The Villa of Mysteries

by David Hewson

  He was worried, too, that he’d overreacted. He’d called in Falcone without discussing the matter with Peroni, which was probably a mistake. His partner had turned up only to find events shaping around him. Costa had risked Falcone’s wrath even further by inviting Teresa Lupo along to join them. It seemed important. Teresa had read the book she kept quoting at them in the morgue. If he was right, she was the only one with immediate access to the research and insight they needed. Now the four of them sat listening to Miranda Julius, each wondering whether this could be coincidence.

  Miranda Julius and her daughter Suzi had arrived in Rome one week before from London. She was a news photographer based there but working on assignment anywhere the agency sent her. Suzi lived with her grandmother, and had for most of her life. She was studying art at a local college. Her mother had taken her out of class for two months on a kind of get-to-know-you holiday in Rome. Suzi had enrolled at the language school in the Piazza della Cancelleria for Italian lessons—the same school that the dead Eleanor Jamieson had attended. The two of them had begun a round of the Rome galleries in their spare time. After a few days Suzi had made a friend. Not at the school, but somewhere nearby. A boy, she said, and one who was reluctant, at the time, to meet her mother, for reasons Miranda could only guess.

  “How old is she?” Falcone asked.

  “She was sixteen in December.”

  “And you?” Falcone persisted.

  Teresa risked glaring at him. Falcone was always direct with women, direct to the point of bullying.

  “I’m thirty-three, Inspector,” Miranda said immediately. “Yes, I’m sure you’re doing your arithmetic already. I was at school when I got pregnant. The father was a jerk. He was gone before she was born.” She had an upper-class English accent which sat uneasily with her crumpled, laid-back appearance. There was money somewhere. The apartment must have cost her plenty.

  “Is this relevant?” she asked. “I don’t mind answering these questions but I would like to know why.”

  “When you have a missing teenager anything could be relevant,” Costa said.

  She turned away from Falcone and stared out the big windows, out at the traffic roar. “If she is missing. Perhaps I am overreacting. She could walk right in that door any moment and then how am I going to feel?” She watched them. This was a show of false confidence, Costa thought. There was fear in her face although he couldn’t help wondering how responsible he was for placing it there. “Will you please tell me why you’re suddenly taking this so seriously?”

  Falcone ignored the question. “The tattoo. Tell us about that.”

  The point of the question was lost on her. “What’s there to tell? I noticed she’d been wearing long sleeves all the time. Then yesterday she just comes out and announces it. He told her to get one. He even suggested what it should be like, took her down some stupid tattoo parlour he knew. Paid for the thing, would you believe.”

  “Does he have a name?” Costa wondered. “Did she say where he lived?”

  She shook her head. “Apparently she wasn’t ready for him to meet me. Not just yet.”

  “Why? Did she give a reason?”

  “She’s still a kid. Young even for her years. She’s still at the stage where a parent’s embarrassing. What was I supposed to do? It wasn’t as if she was spending the night with him or anything. And that’s what’s really strange. Look, I’m never going to win a mother-of-the-year contest. Most of the time Suzi’s been growing up I’ve been in some shit part of the world photographing dead people. But I know my daughter. We can talk to each other. She wasn’t sleeping with this boy. Not yet. It was as if they were waiting for something. In fact . . .”

  She hesitated, wondering whether this was going too far. “. . . she’s never slept with anyone. She’s a virgin. Her decision. Perhaps she looked at me and realized where it could get you.”

  “Waiting for what?” Falcone asked.

  “If I knew that I’d tell you,” she snapped. “But I’m sure of one thing. When. It happens in two days’ time. March the 17th. I heard her talking on the phone. Making arrangements to meet him. She sounded excited. Not that she’d talk to me about it, of course.”

  Costa thought about the date. There were too many coincidences. “Can we take a look in her room?”

  “Feel free. It’s the tidy one at the end.”

