The Villa of Mysteries

by David Hewson

  He read the last page of the report and, knowing the volatile and untrustworthy Neri as he did, understood every word. It said that Wallis and Neri had, initially, proved the best of friends. Their families had dined with each other. Six weeks before Eleanor Jamieson died, she and Wallis had spent some time on holiday with the Neri family on one of their vast estates in Sicily. Some undisclosed form of business had been done. The Americans were happy. So were the mob.

  Then, around the time of the girl’s disappearance, a coldness had entered the relationship. There had been reports that, while in Sicily, Wallis had gone over Neri’s head to talk to some of the senior bosses there, something Neri would soon learn about. There was rumour of a drug deal that had gone wrong, leaving the Americans out of pocket and angry. Neri never could resist taking people to the limit. He skimmed every last dollar that went through his hands, even after his “legitimate” cut.

  Some huge row took place between the two men. One informer even said they came to blows. After that, they were both in trouble with their bosses. Neri was told bluntly he was losing the job of linkman with the Americans. Wallis got a dressing-down too, though he continued to live in Rome for half of the year, with precious little to do except save face. It was an uneasy truce. One of Wallis’s lieutenants was murdered two months later, his throat cut in a car close to a Testaccio brothel. Not long after, a cop on Neri’s payroll was found dead in what had been made to look like suicide. Now Falcone wondered, was there a link here? Would the semimummified body of a sixteen-year-old girl raise these old ghosts from their graves? And if it did, how different would the world be now, with the DIA peering inquisitively over his shoulder every step of the way?

  Leo Falcone looked at his watch. It was just after twelve. He thought of all the careful protocols which surrounded cases involving known mobsters. Then he took out his diary and placed the call.

  “Yes?”

  Rachele D’Amato’s cool, distanced voice still had the power to move him. Falcone wondered briefly whether he was phoning her for the sake of the job or for more personal reasons. Both, he thought. Both were legitimate too.

  “I wondered whether you’d be there. Everyone else I call right now seems to be at home, sick in bed.”

  She paused. “I don’t get to bed as much as I used to, Leo. Sick or not.”

  There was a deliberate, slow certainty to her voice. Falcone understood what she was saying, or thought he did. No one else had filled her life after the affair ended. He knew that already. He’d checked from time to time.

  “I was wondering if you had time for lunch,” he said. “It’s been too long.”

  “Lunch!” She sounded pleased. “What a surprise. When?”

  “Today. The wine bar we used to go to. I was there the other evening. They have a new white from Tuscany. You should try it.”

  “I don’t take wine at lunchtimes. That’s for cops. Besides, I have an appointment. I have to run. We’ve got people sick everywhere too.”

  “Tonight then. After work.”

  “Work stops for you in the evenings these days, Leo?” she sighed. “What happened?”

  “Nothing,” he said. “I just thought . . .”

  He felt tongue-tied, embarrassed. She’d always said it was the work that drove them apart after Mary left. It wasn’t. It was him. His possessiveness. His passion for her, which was never quite returned.

  “Don’t apologize,” she said wryly. “It doesn’t stop for me either. Not anymore.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “There’s no need,” she said, and there was a new note in her voice. A serious, professional one. “You have a body. Is it Wallis’s girl?”

  “Yes,” he sighed, inwardly livid, wondering immediately who had talked.

  “Don’t sound so cross, Leo. I have a job to do too.”

  The corpse had been lying in the morgue for two weeks. Anyone could have seen the tattoo and put two and two together. It would be impossible to find out who had blabbed.

  “Of course. You’re very good these days, Rachele.”

  “Thank you.”

  He wondered why fate had made him fall in love with two lawyers. Why not women who were a little less curious? A little more forgiving?

  “Then we’ll meet,” she announced. “I’ll call you. I have to go now.”

  She didn’t even ask if it was convenient for him. Rachele never changed.

  “Leo?”

  He knew what she’d say. “Yes.”

  “This is professional. Nothing more. You do understand that?”

  Leo Falcone understood, though it didn’t stop him hoping.

  Costa crossed the busy road and headed for the Campo dei Fiori, reminding himself he used to live here and there were memories, important ones, pieces of his personality stamped on the place. He missed the Campo from time to time. He was an innocent when he lived here, young and unbruised by the world. There’d been fleeting relationships, brief flings which Gianni Peroni probably wouldn’t count as love affairs at all. There was the place too. The cobbled piazza was grubby at the best of times. The market attracted too many tourists. The prices were higher than elsewhere. Nevertheless, it was a genuine part of Rome, a living, human community that had never been dislodged from its natural home. As always, he got a small rush of pleasure when he walked along the Via dei Giubbonari and came out onto the square. The stalls were still doing good business, selling spring greens, chicory, calabrese and cavolo nero alongside vibrant oranges from Sicily, stored over the cold months and now fit for little more than juice. The mushroom stand was piled high with all kinds of funghi, fresh chiodini, dried porcini. The handful of fishmongers tucked into one corner had scallops and giant prawns, turbot and sacks of fresh mussels. He worked his way through, picking up an etto of wild rocket and the same of agretti for later. Then he added a chunk of parmesan from the lone alimentari van.

