A Cold Flame: A gripping crime thriller that will keep you hooked

Rossi walked over to a fountain and splashed his face, trying not to imagine the worst that could be about to greet them when they finally got news about the occupants’ fate. As he looked up again, Carrara was returning. He’d got something.

“Registered in the name of a prominent local politician, the Honourable Mimmo Carducci,” he said. “But some of the neighbours are saying there’s an African family living there, fairly recently arrived.”

Rossi pondered the information.

“But no one’s been calling for help from any of the windows, back or front,” he said finally. They both knew what that meant: that smoke inhalation could have done for them already.

The fire crews were gathered and assessing the level of danger. Nineteenth-century building. No reinforced concrete, a lot of wood in the ceilings. Parts of it could collapse at any moment.

“Family of four. Nigerian asylum seekers,” said the chief fire officer.

Behind him a squadron of four men had begun donning breathing apparatus.

“I’m sending them in,” he continued, “if there’s half a chance of finding anyone alive. But it doesn’t look promising.”

Rossi put an anxious hand to his face.

Carrara, who had dashed off again, was now concluding a rapid discussion with another local family who had pulled up in a car. There was a lot of nodding of heads, then some cries of either pain or happiness. It was hard to be sure. Then Carrara turned back towards Rossi and raised a hand in what appeared to be a sign of victory and as a signal to call off the search.

“A lucky escape,” said Carrara, the relief on his face clearly visible.

The house had been empty. When Carrara had finally spoken to the absent occupant, a Nigerian university professor in exile, it emerged that as the dramatic scenes had been playing out on the street in Parioli he, his children and their friends had been playing blind man’s buff in someone’s converted cellar in Trastevere where there was no cell phone signal. Friends of theirs had organized a surprise party. The guy hadn’t had even an inkling of the plan and they had all left the house at the last minute. The father had seen the missed calls only when he went out for a cigarette.

Rossi tried to rub the stress out of his face as Carrara dialled a number.

“I’m calling the professor now.”

The fire crew were removing their apparatus as they awaited further orders. This one at least had turned out for the better and their cold beers would go down a lot easier when this shift ended.

The Parioli fire had now pushed the Prenestina case off their agenda. Rossi and Carrara had driven back to the office in the Alfa Romeo to weigh it all up.

“Initial findings say that the house was torched,” said Carrara. “Accelerants and a relatively sophisticated timed incendiary device were used. The occupant has been confirmed as being the exiled Nigerian writer and professor – Chini Okoli – and his family, living there as guests of the Honourable Mimmo Carducci, who had given them the run of one of the houses he had in his portfolio.”

“Portfolio?” said Rossi sitting up. “What do we know about him?”

“Ex PCI, Italian Communist Party. Now part of the wobbly left-of-centre alliance. Well-to-do Roman family, connections with the university, family law firm. Active overseas in human rights work. The usual story. Seems there was a network of friends of friends in academic circles. They helped out with solidarity missions for Palestine and Brazil.”

This was certainly different to the Prenestina fire but whether or not it was connected he didn’t know. Racial, maybe, but if they had targeted an intellectual, given the context – Nigeria, asylum seekers – it had political written all over it.

“So, technically, it was a bomb. An incendiary. When can we speak to Okoli?”

“I think he might need a night off first, don’t you?” said Carrara.

Rossi nodded but knew he would need to see him as soon as was practicable, to get a handle on any motives, but there were other elements which were already interesting him.

He got up and opened the door of the office’s mini fridge. No beers left. He went then to the bottom drawer of the filing cabinet and pulled out a bottle of Jameson’s twelve-year-old reserve.

“What have you got?” said Carrara. He could see Rossi might already be onto something.

“First up,” said Rossi, pouring a large and a disgracefully small measure for himself and Carrara respectively, “the surprise party. It was so well concealed that any intelligence the firebombers might have had didn’t reveal it either.”

“Go on,” said Carrara, warming to it now. Rossi took a bottle of water from the fridge for his whiskey, a few ice cubes for Carrara and pulled up a chair for himself.

