The Villa of Mysteries nc-2

by David Hewson

  She couldn’t wait that long, though. Regina Morrison was itching to get on with her tale.

  “I’ll pass it on. Promise.”

  “I’m sure you will,” the woman chuckled. “The truth is I was about to fire him. It’s just one nasty job after another here at the moment. They brought me in from outside for a reason. No one local, and certainly no one Italian, was going to face up to the… difficulties that needed cleaning up. I may as well tell you. It’s going to come out anyway one day. Maladministration. Fraud. Some exceedingly dubious academic projects. And Randolph Kirk. A wonderful scholar, one of the best of his generation at Cambridge apparently. But a lonely little man with a lonely little man’s habits. He couldn’t keep his hands to himself. Most academics move on once in a while. That’s the way to get more money. Not Randolph. He stayed here for a reason, my dear. He had to. If he’d pulled some of his tricks anywhere else he’d be out of work for life, sued for every penny he owned, and possibly in jail too.”

  For a moment, Teresa felt like a cop, standing on the brink of some important discovery. It was a wonderful sensation. “Tricks?”

  “He molested young women. The younger the better. I don’t know the full extent of what went on. Back home we’re like the Americans. Girls scream sexual assault if someone says they’re wearing a nice dress. Why Sigmund Freud settled in Vienna is beyond me. We’re ten times more anal in Edinburgh. Here it’s the opposite. Everyone keeps their mouths shut. Maybe they think it goes with the course. All the same, I had enough evidence to terminate him within six weeks of falling into this chair, and had your gun-wielding colleague not intervened I would have done it very soon. Trust me.”

  Teresa tapped the book. “Was it connected with what he wrote?”

  Regina Morrison smiled back at her across the desk. “You and I think along the same lines. Remarkable. I read that a couple of years ago. Then when I turned up here and started hearing some stories about the real Randolph I read it again. You needed to meet the man to understand this. He wasn’t just writing history. He was laying out the grounds for some kind of personal philosophy of his, one he thought he was copying from those rituals. You know what I think? He played it out. He persuaded some of those gullible girls. He convinced them what they were doing was worth a try somehow. I can’t believe they were fooled by all his mumbo-jumbo, mind, but you know what girls are. Perhaps there was something in it for them. Whatever. My guess is he put on one of those masks he was always writing about, pretended he was the great god himself and had his fun. It didn’t fool anyone else, of course. The kids knew why they were doing it. To get the right grades or something. If old Randolph invited along a few visitors—and I suspect he did because he was a man who desperately needed to be told how clever he was every living second of the day—I don’t imagine they bought into his fancy myths either. They were just having a little fun for free. I’m guessing there, which is something no academic should do, but I feel it’s right anyway. I talked to a couple of ex-students. They’re just too scared to tell, to be honest. I wonder why.”

  Teresa’s pulse was racing. There had to be evidence here. There had to be something Regina Morrison could give her.

  “Do you have names? Places?”

  The woman on the other side of the desk eyed her suspiciously. “You could get me into big trouble. You think I haven’t put enough noses out of joint around here already? They brought me in to sort things out. That kind of work never makes you popular. Once I’m finished firing then they fire me. That’s the way it goes. But I don’t want to give them any early excuses.”

  “Regina,” she said, taking care to pronounce the name perfectly, “this isn’t an academic exercise. It’s not about finding out why Randolph Kirk died. Not directly. There’s a girl who’s gone missing. Right now. Maybe she’s been abducted. Maybe she went willingly, not knowing what she was in for. But I’m sure it’s something to do with all this. There was evidence in her apartment. A thyrsus. Some other items. That’s why I went to see him in the first place.”

  Teresa Lupo looked at her watch. She needed to get back to the morgue. There were so many questions to ask this unusual, intelligent stranger, and so little time.

  “But if Randolph’s dead—” Regina Morrison wondered. “Surely she’s safe. You don’t think he went around abducting these girls. He couldn’t do that. Not—”

  Regina Morrison hesitated.

  “Not what?”

