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

the Via Rasella. Or so they’d like us to think.”
    Peroni’s fork dangled over some cold meat. A look of foreboding crossed his big, bucolic face. She glanced at him and added, “Let’s get this out of the way before we eat, shall we?”
    “Oh, wonderful,” he groaned. “If you insist …”
    “This is exactly what Leo and Nic were told about in the Quirinale. The Blue Demon. Terrorism with an Etruscan flavor. No surprises. Well, not many.”
    She held out her phone. There was a photo of some ancient, dark metal object in a museum. Costa craned forward, along with the others, in order to see better. It looked like a very odd ornament, one with a distinct and organic shape.
    “The Liver of Piacenza,” Teresa announced.
    “Liver?” Peroni asked weakly. “As in …?”
    “As in liver. Batisti was mutilated in a very specific fashion. Silvio managed to get me some old news reports about the Frascas’ murder. It looks as if they were injured in much the same way. It was a ritual. Not quite disembowelment, but …” She winced, from lack of facts, not something squeamish. “A haruspex divined the future by looking at the liver of a slaughtered animal. The Liver of Piacenza was used to train people to read what they found. It divides the organ into specific areas that may or may not relate to stellar constellations. There were light surface knife marks on Giovanni Batisti that mirror those used on the Piacenza object. To make them look like the work of an Etruscan haruspex.”
    Peroni’s fork halted halfway to his mouth. “Do we need to know this?” he moaned.
    “Of course,” she insisted. “We’re meant to. Someone doesn’t inflict an injury on a dead man without a reason.”
    They stared at her.
    “A dead man?” Costa asked.
    “It was all theater. Batisti was killed by a bullet through the back of the head. Then they butchered him in a very specific way to make it look like haruspicy.” She pointed to the photo. “I can’t think of any other explanation. Why else would you partially remove a man’s liver and run a knife over it to make a pattern based on some ancient form of divination? There was an egg in a saucer on the table too. That was another Etruscan form of fortune-telling.”
    “Why on earth …?” Falcone began.
    “I told you. It was a message,” Teresa interrupted. “A positive ID for our benefit. Like that poster of the Blue Demon on the wall. Like the Roman numerals. It was Andrea Petrakis leaving his calling card. A boast, if you like. Petrakis wants to make sure we know it was him, and that he hasn’t forgotten his beloved Etruscans.”
    “And
they
were
who
exactly?” Peroni asked, bemused.
    “The people here before us. That was their tough luck. Rome wiped them out. An entire civilization. It was a long time ago. This was ancient history for Julius Caesar, for pity’s sake. But not for Andrea Petrakis. The Liver of Piacenza was a training tool for a haruspex, like a model skeleton for a modern physician. Historians like Petrakis drool over itbecause it’s one of the few examples of the Etruscan language. The only other of any substance is in Zagreb, on the remains of a mummy’s shroud. It was made out of linen that was covered in Etruscan script. Rites, rituals, prayers. They call it the
Liber Linteus.”
    “Linteus
means linen, doesn’t it?” Costa asked.
    “Who says a Latin education is wasted? Exactly. Andrea Petrakis would know all about this. The theory that went around after the Blue Demon murdered the Frasca couple was that Petrakis regarded himself as the leader of some kind of nationalist liberation movement. A lunatic looking for a revival of the Etruscan nation, who were, like him, originally Greek. Before Rome came along, the Etruscans controlled most of Italy, from the Po in the north as far as Salento in the south. The
Liber Linteus
is the only book of theirs that survives. The Romans burned the rest. If you think of yourself as Etruscan, you can