The Villa of Mysteries

by David Hewson

  Four wheels good . . .

  The shape was getting closer all the time now. If he made a couple of flicks with his insect wrist he could draw right up at the driver’s window, even tap on the glass.

  “To hell with that,” she said, and dragged the wheel hard over to the left, braking all the time.

  The bike rider caught on quickly. He wasn’t going to plough straight into her side and pop his black frame right over the roof, thrown by the deadly weight of his own momentum. Instead he just put down a strong leather foot, slid the machine along the damp road, in control all the way, staring, staring.

  “Point taken,” Teresa murmured, and hit the accelerator once more, straightened the Seat with a vicious lurch, and found herself heading straight for the no-entry barrier over a side road in construction just a hundred metres or so ahead.

  There were men in white jackets and yellow hard hats working there. She held her hand on the horn, watching them scatter. The Leon went into a long, lazy sideways skid. She found the wheel twitching in her hands like a wild creature with a mind of its own.

  Instinctively, she turned into the slide, felt the car come back under her control. Something smashed into the window behind her and exited out of the front windscreen, taking with it her vision of the road ahead. A circle of opaque shattered glass now sat between her and the black emptiness that was the world racing up to greet her. She glanced at the dashboard. It read ninety. She couldn’t hear a thing except the car screaming.

  “Not a good day,” Teresa Lupo murmured, and was of a mind, for some reason, to take her hands off the wheel because there was something else demanding her attention.

  A figure kept bobbing up at the driver’s window: long and black and deadly. Its arm was extended. The insect looked ready to sting.

  Knowing it was stupid, and doing this very suddenly, very deliberately, she released her hands, crouched down in the driver’s seat, hands over her head, praying for protection, muttering over and over again that odd word they told you on the airplanes, “Brace, brace, brace . . .”

  The Leon bounced once. The universe turned turtle. She was aware, for one brief moment, that things were not as they should be and wondered whether this was the start of the great secret called “death.” And then another unsettling thought, as the Leon rolled and bounced through the air, making her feel giddy and sick.

  “Not Monkboy,” she murmured. “Let anybody do it but Monkboy.”

  There was the noise of shrieking metal. A sharp pain stabbed at the top of her skull. She felt herself rolled around inside the dying Leon like a bean in a can.

  Finally, the world stopped moving.

  Teresa Lupo was upside down in the car. Something warm and sticky was dripping down her face: blood. She reached up and felt for the damage. Just a cut above her right temple.

  “What fucking awful luck,” she gasped, and suppressed an urge to laugh.

  There was a desperate, scrabbling sound at the driver’s door which was now pointed at the black night sky. She heard voices and cowered in the front seat, wondering if the insect had bred. All the world seemed hostile at that moment. Logic and plain humanity had disappeared from the planet.

  Then cold air blew into her face. Faces peered at her. Men said all the usual things they liked to say about women drivers in these situations.

  “Can you move?” someone wearing a yellow hat asked, holding out a hand.

  She tried lifting herself. It worked. Just bruises, that was all. And a little cut in the hairline.

  He had to be gone, she thought. He wouldn’t dare come into this mass of people, all of them extending their arms to her.

  Teresa Lupo climbed out of the car, wondering whether she was about to burst into a fit of hysterical giggles. The Leon was on its side in what appeared to be the middle of a building site. A few metres away was a vast hole with concrete round the edges, a chasm cut into the earth big enough to take a train.

  “Where’s the bike?” she asked.

  The man who’d helped her out looked into the dead mouth of the hole and pointed downwards. “Not good,” he said. “Boy, was he moving.”

  “How deep is it?”

  “Very deep. We’re doing some work on the metro.”

  “Wow,” she said, and couldn’t stop herself beaming, in spite of the bruises and what felt like a cracked rib.

  There were sirens in the distance. The lights of police cars. She thought about Falcone and his temper. Then she thought about Randolph Kirk and a lost girl called Suzi Julius, who was the point of all this in the first place.