  “Not on his own.” The Scotswoman’s composure was broken for a second or two. Teresa could see she genuinely was worried. “Look,” she said, toying with the photo of the dog in front of her. “I’ve been sitting here all morning waiting for you people to turn up. Where have you been? Who are you to start shouting ”urgent“ now? When I heard what had happened to Randolph last night I came in here late and took a little look around his office. A raid you might say. I thought I’d get in there before you people did. I didn’t understand your timekeeping habits then, you understand.”

  “You broke into his office?” Teresa gasped, a little in awe.

  Regina Morrison tapped her nameplate. “That’s what titles are for. I came up with something too, locked away in a drawer with some teeny little padlock on it. Randolph hadn’t a clue, you know. The man was utterly unworldly. You don’t seem the squeamish sort, Teresa. Am I right?”

  “I’m a pathologist.”

  “Sorry. I meant ”prudish.“ ”

  “Me?”

  Regina Morrison opened a drawer and passed over a manila folder. On the cover, written in a sloping, intelligent hand, was scrawled a single word: “Maenads.” And a picture was glued there too, a print of a familiar ancient theatre mask, howling through an exaggerated mouth. Then she leaned across the desk and said, in a conspiratorial whisper, “You know who they were, don’t you? The Maenads?”

  “Remind me,” Teresa hissed, snatching through the pages of typed text and photographs, breathless, head reeling.

  “The followers of the god. Call him Dionysus. Call him Bacchus. Either works. The Maenads were his women. He—or by implication—his followers—made them initiates through these mysteries of theirs.”

  Teresa’s fingers were racing through the documents. “What happened exactly? At these mysteries?”

  “Not even Randolph claimed to know that. Not exactly. From what we discussed I think he had a better idea than he put in that book, though. It was a ritual, Teresa. It’s important you remember that.”

  She paused over a page of incomprehensible text. “Why?”

  “Because rituals are formal. They have a structure. Nothing happens by accident. These girls weren’t snatched from the street. Some of them volunteered. Some of them were gifts from their family.”

  “What?” It seemed incomprehensible to her. “Why would any mother or father do that?”

  “Because they thought it was right. Why not? Plenty of girls get given to the church today to become nuns. Is it that different?”

  She thought of the book. “Nuns don’t get raped.”

  “They’re both offerings to their chosen god. The difference lies in the detail. Take out some of the weirder parts—the parts Randolph liked—it’s not that different. Gifts or volunteers, they submitted to the ceremony. They became brides of the god. It’s just that the Dionysians consummated that marriage, physically, in the shape of some hanger-on like Randolph, I imagine.”

  “And afterwards?”

  “Afterwards they belonged to him. And the men who followed him. They worshipped him. Or them. Once a year he returned to meet his new brides and renew his gift for those who’d gone before. He gave them all that they wanted: ecstasy, frenzy. If Randolph was right, the nasty parts, the violence and the unbridled sexual encounters, occurred after the marriage, not during it. They enjoyed what we would call an orgy. Pure, mindless, dangerous, liberating. Then they went back to their homes and were good mothers for another year. Have you read The Bacchae, or is Euripides not to your taste?”

&
nbsp; “Not recently.”

  Regina Morrison reached into the bookshelf behind her and took out a slim, blue leather-backed volume. “Borrow it if you like. You can interpret the story in a number of ways. The liberal tradition says it’s an analogy for the dual nature of humanity, the need to give our wild side an outlet now and then because if we don’t it will surface anyway, when we least want it. The natural order breaks down. People get torn limb from limb by crazy women thirsty for blood just because someone broke the rules, unwittingly even.”

  She leaned forward over the desk. “Do you want to know what I think?”

  Teresa Lupo wasn’t sure she did but, all the same, found herself asking, “What?”

  “It’s just about men and power and sex. How they can have it whenever they want, regardless of how a woman feels. And how we’re supposed to be grateful however much we hate it because, well, let’s face things, the god lives with them, not us, and the only way we get a taste is if we let them put a little bit of him inside us. Are you getting my drift?”

  “Oh, I am, I am,” Teresa agreed.

