by David Hewson
“Unless it’s over already,” she suggested. “The American’s thrown in the towel.”
Peroni didn’t look convinced. “Maybe. A part of me hopes that’s so. The trouble is, I can’t help thinking that if that is the case we’ll never get to the bottom of anything. We never get to understand why poor Barbara whacked the professor and then drove into that big hole chasing you.”
This repetitive refrain was beginning to piss her off. “Poor Barbara… Why’s she always ”poor Barbara“?”
He seemed surprised by the question. “Because she’s dead, Teresa. And whatever happened, whatever she tried to do to you, it wasn’t her. It was something else. Something that affected her. Surely you can see that?”
She could, but she didn’t want to face it just then. She’d come close to the edge herself at times. There was craziness in the air.
“What about poor Suzi Julius?”
He shrugged and looked abruptly despondent. “We thought we had a sighting last night. Just before the bangy thing went off. Nic went over there to chase it.” Peroni hesitated, reluctant to go on.
“Well?” she wondered.
“Haven’t heard a word from him since. His phone’s dead. No sign of him in the street. Never went home.”
It always happened with bad news. A picture of the person involved just flew into her head. Teresa Lupo had, maybe unwittingly, got very close to Costa over the last year. He had qualities she didn’t see in abundance around the Questura: persistence, compassion and a dogged sense of justice. And he never caught the cynicism bug either, which, perhaps more than anything, made him stand out from the crowd. “Oh crap. What the hell can have happened?”
“We have no idea,” Peroni said honestly. “But I like that young man, Teresa. He is going to be driving me around when I go back to my old job. No one’s taking that privilege away from me.”
He flexed those big shoulders and she began to understand something else about Peroni. He wasn’t a man to give up easily.
“You could have told me about Nic earlier.”
“I didn’t want to worry you.”
“So what do you want from me?” she asked again.
“Look, I’m not telling you how to do your job. Nor is this a request from Falcone or anything. To be honest with you, everyone back there’s clutching at straws anyway. I just want to say this. We’re all short on resources right now. We all have to think about priorities. You’re a good pathologist, you know the rules, you stick by them, mostly—”
She finished the coffee, looked him in the eye and said, “Cut the crap.”
“OK, OK. I just can’t help thinking that somewhere in that workload of yours there’s something that can help us. And it’s not going to be in the obvious places, or the most recent ones. I know you got to do it on all those poor bastards. I was just hoping you wouldn’t kind of focus on the easy ones first. I mean, Toni Martelli, the accountant guy. Those people from outside Neri’s house. We know how they died. We need forensic, sure, but I don’t think our answer’s going to come from looking at those corpses. Whereas—”
He left it at that, hoping she’d pick up the bait.
“Whereas—?” she wondered.
“Oh God. Do I have to say this? You were right all along. Whatever prompted this shit began with that kid we dug out of the bog. If we could work out what the hell happened to her, and where, then maybe we’d get some better perspective on what’s going on.”
She looked across at the skinny bartender playing with his ponytail and said, “After you’ve washed your hands you can make me another coffee.” The youth slunk off to the kitchen then returned and started working the espresso machine.
Peroni eyed her, just a hint of admiration in his face. “You’re direct, Teresa. I like that in a woman.”
“This Mickey Neri. He killed Barbara’s old man. The Julius woman identified him hanging around her daughter too.”
“Yeah?”
“And if I recall correctly,” she continued, “this same Mickey Neri met Eleanor Jamieson. I saw the notes. They said Wallis and she took a family holiday in Sicily with the Neris six weeks or so before she died.”
“Stands to reason—”
“Oh yes.” She swallowed half the cup of coffee and felt the caffeine and sugar buzz start to hit the back of her head.
“You want to be careful with that stuff,” he said. “It can give you nightmares.”
“I don’t need coffee for that. Do you?”
Peroni glanced at his watch. “Well?”