  “We’re getting a crane in,” the man said. He hesitated. “Did you two argue or something? We called a doctor.”

  Teresa Lupo nodded, smoothing down her clothes, trying to put on a professional face, wondering how she could even begin to square this with Falcone.

  “A doctor?” she asked. “Thanks, but I’m fine.”

  The man gave her an odd look and nodded at the big black chasm in the ground. “For him . . .”

  “Oh?” She walked to the edge of the hole and peered into nothingness. Then Teresa Lupo picked up a big block of smashed concrete and launched it into the air, watching it tumble downwards and yelled, “Impudent fucking bastard . . .”

  She came back and took the man by the arm. He flinched.

  “I can deal with him,” she said with a smile. “I’m a doctor. I’m with the police too. So go tell the rubberneckers to run along now. Nothing to see here.”

  Police tape ran around the site of Randolph Kirk’s excavations. Floodlights stood over his portable office illuminating the bloodstains on the bare floor. Monkboy had been assigned the job of dealing with the body. Teresa Lupo had argued, with some justification, that she should be kept away through a conflict of interest. In truth, she wanted to be with the second team, watching the cranes lower a recovery section down into the big black hole near Fiumicino, waiting for them to come back with a corpse, desperate to see it transformed from the dark insect of her imagination into a real and dead human being.

  Falcone had deferred to her judgement. He didn’t even look mad. Maybe he was saving his fury for a time when she’d feel it more.

  Nic Costa watched Monkboy and his men remove the corpse. Falcone stood to one side with Rachele D’Amato, deep in some private conversation, Peroni eyeing them, making grumpy noises all the time.

  “She’s here for the duration,” Costa said when he could stand no more. “Best learn to live with it.”

  “But why? This guy didn’t work for the mob. He was a professor, for God’s sake.”

  “We don’t know,” Costa said. “We know less than we did a couple of hours ago.”

  Suzi Julius was somewhere, though, even if her name, and her mysterious disappearance, were now sinking deep into the squad’s collective unconscious, despatched there by bigger, more pressing events. Maybe she was nearby. Here, even, dead already because all those well-laid plans for two days hence suddenly seemed impractical. He glanced around the site, at the other office and the low, hulking shape of the old Roman villa.

  “I’m going walkabout,” he announced. “Falcone won’t miss me.”

  There was nothing of any interest in the other office. The villa looked more promising. It could have been an old church or something: brick walls, loose, crumbly mortar. The darkness hid most of the detail but he guessed the building was that familiar pale honey colour he knew from the spent masonry on the Via Appia Antica where he’d grown up. The place was about forty metres square with an open courtyard at the front full of wrecked stones and, fenced off, a small mosaic, unidentifiable in the dark. The colonnaded entrance was open to the air. He walked in and found himself inside a cold, dank anteroom with two adjoining chambers on either side running back into the heart of the building. They were open too, and empty. The centre of the place must have been a windowless hall. The design was odd. This couldn’t be a normal home. It didn’t make sense.

  There was an old wooden pa
nelled door blocking the way to the interior, with a padlock on a rusty chain keeping it closed. He went back to the car and returned with a big torch and a crowbar. It took a minute to prise the rusty links from the lock. Then the torch made a bright arc into the pitch-black interior, illuminating the shadows on the walls. The place seemed empty: just a bare room. So why was there a padlock on the door? What was it protecting?

  He made a careful circumnavigation of the small, windowless space: nothing. Then, just before he gave up, his foot stumbled on something. It was a wooden panel on the floor, built into the ancient brickwork. Modern, by the looks of it. And it had a padlock too, bright and shiny, hooked through a clasp.

  Costa worked at it with the crowbar and forced the fastening free. When he removed the panel he exposed a series of narrow, shallow steps leading down into blackness, a subterranean cavern of some kind.

