The Villa of Mysteries

by David Hewson

Teresa Lupo lunged out with her foot at Falcone’s falling leg, jerked him off balance, grabbed the arm of his jacket and had him down on the ground in one, letting his own weight do most of the work. Peroni was shaking his head, cursing again, looking at them as if they were beneath contempt. Rachele D’Amato watched this little drama in shocked silence. Teresa didn’t want to think about what the morgue team were doing. Holding their heads in their hands in all probability.

  “Fuck it,” she mouthed, and dragged Falcone down to the corpse; she let go of him, then pointed to the dead woman’s shoulder, half ripped from its socket.

  “See that?” she spat at him, forcing his head close up to the torn flesh. “See that?”

  The inspector was breathless, struggling to regain some dignity.

  “Yes,” he said and she believed she heard just a faint tinge of regret, apology even, in his cold reply.

  It was small but distinct. Drawn with care into the flesh of Barbara Martelli’s ruined limb was an inky black mark. A tattooed face surrounded by a head of snakelike hair, and a grinning mouth with bulbous lips, howling, howling, howling.

  “You’re welcome,” Teresa Lupo said softly to herself then barked at her men to load the body.

  Venerdi

  Spring was arriving with vigour. Emilio Neri had ordered the men to put some outside burners on the terrace. With them it was sufficiently warm for his family to eat their first breakfast of the year in the open air, overlooking the Via Giulia. It was eight in the morning. The house felt different. Neri had sent the servants away. He needed the room for his troops. The place was better without them. One of the foot soldiers had gone out to bring pastries and fruit from the Campo. Neri wasn’t that keen to make a move himself, not until he’d thought this through. There was another reason for talking on the terrace, out in the open, high above the cobblestones of the Via Giulia. The scumbags in the DIA would stop at nothing to nail him. Sometimes he thought they were bugging the house, recording every word he said. Sometimes he wondered if he was getting paranoid in his old age. Either way he would feel more comfortable seated beneath the wan rays of the morning sun, with the growl of traffic from the Lungotevere murmuring away in the distance behind, overlooked by no one.

  Or perhaps that was a distant hope too. They could have cameras trained on him from somewhere, helicopters hovering overhead. This was the way the modern world worked, peering into your private existence, sneaking around, asking stupid questions. And all the while real life just turned to shit and no one ever really noticed.

  Adele and Mickey sat side by side opposite him. They seemed even more antagonistic towards one another this morning. The performance—the word seemed appropriate to Neri—just went on and on. His son had arrived home not long before midnight, in a foul, uncommunicative mood. Some date had failed to show maybe. Neri didn’t know, and didn’t want to know. The happiness or otherwise of the kid’s dick was the last thing on his mind.

  He had six soldiers downstairs, all equipped for the occasion should it arise. He’d called a few old compari from the past too, men who’d taken a back seat when they’d banked enough to keep them happy. He had called each one into his office separately, stared into their eyes looking for signs of disloyalty, finding none. Then he told them to keep the next few days free in case they were required. These were men who had reason to be grateful to him. They all knew some debts never got repaid in full. If there was to be a war, Neri would need every hand he could get. His was a Roman firm. He didn’t have the rigid, militaristic structure the Sicilians liked so much. He had no consigliere to turn to for advice, to negotiate with the other mobs to keep them sweet. He didn’t keep a bunch of capi running their soldiers beneath him. Just Bruno Bucci, who was a kind of skipper but never acted much in his own name.

  Neri had always liked to do things himself. In the past there’d been time. Now, the more he thought about it, he was exposed by his own obsessive need for absolute control. Nothing could be delegated easily. There were insufficient troops on the ground. Rome hadn’t seen an all-out mob war in more than two decades. The game should have moved on from those days. People were supposed to be more civilized. They’d been fools, Neri included. Human nature didn’t change. It only went underground for a while. Now he had to adapt—and quickly.

  Bucci walked up the metal stairs onto the terrace carrying breakfast on a tray: pastries, juice, coffee. Adele watched him place them on the table, nod respectfully to Neri then leave, and said, “Would anyone care to tell me what’s going on here? We’ve got a gorilla waiting on table. There’s people down below who don’t match the decorations. Why am I sharing my home with a bunch of zombies wearing black suits before I’m even out of pyjamas?”

