The Villa of Mysteries

by David Hewson

  Wallis made a lazy wave with the knife point and said nothing.

  “Besides,” Neri continued, “if I just walk away from this mess and leave you sitting in the middle of it, you’re going to have so much explaining to do. Reading about all that from somewhere nice and warm and safe could be real amusing. I might just die laughing.”

  “You might,” Wallis said, and allowed himself a smile.

  “An eye for an eye then,” Neri said, returning the gesture. “Just as it should be. We agreed? All this nonsense ends here?”

  “Yeah,” Wallis said. “It ends here.”

  Neri looked at him approvingly. “That’s good. You don’t mind if I ask one more thing though? Just a tiny detail that bothers me.”

  The big American had let go of the knife now. His hands were flat on the table, behind the pile of money, unseen.

  “It does?”

  “One of my cop friends told me the oddest thing. He said that when they found that poor kid she had a coin in her mouth. Some accident, I thought. Then he looks at me the way you look at me. As if I’m dumb or something. Seems this has some significance, Vergil. People used to put it there for a reason. You think Mickey knew that reason? I didn’t. We didn’t put it there when we got rid of the body out near the airport. See, we’re not educated.”

  Neri picked up the gun in front of him and angled it halfway across the table. “Oh, but you are. I guess you’d know what that reason is. Kind of a nice reason, my cop friend told me. It says farewell, sorry maybe. That professor of yours would know too. But let’s face it. He was just some little pervert you picked up along the way to sort things out for you. He didn’t have the spunk to kill someone. Besides, why? If you’d gone in there, on the other hand . . . Maybe not taking no for an answer. Maybe finding out about Mickey’s little present. Or wondering how the hell you were going to square screwing her with her mother afterwards.”

  Wallis’s black eyes burned across at him.

  “One thing I do remember, Vergil, and it’s so clear it’s like yesterday.” Neri nodded at the mask at the head of the table. “You really liked wearing that stupid thing a lot. And when you wore it, you know something? I think you thought you really were some kind of god. One who was better than the rest of us. One who could do what he liked to just anybody and never feel the consequences. Which is why you came here really. You’re scared that little secret might work its way into the light of day, aren’t you? You just want to keep it good and buried, preferably with Mickey’s name on it instead.”

  Neri looked at his son then at Wallis, blinking back the fury. “You’re no god. None of us is. You just fuck up the world pretending. Because of that—because I failed to see it—I’ve been punishing this poor, dumb son of mine for years.”

  He waved the gun at the figure across from him. “Jesus, Vergil. I wish I had more time with you. I wish I could do this some other way and—”

  The explosion burst through the gloom. Emilio Neri found himself flying backwards in his chair, clutching his chest, feeling something turn his guts inside out. He landed on the floor, upright enough to see Wallis’s hand emerging from the money pile, clutching a small pistol taped beneath one of the bundles.

  “Bruno—” he croaked, through a mouth filling with blood, into the reddening darkness.

  The uniformed men lined Bucci and three of his sidekicks against the wall just off the main road. Bucci had that punk look on his face, the one Falcone and Peroni knew so well. The one that said, you can ask and ask and ask but no one’s saying.

  “You got any idea what they were doing?” Falcone asked the uniformed sergeant.

  Gianni Peroni had recognized Bucci as the leader straightaway. Had gone straight up and pushed his face into his, one bull neck against the other.

  “No,” the sergeant replied. “They were walking by the time we stopped them. I guess they saw us first.”

  Falcone walked over to Bucci and said, “I don’t have time to waste on you, sonny. I got a man out there somewhere and if he dies I promise you your life won’t be worth living. Neri’s old goods here. You stick with him, you go down with him. Understood?”

  Bucci looked at the other three hoods with him and laughed. “You hear that? What’s this town coming to? When a decent Italian man can’t walk down the street without some ugly fucking cop coming and staring in his face?”

  “Ugly?” Gianni Peroni asked. “You calling me ugly? No one ever called me ugly before. I take that as an insult.”

