And…

He had to ask himself. How much of the truth was Emily telling him? Ever since the previous night when he’d forced her to confront the idea that her father was the man behind Kaspar’s miserable fate in Iraq, he’d felt there was something she was concealing.

Teresa had looked up the report on the attack in the Piazza Mattei the previous October and tried, in vain, to find something new. The facts were plain, baffling and suspiciously scarce. The American professor had been staying temporarily at Number Thirteen as a houseguest, while conducting some academic research at the American embassy. He’d been assaulted in the square by the fountain. It was pure luck that a couple of cops were in the vicinity. No assailant had been apprehended. No motive could be found. It could be a blind alley…

Then Teresa had suggested she try to find something out about the property itself. After fifteen minutes-a period of time in which Costa, to his frustration, had gotten nowhere-she phoned back, ecstatic. The earliest deeds she could track showed Number Thirteen had been owned by the same private company based in Washington as far back as 1975. That, in itself, was unusual. Foreign owners rarely kept properties for that length of time. The firm wasn’t listed in the US phone book. It didn’t show in any of the financial records which she’d bullied some lowly minion in research into checking. Something stank, Teresa thought. Costa felt sure her instincts were correct. The tough part was turning instincts into hard fact. It was all going nowhere unless he could prise something out of the memory of someone who’d lived in the square for some time.

“What you do in circumstances like these,” Costa thought, trying to still those images running around his head, “is get yourself a coffee.”

He walked into the little cafe on the square, ordered a large macchiato and dumped a couple of extra shots of caffeine inside it from the coffee and sugar sludge parked on the bar in a bowl. Then, as he waited for the sudden caffeine jolt to hit, he tried to think what Falcone would have done in the circumstances.

The inspector had just a few mottos, all of them rarely heard, all of them apposite. One came to Costa at that moment. Curiosity is the basis of detection. Without it, a man learned nothing. Without it, you might as well be an accountant.

He tried to recall the substance of the reports he’d read over the last few days and set them against the conversation he’d had with Emily after Kaspar had handed the phone back to her. Then he finished his coffee and called over the middle-aged proprietor.

He should have figured this out earlier. The ghetto never changed. Places were handed down from generation to generation. He was just a short stroll from the commercial heart of the modern city, but this was a village, one where everyone knew everyone else. Rome was, in some ways, still a collection of individual communities living noisily cheek by jowl. It was what separated Rome from other capitals he had visited, cities that seemed metropolitan sprawls, with ill-defined borders and areas where not a soul lived at night.

“Who’s the oldest resident in the square?” Costa asked, flashing his card.

The man kept polishing a glass with a spotless cloth, thinking. “You mean the oldest who’s still got half a brain?”

Costa sighed. “Listen. I don’t have the time…”

The cloth came out of the glass and jabbed at a house on the other side of the square. “Sorvino. Number Twenty-one. Ground floor. Don’t say I told you.”

No one liked talking to the police. Not even cafe owners, who’d be the first to start screaming down the phone if someone walked off with an extra sachet of sugar.

“Thanks,” Costa murmured. He threw a couple of coins on the counter, then walked out into the cold morning air.

Number Twenty-one, thanks to the vagaries of house numbering in the ghetto, was four doors down from Thirteen. He pushed the bell marked “Sorvino.” A stiff-limbed little woman in a faded blue floral-pattern dress came to the door and peered at him through round, thick glasses. She was eighty, maybe more, at an age when it was difficult to tell. Short, but proudly erect, as if to say: to hell with the years. She took one look at the badge and nodded him into the living room. It was immaculate: crammed with polished antique furniture, a selection of framed photographs, and what seemed like hundreds of pieces of Jewish memorabilia.

“I was hoping to talk to someone with a memory,” he said urgently. “Someone who’s lived here a long time.”

“Is eighty-seven years long enough for you?”

“More than enough,” he replied, smiling, hoping he didn’t look too impatient.

She picked up a delicate porcelain cup, still half full. “Camomile tea. I recommend it for people of a nervous nature.”

“Thanks. I’ll remember that.”

“No you won’t. You’re young. You think you can live through anything. What are you looking for? It must be something important.”

“Very. Facts. Names.” He hesitated. “Names mainly. I’ve been knocking on doors. Getting nowhere.”

“The ghetto’s changing. You don’t see families the way you used to.”

“I want to know about Number Thirteen.”

“Ah.” She nodded and closed her eyes for a moment, thinking. “II Duce had a girl there during the war. German. Ilse, I think she was called. Not that he ever visited, you understand. He wouldn’t dirty his hands coming to meet the likes of us, now would he?”

Jews of her generation had a mixed attitude towards Mussolini. Until the later stage of his career, Il Duce had taken little interest in anti-Semitism. Costa could recall his father telling stories of how some Jews even joined the fascist party. Relatively limited numbers had been transported to the concentration camps. It was the old Roman story: nothing was ever quite black and white.

“What happened to the house after the war?”

She looked at him severely. “I’m not an estate agent.”

“I know that. I just wondered who lived there. You’re a kind woman, Signora, I’m sure. You would want to know your neighbours.”

“No more than they want to be known,” she said primly.

“Of course.”

“Soldiers,” she said with a shrug. “American soldiers, for a while anyway. Nice men. Officers. They had beautiful manners, not like Roman men. They were strangers. I was of assistance to them now and again. I like strangers to go away with fond memories of Rome. As any good citizen would.”

“Of course. And then?”

“You’re asking me who’s lived there for the last fifty years?”

“That would be useful.”

“Huh.”

It was never easy dealing with this generation. They resented something. That the world had changed. That they were getting older within it, powerless.

“Please try to think. A man was attacked there earlier this year. Do you remember?”

“I heard it! Fighting in the street! Here! Not since the war…” She frowned. “The world gets worse. Why don’t you do something about it?”

“I’m trying,” he replied.

“Not hard enough, it seems to me.”

It was a reasonable observation. “Perhaps. But I can’t…” He corrected himself. “None of us in the police can do that on our own. We need your help. Your support. Without that…”

She was a bright-eyed old bird. She didn’t miss a thing. “Yes?”

“Without that we’re just people who enforce the laws made by politicians. Regardless of what anyone thinks. Regardless of what’s right sometimes.”

“Oh my,” she said, smiling, revealing small teeth the colour of old porcelain, a little crooked. “A policeman with a conscience. How they must love you.”

“I don’t do this to be loved, Signora. Please. The house. Whose is it? Who’s lived there over the years?”

“Who owns it? Americans, I imagine. They look like government people to me. Government people who don’t want to say they’re government people. Not that I care. They keep it in good repair. What more can I say? They come. They go. Different ones. Not for long, usually. Just a few weeks, as if it were a hotel. Not long enough to get to know the likes of me. Pleasant men, mind. Always men, too, on their own.”