  Neri was going to have to say something about that. She was wandering around as if nothing had changed. She sat next to Mickey, beneath one of the burners, in a new silk outfit that looked like pure gold. There was nothing on underneath. She didn’t bother buttoning the front that well. He couldn’t help noticing. He didn’t want the men getting a free look too. He guessed people did get ideas around Adele, then wondered again about the way Mickey wouldn’t even look at her in his presence.

  “You could try dressing a little earlier,” he said and gulped down some coffee, trying to think.

  She sat there primly, one hand on the table, and gave Mickey an icy stare. “You woke me. Coming home late like that. Can’t you get hookers who work normal hours?”

  Mickey smiled, his dyed blonde head lolling around stupidly. “What hookers? I got busy. It took me a long time to chase down all those debts. I was working. How about you?”

  He was lying there. Neri knew it. Mickey’s brain lay behind his zip. Always had done. The kid was up to something, maybe some new private business on the side. Neri could see it in his face. “So what happened to your phone? We seem to have a lot of phone problems in this family.”

  Mickey shrugged. He looked a little odd. There was sweat on his brow. His eyes rolled when he spoke. “Gone wrong. I’m getting it fixed.”

  “Do that,” Neri snarled. “I got enough on my plate without having to worry about you two.”

  The old man wondered how to phrase this. How much to tell them. Adele deserved to know for her own sake. Mickey probably thought it was owed him.

  “We need to be careful,” he said. “Maybe, just maybe, there’s trouble.”

  “From who? The Sicilians?” she asked immediately, and Neri wondered why the question came from her, not Mickey.

  Neri waved an impatient hand at her. “Nah. Listen to me. We’ve got nothing to worry about from our own people. We know each other. We go back years. Do you think I’ve spent half my life crawling around those peasants for no good reason? We’re safe there, provided we let them suck a little blood now and then.”

  “Who then?” she asked again, and Neri couldn’t take his eyes off Adele. She was holding a piece of pastry with her delicate, skinny hand and she couldn’t stop herself yawning, didn’t even try to stifle it or cover her face. This was all so distant from her life.

  “We had,” Neri said calmly, “a little problem way back when the boy was just a teenager. With some Americans.”

  Mickey took a deep breath. “That’s over and done with.”

  Neri smiled unpleasantly at his son across the table. “Maybe someone thinks otherwise. Maybe someone thinks we’re responsible.”

  “Are we?” Adele stared at him with those wide-open, guileless eyes. It was, Neri thought, perhaps the worst question anyone should ask in the circumstances.

  “People have got short memories,” he said. “Do you remember what you were doing sixteen years ago?”

  “Sure,” she answered. “Don’t you? I was learning how to fuck. It seemed a useful skill to acquire.”

  “Yeah, well, not everything happens below the waist,” he snapped. Not always, Neri thought. “What matters is that we take care. This is our town. Until everyone realizes that, I want you two to stay here, where I can look
after you.”

  Adele shot Mickey a theatrical glance of pure distaste. “You want me stuck here with him? Like a prisoner?”

  Neri watched the two of them, thinking. “Try to see it as therapy. A break from shopping.”

  “Sometimes,” Adele murmured, “I just can’t stop laughing around this place.”

  Mickey giggled. The kid looked odd. A touch red-faced. Maybe he was back on the dope again, Neri thought. That was all he needed.

  “Me neither,” Neri grunted, then got up from the table and waddled downstairs to talk to the men. His family depressed him sometimes.

  Adele watched him go. Mickey closed his eyes in delight. It was a beautiful morning. There were a couple of gulls screaming in the sky. A helicopter hovered somewhere overhead, maybe getting a good view of what was going on. Her fingers gripped him tightly, stroking, cajoling, running up and down with a certain, insistent rhythm, as they had throughout his father’s tedious lecture. His dick sat upright, begging, in her hand beneath the table.

