“MY BROTHER WAS AN INFANT,” ALDO BARTOLI INSISTED. “A child. Why do you think I joined the Carabinieri in the first place? To look after the young idiot. I did a good job too. Until those bastards from the city turned up.” “MY BROTHER WAS AN INFANT,” ALDO BARTOLI INSISTED. “A child. Why do you think I joined the Carabinieri in the first place? To look after the young idiot. I did a good job too. Until those bastards from the city turned up.”
They sat in a cafe by the harbor. The TV in the corner was locked to the news. A small group of locals sat around it, watching in silence. Costa couldn’t take his mind off Rome. He ached to be there, to do something useful, that had meaning.
Bartoli’s younger brother, Lorenzo, was alone on duty the day of the trip to the shack near Tarquinia. The visiting officers, Ettore Rufo and Beppe Cattaneo, only stopped by the town Carabinieri headquarters to ask for directions. Aldo Bartoli was sure the officers hadn’t wanted his brother along.
“The kid was like that. A pest. He wanted to be a part of everything. He would never have let them go there alone. He phoned me. It was my day off. He said some big guys from the city had turned up looking serious. They had weapons. Not the usual kind, he said. They wanted directions to some shack belonging to the Petrakis family. Lorenzo said he’d show them. That was the only way.”
Bartoli nursed his beer, his eyes misty, his face full of grief. “That was the last time I ever spoke to him. Next thing I knew, there was a call telling me my brother was dead.”
“I’m sorry,” Mirko Oliva said quietly.
“Yeah. Well …” Bartoli called for grappa. “He should never have been there. He was useless. Couldn’t even shoot straight. Couldn’t think straight. If I’d been on duty …”
“Wait.” Costa was trying to get the sequence of events straight in his head. “According to the files, Rufo and Cattaneo came to the local station after they’d found Gregor and Alyssa Petrakis dead.”
The man looked incredulous. “Says who?”
“The files.”
Bartoli shook his head. “Even Lorenzo would have called for help if that had happened. The way I heard it, those guys were just asking directions.”
“When did you know the parents were dead?” Costa asked.
“Afterwards, I guess. It all got complicated. All these people turned up from Rome. All I could think about was my brother.” He stared at Costa. “It kind of happened all at the same time.”
“Tell us about them,” Mirko suggested. “The Petrakis family.”
The coastguardsman squirmed on his seat, looking uncomfortable. “No one liked that pair. They never did a stroke of real work that I could see. Had enough money to keep a little plane down at Civitavecchia, though. The kid liked to fly it. Used to buzz the town sometimes. Flying low. Thought it was some kind of joke. I had words with him. With them. They laughed in my face … didn’t give a damn.”
“Did you have any idea they might be involved in terrorism?” Costa asked.
Bartoli shook his head. “Course not. I would have reported them. I kept my eye on them, though. They were always going places they weren’t welcome. Those tombs. The scary place they found the Blue Demon. They had a thing about all that stuff. The museum people got nervous once or twice and called me. The Petrakis kid thought he knew everything.”
“How did he get on with his parents?” Rosa asked.
The man shrugged. “Fine, as far as I could see. The son was probably the only person they didn’t argue with. Everyone else—us. The police.” He hesitated. “Look. Afterwards, when they told us what had gone on in Rome …” Bartoli scratched his gray head. “It never made sense to people. Why would someone name themselves after some painting in a tomb somewhere? All that Etruscan stuff is history.”
“Not to Andrea Petrakis,” Rosa said.
“Then he’s crazy.”
“Where did Gregor and Alyssa Petrakis get their money?” Costa asked.
Bartoli grimaced. “I asked myself that question a lot. Before all this happened. Every time I tried to get permission to get serious with the Petrakises, someone on high told me to mind my own business. I wondered if it had to do with drugs. There was talk about that in the town. People in Rome were watching them. I was beginning to wonder if maybe they were informers. And then they were dead. Killed by their own son, supposedly.”
He slammed his glass hard on the table. Alcohol spilled over his shaking hand. The barman walked over without being asked and placed another grappa on the table. He knew Aldo Bartoli, knew what he needed.
“Why am I wasting my time telling you all this? I told the big people who came up from Rome after Lorenzo got killed. When they buried my poor, stupid brother … I told them then something wasn’t right. When they didn’t listen, I went to the police. When you kicked me out, I tried to tell the newspapers, until someone got hold of the reporters and whispered in their ears that Aldo Bartoli was a little soft in the head.”