“So, either they hadn’t been tapping the phones or they hadn’t employed the sophistication necessary to monitor, record, and translate from their private conversations in Okoli’s native language.”

“Which suggests a lack of sophistication on the part of the assailants.”

“Or plain sloppiness,” said Rossi. He took a meditative sip on his whiskey and water. It was too hot for it but he needed the kick.

“Improvised far-right aggression?” said Carrara. “A warning by way of a relatively high-profile figure?”

“Or an attempted assassination under the cover of a spontaneous race attack.”

“Riding on the back of the Prenestina business,” said Carrara.

They both considered the significance of their theorizing as they sipped on their drinks. Some unifying strategy could have been behind it. Attacking minorities, blacks, immigrants. That was Nazi-style. It also grabbed the headlines.

“Or what if we’re talking some kind of Unabomber?” said Carrara. “A lone wolf carrying out random strikes, varying his technique, leading us all a merry dance as we try to come up with some ideological motive behind it all?”

They both knew the story well. The Italian Unabomber had never been caught. He, and a he it almost certainly was, as far as the psychological profiling went, had terrorized the north of the country for over ten years with random attacks, planting pipe bombs and incendiary devices in public spaces – park benches, beaches, bus shelters and the like. He had caused only one direct fatality but had maimed and traumatized numerous members of the public. He had once booby-trapped a child’s chocolate egg.

The theory went that since the last attack some six or seven years before, he had either died, or was on an extended cooling-off period, serial-killer style. That there might be more than one, other emulators, could not be ruled out either. That he might have moved south or spawned an imitator in Rome was also a possibility.

“Perhaps someone with military experience,” said Rossi. “Someone with a generalized grudge. PTSD from Iraq or Afghanistan. The race-hate agenda might be right up his street.”

“Maybe” said Carrara. “Have you seen this?” he said then, holding up a printout.

Rossi reached across the desk. Another “potentially relevant” incident had come up on the radar from earlier in the evening. A lot of motorbikes had gone up in flames in a car park in the affluent Prati area and their none-too-pleased and, in some cases, influential owners had already been harassing the local cops.

“No casualties, no homicide,” said Rossi.

“But they want answers,” said Carrara. He was scrolling through the latest headlines and news on social media. “And those with a bit of weight to throw around are calling for ‘deployment of resources, protection of Italian interests. Get the police out of the ghettos and back in the heartlands’.”

Rossi was now beginning to toy with the idea of there being some link there too, but knew it was early days. What if someone was trying to sow chaos, stretch their resources? Crazy environmentalists maybe. There were nuts everywhere in Rome, especially when the mercury was rising. He got up and went to the window to get some air. There wasn’t much.

“Priority goes to the house fires for now,” he said turning back to face Carrara. “Send out some uniforms. Get statements, check for witnesses and CCTV. Then we’ll see.”

The others would get their precious insurance eventually. He was going to nail the real cowardly scum who got their kicks out of burning working men, women, and children in their beds.

Three

Yana was going in late to the Wellness Health and Fitness Centre, so Rossi had let her sleep. She was her own boss and could do as she pleased, but she had a business head and a work ethic that put others to shame. Plans were afoot for expansion and her hunger was plain to see. He steered clear, not understanding a thing of that world. He hoped they would find a balance, however, as his own obsessive approach to cases was not always ideal for those around him.

He laid the table for them both and then allowed himself a quiet, meditative breakfast before the sun began to emerge from behind the apartment blocks, extinguishing with all its gathering fury the night’s last vague hints of coolness. It was relentless, sapping. He lowered the shutter a few notches to keep the heat minimally at bay and then finished his coffee, leaving enough in the pot for Yana. He did a couple of yoga stretches that Yana had taught him, just so as to render the exercise not wholly perfunctory. He was sweating already and headed for the shower.

She was waking as he slipped on his lightest summer jacket.

