The Mammoth Book of Best British Crime 9 Part 65

"They sleep apart," she said quietly and led the way upstairs.

The first bedroom they came across was huge, the size of many working-cla.s.s apartments. It had its own separate lounge and a bathroom with two sinks, one toothbrush by the nearest.

He opened a wardrobe and saw line upon line of elegant dresses there.

The husband's room was as far away as it was possible to get. Right at the back of the house. He could hear the drone of traffic from the busy main road. It was small and functional and hadn't been decorated in years.

"When did Giorgio move in here?" he asked.

She looked at the bed, all perfectly made for a man who'd never sleep in it again. Then she brushed some stray cotton fibres off the sheets and said, "Two months." Nothing more.

Peroni opened the wardrobes. Plenty of expensive suits and shirts, drawers with underwear and socks. All wool or cotton. Nothing cheap or artificial.

"He was a careful dresser," he said.

She nodded.

"The signore took pride in his appearance. He was a gentleman."

"A depressed gentleman?"

Her chin was almost on her chest.

"I am the maid, sir. You ask those questions of the lady."

Peroni got the address of the gym, a back street near the Campo dei Fiori in the city centre, not far from the Questura. An awkward place to get to from Parioli, twenty-five minutes if the traffic was light. Then she showed him to the door. He couldn't help noticing a pile of unopened letters on a sideboard next to it. A few looked like bills. Several bore the names of banks.

He stood on the threshold for a moment, gazing at the Maserati and the Ferrari.

"Those are not cars for Rome," Peroni said. "Too big, too expensive. Too easily scratched by some stupid little kid who hates anyone who's got the money to buy them. Why anyone ..."

"They hardly use them," the woman said. "Only when they leave the city. Every morning I wash them down. But when those big ugly things last went anywhere ..."

She shrugged.

"How do they get around then?"

"I call a driver," she said as if he was being dim.

4.

Peroni didn't approve of exercise. So gyms didn't impress him much. The one the Spallones owned was called the "Palestra Ca.s.sius" and occupied the first floor of a vast palazzo in the Via dei Pellegrino, the old pilgrims' street from the city to the bridge to the Vatican. The name intrigued him until he saw plastered behind reception a black and white picture of the man most people knew as Muhammad Ali, not Ca.s.sius Clay. There was a debt to history being paid here, but it wasn't a Roman one.

The place smelled of aromatic oils and sweat. There was a blank-looking girl with a ponytail behind a computer, rows and rows of unused exercise machines, and close to the small windows at the back a boxing ring. A sign leading off to the right said "Sauna".

"Exercise I can do without," Peroni told the kid behind the desk when he walked in. "But sitting around sweating doing nothing ... that I can manage. Is it good?"

She gave him a leaflet. It boasted of the biggest, most traditional Finnish sauna in Rome. She had her name embroidered on her T-shirt: Letizia. Someone, Spallone's wife he guessed, liked to tag the things they owned.

"I could break into a good sweat looking at the prices," he said.

"We've got great introductory discounts," she piped up. The girl looked around at the lines of empty machines. "And discounts after that if you ask nicely."

"I always ask nicely. How many people work here? Trainers, fitness people and the like?"

"Ten, fifteen guys. Plus me. We're good."

"I'm sure you are," Peroni said, showing her the police ID. "But I'd really like to see Signora Spallone now if you don't mind."

The woman was in her office with ten or so of her men. Every one of them was big and fit, under thirty he guessed. Names embroidered on their shirts. Mostly foreign from the way they spoke and muttered as he showed his ID. More than half of them blonde, Nordic. Like Eva Spallone herself, he now saw.

She ushered them out and gave him a hard stare, the one civilians used when they thought the police were paying them too much attention.

"You're not Italian," he said.

"Is there something wrong with that?"

"Not at all. It's just that I always try to place people. It's a game."

Eva Spallone looked no more than thirty-five. She had short blonde hair, the face of an angel, bright blue eyes, and the curvy, almost carved kind of figure Peroni normally saw in the magazines, not real life. She didn't look as if she'd been crying recently.

"Finnish," he said.

"You guess well."

"Not really." He pointed to the books and trinkets behind her desk. "You've got that blue and white flag there. The sauna makes a thing about being Finnish and not many do that. Two and two tend to make four. Usually anyway."

On the desk stood a picture of her with a man he took to be the living Giorgio Spallone. She was in a wedding dress, he in a suit. The Colosseum was in the background. So many weddings used that location for pictures after the ceremony. From the look of her he guessed this couldn't have been more than four or five years before.

"I went to your house," he said. "There was a detail to be cleared up. We thought you'd be at home."

Her eyes misted over then. Very quickly it seemed to him.

"This was Giorgio's business too. It was how we first met."

A tissue came out of a very expensive rose-coloured leather handbag so small it couldn't have contained much else. She wiped her pert nose then rubbed her bright blue eyes with the back of her hands.

"In a sauna?" Peroni asked.

"He loved the silence, the tranquillity. When his mind was troubled it was the place he went. On his own."

She didn't want to answer that question.

"So you two started the business?"

"It was a wedding gift." Another dab of the eye. "He was the kindest man. Everyone here loved him. I had to tell them myself. Lately he'd been so ... melancholy."