  Falcone nodded at Costa. Teresa got up and followed him without being asked. The two of them wandered down the corridor, listening to Falcone’s persistent drone continue to wear at Miranda Julius behind them. Costa couldn’t help glancing into what he assumed was Miranda’s bedroom. It wasn’t the tidy one. There were clothes scattered everywhere, a couple of professional-looking cameras, and a notebook computer, open, ready for work.

  “Jesus,” Teresa groaned, when they were out of earshot. “That man has the manners of a warthog. Can you believe he ever got married? What are we looking for, Nic? Why am I here for God’s sake? It’s a missing kid, isn’t it?”

  “I’m sorry. I thought you might like the opportunity to do a little cop work.”

  She came to a halt, giving him a filthy look. “I’ve got a corpse half finished back in the morgue. One that looks two thousand years old but only went in the ground sixteen years ago. I’ve got scientific problems with names you couldn’t even pronounce. And you think I might ‘like the opportunity’?”

  He opened the door to the girl’s room. “You want to look or don’t you?”

  “Lemme in.” She barged through and stared at the contents. Then she carefully closed the door behind her, not wanting to hear Falcone’s voice, needing the privacy herself too. “This is a teenager’s room? Hell, my place is worse than this. Come to that . . .” She was thinking on her feet. Costa always liked to watch this. “. . . how come the mother looks like that? Like the kid’s sister? She’s just a year younger than me, for God’s sake, and if you walked her through the Questura every last jack-ass in there would be clutching at his groin making those heavy breathing noises you like so much.”

  “They’d do that for you if they thought you wouldn’t hit them.”

  She glared at him. “You couldn’t stop staring at her. I couldn’t help noticing that.”

  He ignored the remark and went over to the table by the girl’s single bed. There was a portfolio of photographs, black and white, printed in large format. He flicked through them: images from every war that had made the headlines in the last decade, Afghanistan, Palestine, Rwanda, places in Africa he couldn’t begin to identify. Teresa came to join him.

  “Is that what she meant?” she asked. “When she said she went around photographing dead people?”

  “She’s a war photographer apparently.”

  Corpses lay still on the ground, broken, bloody. Lost children, their eyes like saucers, stared back at them from the prints. “Makes my job look kind of normal,” Teresa said. “What drives you to that kind of work? Particularly when you’ve got a kid waiting at home?”

  “I don’t know.” Were the photos in the daughter’s room because Suzi liked them? Or because she kept asking herself that question too? There was something complicated going on here, he thought.

  “If I had a mother who took photos like that I’d maybe think of running away myself,” Teresa said carefully. “You understand what I’m saying?”

  He’d done plenty of missing kid inquiries. He knew what they felt like. And it wasn’t like this. “Of course I do. Half the time the kids aren’t running towards something; they’re running from it. Do you really think that’s what’s happening here? They’re on holiday, Teresa. I’ve dealt with more runaways than I can remember. I don’t recall one of them ever being a foreign tourist.”

  “Point taken,” she said quietly. “All the same—”

  There was a pile of family snaps on the bedside table. Miranda Julius did take them all the time. Most were of the girl, looking lovely, happy. A few were taken by someone else, a stranger perhaps, or a waiter. Ther
e they were outside the Villa Borghese, on the Spanish Steps, eating pizza, laughing. Nic Costa looked at them and felt a pang of guilt. If he was right, Suzi Julius could be in big trouble right now, trouble that would bring her mother pain and possibly grief, whatever the outcome. Pictures spoke, they told stories. These two were close. They loved each other.

  Teresa was staring at them too. “Nice photographs,” she said simply. “Nice to know she doesn’t just snap dead people.”

  For a moment he wondered: was there a small, bitter note inside Teresa Lupo’s voice, whispering: Look on with envy, because you’ll never know this, you’ll never feel the joy or the pain?

  “Can you imagine the feeling of responsibility?” she asked. “What it must be like? Knowing someone else depends on you that much?”

  He thought of his own dead father. He did know it, but only from the point of view of the dependant.

  “You can see it on her face,” she continued. “Whatever happened, whether there was a row or not, she’s just sitting in there asking herself, ‘Is there something I could have done?’ ”

  “It’s always like that,” he said by way of an explanation. “You’re a pathologist. It’s just that you don’t see it.”