“Don’t make yourself too beautiful,” she said through her sleep-infused languor. A strap had slipped off one shoulder of her ivory silk camisole and her smooth body was again calling, siren-like, to Rossi. He knotted his tie as loosely as decency would allow and leaned over to kiss her, his lips straying then along her neck and shoulder and into the warmth of her breasts. As Yana flopped back onto the bed the sunlight fell across her body evoking the promise of long carefree hours. But he stopped and tore himself away.

“Have to go,” he mumbled. “Gigi will be waiting.” He didn’t say where. On a morning like this, when life seemed to burst from every pore of his and their being, it was neither the time nor the place to talk of mortuaries, death, and carbonized corpses. She flopped back down onto the bed. Her strength seemed neutralized, and he couldn’t help feeling protective again, even now. A good deal of time had passed since the winter’s events but Rossi knew that doing the job he did and having the enemies he had would always mean she was vulnerable. They could always hit her to get to him. Always.

“Don’t forget to lock the door,” he said then, trying to assuage something of his guilt. As if that action would lock off his darkest and most persistent fears. As if that could stop the worst they could ever do, if they chose to.

He felt tense. The relief after tracing the professor and his family had worn off and he had slept badly, fitfully, in the near-tropical humidity, his thoughts looping as he turned over the various scenarios again and again.

The city was tense too and that same heat wasn’t helping. Grievances often rankled in the punishing summer torpor, especially in situations where numbers or circumstances created a critical mass – a crowded bus, a queue in the post office, a traffic jam. People didn’t move on with their problems here and in the stifling humidity they could fester. They were oversensitive, their assailed and worn-down egos were fragile. And August in the city was also the time of the forgotten and marginalized – the loners, the rejects; those who didn’t or couldn’t get away to summer retreats to enjoy the fruits of their year-long labours. They too had their own axes to grind.

Only the other day Yana had dared to remind a dog walker not to let his animal foul the street outside her building, and the owner in question, once he had quickly established Yana’s non-native status, had subjected her to a tirade of the most venomous abuse. Racist, misogynist, vile and frightening. A few phrases echoed now in Rossi’s mind as he remembered Yana’s stunned retelling of the event.

We wanna be the bosses in our own country!… Italy for the Italians … Burn the lot of ’em!

In another part of the city, as she stepped into the bathroom, Tiziana Belfonte amused herself by thinking again of the extra touches and final details she might add to a well-deserved holiday she had been planning. She had stayed up late the night before to profit from some of the cooler air that had finally wafted in over the city and onto her balcony. She had been organizing the vacation for months now and had decided to take it in September with a good friend in similar circumstances – happily single, feisty and ready for whatever may come, be it fair or foul.

She was also one of the tribe who liked to work through the hottest months, drawing comfort and real benefit from living in the city when it was at its most arid and deserted. True, the sleep-impaired nights could be torrid and also, being a fairly strict ecologist in her outlook, she didn’t use any artificial air-conditioning. Only adding to the source problem, wasn’t it? Heating up the atmosphere to keep you cool. It was against nature. The summer heat meant you had to slow down, find natural solutions to combat its toll on the body. As such, she enjoyed these months when an ice-cold shower before breakfast was like plunging into the waters of some imagined crystal lagoon. That would soon be a reality and the thought gave her a frisson of anticipated pleasure as the water rushed against her lightly tanned skin. She glanced at her own reflection in the misted mirror panelling, patting and caressing herself a little with satisfaction. Not bad. Not bad at all considering she’d been doing the daily grind for nearly twenty years now. Ready for action in mind and body, whatever the bastards might throw at her today.

And then she shuddered, but not because of the water as she recalled the anonymous note that had arrived just a few weeks before.

N***er lover. Bitch. Whore. We know where you live.

But she was tough, she had to be. But she was human too, and even her skin was only so thick. She also knew that the events of the previous winter – especially the body of the murdered African that she had tried so hard to get identified – still weighed on her conscience. She wondered again what might have become of Jibril, the young immigrant she was sure had some connection to the corpse he had viewed in her presence. But he had just disappeared then and the body had remained unclaimed.

