Costa 08 - City of Fear Read Online Free PDF Page B

creature, half man, half monster, riding triumphantly across the waves, a long flute held playfully to his lips, his serpent-like body snaking behind him. Beneath a balustrade supported by four pale stone nymphs etched with algae, green ferns cascading from adjoining rock niches, ran a narrow channel of water disappearing into caves on both sides, its sinuous path drawing the eye to a bare stone plinth set in a semicircular alcove.
    The mind knew what to expect: some beautiful, freestanding statue of Venus or Diana, half-naked, enticing, an icon of beauty in a private pleasure ground built for a pope whose private life was very different from the severe countenance he maintained in public.
    Instead there were two bodies, torn and mangled, contorted in a way that only death can achieve. A bloodied man and a woman, arms tentatively around one another, necks stretched awkwardly, upturned inagony. A scrawled, spray-painted message on the algaed stone behind them read, in letters two hands high:
II. I. LXIII
.
    The victims in the nymphaeum of Villa Giulia wore only bloodstained underclothes. Their abdomens were terribly mutilated.
    Costa didn’t want to look. Or remember. He was only ten years old when this savage murder filled the papers for days on end one hot summer. He could recall the way his father would snatch the morning editions off the table when they arrived, then destroy them. There had been photos in those papers. Costa was sure of it. But not like this.
    “Signor Rennick?” Palombo continued, turning to the man by his side. “Please.”
    The American was about the same age as the man from the Ministry of the Interior, with a narrow, dark face, and a head of very black hair that might have been dyed. From his seat, in good Italian, with an obvious American accent, he said, “Mr. President. Prime Minister.” The order of greeting was clearly deliberate. Campagnolo smiled. Dario Sordi scarcely noticed.
    “The dead man’s name was Renzo Frasca, an Italian American,” Rennick went on. “Born in Sicily, moved with his family to Washington, D.C., when he was six years old. Dual nationality. Degree in English literature from Harvard. A good public servant. When the terrorists who called themselves the Blue Demon seized him, he was an undersecretary in the U.S. Embassy here. Nobody special.” He waited for a moment, then continued. “You understand what I’m saying here? They murdered a bean counter and his wife. Frasca dealt with minutiae. Trade agreements. Tariffs. Then one day …” He pointed at the screen, and the two bodies there. “This happens to him. I won’t bore you with the details of the autopsy. It’s worse than you could imagine. Frasca and his wife, Marie, were butchered. Thirty-two years old, both of them. They had a son, Danny. Three years old. From what the investigators could work out, the boy probably watched his parents die. We never found him.”
    A new picture on the screen. A house in the middle-class suburb of Parioli, an area Costa recognized. Then interior shots: an elegant living room, the walls spattered with blood. It looked like an abattoir, worse than any murder scene he’d ever witnessed.
    “It was a weekend. The Frascas were due to attend an embassy social function. Partway through that there was a message.”
    “What do the numbers mean?” Costa asked.
    The American glanced at Palombo. The Italian officer came in and said, “We never understood until it was too late. II. I. LXIII. Two. One. Sixty-three.” He shrugged. “We thought it was a reference to the Bible, not that we could make that work. It didn’t seem that important, in the end. It wasn’t …”
    Sordi scowled. “Others made the connection for you,” the president interrupted. “These are act, scene, and line numbers from
Julius Caesar
, the Shakespeare play.”
    He glanced at the ceiling, then recited:
    “Between the acting of a dreadful thing
And the first motion, all the interim is
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