A Season for the Dead Read Free

out.
    She looked at Stefano’s head. It lay on the floor, resting on the ancient copy of Apicius, staining the page with thick, black blood.

2

    They stood in the shade of the colonnades in St. Peter’s Square, Luca Rossi wondering how badly the sun might have burned his bald head already that day. A couple of rocks were rumbling around his stomach from the previous night’s beer and pizza feast. Then, to make matters worse, he had that very morning been given the kid as duty partner for the next four weeks. It was a kind of punishment, for both of them, he guessed. Neither fitted in well with the Rome state police department at that moment, for very different reasons. Rossi’s problem was simple: He was under a cloud. The kid’s was more complicated. He just didn’t look right, period. And never even knew.
    Luca Rossi eyed his partner and groaned. “Okay. I know you want me to ask. So do the trick then.”
    Nic Costa smiled and Rossi wished the kid didn’t look so young. Sometimes they had to arrest the random vicious type in the hallowed precincts of the square. Rossi couldn’t help but wonder how much use this slim, adolescent-looking character would be in those circumstances.
    “It’s not a trick.” They had never worked together before. They came from different stations. Rossi guessed the kid had no idea why some old, overweight cop had been made his new partner. He’d never asked. He just seemed to accept it, to accept everything. Still, Rossi knew something about him. They all did. Nic Costa was one of those cops the others couldn’t quite believe. He didn’t drink much. He didn’t eat meat. He kept fit and had quite a reputation as a marathon runner. And he was the son of that damned Commie the papers used to go on about, a man who had left Nic Costa with one very unusual habit. He was a painting freak, one particular painter too. Nic Costa knew the whereabouts and the provenance of every last Caravaggio in Rome.
    “Sounds like a trick to me.”
    “It’s knowledge,” Costa said, and for a moment looked more like his real age, which Rossi knew to be twenty-seven. Maybe, the older man thought, there was more to him than met the eye. “No sleight of hand, big man. This is magic, the real thing.”
    “Give me some magic then. Over there . . .” Rossi nodded toward the walls of the Vatican. “I guess they’re full of the things.”
    “No. Just the one.
The Deposition from the Cross,
and they took that from its original location too. The Vatican never much cared for Caravaggio. They thought he was too revolutionary, too close to the poor. He painted people with dirty feet. He made the apostles look like ordinary mortals you might meet in the street.”
    “So that’s what you like about him? You get that from your old man, I suppose.”
    “It’s part of what I like. And I’m me, not someone else.”
    “Sure.” Rossi remembered the father. A real troublemaker. He never stood to one side for anything, never took a bribe either, which made him one very odd politician indeed. “So where?”
    The kid nodded toward the river. “Six-minute walk over there. The Church of Sant’Agostino. You can call it
The Madonna of Loreto
or
The Madonna of the Pilgrims
. Either works.”
    “It’s good?”
    “The feet are really dirty. The Vatican hated it. It’s a wonderful piece of work but I know of better.”
    Rossi thought about this. “I don’t suppose you follow football, do you? It may give us more to talk about.”
    Costa said nothing. He turned on the radio scanner and plugged in the earpiece. Rossi sniffed the air.
    “You smell those drains? They spend all this money building the biggest church on the planet. They got the Pope in residence just a little walk away. And still the drains stink like some backstreet in Trastevere. Maybe they just chop up bodies and flush them down the toilet or something. As if we’d get to know.”
    Costa kept fiddling with the damned radio scanner. They both knew