  “We got good prosciutto, Mr. Policeman,” the woman said, recognizing him. “Here . . .”

  She held out a pink strand, waving it in front of his face. If he ate meat, Nic Costa thought he’d be hard pressed to find much better in Rome. “I’ll pass.”

  “Vegetarianism is an unnatural fad,” the woman declared. “You come back here one day when you’ve got time and we’ll go through this in some detail. You worry me.”

  “Please,” Costa said. “I have enough people worrying about me just now.”

  “Means there’s something wrong.”

  He took the prosciutto anyway. When she was out of sight he gave it to the scruffy young boy belonging to the Kosovan who was always begging in the square, playing an ancient violin badly. Then he handed the father a ten-euro note. It was a ritual he’d forgotten somewhere along the line too: twice a day, every day, as his late father had always told him. Being back in the Campo reminded him why it was necessary. He’d been spending too much time on his own, closeted inside the farmhouse on the outskirts of the city, thinking. Sometimes you had to get out and let life happen to you.

  He’d just pushed his way through the crowd at Il Forno and was taking a bite of pizzetta bianca, salty and straight from the oven, when he saw what was happening. Leo Falcone was right. The Campo attracted tourists, and with the tourists came trouble. Pickpockets. Conmen. Worse sometimes. The police always had people on duty there, in uniform and out. The carabinieri liked the place too, parking their bright shiny Alfas in the most awkward of places and then lounging on the bonnet, eyeing the crowds through expensive sunglasses, trying to look cool in their dark, well-pressed uniforms.

  Costa made a point of avoiding the carabinieri as much as possible. There was enough rivalry inside the Questura itself without extending it to these soldiers masquerading as cops. The demarcation lines were dimly drawn between this branch of the army and the civilian police. They could arrest the same people he did, and in the same places. Most of the time it was simply a matter of who got there first. There was an old joke: the good-looking ones joined the carabinieri
for the uniform and the women, the smart and the ugly ones went into the state police because that was all they could get. It wasn’t all exaggeration either.

  A couple of caribinieri were in the Campo now, standing stiffly upright by their vehicle as a slender blonde woman harangued them in mangled Italian, wagging her finger in their faces, holding a large, portrait-size photograph in her left hand.

  “Don’t get involved,” Costa said to himself, and wandered over towards them in any case. The woman was livid. She knew a few good Italian swear words too. Costa took a bite of his bread and eavesdropped on what was going on.

  Then he looked at the photo in the woman’s hand and something cold ran down his back, made him shiver so hard the pizzetta dropped straight from his fingers.

  This was crazy. He knew it. The face in the photo reminded him of the picture Leo Falcone had thrown onto the strange corpse on Teresa Lupo’s dissecting table that morning. He thought of what he had seen there: an old image of a blonde-haired girl looking distinctly like the face he saw now, still at the beginning of her adult life, thinking there was nothing in the future but love and joy.

  And it ain’t necessarily so, an old, old song sang at the back of his head.

  The carabinieri were the pick of the crop. Prize assholes, more interested in keeping their Ray-Bans clean than working out what seemed to have happened in front of their very noses. He thought he recognized one. But maybe not. They all looked the same. These two sounded the same as well, with their middle-class nasal voices. They were sneering at the woman in front of them, exuding boredom.

  “Are you listening to me?” she yelled.

  “Do we have a choice?” one of them, the older one, Costa guessed, replied. He couldn’t have been more than thirty.

  “This,” she said, pointing at the photograph, “is my daughter. She just got abducted. You idiots watched it and yawned.”

  The younger uniform shot Costa a warning glance that said: don’t even think about getting involved. Nic Costa didn’t move.

  The talkative one leaned back on the Alfa, shuffled his serge-clad backside further up the shiny bonnet, took out a packet of gum and threw a stick past his perfect teeth.

  She stood in front of them, hands on her hips, full of fury. Costa glanced at the photo she was holding. They could have been sisters, but ten or fifteen years apart. The woman was a touch heavier. Her hair was a shade darker, more fair than her daughter’s bright, almost artificial, blonde, straight, tailored short, a practical cut.

  He walked over, watched her trying to get her breath back, then, struggling to remember his English, asked, “Can I help?”

  “No,” the senior uniform said immediately. “You can just walk away and mind your own business.”

  She looked up at Costa, relieved to be talking English at last. “You can get me a real policeman. That would be helping.”

  He pulled out the badge. “I am a real policeman. Nic Costa.”

  “Oh fuck,” the uniform with the working mouth muttered behind him.

  He got up off the car and stood upright in front of Costa. He was a lot taller. “Her teenage daughter ran off with a boyfriend on a motorbike here. She thinks that counts as abduction. We think that sounds like some young kid looking for fun.” The Ray-Bans cast the woman a dead, black look. “We think that’s understandable. If you people playing amateur hour think otherwise, please yourself. Take her as a present from me. But just take her. I beg you.”

  Costa managed to grasp her arm lightly at the elbow as it moved towards the man. Otherwise, he thought, the moron in the dark uniform would have been in for a shock.

