The Garden of Evil Read Free

almost heart-stopping.
    He turned away before her darting white form, like an exclamation mark with a full stop made from flame, disappeared into one of the side roads leading to the Piazza Navona.
    Business was business. Caviglia patted the right-hand side of his jacket pocket. The woman’s fat wallet sat there, a wad of leather and paper and credit cards waiting to be stripped. Experience and his own intelligence told him the day’s work was over. Nevertheless, he was a little disturbed by this encounter. There was something strange about this woman in white, and her urgent need to go the Vicolo del Divino Amore, a dark Roman alley that, to him, showed precious little trace of divine love, and probably never had.

Two
    A
LDO CAVIGLIA STRODE TOWARDS THE CAMPO DEI FIORI
and entered a small cafe located in one of the side roads leading to the Cancelleria, determined to count his gains, then dump the evidence. This particular hole in the wall was a place he’d always liked: too tiny and local to be of interest to tourists, and one that kept to the old tradition of maintaining a bowl of thick, sticky mixed sugar and coffee on the bar so that those in need of a faster, surer fix could top up their
caffè
as much as was needed.
    All the same, Caviglia had added a shot of grappa to his cup, also, something he hadn’t done for some months. This chill, strange winter day seemed to merit that, though it was still only twenty to eleven in the morning.
    Within five minutes he was inside the tiny washroom, crammed up against the cistern, struggling, with trembling fingers, to extract what was of value from the bulging leather purse.
    Caviglia never took credit cards. Partly because this would increase the risk but also, more important, out of simple propriety. He believed people should be robbed once and once only—by his nimble fingers and no others. That way the pain—and there would be pain, which might not merely be financial—would be limited to a few days or possibly a week. Nor would Caviglia look at the private, personal belongings which people carried with them in their daily lives. He had done this once, the first time he had been reduced to thieving on the buses to make ends meet. It had made him feel dirty and dishonourable. His criminality would always be limited to stealing money from those he judged could afford it, then passing on the excess to the kind and charitable nuns near the Pantheon. As a Catholic in thought if not in deed, he was unsure whether this was sufficient to guarantee him salvation, if such a thing existed. But it certainly helped him sleep at night.
    Caviglia attempted to remind himself of these facts as he wrestled with the wallet in the extraordinarily narrow and confined space in which he found himself, increasingly aware that the large shot of grappa in his coffee cup had not been a good idea. Then the worst possible thing happened. The wallet folded in on itself under the pressure of his clumsy fingers, turned over, and spilled everything—notes, coins, credit cards, and what looked like a European driving licence—straight onto the grubby toilet floor.
    He lowered himself onto the seat and felt like weeping. Nothing could be left here. Every last item would have to be retrieved from the dark, grimy corners beneath the little sink, packed away again, and rushed to the nearest litter bin. If a single item belonging to the woman was found, he would surely be identified by the youth behind the bar. There had been two cases against him already, occasions when his concentration had lapsed and he had tried to ply his trade in the presence of an undercover officer. A third would mean jail and with it the loss of the little apartment the two of them had shared as a couple for more than thirty years. Everything that was of value to him might disappear if he left one stray item behind on the floor of this toilet in a tiny cafe built into little more than a cave behind the Campo dei Fiori.
    With a