The Villa of Mysteries

by David Hewson

  “Where’s the darling inspector?” she asked. “I am filled with an urgent desire to speak with him.”

  “Went out fifteen minutes ago, mob-handed and ready for action. Got tons of people with him. Busy man.”

  “Hmm.” Her mind was racing. Nic Costa was out there somewhere, wrapped up deep in all this shit. There was no time for niceties. “Do you still come to work on that little motorbike, Silvio?”

  “Sure but what the fu—” His pale cheeks flared with a sudden rush of blood. “Oh no, no, no, no, no . . .”

  She gripped him by the collar of his white medical jacket and jerked so hard that his face was just a couple of inches away from hers.

  “Gimme the keys now. I’ve got to talk to Falcone.”

  He pulled himself back, folded his podgy arms to give himself a little dignity and displayed as much hurt as his featureless face could manage. “You want to take my motorbike and catch up with Falcone to talk to him? That’s it, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, Silvio,” she said calmly. “That’s it.”

  “OK,” he said very slowly. “Here’s the deal. Do you know what this is?”

  She looked at what he was holding and realized he had a point.

  “This,” said Silvio Di Capua, “is what we earthlings call a phone.”

  The tunnel ran beneath the Quirinale Palace, cut straight through rock, four hundred metres, built originally for tram cars, now choked by traffic trying to shortcut the hill above. Big tourist coaches were double-parked on the Piazza di Spagna side to dump their contents for the short walk to the Trevi Fountain. Construction lorries working on the endless repairs in the Via Nazionale habitually blocked the opposite end. It was, in theory, the easiest way from the Questura to most points east. Falcone had dictated this was the route to take, Peroni with Wallis in front, the cover cars following some discreet distance behind.

  Peroni didn’t feel at home. He slunk behind the wheel wishing someone else had picked the short straw. This was so far from vice, so distant from the world he knew, he felt like an interloper, just waiting to make some stupid mistake.

  They drove straight into the tunnel and hit the jam a third from the end. He banged on the wheel then looked in the mirror. Falcone and the back-up cars were nowhere to be seen. Maybe they’d made it in before the traffic fouled up. Maybe not.

  Wallis, mute and expressionless in the passenger seat, took the phone out of his pocket and stared at the little screen. “Not much use in here.” He tapped the mike wired behind the lapel of his leather coat. “This isn’t either.”

  Peroni eyed the man in the adjoining seat and wished he could shake off the idea that something somewhere was deeply wrong. “So, Vergil,” he said amicably. “Here’s an opportunity for the both of us. Get this off your chest, man. You can tell me what’s really going down here and nobody but the two of us gets to know.”

  Wallis peered at him imperiously. “You’re a very suspicious human being. I’m doing you a big favour. A measure of trust wouldn’t go amiss.”

  Peroni shot him a filthy look. “Trust. Excuse me, Mr. Wallis, but I don’t buy this retirement story. I didn’t when that poor bitch Rachele D’Amato spun it for me. I didn’t when I met you. Leopards don’t change their spots. Crooks don’t do the cops favours. Come on. I got a friend involved in this. Level with me.”

  Wallis took a deep breath and looked up at the grimy roof of the tunnel. The air in the car was disgusting, just a thin stream of oxygen fighting to get through the clouds of carbon monoxide getting pumped out by the jam around them.

  “You know what’s up there?”

  “Changing the subject? Understandable I guess. Yeah. Mr. President in his pretty palace. Don’t you just love him? I used to work guard duty at the Quirinale when I wore short pants.”

  Wallis gave him a condescending glance. “Interesting. I meant historically.”

  “Oh. Excuse me. I’m Italian. What the hell would I know about history?”

  “That’s where the Sabines lived. You remember the story? It had rape in it. Gives the thing some modern currency.”

  Peroni did remember that story vaguely. It was important. Romulus or Remus, one or the other, stole some women and had to get their act together to clean up afterwards. And out of that mess—out of rape and murder—came Rome. “They lived up there? I thought they came from miles away. I thought they were like foreigners or something.”

