Costa 08 - City of Fear Read Online Free PDF

that,” Campagnolo cut in.
    A flash of fury hardened the president’s features. “For the right money, there are lawyers who will debate anything, as you surely knowbetter than anyone, Ugo. I am grateful that you accept this is one occasion when their … talents … are best avoided. We have little time and no room for uncertainty.”
    He glanced at the prime minister. Something passed between them, and it was not animosity, more a recognition that they occupied different positions, ones that were, by their very nature, in conflict.
    “As all Italy understands, a young employee of the state was brutally murdered last night and the unfortunate Giovanni Batisti taken by her killers,” Sordi went on. “For what reason, we can only guess. What you don’t know is that we were forewarned something like this would happen.” Sordi sighed. “The Blue Demon has returned.”
    Costa happened to catch Esposito’s face at that moment. The expression there—shock, fear, and a sudden paleness in the
commissario
’s usually florid cheeks—was mirrored on Falcone’s lean brown features.
    “Your father warned, and I never listened.” Dario Sordi pointed directly at Costa. “Though I doubt even he could have predicted this turn of events.”

5
    THE BLUE DEMON
.
    Costa hadn’t heard the name in years, except on TV programs about the tragic “Years of Lead,” when Italy had been gripped by terrorist outrages committed by a variety of outlaw bands, on the left and the right.
    The Blue Demon was the oddest, the least understood of them all, even down to its name. An individual? An entity? No one knew, or even whether the entire episode was nothing more than a student prank or a myth gone wrong, some dark, violent fantasy originating in the old land of the Etruscans, in the bleak Maremma north of Rome.
    Luca Palombo, the dour gray-haired spook of the Ministry of Interior, took them through the background to the present events, the bloody recent past that the young knew only dimly and the old preferred to forget. Carefully, with a civil servant’s measured, precise words, Palombo told of the beginning in 1969, before Costa was born, when sixteen people died in the savage bombing of the Banca Nazionale dell’Agricoltura in the Piazza Fontana, Milan. A year later a fascist coup failed in Rome. The leader, Junio Valerio Borghese, the “Black Prince,” a direct descendant of Pope Paul V, one of the first occupants of the Quirinale Palace, fled Italy, never to return. In 1972 the first police officer was assassinated, in response to the death of a student in custody. Within a fortnight three
carabinieri
were murdered. Steadily, from that moment on, violence supplanted politics. Then a sudden, catharticagony, the murder of Aldo Moro, a mild, left-leaning Christian Democrat, cruelly kept captive for more than two months before being riddled with bullets beneath a blanket in the back of a car in a Rome suburb.
    This was one atrocity too far. The nation rose up in horror at Moro’s murder. The authorities arrested and imprisoned everyone they suspected of complicity and, in some cases, nothing more than political sympathy. The wave of violence stuttered to a close as the prisons filled with men and women who regarded themselves as martyrs for a failed revolution.
    “Finally, when we thought it was over,” Palombo continued, with a quiet, miserable disdain, “we met this.”
    He touched the keyboard. A familiar building flashed onto the screen: the Villa Giulia in Rome, a former pope’s mansion close to the ancient Via Flaminia, now a museum so obscure that Costa had never set foot through the door.
    “March the twenty-third, 1989,” Palombo noted, clicking through a series of photographs that might have been stills from some contemporary horror movie. “The nymphaeum.”
    A classical pleasure garden, built in a stone grove hollowed out from the garden of the villa. In the foreground stood a monochrome mosaic of a marine