As she thought about it, it stung her conscience and the holiday suddenly seemed like another cowardly attempt to flee her responsibility, an extravagance she did not deserve.

Driving in Rome in August was as close to a pleasure as it could ever get. Traffic was down to its annual minimum and a hint of space could finally be seen and felt. As Rossi looked out at the sky and its default-setting of blue, a little of his tension fell away. The air too felt cleaner, while colourful, carefree, smiling tourists seemed to mop up some more of his previous negativity with their languid sweep through the city. Tradition dictated that the lion’s share of the citizenry would be out of town for the whole month and the pervading feeling was usually one of mild and welcome liberation. In the suburbs away from the well-worn tourist trails every second shop had its shutter lowered. Closed for holidays. See you in September. But then there was also something final and obstinate about those shutters – like the sealed lips of a witness who will never speak, holding the secrets back, the unstated “Fuck You” if you want an answer. Try as he might to let the spirit of summers past dominate his thoughts, Rossi knew his work was just beginning.

Carrara was waiting under a tree as Rossi approached. He held out his newspaper so Rossi could check the front page. They’d got their story but not all the facts. “A possible electrical fault” was one theory, and Rossi had made sure they kept a lid on the forensics, at least for now. As usual the man from Puglia was looking fit and focused in an apparently laid-back way. The years in undercover anti-mafia work had kept Carrara sharp and adaptable, and family life with kids had scarcely seemed to sap his energy.

“Coffee?”

Rossi glanced at his watch.

“Why not?”

The corner bar was the only one open within walking distance and catered mainly for the skeleton staffs of the nearby public offices and time-killing locals. Most offices had coffee machines on every floor and any employee worth their salt knew which was the best. Some had their own bars too, but there was nothing like leaving the office behind for the dark gunshot of an espresso to banish the morning lethargy. Some, however, lingered over a cappuccino or a caffè latte. There were even those that didn’t bother to go back to the office at all, having clocked in, and then went about their daily tasks with complete nonchalance until they saw fit to put in at least a token appearance before lunch.

In the bar there was the usual hubbub and high-octane gossip; at peak times there would be the kind of crush more typical of a British pub on a Friday night than a café at ten o’clock in the morning. Fallen and discarded napkins and cornetti flakes littered the floor as Rossi and Carrara edged and nudged their way towards the counter to catch the bartender’s eye. Once they had been served their respective macchiato and espresso, they established themselves at a standing-only table in the corner.

“So, do we have an appointment at the morgue or do we just walk in?” said Carrara stirring his espresso with energy. “Lallana will have been already, of course. Do you think they might consider it irregular?”

Rossi stirred a half sachet of brown sugar into his macchiato.

“We just say we have a wide brief to investigate all acts of arson and we’re cross-checking facts. Thoroughness never goes amiss and Lallana’s off it now anyway. Maroni’s busy with some internal audit business. I say we press ahead until we encounter an obstacle.”

Carrara finished stirring his espresso.

“But have you got a theory about this or are you going on instinct or what?”

Rossi knocked back his coffee and waited for the rush.

“The more we know the better. I don’t like taking the easy way out. All this open verdict stuff. That’s a gift to criminals and an affront to investigative police work. We have to eliminate any doubt about this being accidental, which it can’t have been, and then find out if there was more than blind racial hate behind it. So we need to get down to the hospital before they’ve forgotten all about this Ivan guy. He might have said something. Seen something. It has to be worth a try.”

“And last night’s business? I’ve had some more info through on Okoli.”

“Set up a chat with him. What does he do?”

“Playwright, investigative journalist. Rubbed the government up the wrong way it seems.”

“So a target or a coincidence?”

“See what he has to say for himself,” Carrara replied. “I’ll give him a call.” He glanced at his watch. “Should be up and about by now.”

He moved away from the babble and noise of the bar.