  “Up there,” Wallis replied, pointing again. “But that’s an interesting reaction, you know. Maybe we like to deal with bad memories that way. By thinking that the only people who got affected were from someplace else, a long way away. It makes everything so much easier.”

  “You can say that again.” There was a gap in the traffic out in the daylight ahead. They’d be gone soon. “You know, I kind of admire you for knowing so much about history and stuff. When you grow up on top of it you tend not to notice things. I still don’t understand why, though.”

  “Why?” Vergil Wallis shook his head and actually laughed. It was a pleasant sound. It even made Gianni Peroni feel a little less jumpy. “Because it’s Rome. It’s where we all came from, in a way. It’s about how good things can be. And how bad if we choose to make them that way.”

  “Really?” Peroni got ready to kick the car into gear.

  “Really.”

  “You know,” Wallis said in that low, calm drawl of his. “I enjoy talking to you. I think that, in different circumstances, we could maybe have a mutually enlightening conversation.”

  “Point taken, point taken.” The idiot up ahead was slow to get moving. Peroni fell angrily on the horn. “All the same, Vergil. I still think you’re a lying sonofabitch.”

  “That’s your privilege. Tell me. Whatever happens now, you’ve got Neri and the kid anyway, haven’t you? You know the old man planted that bomb. Now I gave you that camera, you got Mickey too. They’re finished whatever.”

  “True.” Peroni found his attention split. Between the gap opening up in the traffic ahead and the sudden loop in Wallis’s conversation.

  “So what if the two of us cut a deal? You just give me a spare thirty minutes dealing with this asshole in my own way. After that I call and you get to come in and do what you want.”

  Peroni looked at him and knew at that moment he wasn’t driving this black hood anywhere except back to meet Falcone. Something was getting played here he didn’t understand.

  Wallis put a large, firm hand on his arm. “Peroni,” he said. “I got your number, man. I know what happened a couple of months ago.”

  “You do?”

  Peroni thought about that and wished he’d had more time to go through the details back in the Questura. Nic had gone missing sometime before midnight. Vergil Wallis had picked up half a million euros less than eight hours later. What kind of “private banker” did Miranda Julius use? Who on earth had that kind of money lying around ready to be bundled up in a bag at a moment’s notice?

  “I heard you got busted down from on high,” Wallis said. “Why’d you think I picked you for this job? It says two things to me. You’re a man who’s open to ideas. Plus you could use the cash.”

  Peroni noted the growing gap in the traffic ahead and wondered how quickly he could make a U-turn. “You disappoint me, Vergil. You are a very, very bad judge of character. Best we turn around right now and go through this whole thing again with Inspector Falcone, only in a little more detail and leaving out the lying parts.”

  There was enough room, if only the idiot in front would pull forward enough to let him make the turn.

  “An honest cop,” Wallis said, nodding his imposing black head. “Who’d have thought it? I admire that, though. And it’s because I do I’m not gonna hit you as hard as I might otherwise.”

  Peroni wasn’t sure he heard that last one right. He took his foot off the pedal, screwed up his face and said, “What?”

  When he opened his eyes a big black fist was coming towards him, fast, so fast he could do not
hing but watch and wait as it crashed straight into his right eye.

  It got a little fuzzy after that. Huge hands moved around him. The belt got unbuckled. Vergil Wallis’s collar mike got torn off and thrown onto the floor. A big foot came across and kicked open the driver’s door. Then a pair of arms came beneath his body and hurled him out of the car.

  He fell on the filthy road with a crack, took one breath of the stinking air and started to cough.

  The unmarked police car was doing a U-turn into the tunnel, now facing a clear run back into the city, headed anywhere but San Giovanni. And—Gianni Peroni would remember this for a long time, he told himself—he’d be damned if the grinning black figure behind the wheel wasn’t waving goodbye.

  She whispers and, through the chemical fire that rages in his head, he sees.