  She toyed with one of the best photos: the two of them laughing in a pale winter sun on the Ponte Sisto. “Just because it’s always like that doesn’t make it any easier.”

  “No.” He wondered if the resemblance was just his memory playing tricks. It was hard to compare this living, breathing kid with the mahogany corpse on the silver table. “Does she really look like the dead girl? Or is that my imagination? Could the resemblance have sparked something? Made whoever was responsible sixteen years ago suddenly get the itch again?”

  Teresa shrugged. “Pushing it a bit, isn’t it? She’s blonde, pretty, and young, if that’s what you mean. From the pictures I’d say she’s a bit on the thin side for most Italians. The mother’s more our size. I wish. Nic, there are skinny blonde kids in Rome all the time. Why would it take sixteen years for him to run across one again? Face it. She’s probably just one more runaway kid.”

  He looked at the scattering of disjointed facts that faced them. “I don’t think so. It feels wrong. What the hell does it all mean? What does it say in that book you read? What exactly happens? Where do they get their victims from?”

  “They’re not victims, Nic,” she insisted. “If you think that you’re misreading everything. What happened to them was a privilege, even if it didn’t feel like it at the time.”

  “Unless it went wrong,” he reminded her.

  “Unless it went wrong. But that can’t have happened often. These girls were gifts. Some of them were slaves handed over by their owners. Some were daughters led there by their own fathers. They went through the ritual. They came out changed. Acolytes of the god, remember. That must have meant something.”

  “But what?” he muttered. “I still think this feels wrong.”

  “Don’t ask me. I’m a pathologist. Not an archaeologist. Or a cop. Or a psychic for that matter. Listen to yourself. It feels wrong. Are you really going to go back out there and tell Falcone that?”

  Yet he felt sure she had seen some kind of link too. He could recognize it in her face, the bright spark of intelligence mixed with the dread of what that new information could mean.

  “You’re the only person I have right now who’s researched all this. Please—”

  She sat down and sighed. “Don’t do this to me, Nic. Don’t take what I say as gospel. I don’t like being imprecise. I’m trained for the opposite.”

  “Just point me somewhere. I’ll check it out. I promise. Tell me more about this ritual.”

  “All I know is what I read. The ceremony was about the initiation of chosen girls into adulthood. On one particular day: 17 March. Sounds familiar? This was party time. There’d be men there, for sure. Priests, hangers-on, hoping they could get in on the fun. They drank, they danced, they swallowed every ancient Roman narcotic they could find. Then they did tricks to each other that would make a bunch of Hell’s Angels walk out of the room feeling things were going a little too far. But this was about the girls. It was about giving them something they could use in adulthood. An advantage, maybe. Or some kind of membership in a club they could use later on.”

  Costa stared at her, expecting more. “Look,” she said. “The man who wrote the thing said himself it’s all guesswork. No one really knows what happened. All they know is that it got out of hand sometimes. It got bad enough for the Romans to ban it after a while. Long before the Christians came along with peace and love. It was all too much for them. They just carted off the organizers, put them to death somewhere, then relaunched the thing as some toned-down happy-clappy ceremony called the Liberalia. The same kind of stunt they pulled off to wind up with Christmas, if you recall. What preceded it? Who knows?”

  He tried to make sense of this. “So maybe two thousand years later someone’s playing the same tricks? Using the same rituals?”

  “We don’t know that. All you’ve got is a tattoo. A date—”

  “And a dead body.”

  She tried to look hopeful. “Which has no connection whatsoever with this girl. Be honest with yourself. The mother’s probably right. The kid’ll walk back in with a certain smile on her face thinking, ‘Thank Christ I got that out of the way.’ Jesus, a virgin at sixteen. What kind of lives do these people lead?”

  He wasn’t listening. He was doing the cop thing—opening drawers, looking into the contents, only with a touch more respect than most of them had. Nic Costa didn’t upend the things and turn the stuff out onto the floor. He just sifted carefully, as if he felt he were intruding.