“We haven’t touched any of yesterday’s,” she said. “Well, hardly anyway. I spent most of last night trying to complete the autopsy on Eleanor Jamieson. I did try to come up and talk to you people about this. Around two thirty. If I recall correctly, you were all too busy.”
His mouth hung open, hungry for information. Quite deliberately she slowly finished the coffee then wiped out the dregs with her index finger and sucked it, making little squeaks of pleasure all the time.
“Please—” he begged.
“I got it wrong, twice over, big time. She wasn’t some virgin sacrifice. Or to be more accurate, she may have been a sacrifice but she wasn’t a virgin. I was wrong too that you couldn’t get any DNA out of a body that’s been sitting in all that acid peat for sixteen years. There’s one circumstance that allows this.” She looked at him. “You want to guess?”
“No!”
“If there’s a foetus. Even a tiny one. Eleanor Jamieson was pregnant. Six weeks or so I’d say. Probably just at the stage she was starting to notice, starting to wonder whether she dare tell the father.”
Peroni’s eyes were shining with hope and outright joy. “Jesus, you beautiful woman.”
“I said to cut the crap. The point is that she’s pregnant six weeks or so after she met Mickey Neri, who’s now been hanging around her look-alike, a sixteen-year-old kid who happens to have disappeared.”
It came so suddenly she wished she’d had the time and the strength to react. Gianni Peroni stepped forward, grabbed her face with both hands, then kissed her rapidly on the lips. She sat, transfixed. The ponytailed waiter was staring at the pair of them.
“Don’t ever do that again,” she whispered. Then added, “Not without asking first.”
“Give me more.”
“I don’t have any more,” she objected. “Not until the lab gets back on the DNA.” She smiled. “We’ve Mickey Neri on file already. He was accused of rape two years ago. Somehow the thing never got to court. It could be waiting on my desk right now.”
“Oh sweet Jesus.”
Gianni Peroni was beaming. “Don’t even think of kissing me again,” she warned. “Too early in the morning. Just go and find Nic, will you?”
“Yeah,” he agreed, nodding. “You bet.”
He stopped and stared out into the road. A tall dark figure was walking across the road, towards the Questura. It was Vergil Wallis, leather coat flapping around his shins, striding deliberately like a man with a mission.
“Two miracles in a minute,” Peroni murmured. “Maybe there is a God.”
NIC COSTA WOKE UP on a large, old double bed in an enclosed chamber that stank of damp. A single yellow bulb cast a pool of waxy light into the cold, dusty room. His head hurt. He ran his fingers gingerly over the faint, tender bump on the back of his scalp then sat upright, legs over the side of the bed, trying to think. His jacket lay crumpled on the floor. Costa picked it up. The mobile phone was still in the pocket. He stared at the screen in vain. He was deep inside the rock of the Palatine now. There was no chance of a signal. No sign of his gun either, or a soul anywhere nearby.
He stood up, paused for a moment to let the pain at the back of his head subside, then walked around the room. It looked like the kind of place Randolph Kirk would have used, professionally and for his private pleasure too. There were paintings on the walls, old, rough ones, never retouched over the centuries. He stared at the images that, just like at Ostia, ran arou
nd the place in a continuous frieze a good metre deep. It was the same theme that he’d seen in the underground chamber by the coast, an initiation ceremony. A young girl, more puzzled than frightened on this occasion, was being led through a crowd of revellers, only some of them human.
