Free Costa 08 - City of Fear by David Hewson Page A

attack occurred had come to be swamped by other parties. Luca Palombo and his counterparts from America and elsewhere had arrived to take control. Not long after that, everyone in the Polizia di Stato came to understand their place in the pecking order.
    Teresa, with a small group led by her assistant Silvio Di Capua, managed to spend almost fifteen minutes in the room where Batisti and the corpse of his apparent killer were found. Then they were ejected by a team from the Carabinieri, under Palombo’s direction.
    Peroni, Rosa, and Mirko Oliva had been interviewed for almost two hours, with Commissario Esposito in attendance. After that they had been sent out into the street, where the two younger officers disappeared into a nearby bar, shell-shocked and, it seemed to Costa, rather closer to one another than they had been previously. The rest of them returned to the Questura, where the atmosphere was unreal, as if they had entered a lull before some unpredictable storm.
    After a few desultory attempts to work their way back into the investigation, efforts that Commissario Esposito rapidly stamped upon, Leo Falcone suggested dinner. The invitation came as such a surprise that no one objected. Strictly speaking, their shift was over—Peroni should have gone off duty hours before. They were all tired, yet aware of an unspent nervous energy, a need to talk. Costa was astonished to discover that he was rather hungry too. Or rather, some inner voice appeared to be urging him to eat soon, because it might be a while before he had another chance to sit down again with friends in a decent restaurant.
    A waiter came over with a trolley piled high with plates of fish and vegetables and a small bowl of the scorching pepper sauce Costa always associated with Calabria.
    “That’s very kind,” Peroni told him, “but we didn’t order this.”
    His battered, homely face still looked a little pale. Costa had been inside that upper room, seen what was in there. The big ugly cop was never good around blood.
    Falcone, never one to be squeamish, was already prodding gently at the choicer dishes with his fork, judging the food with the studied and detached care with which he measured those around him. It was a very good restaurant.
    The waiter leaned down and in a lowered voice said, “We know who you are. We’ve seen the inspector here before. It was all on the TV. We heard it.”
    “Heard what?” Falcone asked as he picked at what looked like tuna and swordfish, already forking pieces onto his plate.
    “That you’re …
off the case,”
the waiter said with a theatrical flourish, visibly pleased with his own ability to produce what he thought of as cop-speak. “So you come here. You eat, you think. All those stuck-upbastards in the Carabinieri, the government. They think they own the world.”
    He put down the bottle of wine, which was still, to Peroni’s visible concern, unopened.
    “They close the streets. They build a wall around the Quirinale. Where are we living? Rome or Berlin in the 1950s? And when some ordinary guy in the police sticks his neck on the line, what do they do? Sit in their offices until the shooting stops, then come and take it all away from you like they know best.”
    “We’ve still got Traffic,” Peroni said brightly. “Didn’t they mention that?”
    “No.”
    “You should never believe what you hear in the media,” Falcone suggested, then placed a long finger on the side of his nose and winked.
    The waiter mouthed, “Ah …” and made the same gesture. Peroni, getting desperate, held up the wine bottle, which the waiter uncorked, pouring four full glasses. The rich, aromatic smell of Pugliese
primitivo
mingled with the smoke from the oven downstairs.
    “Haruspicy,” Teresa declared, finally looking up from the phone after the waiter disappeared.
    “It’s not on the menu,” Peroni pointed out.
    “I’m not talking about food, you fool! It’s what was going on back there. In that room. In