  “You saw this?” he asked them.

  The younger one found his voice. “Yeah we saw it. Hard to miss it. You’d think the kid wanted the whole world to watch. You have any idea what you see if you hang around the Campo day and night? Caught a couple hard at it a few days ago. In broad daylight. And she wants us to start jumping up and down just because her daughter’s got on the back of some guy’s bike.”

  The woman shook her head, as if somehow angry with herself, then stared in the direction of the Corso, the way the bike had gone, Costa guessed.

  “It’s not like her,” she said. “I can’t believe this is happening. I can’t believe you people won’t even listen.”

  She closed her eyes. Costa wondered if she was about to cry. He looked at his watch. Peroni would be back at the car in forty minutes. There was time.

  “Let me buy you a coffee,” he said.

  She hesitated then put the photo back in the envelope. There was a stack of others there, Costa saw, and he wondered again: was he really letting his imagination run away with him? The girl looked so like the teenager in Falcone’s picture.

  “You really are the same as these people?” she asked.

  “No,” he replied, and made sure they heard every word. “I’m a civilian. It’s complicated. Even for us sometimes.”

  She dropped the envelope into her bag and slung it over her shoulder. “Then I’ll take that coffee.”

  “Nice job,” Costa said and patted the senior uniform on his serge arm. “I love to see the carabinieri do public relations. Makes our life so much easier.”

  Then, ignoring the torrent of curses directed at his back, he took her arm and led her away from them. She was pleased to go. When her face lost its taut anxiety she looked different. She’d dressed down, in jeans and an old, bleached denim jacket. But it didn’t fit somehow. It was almost a disguise. There was something alluring, almost elegant underneath, something he couldn’t quite put his finger on.

  Costa led her round the corner, to a tiny café in an alcove behind the square. There were pots of creamed coffee on the counter, with people ladling spoonfuls into their cups to beef up the caffeine. She leaned on the counter, looking as if she came into the place every day.

  “My name’s Miranda Julius,” she said. “And this is crazy. Maybe I’m crazy. You’ll regret ever asking me here.”

  Costa listened as she told her story, slowly, methodically, with the kind of care and attention he wished he heard more often.

  “What’s the matter?” she asked when the story was finished.

  “Nothing.”

  She stared into his face with a frank curiosity. “I don’t think so.”

  He thought about what she’d said. Maybe the girl really had just run away with a boyfriend her mother had never even met. Maybe it was all as innocent as that. Her misgivings were based on intuition, not fact. She just felt something was wrong. He could understand why the assholes from the carabinieri just wanted to send her on her way.

  “You said she came back yesterday with a tattoo.”

  “Stupid, stupid. Just another reason for an argument. It wasn’t supposed to be like this. It wasn’t why we came to Italy.” She shook her head and it annoyed him he couldn’t stop watching her. Close up she was older than he first thought. There were stress lines at the corners of her bright, intelligent blue eyes. But they just added character to a face that, when she was young, must have been too perfectly pretty for its own good. She looked like a model who’d later taken up manual labour or something just to make life more interesting, just to get a few scars.

  “What was it like?”

  “The tattoo? Ridiculous. What do you expect from a sixteen-year-old? She had it done a couple of days ago apparently. It was only yesterday she plucked up the courage to tell me, when the scars had healed. She said it was his idea. Whoever he is. But she liked it, naturally. Do you want to see?”

  “What?”

  She reached into her bag and withdrew the folder of photos. “I took a picture, just for the record. I had the film developed this morning, which is why I have all this stuff with me. Taking pictures is what I do, by the way. Call it an obsession.”

  She sorted through a set of photos then threw one on the table. It was a close-up of the girl’s shoulder. There was the dark black ink of a tattoo at the top of her arm, and the howling face.


  “You know what that is?” he asked.

  “She told me. A theatre mask or something. If it was the Grateful Dead I might have understood. She wasn’t that pleased when I said I wanted a shot of it for the record.”

  She stared into his eyes with a sudden, determined frankness. “I wasn’t taking no for an answer. A tattoo. Jesus, if I’d done that when I was her age.” She hesitated. “Mr. Costa?”

  “Nic.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “I don’t know. I need to call some people. Give me a minute.”

  She was starting to look scared.

  “It’s probably nothing,” he said, and heard how lame the words sounded.

  Miranda Julius rented an apartment on the top floor of the Teatro di Marcello, the sprawling, fortress-like complex in the shadow of the Capitol Hill. She’d taken the place over the Internet, she said, because the owner offered a good deal for the couple of months they needed, and it came with history. Though much changed over the centuries, the theatre was begun by Julius Caesar, finished by his adoptive son Augustus and used variously as a fortress and a private palace before it was converted into private accommodations. The apartment looked out towards the river and Tiber Island. The steady drone of traffic was audible through the thick, double-glazed windows. Nic Costa had walked past this building countless times and never seen inside. Now he was there he didn’t envy anyone who owned such a fancy address. It was too noisy, too detached from the city. It was in Rome, but not a part of it.