IT WAS AS IF THEY WERE IN A MOVIE. EVENTS SHIFTED rapidly, frame by frame. The first shot splintered the foot of the statue beside Dario Sordi, raising a cloud of fragments and dust. As Andrea Petrakis struggled to finish the final act of what he surely regarded as the purpose of his life, a second crack rent the air. This time the outcome was different: the clatter of metal meeting metal, of a powerful, violent impact shattering the evening calm.
The man in the ornate uniform jumped back, a look of agonized astonishment on his face. It was only at that moment that Dario Sordi realized they were no longer alone. Beyond Petrakis, Nic Costa was sprinting down the path from the palace, pistol in hand, starting to cry in a voice full of righteous anger, one that reminded the old man of his friend, the young officer’s father. Behind him came a group of corazzieri, swarming into the gardens.
Dario Sordi looked at his assailant again. The shot had entered the breastplate somewhere near Petrakis’s left shoulder. There was a dark hole torn in the shiny metal there, and blood pumping through. The glistening sword hung loose in the man’s right hand, ineffective. His eyes were glassy with pain and shock. He was stumbling, attempting to head back toward the palace, making hurt, whimpering noises, as if pain were a stranger to him except in its infliction.
Sordi stood up.
“Take this man into custody,” he ordered, slightly ashamed of the note of triumph in his voice. He added, more quietly, “And …”
What?
“Thank you,” the old politician muttered, mainly to himself. He felt a little giddy, heard more words escape his lips unbidden. “I’m safe now.”
That grim day in the Via Rasella was rising again in his memory. In his mind’s eye he was seeing the faces of the two Germans, the speaking one from his recurring nightmare brighter than the other.
Safety was what everyone sought in the end. A private place to call their own. Shelter from the storm. The young never quite appreciated this. To them the world was a place to be fought for, to be won. For some, like Andrea Petrakis, it would remain that way forever, which was a very personal and dangerous tragedy. Age never softened their sharp ambitions, diminished their appetite, whispered the great secret: that life was brief and fragile, a gift to be cherished, not thrown away on a whim or some obsession.
Costa got to him first, face anxious, eyes still raking the rooftops. Corazzieri crowded around like some ancient Roman phalanx in silver, a growing human shield of tall men, one that Fabio Ranieri joined, out of breath, uncharacteristically wild-eyed.
“There’s someone else out there,” Costa told Sordi urgently. “We need to get you inside immediately.”
The old man found it difficult to hear, to understand. He couldn’t take his eyes off the other figure, the one clutching the bloodied sword, who’d now staggered to the steps in front of the cool, shady terrace, with its long evening shadows, only to turn back, mouth open—eyes too—in shock at his own injury and failure. Sordi wondered which was the greater suffering: the wound or the sudden, brusque collapse of his mission. Wondered too how he might have felt all those years ago in the Via Rasella, if matters had turned out differently.
He shook his gray head, hoping to clear his thoughts. There was time to work, to prepare. Time perhaps, finally, to discover something tantamount to the truth of the Blue Demon.
“Don’t you see what this means?” Sordi said. “We have someone. Alive. A witness. I want Falcone. I want …”
The lean inspector was there already. Sordi realized he should have expected no less.
“Deal with him,” the president ordered, pointing at Petrakis, half in the darkness of the terrace, leaning against a column, hurt and lost. “As you dealt with the Spanish woman. This one can tell you something. Everything. We shall have answers, important ones. Do this now, please. Quickly. No need to inform Palombo for the moment.”
But no one moved.
“He’s got a gun,” someone said.
Sordi looked. It seemed impossible. The wounded man in the silver breastplate leaking blood had somehow exchanged the sword for another weapon. A black pistol. It trembled in his blood-spattered right hand, as if it had found its way there without the man’s knowing.
Andrea Petrakis stared straight at him across the verdant space that separated them and shouted, “I know who you are!”
“I know who I am too, young man,” Dario Sordi whispered, watching him prepare to move.
Petrakis snatched off his plumed helmet, stumbled down the path toward them, the revolver rising, repeating over and over, “I know, I know, I know …”
Behind him stood a second figure. A familiar one.
Ugo Campagnolo stepped out into the sunlight. There was a gun in his hand too. A small weapon, almost insignificant. Sordi watched aghast, knowing what he was about to see.
Campagnolo walked up to the side of the man in the corazziere’s uniform, extended a shaking arm, then pumped a single bullet into his bare head. Petrakis fell down to the lawn on one knee, screaming. They watched as his assailant took aim and fired again.
The shot man leaped sideways, as if hit by some electric shock. His broken frame tumbled to the ground, arms outstretched, unmoving.
Dario Sordi shook himself free of his guards and stormed across the perfect green grass of the Quirinale. There was a scarlet fury in his brain, one he knew and hated.