  “One doesn’t wish to appear the puritan, Teresa. As a Scotswoman I am all too aware of that. There’s nothing wrong with—what was it that American woman called it?—the ”zipless fuck.“ Everyone likes some mindless carnality from time to time. Half an hour of pleasure and nothing to think of afterwards. You must have done the same?”

  Teresa Lupo looked at the staid, elegant woman opposite her and after a while could still only think of one thing to say. “Yes.”

  “But a quick fuck in the dark’s not the same, is it? Old Randolph planned all this. It’s all just so damnably male.”

  “Agreed. We must have dated the same men over the years, Regina, believe me.”

  “I don’t date men anymore,” Regina Morrison said very sweetly. “Where’s the hunt? Where’s the challenge? When you know they’re panting for it anyway, with whomever or whatever they can find, what’s the point? Here. Let me give you my card. My mobile’s on there.”

  “Right,” she replied, cursing her own stupidity, taking the item from the woman’s slim hand in any case.

  “It’s a question of timing,” Regina Morrison said. “Everything is.”

  Teresa looked again at the file. There were pages and pages. And photographs. Lots of photographs.

  “What is?” she asked idly.

  “Finding this girl is your idea, isn’t it? That’s why you’re here on your own. The police don’t think there’s any connection.”

  Teresa stared at her. The woman had been two steps ahead all along. It was disquieting. “They’re not sure.”

  “You’d best hope they’re right and you’re wrong, my dear. Think about the dates.”

  “The dates?”

  “You read the book. Tomorrow is Liberalia. The day for making new Maenads. And the day the old ones come out to play.”

  “Yes. I know that.” She thought of Nic Costa. “We know that.”

  Regina Morrison smiled at her, bemused. “You seem somewhat… distracted.”

  Teresa Lupo took out one photo from the folder and placed it on the desk. Then she stifled a sneeze with a lone finger.

  It was an old picture, shot secretly like the rest, in poor interior light using a cheap camera. Home-developed probably, which explained the thin, washed-out colours. That and its age. She could just about make out the images on the walls in the background. They were almost the same as the dancing fauns and leering satyrs in Kirk’s book, from the place that seemed to double as his strange, private playground at Ostia. But not quite. This was somewhere different. The paintings looked even older, and more sinister somehow. The place looked larger too. Perhaps he’d found the Villa of Mysteries and kept it for this one particular purpose.

  Barbara Martelli was in the centre of the shot. She wore a plain white tee-shirt and jeans. She looked so young, just a teenage kid, so sweet it almost hurt. Teresa Lupo’s head hurt trying to reconcile these conflicting images into some sane, comprehensible whole: innocence on the verge of being spoiled, of entering the long path that would transform this lovely kid into a murderous black-helmeted insect. Was the beast in her already, a cocoon of hate and death just waiting, growing over the years?

  She didn’t want to look too closely at the figure next to Barbara. It was Eleanor Jamieson. That much was quite clear. But seeing the girl like this—alive, full of spark and expectation—was almost more than Teresa Lupo’s pained, congested head could bear. She’d come to think of her as a mummified corpse on a shining silver table. This image made her something else, a real, looming presence haunting Teresa’s head, and emphasized, almost to breaking point, the enormity of her death. This was all before. The god hadn’t visited them yet. Maybe they never even knew he was on the way.

  And one more thing, one crazy, nagging idea that couldn’t be dismissed. Teresa was unable to forget the pictures of Suzi Julius she’d seen. She and Eleanor were so alike they could almost have been sisters, smiling teenage siblings from the same template of classic blonde beauty. The thyrsus, the tattoo, the seeds… all these coincidences paled next to the physical resemblance they bore to one another, and it was this, she knew, that had triggered Suzi’s disappearance, this alone that made her reach the bottom of some long, dark narrow street and get called into the shadows. Someone who knew what had happened sixteen years ago found his memory jogged when he saw this lovely young stranger walking down the street. The wheel turned. The ritual was in motion.

  “Teresa?” Regina Morrison looked worried. “Are you OK?”

  “I’m fine,” she said softly, then coughed and felt the mucus move painfully inside her temples. “I need to take these documents.”

