laughed. ‘Really?’
‘Really. And let me tell you one more thing. I knew her old man. He was in vice too until a couple of years ago. One of the meanest, most miserable bastards you ever saw. How he ever spawned a woman like that is beyond me. There. You got a good reason not to date her. You’d have to meet that old sonofabitch.’
‘Thanks.’
‘You’re welcome. You look like the sort of person who appreciates reasons for not doing things. Which is fine by me, until I talk myself out of this seat. Do we understand each other?’
Costa didn’t get mad. In a way he felt relieved. At least he knew where he stood.
‘Is that out of the way now?’ he wondered. ‘Can we just settle down to being old cop, young cop, cleaning up the streets of Rome?’
But the big man in the passenger seat was waving at him to be quiet. The radio was squealing their number. Peroni picked up the mike and answered. They listened to the call. Nic Costa gunned the car and headed straight for Piramide and the autostrada out to the coast and the airport, casually flicking on the blue light and the siren to get the cars out of the way.
‘What a day,’ Peroni groaned. ‘First I get baby-sitting duties. Now we’re the fire brigade. Hard to know which is worse.’
Bobby Dexter’s determined expression was one Lianne recognized. It usually meant they were headed for trouble.
‘I’ll tell you what we’re going to do,’ he said. ‘We’re going to take back a head for Tom Jorgensen to look at. One that’s a million times better than that piece of Greek shit of his.’
She gaped at him, outraged. ‘What?’
Bobby raised the shovel to shoulder height, holding it like an axe, a little breathless already from the anticipation. ‘Watch. Watch and learn.’
He brought the metal down hard; where the statue’s neck ought to be. Nothing much happened. Some dirt moved. But Lianne was yelling, louder than she’d ever done before.
‘Bobby Dexter,’ she screeched. ‘What the hell are you doing? This thing’s like a piece of art or something. It’s history. You’re just going to smash it to pieces so you can make out your dick’s bigger than Tom Jorgensen’s?’
He held the shovel high, swaying slightly. ‘What do you know about the size of Jorgensen’s dick?’
‘It was a figure of speech, moron.’
Bobby Dexter blinked at her. He looked downright ugly. The light was failing now and the world was getting weird. He took one more swipe at the statue’s neck and missed, sending up a shower of stinking earth that bounced straight back into his face. A few grains fell into his mouth. He spat out the dirt as if it were poison.
‘If you break that statue, we’re over, Bobby,’ she said, dead serious. ‘I mean it. I don’t go talking to my father. I get a lawyer. The moment we get back to Seattle.’
He hesitated, staring at her as if wondering whether she really did mean it … ‘You tell me that when we’re back home with the best fucking piece of coffee table statuary in private ownership anywhere in Washington State. You’d be amazed what a nice piece of household ornamentation can do for dinner parties.’
‘Bobby—’ she yelled.
‘Bullshit.’ He took a final swing.
This one connected. The sharp side of the spade went deep into the neck. There should have been a sharp, cracking sound that indicated a good clean break, one that went right across the stone in a level line with just enough randomness in it to look convincing. She knew Bobby well enough to understand what he was thinking. There were probably ideas in his head already.
But everything just went straight out of their heads a moment after the blade hit. Lianne Dexter realized right then that they’d been wrong, terribly wrong, both of them. They saw what they wanted to see. Not what was. Maybe there was a reason behind that. Because what was turned out to be the last thing they wanted to encounter anywhere on this planet, least of all on their own down a little lane, next to a stinking grey river in a country where their language skills extended only to ordering pizza, beer and wine.
The blade didn’t strike hard stone. It met flesh, a kind of flesh anyway. Something that looked like leather, tanned, tough, but supple. The side of the spade cut straight through just where the neck met the shoulders, severing something that resembled a real human tendon, spattering both of them with a mixture of foul-smelling wet mud that seemed to have something distinctly organic, almost alive, inside it.
Lianne’s face was covered with the peat gore that had spat back at them when he attacked the thing. She was spitting bits of it out of her mouth, sobbing, dry-retching as she did so.
She stopped for a moment and watched Bobby bend down to look closely at the thing, just a hint of reverence in his face.
On the ground in front of them, partly severed from the body by the spade, was the head of a young girl, sixteen, seventeen, no more, dressed in a classical gown, holding some large, ceremonial wand in her left hand. The force of the blow had removed most of the solid cake of peat that had sat on her features. What they saw now was her face which, beneath the crud, seemed beautiful. She had a high forehead and prominent cheekbones. There wasn’t a wrinkle in sight on her flawless leather skin. Her eyes were closed. Her lips were partly open as if she were uttering a final, dying sigh. She had perfect teeth which were just closed together with a hint of pearly whiteness showing through the brown stain of the earth. Her long hair was tied back behind her neck and matted into solid strands. Her expression was one of utmost peace. She looked, Lianne Dexter thought, happy, which was, she knew, ridiculous in the circumstances.
And just in case they were in any doubt about the nature of this object before them there was the matter of the neck. When Bobby had come down hard with the shovel he’d done what he hoped: split through into the interior. Bobby and Lianne Dexter were now looking at the inside of another human being’s throat and it was black and complicated and messy, with bones and sinews and passages that looked vaguely familiar from some distant school lesson in anatomy.
‘Holy shit,’ Bobby muttered and started shivering.
A 747 swooped low over them. They felt the heat of its breath. They inhaled the chemical stink of its fearsome engines. When the roar of its gross presence diminished Bobby Dexter became aware of another noise. It was his wife, screaming.
‘No,’ he pleaded. ‘Not now, Lianne. I’m trying to think for chrissake.’
Then he gave up altogether. Two men, one short, one tall, were walking towards them, staring intently. Some way behind them there was something else: a red fire engine struggling down the lane trying to reach the charred and smoking remains of the Clio.
The men were waving badges. They didn’t look sympathetic.
The older cop was a bull-necked gorilla with a disfigured, scowling face and piercing, aggressive eyes that looked as if they could see everything. The younger, shorter one was staring at the thing in the ground, the shit-coloured cadaver with the head all to one side where Bobby had lopped it with the shovel.
‘This day just gets stranger,’ Gianni Peroni murmured. ‘Pinch me. Tell me I’m