“Give my officers the gun,” the president ordered. “The police will need it as evidence. This is too far. Even for you.”
“Evidence?” There was a wild look in the prime minister’s eyes.
“The gun,” Costa demanded, then walked up and removed the revolver from Campagnolo’s trembling hands.
“Evidence?” Campagnolo asked again, more quietly.
He took one step forward, his features rigid with hatred and anger, and stared into the president’s long, pale face.
“I saved you, Dario. Don’t you realize, you old fool? He had a weapon—”
“Which came from where?” Sordi interjected.
“He had a weapon. He’d have used it.”
Ugo Campagnolo looked at each of them in turn.
“I saved the president today. You all saw it. You’re witnesses.”
He raised himself up on his heels and brushed down the front of his jacket, as if it were covered in dirt.
“Soon you shall hear about it too. In the papers. On the TV. One call is all it takes. Soon …”
His voice froze. He faltered, confused by the expressions on the faces of the men watching him. Unseen by Campagnolo, something had traveled toward him. A bright red mark, like a scarlet beauty spot on a movie actress from another era, had briefly brushed across the prime minister’s sweating temple, then disappeared, as if dashing away in search of another target.
Sordi looked down. The livid spot, some sighting aid from a twenty-first-century weapon hidden away on a distant rooftop, had ranged across the grass to climb his arm. It began moving steadily toward his head.
Ranieri yelled something. Sordi found himself surrounded by a pushing, arguing phalanx of bodies, men dragging him to the ground, trying to cover his frame with theirs. He glimpsed Costa’s anxious face. Then Ranieri’s. A shot rang out. A man’s pained shriek rent the air. Then another.
“My God …” Sordi cried, and found himself swamped again by the crush around him. Still afraid?
It was an old dead voice. German. Clearly audible in the crush of struggling men around.
There was a time to stand up, he thought. A time to face the Devil.
Sordi pushed and yelled and screamed and fought his way against their good intentions. Finally, his fury and what little strength he possessed had some effect. He scrambled to his feet to see three silver-clad corazzieri bent over the motionless frame of Fabio Ranieri. One man straightened. There were tears in his eyes.
Sordi tore himself away from the broken form of the Corazzieri captain and turned to look at the bright blue sky and the buildings around them.
“Bastards!” he screamed. “Do you think I fear you now?” He pounded his chest with his fist, looking for something, anything, seeing only the skyline of Rome, its ancient buildings and church towers, a horizon imprinted on his memory since he was a child. “Do you really think that after all these long, bloody years …?”
“Dario.” Costa stood beside him. “You must—”
The red dot returned and ran up the young police officer’s sleeve. Sordi elbowed him out of the way and let the deadly bead fall on him, bellowing, “Take me. Take me if you dare!”
He waited. Nothing.
Then a low, worried sound came from the officers still crouched by the unmoving Ranieri. Sordi followed the direction of their gaze. The sighting point had moved on; it was now traveling along Ugo Campagnolo’s right arm. The prime minister saw it too, shrieked and stupidly tried to rub it off with his hand. The scarlet mark rose to his brown, stocky neck, higher to his cheek, then stopped above his right eye.
Campagnolo howled with fear, clutched at his face with his hands. The single sniper shot, one that caught him straight in the head, threw him backwards.
Sordi turned to one side and looked at this cherished oasis of green in the heart of an overcrowded, overburdened city. The still Roman evening was broken by the urgent, hurt cries of the men around him.
Il Torrino began to toll the half hour. On the third stroke, the sonorous tones of its chimes were drowned out by another noise, a deep baritone bellowing like the roar of some subterranean monster shaking itself awake. They all turned toward the building, staring. A black and yellow storm cloud was beginning to tear through the palace behind them, right to left, a rolling ball of thunder that picked up debris, stone and fabric and canvas in its maw, and burst out of the porticoed arcade like a fiery tsunami shrieking as it traveled, tearing down columns, turning this side of the palace—a view Dario Sordi had come to love—to rubble and chaos.
The final resonant chimes of the campanile were faintly audible as the noise of the blast abated. They were replaced by the harsh mechanical chatter of a million alarm bells strewn somewhere inside the shattered Quirinale. Sordi watched the flames start to recede and the garden edge of the building begin to crumble and collapse into a tumult of disorder. The corazzieri left the broken, shattered body of their leader and began to stumble mindlessly toward the place they were sworn to protect.
Duty followed a good man forever, from the first dawn of consciousness all the way to the grave.
Sordi watched the palace of the popes disintegrate before his eyes. This is what they wanted all along, he thought. Not blood, not vengeance, but anarchy over order, the sharp, bright fury of the moment victorious over the slow, pained progress he knew as civilization. It was the lesson Andrea Petrakis had learned from the Etruscans, and perhaps the man had a point.
The Blue Demon was everywhere and nowhere, eternal, invisible, waiting for its time to come.