  A finger crept close to the rim. Some insistent flood was moving, racing north. She lifted the tablecloth. Adele’s head went down, dipping towards Mickey’s groin. He felt her soft red hair fall beneath his hand. Her lips closed on the heat rising from inside him, her tongue performed two perfect circles of pleasure.

  Mickey yelped, couldn’t help it. When he opened his eyes she was back above the table, dabbing a napkin to one corner of her mouth, the tip of her scarlet tongue just visible.

  “Did she do that for you, Mickey?” Adele asked, when she was done. “This slut of yours last night?”

  “I told you,” he answered dreamily. “I was working.”

  “I hope that’s true.” She was looking at him in an odd way. Adele had changed the last couple of days, he thought. There was something she wanted, something more than just the fucking.

  “Did you listen to what he said?” she asked.

  “Hard to pay attention to your old man when your stepmother’s jerking you off under the table.” It was too. He was making a genuine point there, though it all came out like a wisecrack.

  “Maybe I shouldn’t do it anymore. Maybe I should give this up altogether before he finds out.”

  He blinked, unable to countenance the thought.

  “Or maybe,” she continued, “I should tell him you made me. You wouldn’t leave me alone. I could just throw myself at his feet and beg for mercy. He’d listen, you know.”

  He twitched and with it came the occasional stammer he had from time to time, when he was stressed. “D-d-don’t joke about stuff like that, Adele.”

  Her hand gripped his arm. Her slim fingers bit into his flesh. “We need to get serious, Mickey. You need to listen. He’s old. He’s out of his depth. He doesn’t know what he wants to do. And the Sicilians . . . You know these people?”

  “They’re friends,” he explained, trying to give the words some conviction.

  “They’re associates. If they think he’s weak or out of line they’ll just walk in and hand all this to someone else. And you’ll be dead in a car somewhere out in the stinking countryside, while I go back to doing tricks for any rich old jerk who can’t get it up anymore.”

  “What are you saying?” She was starting to scare him. Mickey liked Adele. Maybe this was love even. Weird things happened in spring.

  “I’m saying—” She hesitated, thinking. “We need to be prepared.”

  There was a sound beyond the balcony: cars, sirens. They went to the edge and looked down to the narrow street. Mickey took a deep breath then stepped back. He never did like heights. He didn’t like what he saw down there either: a fleet of blue vehicles swarming across the cobblestones, blocking the narrow street completely. At their head, close to the church on the Tiber side of the road, a tall, distinguished-looking man had stepped out of an unmarked Alfa. With him was a woman: elegant, well-dressed, young.

  “Shit,” he murmured, then pulled back from the edge, head swimming. On the floor below the bell rang repeatedly, insistent.

  Costa got into the Questura early and took the hair-band and the brush over to forensic. The surly-looking lab assistant in the white coat sniffed at the plastic envelopes.

  “What case do I assign them to?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “We got some new cost management procedures sent down from above. You got to tell me the case so I can lay it against the right budget.”

  Costa sighed. “The missing teenager. Suzi Julius. I need to know if the hair on both of them match. By this afternoon.”

  The man’s eyebrows rose. He was about forty, short, skinny, with a long bloodless face. He held the plastic bag up to the light on the desk and took a good look at the contents.

  “I can tell you right now, Detective. They don’t match.”

  “What?”

  “Take a look for yourself. The hair’s a different colour.”

  Costa snatched the bag off the man and stared at the contents. Maybe the man was right. There was a subtle difference in the hair colour. The sample on the hair-band from the villa was darker. Perhaps it did come from someone else. Or maybe it had been stained by the ochre earth on the floor.

  “Is a person’s hair colour the same everywhere on the head?” he asked.

  “Not unless they’ve done a very, very good dye job.”

  “Then do me a favour,” Costa begged. “Satisfy my curiosity. Check.”

  The assistant grunted and made a note. “This is gonna look good on the weekly audit. We’re half down on manning right now ’cos of the stinking flu. I think I’m coming down with it myself. Don’t expect miracles.”

  “So how long?”

  “Three days minimum,” the man replied. “It’s the best I can do in the circumstances. Sorry.”

