Costa 08 - City of Fear Read Online Free Page A

most visitors.
    That privileged peek behind the palace’s towering stone façade was a quarter of a century before. The quiet, introverted child he was could never have imagined that one day he would return there as a police officer, in a frightened Rome, a city full of trepidation, a place he barely recognized.
    But Falcone did, and so did Esposito. They were older, in their fifties,and their bleak, immobile faces spoke volumes. Something that was once thought dead had returned, and for those of a certain age it bore a terrible familiarity.
    The impossibly lofty
corazziere
at the gate let them through, and the moment he was inside the palace Costa found himself recalling his puzzlement as a child over his father’s explanation of what a president did. This was not America. The Italian president was not the day-to-day head of government, an elected king in all but name. That job was given to the prime minister. But a republic required too a figurehead, an emblem of the state. History being what it was, the government had naturally decided that the place for such a man to live was the Quirinale, the very palace that was once occupied by the popes who ruled what was known as the
Stati della Chiesa
, the Republic of Saint Peter.
    Foreigners seldom appreciated the complexities of politics in Rome. As the son of a communist politician, Costa had rarely been allowed to forget them. From the third century after Christ until 1861, when, in a brief interregnum, the pope became “the prisoner in the Vatican,” the papal hierarchy regarded itself as God’s government on earth. Only when Mussolini’s Lateran Treaty of 1929 gave the Catholic Church some formal recognition, and its own minuscule country set around Michelangelo’s magnificent dome across the river, did the rift between pope and secular politicians begin to heal.
    These were the antecedents that Costa’s father had drummed into him from the earliest age, the story of the collapse of a once-supreme theological sovereign power and its replacement by a worldly, bickering, and equally corrupt parliamentary democracy that had never quite found its feet. Marco Costa had been born eight years after the Lateran Treaty was signed, into a nation dominated by fascism, one that would soon disintegrate into the bloodshed and poverty of war. This was all history, but Italian history, which meant that it was never as distant as one might sometimes have hoped, or completely forgotten.
    Costa followed Esposito and Falcone up the broad stairs, exchanging glances, nothing more, with a group of Carabinieri officers on the way out. Very soon he found himself in a long, ornate room, with a carved-oak ceiling, tall, shuttered windows, elaborate gilt furniture, and so many paintings he didn’t know where to look.
    At a vast ormolu table stood the president of Italy, Dario Sordi. Seated to his left was a familiar figure from occasional high-level meetings within the Questura, Luca Palombo, the tall, heavily built, gray-haired security chief of the Ministry of the Interior. Next to him was an individual Costa did not know, though something about the man’s dress, a standard, expensive dark blue suit, suggested he came from the same distant and occasionally shadowy world as Palombo. At the end of the table stood a screen displaying a blank white rectangle from the computer projector opposite.
    A door in the corner of the room opened. Another familiar figure entered and Costa reminded himself that he did not normally move in circles like this. Ugo Campagnolo, the prime minister of Italy’s sixty-third government since the Second World War, heir, in the space of a few short years, to Prodi, Berlusconi, and, most recently, Walter Veltroni. Campagnolo was a man who had emerged from the constant bilious flux of national politics by both courting and coveting controversy. Smaller than he appeared in the media, a handsome, slender man, with the energized, upright figure of the waiter he once was,