  “Do you realize,” she said out of nowhere, “that if I meet someone now and we have a kid, when that kid is Suzi Julius’s age I will be turned fifty? My God, who’s the virgin here?”

  Costa opened the bottom drawer, slid his hand beneath a neatly folded nightdress and stared up at her.

  “What?” she said.

  He took out a couple of items: obscure things, hidden, wrong.

  One was the stalk of some plant, dried. A pine cone was attached to the thinner end, clinging clumsily to the stump, held there with tape. It looked like a schoolkid’s craft project.

  “She was working out how to make it,” Teresa said glumly.

  “The name again?” he asked.

  “Thyrsus.” She took it from him and sniffed the stem, her face deadly serious all of a sudden. “That’s fennel. Just like the one from the peat.”

  “And this?” It was a plastic bag, full of seeds. Costa smelled the contents. “It’s not dope.”

  “Not ordinary dope.”

  She looked inside the bag, deeply miserable.

  “Teresa?”

  “I found something similar in the dead girl’s pockets. I’m waiting for the full lab report. From my limited culinary expertise I’d say it’s a mixture of herb seeds. Cumin. Coriander. Fennel again. Something hallucinogenic too maybe. Something fungal. Magic mushroom in all probability.”

  He waited, wondering how she knew.

  “According to the book it was part of the ritual. A small gift from the god. A thank you for what he was about to get in return.”

  “Which was?”

  She was silent.

  “Guess,” he said. “Give me some female intuition.”

  “If you got it right? Paradise. You lost your virginity, probably to some temple creep wearing that spooky mask from the tattoo just to look the part. This was about ecstasy. Physical ecstasy. Mental, spiritual—”

  She screwed up her eyes, thinking, remembering. “The book said that, in public, 17 March was the day Roman boys attained their manhood. In private, the women achieved some special kind of status too. At least the ones who were hanging round the cult.”

  “And if you got it wrong? If you said no . . .”

  “Then I guess you met one very angry god.” She hesitated. “You really beli
eve this poor kid’s a part of all this? And she thinks she’s just playing some game?”

  He looked at the homemade wand and the little bag of seeds. “It’s a possibility, surely? We can’t ignore it.”

  “There’s not enough here to push any of Falcone’s buttons.”

  She was right. These were just coincidental wisps of smoke in some distant, hazy mirrors. There was nothing to suggest an answer to the biggest question of all: why her? Why an English kid who’d only been in Rome a week?

  They returned to the living room. Miranda Julius was red-faced and puffy-eyed. Falcone must have been working her hard. She looked at them as they came in and read their faces instantly.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  Costa showed her the thyrsus and the packet of seeds. “Have you seen these before? Do you know what they are?”

  She looked at them and shook her head. “I’ve no idea. Where did you find them?”

  “In her bedroom,” Costa replied.

  “What are they?” She could be crying again soon.

  “It could be coincidence,” Costa said.

  “It could be anything,” Falcone interjected. “We’ll log your daughter’s disappearance, Mrs. Julius. We’ll circulate her description. Usually these cases end with the child coming home. Usually they’ll call. Probably today.”

  “Look,” Teresa interjected, “there’s time. There are a lot of loose ends to work on here. If . . .”

  Falcone stood up, glowering at her. She knew when to shut up.

  “Doctor,” he grunted. “Here’s the deal. I don’t go around cutting up bodies. You don’t go around interrogating potential witnesses.”

  Costa thought, for one moment, she might hit him and wondered what would happen after that. Instead Teresa went over to Miranda Julius, sat next to her on the sofa, and put an arm around her shoulders.

  Falcone led Costa and Peroni away from the women.

  “This is serious,” Costa said. “I know it looks odd but—”

  “Don’t tell me my job,” Falcone said curtly. “We’ve got one clear-cut case of murder and one missing teenager to add to the scores we get every week. There’s nothing that links them. Nothing you can count on. Be honest, Nic. If there were . . .”