  There were lights here too. Wires ran down one side of the steps, with a switch cut into the rough wall at the base of the stairs. A bare bulb, perhaps the first of several, dangled ahead in the darkness. Nic Costa didn’t know anything about archaeology but that struck him as odd. Surely they would use portable floods? A string of bulbs seemed like normal lighting, the kind you got in a hall.

  Costa checked himself. You were supposed to do these things in twos. It was possible there was someone else around. This could be a perfect place to hide, to stay out of sight until it was all over.

  And then drag Suzi somewhere else. Or just leave a body on the mouldy earth.

  “No time,” he said to himself. Besides, he was sick of the way they kept giving him that tired look whenever he mentioned the girl.

  He took his gun out of its holster, hugged the wall, and walked down into the subterranean cavern, step by step. The temperature immediately seemed to fall a couple of degrees. The place had the dank, fungal smell of something rotten.

  There wasn’t a sound. At the bottom he flipped the switch on the wall and walked through a doorway so low he had to duck to get through.

  The room was brightly lit. This must, he realized, have been restored somewhat. It was impossible that original wall paintings could have remained so bright and vivid for two thousand years. Or maybe they weren’t original at all. Maybe someone painted them there recently for some reason.

  Nic Costa looked at them and thought: here lie nightmares. And maybe that was what they really were. Some desperate effort to take this poison out of the human mind, to exorcize it by transforming the living demons inside a man’s head into images on some ancient, pagan wall.

  They ran around the rectangular chamber in a series of frames, each with the same bright red background behind the detail. A figurative mosaic frieze of dolphins and sea monsters capped every scene. Painted columns divided one frame from the next. The pictures were designed, he understood, to be viewed as a series, a set of linked images which told a story. From what he recalled of Teresa’s brief lecture that morning, it had to be that of an initiation into the Dionysian mysteries.

  To his right, covering the short wall by the door, was what he assumed to be the beginning of the tale. An imposing male figure, the god himself perhaps, reclined lazily on a golden throne, with a horned satyr on each side, both peering into silver water bowls. At his feet lay a young woman, her face covered by a veil, holding a phallic object topped with a pine cone: Teresa’s thyrsus. The long wall next to this contained three further frames. A naked child read out loud from a scroll. Three female dancers, hands clasped together, faces ecstatic, turned around an urn. An old crone in a dark robe, crouched on a decaying tree trunk, peered malevolently at a beautiful young woman seated in front of a mirror, toying with her hair.

  The main wall opposite the entrance was occupied by a single work. The young woman was entering the presence of the god. Black slaves scourged her with whips. Satyrs played lutes in the background. There was terror on the initiate’s face. The god leered hungrily at her from his throne.

  Costa turned to face the left wall. Here were more rituals: scourging, drinking, dancing, coupling. The four frames depicted an orgy but one that sat at the edge of sanity, like something from the imagination of a Roman Hieronymus Bosch. In the corners of the images there were revellers who were unconscious or vomiting. A pregnant mother suckled a child on one breast and a goat on the other. Women lay on their backs embracing horses and lions. Two girls were engaged in a bloody fight, rolling on the floor, scratching at each other’s eyes.

  And in the last image an execution: one woman walked on, blind-folded, towards the god. The second was killed, her throat cut from behind by a grinning satyr who pressed his groin against her buttocks.

  He turned to face the final frame, the counterpart to the first, set on the other side of the door. The god still sat on his throne but now he wore a mask, the obscene screaming mask that was the source of the tattoo he’d seen on both the dead Eleanor Jamieson and the living Suzi Julius. They were poor imitations. In the god’s face lay a blind, hungry fury that couldn’t be reduced to a scrawl on flesh.

  The initiate was naked, half standing over him, face forward, as he savaged her from behind, his hand reaching round to grip her left breast hard between his fingers. Her face was partially covered with a veil. Her mouth was a wide-open screaming rictus of agony. The shape of his massive erection was visible beneath her open legs. Satyrs and hangers-on watched avidly, with wild eyes and open, hungry mouths.