As he walked round the room, following the story, he realized this was different somehow. The rape looked more like seduction here. The girl seemed passive, willing even, with bright, knowing eyes and the hint of pleasure in her face. There was a graphic depiction of her coupling with the god, locked in his powerful arms, eyes closed, mouth just open, ecstatic, but this was no longer the final piece in the saga. It appeared midway through the frieze and was followed by some kind of frenzied orgy, in which the girl took part voluntarily, watching the fights and the lovemaking, the vicious wrestling bouts and the acts of bloody violence around her with a nonchalant sense of detachment. Then, in the last frame, she was the central figure once more. The girl stood in front of the god who was now tethered to a stake, his arms held both by ropes and the grip of two female acolytes, his body shrinking in fear. Now she held a knife which she plunged into his right eye. Blood soaked his dreadlocks. A silent scream rose from his throat. The girl was laughing like a maniac and Costa found himself thinking of Randolph Kirk, slaughtered in his grimy little office by a Maenad much like this one, greedy for vengeance over some unseen, unexplained crime. Had the “god” failed her, and Barbara too in some mysterious way? Was she now more important than him? Or was this simply the last part of an intrinsically inexplicable drama, the fury in which every participant, man and woman, human and mythical, visited the extremes of their imagination?
The simple answer—that the god, and by implication Kirk and his associates, were exploiters of young women—didn’t fit this story. There was, Costa realized, some form of reward on both parts, and some kind of revenge if, for whatever reason, the bargain wasn’t kept.
He forced himself to stop examining the pictures. They had a hypnotic, openly erotic quality that drew him in, made it hard to think of anything else. Costa scanned the corners, his eyes becoming more used to the shade. There was a door, dimly visible in the shadows beyond the bed. He walked towards it and touched the surface: old, tough wood. It was locked but as he rattled the handle he heard a sound from the other side: a surprised gasp, not far away. And female.
He thought of the night before and the bright blonde head disappearing into the maw of the cave, that repeated again and again in the photographs that covered the walls of the central chamber. Costa drew himself close to the crevice and tried to peer through. The wood wasn’t a perfect fit. There was light on the other side, the same dim, faint luminescence as in his own chamber.
“Suzi—” he whispered through the crack. Someone moved on the far side. He heard her breathing.
“Suzi—” he said again, more loudly. “My name is Nic Costa. I’m a police officer. Please look at the door. See if you can let me in. Let me help you.”
The person on the other side didn’t make a sound. He tried to put himself in her shoes: trapped, lost in this labyrinth, not knowing what to do, or who to trust.
“I talked to your mother,” he said in a normal, controlled voice. “She’s worried about you. This will all work out. Trust me. Please.”
He thought he heard a choked sob. Maybe she wasn’t alone. Maybe Mickey Neri was there, holding a knife to her throat, trying to work out what to do with the pair of them. Costa hadn’t thought about his own fate for a moment. Now that he did, something puzzled him. Why had Mickey let him live at all? If Neri just wanted him out of the way he’d surely be dead, or somewhere far from the heart of what was going on.
“Suzi—” he said for one last time.
There was a sound on the other side of the door: a bolt being drawn back.
Costa made a conscious effort to think like a cop again. He needed a weapon. He needed to know where they were, how the hell they could find a way out of this damp, stinking place.
The door didn’t move. He heard footsteps receding on the other side.
“It’s OK,” he said. He took hold of the handle, turned it and pushed gingerly. The old wood creaked open. On the other side was a room much like the one he’d woken in: small, almost circular, with paintings round the wall, a double bed with a single light bulb above it, and opposite, in the shadows, another door.
She stood against it with her back to him, hair shining under the wan light, shoulders hunched, crying he guessed, most likely terrified.
Nic Costa walked over and put his hands on her shoulders, unable to take his eyes off that bright, gleaming head of hair.
“Suzi—”
She turned suddenly and thrust her face into his chest, threw her arms around him, clenching his back hard with her hands.
He held the taut, slim body, his head beginning to spin, trying to work out why this felt wrong.
Her mouth worked its way to his neck. Warm, damp lips brushed his skin, a tongue flickered against day-old bristle.
Automatically, his hand went to her head, felt the soft hair, pushed her gently away.
“Suzi—” he said, then was quiet.
It was as if two people had merged into one. Or as if they had never been quite separate in the first place.
Tears starting to stain her cheeks, her face framed by this bright shock of too-young hair, Miranda Julius looked up at him, pleading, drawing him ever closer.
