Read Online A Season for the Dead by David Hewson - Free Book Online
Authors: David Hewson
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meanings. It’s a hobby.”
A couple of tourists turned on the light for an adjoining painting. It was brightness and shade again, Rossi noticed, but there was more action in this one. Some old guy was lying on the floor, dying, a madman over his body, holding a bloodied sword. There was something deeply disturbing about the work. It was dense, vivid, savage. It seemed poised on the very edge of sanity.
“Matthew’s martyrdom,” Costa said quietly. “Another story. For another time.”
“I never did work out why a religion based around love and peace seemed to involve so much killing,” Rossi grumbled. “You know the answer to that? Or do you need to be a Catholic to understand?”
“It’s about martyrdom. Sacrificing yourself for something bigger than one human being. Could be the Church. For my dad it could be the hammer and sickle.”
“Sounds the kind of thing dumb people do,” Rossi mumbled, then wiped his sleeve across his mouth.
Costa knew what the gesture meant. Rossi wanted a beer. He followed the big man outside, watched him working out where to go next.
“Listen.” Rossi’s watery eyes hooded over. “If you want to hear more about this I’ve an idea.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. We’re having dinner with Crazy Teresa tonight. It could be useful.”
“We?
We
have a date with Crazy Teresa?”
Rossi eyed him as if to say:
So what?
“We hardly know each other,” Costa objected.
“It’s Crazy Teresa. Everybody knows her.”
“I meant
we
hardly know each other.”
Rossi seemed offended by that. “Look. I know this relationship didn’t get off to the greatest of starts. But I’m trying here, kid. I’m doing my best. And there is something in it too. She wants to talk. I know the rumors doing the rounds. There’s a touch of truth in them but it’s not gone as far as people think. I’m not eating with Crazy Teresa on my own, not tonight.”
Costa couldn’t believe his ears. “Jesus. Why should I be there?”
“She wants you. Don’t ask me why. It’s only polite. Interdepartmental relations and all that.”
“Wonderful.”
Costa couldn’t work up much enthusiasm to complain. He had nothing else to do. Maybe Crazy Teresa off duty would be a different woman.
“Is that a yes?”
“Depends,” Costa said slyly. “Are we still negotiating?”
8
Sara Farnese lived in the Borgo, the residential area that led from the river to the very walls of the Vatican. This was still Rome, still under the jurisdiction of the city. Yet it was impossible to ignore the proximity of the papal state up the hill. Her home was in Vicolo delle Palline, a narrow cobbled lane that ran between the Via dei Corridori and the Borgo Pio.
Il Pasette,
the elevated, fortified corridor which joined the Vatican with the Pope’s former fortress, the Castel Sant’Angelo, abutted her medieval, ochre-colored building. When parties of visiting luminaries were allowed to walk down the passage, treading in the footsteps of long-dead pontiffs sometimes fleeing for their lives, she could hear them through the wall and listen to their idle chatter. The commercial bustle of St. Peter’s Square and the hectic tourist trade around it were only minutes away, but in the little street and the close, narrow lanes she favored, people moved at a different pace. This was still a local quarter, residential, largely untouched by the modernization of the city. Homes were handed down from generation to generation—though not hers, which had been bought at a substantial price.
She had acquired the second-floor apartment four years before when she finally moved to Rome for good at the age of twenty-three, putting on the professional suit of a university lecturer and, shortly after, starting to look older, perhaps more serious, than she felt. College, in London and America, was now a fading memory. Her teenage years, spent in boarding schools throughout Europe and finally in the cold Swiss town of Montreux, seemed remote, as
A couple of tourists turned on the light for an adjoining painting. It was brightness and shade again, Rossi noticed, but there was more action in this one. Some old guy was lying on the floor, dying, a madman over his body, holding a bloodied sword. There was something deeply disturbing about the work. It was dense, vivid, savage. It seemed poised on the very edge of sanity.
“Matthew’s martyrdom,” Costa said quietly. “Another story. For another time.”
“I never did work out why a religion based around love and peace seemed to involve so much killing,” Rossi grumbled. “You know the answer to that? Or do you need to be a Catholic to understand?”
“It’s about martyrdom. Sacrificing yourself for something bigger than one human being. Could be the Church. For my dad it could be the hammer and sickle.”
“Sounds the kind of thing dumb people do,” Rossi mumbled, then wiped his sleeve across his mouth.
Costa knew what the gesture meant. Rossi wanted a beer. He followed the big man outside, watched him working out where to go next.
“Listen.” Rossi’s watery eyes hooded over. “If you want to hear more about this I’ve an idea.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. We’re having dinner with Crazy Teresa tonight. It could be useful.”
“We?
We
have a date with Crazy Teresa?”
Rossi eyed him as if to say:
So what?
“We hardly know each other,” Costa objected.
“It’s Crazy Teresa. Everybody knows her.”
“I meant
we
hardly know each other.”
Rossi seemed offended by that. “Look. I know this relationship didn’t get off to the greatest of starts. But I’m trying here, kid. I’m doing my best. And there is something in it too. She wants to talk. I know the rumors doing the rounds. There’s a touch of truth in them but it’s not gone as far as people think. I’m not eating with Crazy Teresa on my own, not tonight.”
Costa couldn’t believe his ears. “Jesus. Why should I be there?”
“She wants you. Don’t ask me why. It’s only polite. Interdepartmental relations and all that.”
“Wonderful.”
Costa couldn’t work up much enthusiasm to complain. He had nothing else to do. Maybe Crazy Teresa off duty would be a different woman.
“Is that a yes?”
“Depends,” Costa said slyly. “Are we still negotiating?”
8
Sara Farnese lived in the Borgo, the residential area that led from the river to the very walls of the Vatican. This was still Rome, still under the jurisdiction of the city. Yet it was impossible to ignore the proximity of the papal state up the hill. Her home was in Vicolo delle Palline, a narrow cobbled lane that ran between the Via dei Corridori and the Borgo Pio.
Il Pasette,
the elevated, fortified corridor which joined the Vatican with the Pope’s former fortress, the Castel Sant’Angelo, abutted her medieval, ochre-colored building. When parties of visiting luminaries were allowed to walk down the passage, treading in the footsteps of long-dead pontiffs sometimes fleeing for their lives, she could hear them through the wall and listen to their idle chatter. The commercial bustle of St. Peter’s Square and the hectic tourist trade around it were only minutes away, but in the little street and the close, narrow lanes she favored, people moved at a different pace. This was still a local quarter, residential, largely untouched by the modernization of the city. Homes were handed down from generation to generation—though not hers, which had been bought at a substantial price.
She had acquired the second-floor apartment four years before when she finally moved to Rome for good at the age of twenty-three, putting on the professional suit of a university lecturer and, shortly after, starting to look older, perhaps more serious, than she felt. College, in London and America, was now a fading memory. Her teenage years, spent in boarding schools throughout Europe and finally in the cold Swiss town of Montreux, seemed remote, as
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