deadbeats from all over the world, breaking into empty houses, staying a week and then moving on. There were so many around, the police never bothered much anymore. Except when they got in the way.
    He tried to extinguish the angry fire that was beginning to burn in his head. They were supposed to be looking for a family man who’d been kidnapped by murderous terrorists, not wasting their time on minutiae like this.
    “Polizia!”
Peroni bellowed, and stormed up the remaining few steps, to find himself in a hot, stuffy room that stank of something physical. There was nothing in it but a cheap wooden dining table and a few chairs. And a man, who was seated, back to the door, head slumped forward, like someone who had fallen asleep while eating.
    Flies too. Peroni had forgotten about the flies. They buzzed in and out of the windows in a black cloud, focusing on the slumped figure at the table, hesitantly, as if there was something there they didn’t understand, either.
    He kept his gun in front of him. The stench of the incense returned, stranger somehow. It seemed to be coming from a pool of darkness in one corner, where the sunlight streaming through the open windows couldn’t reach.
    “Polizia,”
Peroni said more quietly, and started to work his way around to the front of the hunched form.
    “Boss,” Mirko Oliva said quietly.
    “What?”
    “He’s not moving.”
    Peroni knew that. Knew too that, though he could only see the back of this figure in a dark, crumpled business suit, it was Giovanni Batisti, huddled over the table, face in his arms.
    On the wall behind, someone had stuck up a poster, one so big that it looked as if it ought to have come out of one of the tourist shops around the corner near the Trevi Fountain, where you could pick up Raphael or Caravaggio, Da Vinci or some modern junk, for next to nothing.
    He leaned forward, placed a gentle hand on the shoulder of the man at the table, and said, more out of hope than anything else,
“Signore.”
    No sound, no stirring, not a sign of breath, a hint of life.
    Peroni swore and looked at the poster again. It was a blown-up photograph, the kind of overimaginative thing you got in squats and communes. An ancient scrawl, like paint on plaster, depicting an evil-looking devil, teeth bared, eyes on fire, snakes writhing in his fists, skin painted a faded blue.
    So many faint, unconnected memories were fighting for his attention at that moment. The knowledge that the Via Rasella meant something, and this hideous picture on the wall …
    Letters, Roman numerals, had been scrawled—in blood, surely—next to the vile creature’s head.
    III. I. CCLXIII
.
    Mirko Oliva swept his hand through the cloud of flies in front of him, then stooped down to tap the still, prone man at the table, getting there before either Peroni or Rosa could stop him.
    What came next seemed obvious, inevitable. Oliva touched Giovanni Batisti on the shoulder, gripped him, shook him. The politician’s body lurched forward. A buzzing, billowing mass of insects rose from inside the fabric.
    The junior officer said something inaudible, clapped his