  Was this the ordeal Wallis’s stepdaughter had refused? Costa wondered. Perhaps in a room very much like this? And if she hadn’t, where would she be now? Anywhere, he realized. If Teresa was right, this villa was just an outpost. Somewhere in Rome there stood the Villa of Mysteries, the heart of the cult, a hidden temple, just like this one, buried beneath the earth.

  It didn’t add up. One man, surely, would not go to these strange lengths. Randolph Kirk couldn’t have been the figure racing a bike across the Campo with Suzi Julius happy on the back. That was someone young, someone she knew.

  Costa tried to think practical thoughts. This wasn’t an active dig. There was no sign of recent excavation. Yet people did come here regularly. He could see the odd cigarette butt and a few sweet wrappers. The university maintained the site. They would use it for study, surely.

  He walked around the corners, using the torch to illuminate the darker parts.

  Something bright lurked close to the image of the god and the screaming initiate. He took a plastic envelope out of his pocket, bent down and picked it up. It was an elastic hair-band, bright red, green and yellow, Rastafarian colours, the kind a young girl would use. He searched the rest of the room as best he could. There was nothing else of obvious interest.

  Then he walked back up the stairs, back to the portable office. It was getting late now. Falcone looked tired, gloomy. D’Amato stood silent by his side.

  “The scene-of-crime people can take a look at the place once they’re done here,” he said after listening to Costa’s ideas. “There’s probably nothing left from sixteen years ago, Nic, if that’s what you’re thinking. Besides, Lupo already said she was probably killed somewhere in the city.”

  “I know,” he answered and held up the hair-band. “But this isn’t sixteen years old.”

  Rachele D’Amato peered at the plastic bag. “It’s the kind of thing a child would wear,” she said. “Did they let children in there on visits?”

  He thought of the pictures on the walls. “I can’t imagine they’d allow that.”

  Falcone raised a grey eyebrow. “You think so? These are liberated days. Look, it’s late. If you think there’s something to chase here, go and see the mother. On your own. We’re a little short of men. If she recognizes it, try the lab. There must be millions like it. We need to know for sure. Then get some rest. We’re all going to be working overtime tomorrow.”

  “You can say that again,” D’Amato whispered.

  Costa saw them exchange a glance. He wondered if something was going on between them and whether t
hat could cloud the man’s normally excellent judgement.

  Then Falcone took him to one side, peered inquisitively into his face. “How are you doing? You look dog-tired. You been drinking recently?”

  “No,” Costa snapped. “Are you my boss or my keeper?”

  “A little of both. For now anyway.”

  Falcone’s phone rang. He listened then said, “Wait for me.”

  Costa hesitated, wanting to know the news.

  “We’ll follow you part of the way,” Falcone said. “That was the crew at Fiumicino. They’re about to bring up the body. It seems Crazy Teresa can’t wait to get her hands on it.”

  “Can you blame her?” D’Amato wondered.

  “Damned right I can,” Falcone murmured, walking away so quickly they had to struggle to keep up.

  The rain had stopped. The heart of Rome was growing silent. A generous moon now stared down at its own hard reflection in the black shiny waters of the Tiber. The day’s warmth had fled, a reminder that winter was relinquishing its grip with a slowly dying reluctance.

  Adele Neri lay alone in the bedroom. Her husband was still up, talking long and hard to the bleak, grey men he’d invited into their lives. Their voices crept beneath the closed door, intruding into her most private thoughts. Mickey was nowhere to be seen. Nor had he called. It was unusual, but not unexpected. He’d been crazier than normal recently. Some of it was due to the dope. Some of it was down to the deals on the side, and his terror that his father would find out about them. But most of it came from this sudden and fierce fixation for his stepmother, one she had no intention of discouraging. She liked the way he thought of her and the things she could do to him drove Mickey wild. Adele had some power over Emilio, but it was muted, fixed by boundaries, and always had been. Now it was waning too. Emilio was feeling his age, realizing that change would soon be inevitable.