LITMIR.BIZ

       Two

      “Yesterday was yesterday,” the checkout girl declared as Rossi, making one of his regular top-up shops, tried to pay the ten cents lacking from the previous evening.

      Time to forget.

      Time to move on.

      After lunch and a short siesta he’d spent an hour in a bar, leafing through the papers thinking things over and watching the more popular TV channels to see their take on the Prenestina fire. The mayor had shown up, looked contrite, made a bit of a speech. A local priest was more outspoken, calling it ethnic cleansing. But it wasn’t as if there was any great rallying cry to get to the bottom of it, to trace and compensate the victims’ families, whether it was racially motivated or down to some underworld grudge. While the space being dedicated to the story was rationed after the initial reports, it was almost as if some sections of the media were giving the tacit impression that it had been, if not a necessary culling, then almost an occupational hazard for “illegals”.

      As he left the supermarket a figure flashed past in the crowd. Was it? It couldn’t be. She was dead. He stood and watched as the dark-haired, athletic silhouette melted into the crowd, and then shaking himself back into something like rationality he proceeded homewards.

      But the doppleganger had set him thinking – thinking about her again and the fallout from the Marini affair. It was almost unimaginable now to think that this same baked, arid city had been wreathed in snow and thrown into chaos while he and Carrara pursued a serial killer dubbed ‘The Carpenter’, trying to halt his murderous crusade against the city’s women.

      It had been dubbed ‘The Carpenter’ case, but Marini had been at the centre of everything, playing an ambiguous role on the fringes of a coterie of obscure, occult power brokers in the Church, the state, and big business. For her own ends, she had played them both like violins almost all the way, before coming on board with him and Carrara as they made a pact to use her secret service skills to nail the killer. Her contorted rationale had been a part of a broader strategy, so she could control everything. They discovered that Giuseppe had had a history of working for the services and her cronies all along, and even if in a ragged way Rossi and Carrara did eventually get their man, the circumstances and the consequences still rankled.

      He knew that the work of the dark, deep state, the powers-that-be, was not finished. It was an ongoing concern.

      And then a decomposed body had turned up in the spring. Hers presumably, in the car she had escaped in through the snowstorm following that last encounter. The corpse had been buried in an unmarked grave, and Rossi and Carrara alone remained the custodians of the whole complex secret. But with no one having stood trial for either The Carpenter’s crimes or Giuseppe Bonaventura’s own murder and no one looking likely to, and while a file remained technically open, the case was considered as good as closed unless new evidence came to light.

      All despite the misgivings and rumours that rumbled on in some quarters.

      There was no shortage of paranoid speculation on the more radical fringes of the political world and within the world of crime investigation itself. No one but Rossi and Carrara knew the guilty truth. The tangled webs we weave, thought Rossi. They wouldn’t even believe it if he ever did try to come clean. Either way, he would go down for malpractice, perverting the course of justice, you name it. They would make sure of that.

      But the dominant, accepted narrative was that the evil had been exorcized, the murders had ceased and The Carpenter had met a justified violent end.

      One day perhaps it would all come out. One day.

      The domestic political upheavals remained largely on hold now as the MPD faced up to its being so near yet so far from obtaining anything like real power. A general election was far off, unless the government were to fall, but that seemed unlikely. So little had changed in the city in terms of its politics and the penchant for corruption at every imaginable level. On the park walls, on the apartment blocks, the far-right graffiti, however, was fresh, with new variants and vile, resurrected favourites.

       HONOUR TO THE FATHERLAND.

       DEATH TO PERFIDIOUS JEWRY.

       GYPSIES TO THE INCINERATORS.

      The comments too that Rossi might hear from disgruntled older citizenry could be strikingly un-PC. “It’s an Islamic invasion, mark my words,” was one familiar refrain. No, the race issues had not gone away, as immigration, religious extremism, and the global terror threat continued to dominate the fear agenda.

      He dropped his shopping onto the kitchen table and picked up one of the newspapers he hadn’t yet opened. He flicked through to the letters page, where citizens continued to rail against buses that still didn’t come, roads still full of holes, and, depending on how the breeze blew, the rubbish putrefying on the streets that continued to sour the evening aperitivo. He tossed the paper aside and set about about fixing himself a decent drink.

      ***

      Rossi looked down from his balcony, his after-dinner sambuca and ice still holding its own against the enveloping evening heat. With the sun down, the city had begun to breathe a little. Traffic was almost non-existent, with only the odd revving motorino whining and yelping its horn from some unseen side street. Cut-price tourists, escaped from the throng, ambled about off the beaten track in mismatched summer clothes. Oblivious. Oblivious. Yes, thought Rossi. A state-within-the-state has its own people killed in the name of a perverse agenda and there’s nothing you can do about it. Just count yourself lucky it wasn’t you getting the bullet or the bomb. After all, these days you got it easy. The days of bombs in banks and train stations were long gone, buried under the rubble of the Seventies and Eighties. Of course they were.

      Yana, his Ukrainian girlfriend of several years standing, was already in bed. He had cooked dinner and then they had chatted a little. She had seen, however, that he was distant, newly involved with a case. Tired herself after a busy day in the health centre, she had left him to ponder. Since going back to work full-time in the Wellness Centre, she had hardly had a moment’s rest. She lived, ate and slept work now, as if surviving the attempt on her life only a little more than six months earlier had left her leading a charmed life – every day and every moment was precious. She knew it and she was going to make it count and was even talking of expanding the business.

      But it still chilled Rossi to the bone when he remembered it all and he still feared for Yana. Giuseppe had taunted him, letting him know in no uncertain terms that he had crossed Yana’s path in the dark days when she had arrived in Italy and fallen victim to traffickers. It had unsettled Rossi profoundly. But who else knew Yana’s secrets? Who else might crawl out from under a rock and want revenge? Perhaps the snakehead of the trafficking ring who had evaded Rossi all those years ago, thanks probably to a tip-off from a rat in his own Rome Serious Crime Squad, the RSCS.

      The same rat who was still on the force now and, though he had his suspicions, remained unknown to him.

      And the calls still came to his house or to Yana’s when they were together, sometimes months or even a year apart. Sometimes in the dead of night to torment him, or them. No voice. Just silence, a barely perceptible breathing. Someone he knew, he was sure, keeping tabs on him, making sure of where he lived and who he was with.

      His thoughts turned to Yana again. The August-induced insomnia had left her feeling jaded, and the combination of heat-disturbed sleep and the effects of her cocktail of medication were wreaking havoc with her natural rhythms. Still she had astounded every doctor that had examined her. It had to be something to do with her inherent athleticism and her Ukrainian resilience or the will to live that he had seen all those years before when he had played his part in freeing her from the nightmare world of drugs, violence and exploitation that she had been sucked into as a naive young immigrant.

      Apart

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