  Bucci laughed. His shoulders jerked in that punk way the cops all knew. “Yeah. Ugly. Ugly as—”

  It came so quickly even Falcone didn’t expect it. Peroni dabbed his big head forward in a single blow, stomped his bone-hard temples straight into Bucci’s nose. The big hood fell backwards onto the wall, blood and snot streaming down his face, gasping for air. Then Peroni butted him again, twice, punched a big fist into his guts, got him on the ground and laid in a flurry of stiff kicks. Bucci writhed there, screaming, bleeding, and Peroni took hold of the man next to him, a skinny-looking jerk in his thirties with mud-green eyes now as big as saucers, grabbed his shoulders, pulled back ready to strike.

  “Down the road in some fucking cave, man,” the jerk whined. “Don’t hit me. Please.”

  Gianni Peroni didn’t wait for anyone else. He was first into the dark stinking mouth of the caverns. In seconds he was fighting to find his bearings under the dull yellow lights that ran through the labyrinth, leading into the blackness.

  Mickey Neri whimpered. He’d pissed himself. The hot stream felt like acid against his leg.

  “Don’t do this, mister. P-p-p-please.”

  Wallis stalked him with the knife. The big American couldn’t take his eyes off the mask with its dead eyes watching them.

  “Got to,” Wallis murmured, coming round to stand behind the figure strapped in the chair. He reached down, grabbed a hunk of Mickey’s hair in his fist, jerked back his head, held the silver blade over the pale throat below.

  They watch, hidden in the black corner, and two times collide in Nic Costa’s head. What he sees before him now is no god, just a man, bright beneath the single yellow bulb, angling himself behind the screaming shape on the chair, pitiless, determined.

  Don’t fail me, Nic, she says. Remember what you are. Don’t make me the silent witness twice.

  Her hand grips his and passes something over. Its shape slips beneath his fingers, cold metal, the old, familiar dumb machine.

  The powerful black arm rose . . . rises.

  A figure strides out of the darkness. Vergil Wallis watches and pauses, surprised. A name slips from his lips, hangs in the air between them. He lowers his gaze, nods at the table.

  You got your money, the American says, staring at her too-blonde hair, eyes glittering covetously, remembering. You know the deal. Get gone.

  Her face is more radiant than anything in the room, shining with a living brightness leeched from the vibrant photos pasted everywhere. She shivers, she shakes, rooted to the spot, afraid but not afraid.

  Wallis waves the blade at her. Take it.

  No movement. Fear and resolution.

  I know, she says.

  He halts, confused. Her golden head shakes. There are tears in her eyes as, stuttering, she says . . .

  I saw, I know, I never had the guts to tell.

  He looks at the dead mask on the table and laughs, wondering whether to try it on again for size.

  So what’s one more? he wonders, then laughs, staring avidly at the shining hair. Afterwards . . .

  The blade rises, then falls. A red line starts on the white, shining skin.

  You got a talent for watching, girl . . .—he tries to say into the dark air, but finds himself struggling for the words. Wallis looks beyond her, into the shadows, where fire and thunder are shredding the darkness.

  He stares at this black shape there and tries to roar, to find the god inside him. Blood rises in his throat. He falls and, in the smoke and powder s
tink, Nic Costa finds his consciousness fading too. His head spins, his legs become feeble.

  On the ground, sight fading. One last memory.

  She bends over the fallen man, opening his bloody lips, still mouthing, still trying to say some single word. A coin glitters briefly between her fingers then is gone.

  Another room. Smaller. A pool of grubby light pierces the darkness. Her older voice now talks to him and it is calm, unmoved.

  Sweet Nic, sweet Nic. You save yourself. You save me.

  No, he says, and hears his own voice rumbling around the inside of this curling, twisting intestine cut into the rock.

  He sits on a chair. She crouches above him, holding his cheeks. Her face fills his vision, becomes all there is to the world.

  You have to feed the savage sometimes. It’s the only way to keep him in his cage.

  Fighting to control his hands, his fingers reach her shoulder, push the fabric of her tee-shirt down.

  And hears the old voice, laughing, you should have looked earlier, kid, call yourself a cop.