Peroni found he couldn't take his eyes off the wedding photo.

"What detail?" she asked.

"Was your husband a fastidious man?" Peroni asked.

Eva Spallone blinked.

"Fastidious?"

"Was he careful about what he wore? How good his clothes looked? How neat they were?"

"Very much so," she said.

"Thanks." Peroni got up.

"You came all the way for that?"

"I don't need to take up any more of your time, signora. Will you be here long? Just in case my boss thinks of anything else."

"I'm having lunch with a friend. Round the corner. So many people to tell. And you won't let me do anything with poor Giorgio. No funeral arrangements. It's OK. I understand."

He asked himself: was that what most widows did the day their husband was found floating in the Tiber? Have lunch with someone to tell them how awkward things were?

He wondered. Most people reacted by staying close to the home they shared. A few found that too full of memories. Too painful.

"Here," she said and gave him a business card for the gym with her mobile number on it.

On the way out he stopped by the ring. Two of the hulks were sparring, landing not-so-gentle blows with puffy brown leather gloves.

Peroni watched them, thought about the gloves and said quietly to himself, "Boxing."

The rest of the hulks stood around watching, commenting in a variety of accents, none of them native Italian. None of them looked to be in mourning. Next to the ring was a gla.s.s door marked as the sauna entrance. Peroni wandered over and took a look. He'd no idea what a sauna was like really so he opened the door and found himself gasping for breath almost instantly. It was like peering into a hot, damp fog. All billowing steam, so thick he couldn't see his hand in front of his face.

"You wanna try?" asked a hulk, taking him by surprise when he walked up behind.

"Isn't there someone in there already?"

The hulk laughed.

"Who knows? You share a sauna, man. That's what it's about. Togetherness." He squinted at the fog. "But no. I don't think there's anyone there. Thursdays are quiet."

"Spallone used to come here alone, I thought," Peroni told him.

"Yeah, well ..." The hulk shrugged. He looked and sounded east European, Russian maybe. Peroni couldn't quite make out the name st.i.tched on his shirt. "That's more business than choice I guess. Sauna's a sociable thing." A big elbow nudged Peroni in the ribs. "A place for men to talk. Get things off your chest."

"Maybe I'll try next week," Peroni told him and walked out of the building, back into the bright day. It was just after noon now. Lunchtime. He wondered what Teresa was doing in Venice, how the play acting was going at Fiumicino, what kind of culinary delicacy the ever-picky Falcone had chosen for his solitary meal in Sardinia. All this speculation made Peroni hungry so he bought a panino stuffed with rich, salty porchetta from the market and ate it from his big left fist as he drove out to Ciampino and the Roma camp.

5.

He didn't need any directions for this place. Every cop knew where the Roma lived, dotted around the city in shifting encampments, bulldozed from time to time by the authorities only to reappear a few weeks later, a kilometre or so down the road. Several hundred, even a thousand men, women and children lived in these places, crammed together in hovels built out of sc.r.a.p wood and corrugated iron, huddled around makeshift braziers in winter, sweating out in the open in the scorching summer. For years now the Italian government had been trying to push them back into Romania and Hungary. It was like trying to sweep away the tide with a broom.

Peroni pulled through the camp gates and found his car immediately surrounded by scruffy urchin kids, hands out begging for money. He pushed through them and found himself confronted by a tall, surly-looking man with a beard. Grubby clothes, dark, smart eyes. Security around here.

"Police," Peroni said, showing his ID. "I need to see Ion Dinicu's father."

"Not here," the man said immediately.

Peroni sighed, looked around. There were eyes glittering in the dark mouths of the makeshift homes, all watching him. He'd dealt with these people many times in the past. It was never easy. They liked living apart from everyone else. They didn't want the police to solve their problems, offer them protection. In their own eyes they were a separate nation, detached from a world which failed to understand them. That didn't mean they were without rules or principles or beliefs. Faith even.

"If Ion isn't identified ... claimed by someone ..." Peroni told the man, "... then it's up to us to deal with his funeral. If that's what you want, fine. But bear this in mind. We'll pa.s.s the work on to a charity in all probability. A Catholic one since we're in Rome. If anyone wants an invitation ..."

The bearded man stood there, silent.

"If Ion's father speaks to me now, just for a few minutes, I will make sure a request goes through for an Orthodox service. Romanian Orthodox if you like. It can be done. It won't be unless I ask for it."

He waited.

Orthodox and Catholic. It was like football. Same game, different teams. Bitter rivals.

Two minutes later he was in a corrugated shack at the end of the camp, seated at a low plastic table with an elderly bent man who smelled of cheap dark tobacco and wood smoke.

"What do you want?" Ion Dinicu's father asked.

"To find out who killed your son."

"Why?"

Peroni shrugged and said, "It's what I do. Don't you want to know? Don't you want some kind of ..." He hesitated. The word sounded odd, wrong, in these circ.u.mstances. "... justice?"

Dinicu's father had the same kind of eyes as the man on the gate. Dark and intense. Blazing now.

"Find me the man who killed my Ion and I'll show you justice," he said. "He was a good boy."

Peroni sighed.

"He was a pickpocket. A petty thief. Petty. But a thief all the same."

"That was then!" the old man cried. "Not now."