selling spring greens, chicory, calabrese and cavolo nero alongside vibrant oranges from Sicily, stored over the cold months and now fit for little more than juice. The mushroom stand was piled high with all kinds of funghi, fresh chiodini, dried porcini. The handful of fishmongers tucked into one corner had scallops and giant prawns, turbot and sacks of fresh mussels. He worked his way through, picking up an etto of wild rocket and the same of agretti for later. Then he added a chunk of parmesan from the lone alimentari van.
‘We got good prosciutto, Mr Policeman,’ the woman said, recognizing him. ‘Here …’
She held out a pink strand, waving it in front of his face. If he ate meat, Nic Costa thought he’d be hard pressed to find much better in Rome. ‘I’ll pass.’
‘Vegetarianism is an unnatural fad,’ the woman declared. ‘You come back here one day when you’ve got time and we’ll go through this in some detail. You worry me.’
‘Please,’ Costa said. ‘I have enough people worrying about me just now.’
‘Means there’s something wrong.’
He took the prosciutto anyway. When she was out of sight he gave it to the scruffy young boy belonging to the Kosovan who was always begging in the square, playing an ancient violin badly. Then he handed the father a ten-euro note. It was a ritual he’d forgotten somewhere along the line too: twice a day, every day, as his late father had always told him. Being back in the Campo reminded him why it was necessary. He’d been spending too much time on his own, closeted inside the farmhouse on the outskirts of the city, thinking. Sometimes you had to get out and let life happen to you.
He’d just pushed his way through the crowd at Il Forno and was taking a bite of pizzetta bianca, salty and straight from the oven, when he saw what was happening. Leo Falcone was right. The Campo attracted tourists, and with the tourists came trouble. Pickpockets. Conmen. Worse sometimes. The police always had people on duty there, in uniform and out. The carabinieri liked the place too, parking their bright shiny Alfas in the most awkward of places and then lounging on the bonnets, eyeing the crowds through expensive sunglasses, trying to look cool in their dark, well-pressed uniforms.
Costa made a point of avoiding the carabinieri as much as possible. There was enough rivalry inside the Questura itself without extending it to these soldiers masquerading as cops. The demarcation lines were dimly drawn between this branch of the army and the civilian police. They could arrest the same people he did, and in the same places. Most of the time it was simply a matter of who got there first. There was an old joke: the good-looking ones joined the carabinieri for the uniform and the women, the smart and the ugly ones went into the state police because that was all they could get. It wasn’t all exaggeration either.
A couple of carabinieri were in the Campo now, standing stiffly upright by their vehicle as a slender blonde woman harangued them in mangled Italian, wagging her finger in their faces, holding a large, portrait-size photograph in her left hand.
‘Don’t get involved,’ Costa said to himself, and wandered over towards them in any case. The woman was livid. She knew a few good Italian swear words too. Costa took a bite of his bread and eavesdropped on what was going on.
Then he looked at the photo in the woman’s hand and something cold ran down his back, made him shiver so hard the pizzetta dropped straight from his fingers.
This was crazy. He knew it. The face in the photo reminded him of the picture Leo Falcone had thrown onto the strange corpse on Teresa Lupo’s dissecting table that morning. He thought of what he had seen there: an old image of a blonde-haired girl looking distinctly like the face he saw now, still at the beginning of her adult life, thinking there was nothing in the future but love and joy.
And it ain’t necessarily so, an old, old song sang at the back of his head.
The carabinieri were the pick of the crop. Prize assholes, more interested in keeping their Ray-Bans clean than working out what seemed to have happened in front of their very noses. He thought he recognized one. But maybe not. They all looked the same. These two sounded the same as well, with their middle-class nasal voices. They were sneering at the woman in front of them, exuding boredom.
‘Are you listening to me?’ she yelled.
‘Do we have a choice?’ one of them, the older one, Costa guessed, replied. He couldn’t have been more than thirty.
‘This,’ she said, pointing at the photograph, ‘is my daughter. She just got abducted. You idiots watched it and yawned.’
The younger uniform shot Costa a warning glance that said: don’t even think about getting involved. Nic Costa didn’t move.
The talkative one leaned back on the Alfa, shuffled his serge-clad backside further up the shiny bonnet, took out a packet of gum and threw a stick past his perfect teeth.
She stood in front of them, hands on her hips, full of fury. Costa glanced at the photo she was holding. They could have been sisters, but ten or fifteen years apart. The woman was a touch heavier. Her hair was a shade darker, more fair than her daughter’s bright, almost artificial, blonde, practical cut.
He walked over, watched her trying to get her breath back, then, struggling to remember his English, asked, ‘Can I help?’
‘No,’ the senior uniform said immediately. ‘You can just walk away and mind your own business.’
She looked up at Costa, relieved to be talking English at last. ‘You can get me a real policeman. That would be helping.’
He pulled out the badge. ‘I am a real policeman. Nic Costa.’
‘Oh fuck,’ the uniform with the working mouth muttered behind him.
He got up off the car and stood upright in front of Costa. He was a lot taller. ‘Her teenage daughter ran off with a boyfriend on a motorbike here. She thinks that counts as abduction. We think that sounds like some young kid looking for fun.’ The Ray-Bans cast the woman a dead, black look. ‘We think that’s understandable. If you people playing amateur hour think otherwise, please yourself. Take her as a present from me. But just take her. I beg you.’
Costa managed to grasp her arm lightly at the elbow as it moved towards the man. Otherwise, he thought, the moron in the dark uniform would have been in for a shock.
‘You saw this?’ he asked them.
The younger one found his voice. ‘Yeah, we saw it. Hard to miss it. You’d think the kid wanted the whole world to watch. You have any idea what you see if you hang around the Campo day and night? Caught a couple hard at it a few days ago. In broad daylight. And she wants us to start jumping up and down just because her daughter’s got on the back of some guy’s bike.’
The woman shook her head, as if somehow angry with herself, then stared in the direction of the Corso, the way the bike had gone, Costa guessed.
‘It’s not like her,’ she said. ‘I can’t believe this is happening. I can’t believe you people won’t even listen.’
She closed her eyes. Costa wondered if she were about to cry. He looked at his watch. Peroni would be back at the car in forty minutes. There was time.
‘Let me buy you a coffee,’ he said.
She hesitated then put the photo back in the envelope. There was a stack of others there, Costa saw,