“I’m sorry, Nic,” she said. “I didn’t want you here. I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be,” he whispered, and found his hands roaming her shoulders, holding her tight to him, his lips close to her shining head, his eyes locked on the figures dancing over the walls.
BEYOND THE GLASS of Leo Falcone’s office the Questura buzzed furiously. For once the rival forces of the DIA and the carabinieri were making an effort to work in tandem, sharing information, scouring the streets for any sign of Emilio Neri. The old hood had gone to ground, and it was clear he had done it well. For all Falcone knew he could be out of the country already. The networks of informers used by all three organizations had come up with a few nuggets of information. They told him what he already suspected: the blast outside the house in the Via Giulia was Neri’s own work, a parting gift deliberately timed for the arrival of the police. There would be no return. From this point on Neri would hide out abroad, doubtless somewhere he believed the Italian extradition laws would never reach him.
Vergil Wallis sat opposite wearing his long leather overcoat, a brown travel bag on his lap, black face impassive as a rock, and said, “I’m glad you made time for me in the middle of all this.”
“You seemed to think it was important,” Falcone replied.
“It is.” Wallis opened the bag and took out a digital camera, turned on the screen, and passed it over the table.
“What the hell’s that?” Falcone asked.
“Got thrown over my wall at three this morning,” Wallis said. “With this.” He held up a mobile phone. “Started the dogs barking. I’m surprised those people you’ve got outside never saw who did it.”
Falcone screwed up his eyes at the picture on the little screen. “They’re not ours. That was the DIA’s job.”
He picked up the camera. Peroni came and stood behind him then swore softly under his breath. The picture was of Nic Costa unconscious, lying on a bed in an anonymous room.
“This is my fault,” Peroni groaned.
Falcone pressed a button. The next picture was of Miranda Julius, her hair dyed the same bright blonde they all now associated with her daughter, scowling at the lens, tied to a chair. Then a third. The lighting was slightly different this time. More harsh. It looked as if the picture had been taken in different circumstances. The face was that of a young girl, with the same blonde hair, looking vacantly into the camera. She too was tied to a chair, but somewhere else.
“That’s the missing girl?” Wallis asked.
“Suzi Julius,” Peroni confirmed. “We got
the pictures her mother gave us. It’s her.”
The big black figure folded his coat around him as if it were a second skin. “There’s a message too. Play the last thing you find.”
They did. It was a little video of Mickey Neri staring straight into the lens, looking scared as hell, glancing around him as if someone else was giving the orders. Mickey gulped once then said, in a mock-tough voice, “Vergil, you bring what I want at ten. Use the phone. I’ll call you and tell you where to collect at seven. At nine I call and tell you where to deliver. You’ll know the way. Don’t come with anyone else. Don’t fuck with me. Do anything other than this and they’re dead.”
“For all we know they’re dead already,” Peroni murmured.
“Maybe,” Wallis agreed testily. “I can’t tell you one way or the other. This is none of my business. What am I supposed to be here? Some kind of messenger boy? What’s going on, huh? Can you tell me that?”
Falcone scanned through the pictures again. “Did you get the call at seven?”
“On the dot. Sent me round to some private banker out in Paroli. He was waiting. He’d had a call too. Got this packed. As soon as I saw it I knew I was passing it on to you guys.”
Wallis opened the bag. It was full of brand-new banknotes, big denominations, still with the ties around them. “Half a million euros there.”
“Whose?” Peroni demanded.
“Man said it came from some woman called Miranda Julius. She’d ordered it collected overnight. Little guy was petrified. Can’t say I blame him. So why am I expected to act the bagman for this woman’s ransom money?”
Peroni glanced at Leo Falcone, checking he wasn’t going too far. “The word is Emilio Neri and his boy have fallen out big time. Over what exactly we don’t know. This Julius girl, maybe. That’s not Emilio’s style. It seems pretty clear Mickey’s the one who snatched her in the first place. Now he’s got our guy too. And the mother. He could use the money. Maybe he wants to give up the life and open a café or something.”