  Deep in the flesh, dark blue and old, the dreadlocked face grins at him, victorious. His mouth closes on the stained skin, swallows its guttural voice. His teeth bite into her, chewing, licking, sucking the vile blue poison from her pores, takes it into himself, feeling the rush.

  Voices down the corridor, voices in his head. He snatches a breath and knows: this is only the beginning. The dope is moving higher up the ladder, seizing more territory inside his limitless imagination.

  Then, like a lifeline from sanity, a familiar voice rings through the guts of the labyrinth, echoing, distant.

  Nic! Nic!

  A sound from the old world. The real world.

  One pill makes you small, Miranda Julius sings.

  Nic!

  She bends down to kiss him, tongue darting briefly into the corner of his mouth.

  “Don’t look for me,” she whispers, then vanishes into the shadows, leaving just the aftertouch of her skin, her presence, glowing in his head.

  The light dies. It is dark and cold. He shivers alone.

  Aprile

  It was late afternoon on the first day of April. They sat in the old courtyard garden of the hospital of San Giovanni enjoying the last of the sun. Peroni bolted down the remains of a panino, balled up the bag and despatched it into a nearby rose bed.

  “Nice to have you back, Nic,” he said. “I never had a partner with acid flashbacks before. What’s it like?”

  Costa gave him a wry look. “I’ll let you know when it happens.”

  “Not yet, huh? Did they ever find out what shit that woman pumped into you?”

  His partner’s eye had mended but still had a rosy bloom above the eyelid. Given the state of the rest of Peroni’s face, it didn’t look particularly out of place. Peroni was unchanged by events. Nic Costa had stared at himself in the mirror that morning and wondered if anyone would say the same about him. He looked older, more marked by the world. He’d even found a couple of grey hairs above one ear. This went with the odd new territory he seemed to have carved out for himself within the Questura. He wasn’t a hero, quite. But when he’d walked down the corridors that afternoon, for the first time since the incident, he realized he was now the kind of man who turned heads.

  “If they did,” he said, “they haven’t told me.”

  “Drop off a bottle of pee with Teresa,” Peroni declared. “She’ll know. I’m serious. That woman’s a genius.”

  Costa thought of the role the pathologist had played in the Julius case. Maybe she was too. “So you never found out who Miranda really was?”

  Peroni shook his head. “We got the ‘daughter’ though. Not that it did us much good. She was a teenage model from Prague. Wanted to break into acting. Seems she was picked out of a portfolio for her looks, paid to come here and ‘audition.’ Which meant getting her hair dyed a touch more blonde and her picture taken in a few places. You can guess by who. Oh, and doing that stunt on the motorbike for the benefit of the cameras and any cops who happened to be lurking in the Campo at the time.”

  Costa thought about this. “She didn’t know anything about Miranda? She was just picked at random because of how she looked?”

  “Sure. Miranda claimed to be a big talent scout from America. How many questions do you think would-be actresses ask in those situations? She got her plane ticket. She got put up in a nice hotel. Then, after performing the ‘action audition’ with the bike, she took a taxi for Fiumicino and flew home. You got to admit it, Miranda did a great job. While we were thinking her daughter was lying drugged in a cave somewhere, making out with Mr. Beastie and about to get killed, she was actually back at school strutting around in front of her classmates boasting about her new career in Hollywood. She can’t give us a clue who Miranda really is. And you want to know something? I doubt we’re ever going to find out.”

  Costa wondered how he really felt about that. “Falcone’s letting it drop?”

  Peroni hesitated, choosing his words carefully. “I wouldn’t put it quite so crudely. You got to remember, Nic. People like him answer to lots of different bosses. Some of them hold the purse strings and ask about the money. Is it really worth it? Ask yourself. Is it?”

  “Six people dead. I would have thought so.”

  Peroni took a deep breath. “That’s seven actually if you include Eleanor Jamieson. Not counting those poor bastards outside Neri’s.”

  Costa shook his head. The death toll there had risen to five in the end, some DIA, some cops. It could so easily have been higher. “We can’t just let this drop.”

