Costa 08 - City of Fear by David Hewson

understand why you might feel a little oppressed. I guess.”
    The pizzas arrived and Peroni asked, “Does the fact we’re talking history mean that the liver part is done with?”
    “Pretty much,” she replied, nodding. “Petrakis was a junior professor in Etruscan studies at an age when most kids would still be working on a postgrad degree. A world-class obsessive. Maybe, in his own crazy head, it makes sense to kill people like this.”
    Costa shook his head. “I don’t see it. He’s an intelligent man. Who’d believe in a separatist movement based around a civilization that was destroyed more than two thousand years ago?”
    “You can never apply logic to terrorism,” Falcone suggested.
    “I’m not sure about that,” Costa insisted. “This man was capable enough to escape from Italy, then hide away in Afghanistan for two decades. To deal with weapons. Money. Why would he take to pretending to read the future through butchering another human being, the way some primitive tribe did?”
    Teresa Lupo frowned at him with the disappointed expression of a teacher failed by a bright pupil. Now that she and Peroni had settled into a relationship that seemed more close, and happy, than many marriages, she was beginning to resemble the big man. The same love of food was visible in their stout, healthy frames, and a similarly skeptical approach to the world in their pale, engaged faces.
    “He didn’t,” she told him. “First, the Etruscans didn’t indulge in human sacrifice. They would have been horrified by the very idea. Their priests slaughtered animals, not men.”
    She skimmed her fingers over the phone and brought up new photos. Costa stared at pastoral scenes of dancing and celebrations, tall, elegant women, bearded, handsome men. Then more, these photos vividly sexual in nature.
    “The Estruscans weren’t brutal primitives just emerging from the Iron Age, either. More like colonizing Greek hippies. The Romans thought them degenerate and debauched. Uncontrollable hedonists who did what they wanted, when they wanted, to anyone they chose.”
    “And then?” Peroni asked, interested now that the conversation had moved on.
    “Then along came Rome. The Estruscans got assimilated. We beat them at war, looked at their culture, adopted what we liked, and destroyed the rest. The Etruscans were the victims of what we think of as civilization. Organized society, materialism, greed, pursued by a single-minded and fierce warlike state.
Us
. The Romans marched north and eradicated their language, their customs … everything. It says here that sophisticated ancient Romans were bemoaning the death of Etruscan culture as early as the first century A.D . They looked on it as a lost golden age, a kind of paradise, one they’d destroyed themselves.”
    Peroni put down his knife and fork. “That boy. The one we think killed Batisti …”
    “Batisti was shot,” Falcone reminded him.
    “Fine, fine.” Peroni’s large, bloodless face contorted in puzzlement. “The boy was dressed up as if he was in some kind of ceremony. That knife he had. The blood on him. Maybe he believed he was the Blue Demon. Whatever that was.”
    “A figure from Etruscan mythology,” Teresa interjected. More taps at the phone, yet another set of photos, one of them recognizable from the briefing in the Quirinale. “There are plenty of their burial sites north of here, near Viterbo, Grosseto, Tarquinia, in the Maremma. The early ones depict a paradise that’s almost Christian. A happy afterlife, parents meeting with their children. Our idea of Heaven. Then this.”
    She brought up the most vivid of the pictures: the long-bearded blue face, the eyes that burned, fangs dripping blood.…
    “I know that face,” Peroni said.
    “We all do, Gianni. It’s Satan. The bringer of damnation. Before the Blue Demon came along, the Etruscans inhabited a world that was either good or nothing. After this charming gentleman turned up, the place possessed