He downed the drink in one shot.
“I don’t think I ever saw my mother smile again after that day. She went to her grave and my old man drank himself to death. So I got the hell out of there, found myself a job watching rich people bump their yachts into each other, sticking tickets on them for bringing in too many cigarettes from time to time. This story’s dead. As dead as my brother. You can’t do a damn thing to change that.”
Costa looked at his watch. It was close to five. There would still be people around in Tarquinia they could talk to.
“So what do you think?” Aldo Bartoli demanded. “Does it sound like I’m a lunatic?”
“We need facts …” Costa began.
“Facts. I saw the parents’ bodies in the morgue,” Bartoli snapped. “They’d been dead a week, maybe more. Andrea was living in Rome. He didn’t come home at all during that time, not as far as I could see. Why kill them? What was his motive? He didn’t look like the most loving son around. He didn’t look like he wanted them dead, either.” Bartoli grinned. He looked a little drunk. “Maybe the Carabinieri were just cleaning up the statistics, huh? Dumping the deaths of the parents at the kid’s door so they didn’t have to report it as one more unsolved crime?”
Rosa Prabakaran brushed away a strand of long brown hair from her dark, thoughtful face and said, “It wouldn’t be the first time.”
“Bullshit,” Bartoli mumbled. His eyes looked redder, mistier. “There’s something else you should know. This is the one where you start to know I’m crazy.”
“Try me,” Costa suggested.
“They didn’t want us to see Lorenzo when he was dead. The big men in the Carabinieri said it was a bad sight. Not for a mother or a father. Mine being the nice, trusting people they were, they believed that too.”
Aldo Bartoli was beginning to enjoy this, Costa realized, as if he had something to say that had been waiting for years.
“Being a country carabiniere, I’d gotten used to dead bodies. Usually in pieces inside a car stinking of drink, smashed up against a tree or a wall. I wanted to see my brother before they buried him. Whatever he looked like. A friend of mine worked in the morgue. He got me in when no one was looking. Five minutes. Was enough.”
Someone at the bar was getting bad-tempered. The TV news went off. It was as if no one wanted to see any more.
“The story,” Bartoli continued, “was that Lorenzo and those two carabinieri from Rome were walking up the front path of this crappy shack of the Petrakises when the kids inside opened fire. Lorenzo was hit straightaway. The other two got lucky. They fought back, and by the time they got to the shack, the kids inside had killed themselves.” He raised a long, skinny finger. “One problem. Lorenzo didn’t look bad at all. I’d seen much worse out on the roads on a Saturday night. He had just one bullet wound.…” Aldo Bartoli swiveled his head and indicated the nape of his neck. “Close up, from what I could make out. Here. In the back. The way the mob used to execute people. Which is odd, when you come to think of it, since he was walking forward at the time. Those university kids must have been real clever to have killed him like that.” The coast guard officer pushed back his beer.
“A cynical man might have thought those students didn’t kill him at all. Those two carabinieri from Rome did, and then went on and murdered those kids, which is what they came for in the first place.”
“Why would they do that, Aldo?” Costa asked him.
“I’ve no idea. But I talked to someone who said they’d seen those two before. A week or so earlier. Around the time the Petrakises got shot. How’s that for a coincidence? If those two guys were good at murdering my brother, maybe they were good at murdering those Greeks too. Nothing to do with Andrea Petrakis. He just got the blame, because someone decided that was what was going to happen.”
Costa shook his head and was silent.
Aldo Bartoli blinked. “And you know another odd thing? A few years later they found one of those carabinieri—Cattaneo, I think his name was—shot dead. Bullet through the back of the skull, though for some reason this one came out a little messier than it did with Lorenzo.” He grinned. “They never did find out who did that. I guess it’s like my kid brother. There’s no knowing now, is there? I’d like to ask the other guy. Rufo’s his name. Except I never managed to find him to talk to, not that I haven’t tried. If you get lucky there …”
Costa glanced at the two young officers with him. Both looked glassy-eyed, a little shaken.
“I need names in Tarquinia,” he told Bartoli.
“I don’t know any worth talking to.” He leaned forward. Costa could smell the strong spirit on his breath. “Did you understand what I just told you?”
“I think so,” Costa replied, getting up and throwing some money on the table for the drinks.