  “Jesus . . .” Costa murmured and went back to the office to find Peroni slumped in a chair at his desk, eyes closed, face grey and downcast.

  “Morning,” Costa said.

  “You left out the word ‘good.’ I approve. You got a visitor. The Englishwoman’s outside.”

  Costa gave him a sharp look.

  “Hey,” Peroni protested. “Don’t get grumpy with me. I offered to listen. Seems you’re her main man. No Nic Costa, no talkie talkie.”

  Costa went out to the reception area. Miranda Julius sat on a bench looking miserable. There were bags beneath her eyes.

  He led her through to a reception room, past Teresa Lupo who scuttled along the corridor, head down.

  Peroni followed and pulled up a chair at the desk, staring at her. “What can we do for you, Mrs. Julius?” he asked. It was, Costa guessed, a deliberate act, an attempt to make it clear they were a partnership, and she had to deal with both of them.

  “Have you heard anything? Anything at all?”

  Peroni frowned. “We’ll be in touch the moment we have some information. I promise.”

  “So what are you doing?” she demanded. “What about the hair-band you found? Do you know for sure if it’s Suzi’s or not?”

  The two men looked at each other. “Tell you what,” Peroni said. “I’ll just go ask about that outside.”

  Costa watched him leave. “It takes time,” he said. “Everything takes time. You weren’t sure about that hair-band yourself. It’s probably just something left there by someone else. A school party.”

  A school party out to study some Roman porn, he thought. Or a bunch from the university.

  She leaned over the table and gripped his arm, peering into his face with that unavoidable intensity he was coming to know. “Nic. My daughter is missing. I heard on the TV all that speculation about rituals. You found those stupid things of hers in the apartment. What if she’s mixed up in this?”

  He nodded. “As of now, there’s nothing to link Suzi directly with what happened in Ostia. Why should there be? Do you know either of these people on the news? The university professor? The policewoman?”

  “No.”

  Miranda Julius had the look h
e’d seen so often in these cases, a mixture of fear and self-loathing.

  “Suzi ran away,” he said. “Probably with some stupid kid she met when you weren’t around. We’re circulating her photo everywhere. Someone will see it. Someone will recognize her. That’s if she doesn’t call you first.”

  She looked at her watch. “I’m sorry. It’s just that I feel so . . . helpless.”

  “It’s understandable. As I said, I can get someone to be with you if that’s what you want.”

  “No,” she replied immediately. “There’s no need.” She paused. “I’m sorry. About last night. Embarrassing you like that. It was inexcusable.”

  “Forget it.”

  “No,” she said firmly. “I won’t forget it. Most men . . . well, I know what most men would have done. I guess . . . thanks.”

  He didn’t want to prolong this particular line of conversation. “What are you going to do now?”

  “Just walk around the place. Think. Hope. Just sitting in that stupid apartment on my own is driving me crazy. She’s got my mobile if she needs it.”

  He gave her his card. “Call me. Anytime. For any reason. Even if there’s no news. If you just want to talk.”

  She put the number in her bag. “Don’t take this the wrong way,” she said hesitantly. “I didn’t mean it last night when I said I had a habit of doing that. Sleeping with strangers. It wasn’t strictly true. I don’t want you to think . . . it was just automatic.” She glanced directly into his eyes for a moment.

  Peroni saved him. He walked back into the room, shaking his head, saying there was no news from forensic, but they were still looking, they were starting to take phone calls from the public.

  Then he sat down next to her, took off his jacket and placed it round the back of the chair, looking serious, businesslike. “We’re doing the best we can, Mrs. Julius,” Peroni added. “If there’s anything you can think of that’s occurred to you since yesterday . . .”

  She clutched her arms tightly to her chest and nodded forward, a tense, nervous gesture. Her fair hair bobbed with the momentum of the sudden movement. “Nothing.” Then she came to life briefly. “No. I’m sorry. I’m not thinking straight. Last night, after you’d gone, I found one of those throwaway cameras in Suzi’s room. I got it developed just now. There’s nothing there. It’s just . . . stuff. Places. A young man. It’s just the usual holiday snapshots, though. No pictures of specific people, not that I can see. But you’re welcome to it.”