  The thyrsus sits in the same place, now green and vivid, coloured ribbons round its shaft, beneath the bulbous priapic head. The lights are brighter. Men, middle-aged, stiff in their movements, conspiratorial in their shared glances, move beneath them. There are glasses in their hands, brimming with purple wine. A couple smoke, long, hand-made roll-ups that send blue-grey smoke rolling up to the rocky ceiling. They talk among one another: Emilio Neri, the little accountant Vercillo, Randolph Kirk and Toni Martelli, others who are just faces half hidden in the shadows.

  Mickey lurks behind them, miserable, uncomfortable, unsure of where he belongs.

  They talk and talk and now Nic Costa understands why. These men, powerful men, influential men, are nervous. This is something new for them. An experiment, a break with convention. They look at Randolph Kirk and their eyes say everything: make this work or else.

  Randolph Kirk knows this. He’s more nervous than the rest, almost twitching with anticipation. He speaks but his words are inaudible. He claps his hands and, though they make no sound, the men stop talking and look. A line of young figures gathers at the door. Girls in sackcloth shifts, flowers in their hair, young, young. Some giggle. Some smoke. Their eyes are bright yet hazy. They are, like Randolph Kirk, afraid.

  The mood pivots on a breath, a gesture, anything that might break the spell.

  One of the initiates, Barbara, young yet knowing, walks forward, expectant, animated. Her hand falls on the mask. Her fingers stroke its ugly features, caress the vile, bulbous nose.

  Watch, the chemical screams, a god inside him, so strong it is impossible to fight.

  The golden girl lifts the dead, ugly face, looks at each of them in turn and smiles.

  They left the house on the Aventine Hill just after nine. Bruno Bucci drove. Neri huddled down in the rear with one man on either side. Then the Mercedes snaked down the back roads, taking the narrowest it could find, before it emerged in Cerchi, just where the call had dictated.

  Not that Emilio Neri needed directions. He’d never forget this place. Too many memories lay behind the scarred earth.

  The car pulled onto the pavement. They got out and stood in the shadow of the escarpment that ran into the Tarpeian Rock. The sun was coming up on another fine spring day. If there’d been a little less traffic Neri could have taken a deep breath and believed he would miss Rome.

  Bucci looked at him, nodded at the black hole of the cave, behind the broken gate its ancient city archaeology department notice saying “Keep Out.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” Neri said and ducked into the darkness. “I’ll handle this on my own. Just make sure he’s carrying nothing when he shows, huh?”

  “What about Mickey?” Bucci said.

  “Mickey?” Neri laughed. “What about him? He’s just a stupid kid. I can handle my own son.”

  Neri thought about Bucci again and briefly wondered about his own judgement. “You think I’m being dumb, don’t you?”

  Bucci didn’t say a thing.

  “OK. Don’t answer. I got to say, Bruno. I’m being more than fair to you here.”

  “Sure. I’d still like to come in with you.”

  Was this sentiment? Or just some self-serving show of concern? Neri couldn’t decide. Maybe Bucci was right. He could handle Mickey, no problem. But if his son had others in tow . . .

  “You heard of anyone going over to Mickey?” he asked.

  Bucci laughed out straight. “Are you kidding? Who’d be fool enough for that?”

  Neri nodded at the shadowy mouth of the cave. “So it’s just him in there. And maybe Adele. Do you honestly believe I cannot cope with my own son and a two-timing wife I can slap down with one hand?”

  Bucci shuffled on his big feet, uncomfortable.

  Neri took that as a yes. “Just make sure Wallis goes in on his own and he’s not carrying anything,” he said. “I don’t share out this pleasure with anyone. Besides. I’ve been thinking. There’s some questions I want to ask, and they’re all family. I don’t want anyone else listening.”

  “Think of me as back-up.”

  Neri tapped him on the chest with a single finger, quite hard. “I was putting men down before you were born, Bruno. Don’t get presumptuous. You got the rope and the tape like I asked?”

  Bucci nodded and handed them over.

  Emilio Neri patted his jacket, felt the butt of the gun there. Then he walked into the darkness, surprised how cold it was, surprised too by how little illumination the bulbs gave.

  His memory must have been playing tricks. In the old days everything seemed much brighter.

