37

Giulio Aventino couldn’t decide whether to sigh in frustration, snarl in anger, or give in to a satisfied grin. He settled on the grin as he piloted his Fiat through the Trastevere traffic. His dominant emotion at the moment, he had to admit, was smugness. He’d come back to the station to find his sergeant, the well-heeled and pious Raffaele Orsini, out doing the bidding of his cardinal uncle. Not entirely Raffaele’s fault, of course: he’d quite properly taken the Cardinal’s request to the maresciallo. Everything Raffaele did was quite proper. The boss, obviously seeing visions of himself on the Vatican’s IOU list, had dispatched Raffaele to sit in a café watching someone the Cardinal, for some secret Vatican reason, wanted watched. Giulio didn’t care about the Vatican and its secrets and he wouldn’t have given a damn, except that he did.

Two damns.

Damn the maresciallo for sending Raffaele out on, basically, an extended coffee break, and thereby sticking Giulio with the mountain of unfiled witness reports on a case he and Raffaele had closed last week.

And damn the Vatican for thinking it could call at any time and the Carabinieri would jump because it said to.

No, three damns.

Damn the Vatican again, for being right.

Still, neither the Vatican’s secrets nor the maresciallo’s naked ambition nor even the shorts-clad, bottled-water-slugging tourists ambling through the streets as though any car they ignored couldn’t hit them quite pierced Giulio’s satisfaction. Raffaele’s little café break had turned, right under the sergeant’s patrician nose, into a homicide. News of which had made the apoplectic maresciallo explode from his office and order Giulio Aventino to Santa Maria della Scala immediately, posthaste, and soonest, to go see how much of the situation he could salvage.

The boss, Giulio had noted, and here’s where the satisfaction had begun, had showered a few damns of his own on the absent person of Raffaele Orsini.