A slim but strong woman, perhaps approaching forty but easily passing for five years younger, had seated herself at the bar to Rossi’s left. Her off-white summer dress was elegant without being provocative, thus going against the dominant Roman trend which saw the season’s clothing often resembling more négligées than daywear. The dress’s broad straps framed a rich, evenly tanned rectangle between her shoulder blades.

“He’s going to swing by the Questura later,” said Carrara returning to the table. “Any news on Iannelli, by the way?” he said, recapturing Rossi’s attention.

“Iannelli?” said Rossi with a pronounced exhalation. “It’s going to be a steep learning curve for Dario. Life under 24-hour police escort. I don’t know if he’s realized yet how tough it will be.”

Dario Iannelli, investigative reporter, Rossi’s long-time friend and confidante, and now with a Mafia contract out on his life. He had made it big with his scoop on high-level corruption during The Carpenter case, but had fallen foul of Cosa Nostra and had been fortunate to escape a car bomb with his life.

The woman had finished her coffee and, rising from her stool, appeared to make for the exit, but then stopped, as if struck by some sudden realization.

“Excuse the intrusion,” she said, moving back and then coming alongside Rossi and Carrara’s table. “But I couldn’t help overhearing something. You mentioned Dario Iannelli. The journalist.”

“Yes,” said Rossi. “Is there anything I can do for you?” he began and reached out to take her hand. “Inspector Michael Rossi. And this is Inspector Luigi Carrara.”

As Carrara turned to take her hand, he too was struck by her unostentatious elegance.

“Well, yes. Maybe there is.” She glanced around at the chattering clientele. “Could we talk somewhere, in private. But perhaps not in my office. I work at the hospital of legal medicine. The mortuary to be exact.”

Four

“If I don’t get the job this time then we go, right?” said Francesco. “We pack our bags and leave Italy for good.”

Paola replied on the other end of the line with the usual consternation.

“Where?” she said. “Where do we go? I mean do you have an idea, a plan?”

Francesco let out a sigh.

“To Spain, to Ireland, or Germany, or anywhere a researcher can make a decent living. Anywhere where they appreciate and value me for my knowledge and experience not just my loyalty and my contacts or my family connections.”

It was the old story. She knew it but didn’t want to hear it, and he was tired of telling her.

“But what about Mum and Dad? And your mother on her own?” she shot back.

It was true that it would be a wrench, a sacrifice for him too, but he had decided.

“Paola, I’ve had enough! I’m going to grow old here trying to get a job in the university, don’t you see? I want to settle down. I want us to settle down and have children. Then we see. And I want you to be able to choose whether or not you want to go back to work, not get thrown on the scrapheap at forty because you’ve had a kid. If we go abroad you can have that chance.”

There was a long pause. He could hear the random noises of a train station in the background. She’d called to wish him well but the conversation had turned sour. But he had to get it out in the open.

“I’ll call you later, when it’s over,” he said, with little real conviction. He wanted to be alone.

He finished his coffee and bit on a breakfast biscuit then went over again the possible questions they could ask him, trying to conjure the unforeseen from thin air, the unseen questions in the envelopes they would proffer him, smiling at him from behind the desk they so loved to interpose between themselves and the mere mortals in the other, real world. The uninitiated, the hopeful, the desperate.

So this was to be the last Concorso. He had decided. The Concorso or “public competition” was, in theory, an open, transparent method of selecting candidates for positions in state bodies or for publicly funded research projects. You applied, sending off the forms and all the relevant paperwork and then you were called to take an exam. Then you got to the interview, which was when they could do what they wanted.

He had been from pillar to post, to deliver conference papers, often at his own expense, to take low-paid temporary teaching positions in this or that university, to win a research grant, which meant he could live just above the breadline for a year. And then when the money ran out? Back to square one. In and out of offices. Up and down the country. Moving. Moving back. Working for free. This was the life of the researcher who could not count on patronage, or a powerful relative, or a favour due from on high. This was the life of that singular and sorry category of person who was not a raccomandato – not “recommended” for a job or a grant. Not useful for someone. Not worthy of being a token to flip across the baize in their feudal game.