  Leo Falcone watched Peroni dabbing his head next to him in the back seat.

  “That’s one big black eye on the way,” he said. “Do you have any idea where Wallis might have gone? Did he say anything?”

  “Yeah. First he asked if Neri and his kid were safely in the net anyway, even without this. Then he tried to bribe me to look the other way so he could get a spare thirty minutes with the fat man. I was explaining the problems this posed for my fragile sense of public duty when he whacked me in the face. Said he wasn’t hitting me so hard because he admired me. I’m glad I wasn’t on the hate list. If he punched like that when he’s a fan—”

  The radio barked at them. Wallis had dumped the police car in a side road near the Trevi Fountain and disappeared into the tourist masses. Falcone swore and then issued the standard call. Tall black men in flapping leather overcoats weren’t that common in Rome. Someone ought to see him.

  “Maybe he’ll take a cab,” Peroni suggested. “That guy is as cool as they come. You know what I think? He intended to make that drop all along. And on his own. He just came to us to make sure we got that camera with Mickey on it. Make sure the Neris wind up in the shit whatever.”

  Falcone picked up the mike and ordered every man he had to cruise around Cerchi; he told his own driver to get there too. It was the last place Costa had been seen. If they got lucky . . .

  It was hard thinking straight. Then his phone went and it got even harder.

  “Not now,” he said instantly.

  “Yes now,” she yelled at him, and Falcone wondered for a moment why he and Teresa Lupo so seldom had a conversation at normal volume. “Listen to me. I’ve just been through Kirk’s belongings again. I’ve found some phone numbers. One in particular. The most recent. Maybe the one he called before he died.”

  “Maybe?” Falcone roared. “What the hell use to me is ‘maybe’?”

  “He called Miranda Julius,” she said simply. “At least that’s the number on his snotty little handkerchief, as bright and clear as day. She gave me the number when we were in that apartment of hers. Doesn’t that sound more than a little interesting? Sometime before he died, Randolph Kirk called the mother of the kid we’re supposed to think he snatched in the first place.”

  Falcone shook his head, trying to clear some space for thought then ordered the car to pull to the side of the road. “What?”

  “Her mobile number was there on Kirk’s person. There is no mistake about this. And given how disorganized that particular man was I can only think it was there for a very recent reason. You tell me.”

  Leo F
alcone leaned back into the soft seats of the Alfa Saloon and stared out the window, out at the tourist crowds mingling near the mouth of the tunnel, making their way at a snail’s pace to the little square and its over-blown fountain. Miranda Julius had given them a picture of Randolph Kirk near the Trevi, staring myopically at her daughter. Or so it appeared.

  “Meet me at her apartment,” he said, making a particular effort to keep the volume down. “I’ll send a car.”

  “Hey,” said the surprised voice on the other end of the line. “I’m just a pathologist. I don’t want to tread—”

  “Be there,” he yelled and cut the call.

  Mickey Neri stood with Adele in the shadows, watching his father walk into the big, brightly lit chamber. The old man was grinning at the pictures on the walls, happy as could be, as if they brought back good memories, which was, Mickey knew, ridiculous. Something else must have been making the old man feel this way.

  The shadows in this stupid place had such substance. They were places you could hide and feel you didn’t really exist as you watched what went on in the light. Mickey Neri knew he would be happy to stay in shadows like this, all the way to one of the several exits she’d talked about and out into the bright new day. Then Adele gave him a short, damp kiss on the cheek, whispered “Ciao” and propelled him out into the yellow light.

  Neri opened his arms in a welcoming, paternal gesture. “Son, son—”

  Mickey didn’t move. Neri took two steps towards him. “Mickey . . . Why the long face? Are we going to argue about this forever?”

  He stood his ground, fearing the presence of the old man.

  “I gave you a test, Mickey. What do you do? Not just kill that talkative bastard Martelli but come up with a present for me too? So you’ve been screwing Adele. What the fuck? If it’s gonna happen best it’s kept in the family. I don’t care. Screwing around’s such a little thing for a man of my age.”