  His partner sighed. “Nic. Let’s have this conversation once and then leave it to one side forever. Most of this is wrapped up already. We got hard evidence that Mickey Neri accounted for that bastard Toni Martelli, for which he will stand trial once we can get him out of the hospital and into a jacket with sleeves. Barbara Martelli, meanwhile, popped Randolph Kirk to stop him talking to us before disappearing down a hole outside Fiumicino. Thanks to you we know most of the rest too. Wallis killed his own stepdaughter and got to Emilio Neri too, before you had the chance to stop him. This . . .” Peroni patted his knee to emphasize the point, “. . . is all good news for the statistics, and the people who live above Leo survive on statistics. Do you think it possible Crazy Teresa has the hots for me by the way? I’ve been getting some funny looks from that woman lately.”

  “No,” Costa objected. “What about—?”

  “Mr. Vercillo? Miranda Julius, or whoever she is, did him. There’s forensic on that costume we found, and we got some bloodstains on a shirt in the apartment too. So you see the dilemma? Do we really waste public money—big public money in all probability—chasing all over the world for a woman who, let’s be honest here, probably did the Italian public at large some very big favours?”

  Costa scowled and said nothing.

  Peroni sniffed a young rose on the bush next to them, just coming into bloom. “Summer’s on the way, Nic. Let’s put all this behind us.”

  “I’m trying,” he murmured.

  Peroni’s hand went to Nic’s shoulder and that big ugly face now stared up at his. “OK. I know. I checked the records. It’s the first time you shot a man. And it bugs you. I don’t blame you. I never shot anyone in my life.”

  Costa looked Peroni straight in the eye. “Did you ever want to?”

  A touch of colour rose in Peroni’s face. “Nic. Stop feeling sorry for yourself. As luck would have it I am going to be by your side somewhat longer than I expected. And I do not intend to sit back and watch you choke trying to swallow this. Do you think either of them, Neri or Wallis, was going to let you walk out of there? You’re damn lucky the woman did. Still not sure I get that. What I do know is she filled you up with dope before this happened. If you’re looking for someone to blame, blame her.”

  Costa carefully removed his partner’s arm from his shoulder. “Don’t worry. What bothers me is I’m not that bothered. It wasn’t the d
ope, either. Not all of it anyway. I wanted that man dead. He was a monster.”

  Gianni Peroni looked at him and Costa was unsure of his expression. It just may have been shock.

  “I’m sorry to hear that, Nic,” he said eventually. “In a way. A part of me wants to say, ‘Welcome to the real world, Mr. Costa. Where most of us go round having some such thoughts on a daily basis.’ A part of me hopes you don’t catch the same bug everyone else gets. Let’s not make a habit of it, huh? It’s such an easy way out. Is that a deal?”

  “Yeah,” Costa replied, feeling a little embarrassed.

  “Good.” His partner was grinning now. It made him look younger and a little scary.

  “What do you mean you’re sticking around with me?” Costa asked. “I thought you were going back to pushing a desk in vice.”

  Peroni took another look at the single rosebud struggling into bloom on the bush next to them then snipped off the stem with his forefinger and thumb and placed the flower in his jacket pocket. “You wouldn’t believe it. That Bucci bastard, the hood I knocked around good in Cerchi, laid in a complaint about me. Amazing. He may even sue too. Police brutality. First time I ever truly hit a man on the job, and he’s a murdering goon. What with all the hooker stuff that went down before, they wanted to kick me out altogether. But old Leo waded in and started screaming at everyone high and low. At least so I gather. He’s not even said so much as a word either way to me.”

  Costa tried to decode the expression on Peroni’s face. “Is that good or bad? You staying with me?”

  “It’s good for me,” Peroni yelled. “I got a job still, and a partner I can live with. How about you?”

  Costa shrugged. “I may need to think about it for a while.”

  “Jesus,” Peroni gasped. “Will you analyse every last fucking event on the face of this planet until it rolls over and dies? It is how it is. Nothing I can do will change things. So why sweat over it?”

  Costa chuckled.