  Regina Morrison nodded. “Of course. Sure you’re all right? You look as if you could use that drink.”

  “No. I’m fine.”

  She was lying. Her eyes had started itching again, stinging cruelly.

  She looked into Eleanor’s face. It had never happened like this before. They were always dead, truly dead, long dead, dead and gone forever, when they fell beneath her knife. A switch had been turned: life went from on to off, with nothing in between and nothing after.

  She remembered cowering in Randolph Kirk’s scruffy little office, remembered what happened when she heard the shots, how something appeared to pass through her with a sudden resigned rush, like the last gasp of a departing persona.

  When she stared at Eleanor Jamieson she felt the same sensation, the same lack of certainty about herself and what she did for a living. Just to pay the bills, to feed the prurient maw of the state. And now Suzi Julius was out there, walking in these same shadows, towards the same destination, with no one in the Questura paying sufficient attention because Teresa Lupo, Crazy Teresa, had taken matters into her own hands, pretended she was something she wasn’t and made it all worse.

  “Teresa,” Regina Morrison said. “Here’s a tissue. Take it.”

  “Thanks,” she said, and put down the page, her hand trembling, her vision awash with tears, gulping at the whisky, gulping at another too when Regina Morrison briskly refilled the glass.

  FALCONE CAST an interested eye at the bunch of men lurking on the first floor of Neri’s house. Then the fat old hood hurriedly ushered him and Rachele D’Amato upstairs.

  “I didn’t realize you had guests,” Falcone said. “And you answer the door yourself these days. Servants getting too expensive?”

  “I don’t need any damn servants,” Neri retorted. “Don’t give me any shit, Falcone. I could’ve turned you back at the door. You got no papers that give you the right to walk into a man’s home like this. And her—”

  Neri looked right through D’Amato. “So you two are on speaking terms these days? I heard that ended when the sheets started to get cold.”

  “This is business,” she said briskly, then followed Neri into a large living room furnished expensively with a minimum of taste: modern leather sofas and armchairs, reproduction p
aintings on the plain cream walls, and a big glass table at the centre.

  Two people sat on the couch: a slim attractive woman in her thirties, with fiery reddish gold hair and striking, angry features, and a slightly younger man, slim, nervous, with dark, shifty eyes and a bad bleach job.

  “I don’t have a lawyer on the premises,” Neri said. “So you can talk in front of my family. That way if you invent stuff I’ve got witnesses.”

  Falcone nodded.

  “You didn’t introduce us,” the woman said. “I’m Adele. His wife.”

  “Current wife,” Neri added.

  “True,” she agreed. “This is Mickey. My stepson. Say hello to the nice policeman, Mickey. And stop twitching like that. It pisses me off. Quit gawping at the lady too.”

  Mickey ceased fiddling with his fingers and muttered, “Pleasure.”

  Neri fell into a large, fat armchair next to them and waved Falcone and D’Amato to the table. “I’d offer you coffee but fuck it. Why are you here? What am I supposed to have done now?”

  “Nothing,” Falcone said. “Just a social visit.”

  Neri’s big chest heaved with a dry laugh.

  “When we decide you’ve done something, Emilio, it won’t be just the two of us who turn up,” Rachele D’Amato said, amused by the way Mickey was still staring at her. “We’ll have lots and lots of people. And the TV crews, the newspapers too. I just know they’re going to hear of it.”

  “Not gonna happen,” Neri muttered. “Never. There’s no reason for it.”

  She nodded at his son. “Do we take him in too? Is he part of the family firm now?”

  “You tell me. You DIA scum never give up spying on me. What do you think?”

  She smiled at Mickey. He blushed a little and stared at his feet.

  “I think he doesn’t look like you. Maybe he doesn’t act like you. I don’t know.”

  “No,” Neri agreed. “You don’t know. Tell you what. If you want someone to keep your statistics up you can take him now. Take her too if you feel like it, so long as…” He took a good look at them when he said this. “… they get to share the same cell. She’s got more brains than him though. You might find it harder fitting her up.”