The Villa of Mysteries (22 page)

“And Randolph Kirk? Where’s he supposed to fit in?”

“When you started talking to him someone got worried he might blab about something or other and sent Barbara out to whack him and nip it all in the bud. They didn’t want witnesses either so she went after you.”

“The prof being in the mob too, then. I mean, that’s how most Mafiosi hide out from the cops these days, isn’t it? By holding a chair in classical antiquities at the University of Rome or something?”

“Didn’t get that far,” he mumbled. “Didn’t like to ask.”

“And they really think the Julius kid is just coincidence?”

“They don’t know what to think. You know what they’re like. They’re primitive organisms. They don’t multitask. There’s only so much they can handle at any one time. Also they got lots of staff off with this virus thing. Hell, so have we.”

She ran a hand through her hair. She hadn’t been as careful as normal with it that morning. It was a mess, if she were honest with herself. Just like the old days. “But, Silvio. Suzi Julius is still alive. At least until tomorrow, if I’m right. Doesn’t anyone understand that?”

He muttered something about priorities and how it was unfair to throw all this at him, then looked helpless again. She hated herself for venting her anger on this hapless minion. It was cruel, unjustified. It was the kind of thing cops did.

“Sorry,” she whispered. “It’s not aimed at you. It’s aimed at me if you want to know.”

He put his hand on her arm, which was, all things considered, a little creepy. “Let’s just go back inside, Teresa. We’ve got work to do and you and me are just about the only two people here right now who aren’t sneezing up buckets. Let’s keep our heads down and get on with things until it all blows over. They’re paid to deal with this crap, not us. If we stay quiet, maybe it’ll all go away. They’ll find what they want and forget about the rest.”

Which was a nice idea, she thought, and one that had not a snowball in hell’s chance of becoming reality.

“There’s nothing in there you and the rest of the team can’t handle,” she said abruptly. “Let’s face it. You don’t need to be a genius to know how the beautiful Barbara and the professor died. And the bog girl’s there more for the science than the criminology. We might as well admit it. We’ve got no answers for them. We should be trying to make sure Suzi Julius doesn’t go into our in-tray instead.”

He took his hand away. He looked scared. “That’s what they get paid to do. We’ve got a big workload on. I can’t cope on my own.”

“You can cope, Silvio,” she said. “You can cope better than you know.”

“What if something else happens? What if—”

She took his arm again, smiling. “Look. Statistics. How many violent deaths do we get in Rome? There’s a week’s quota lying on the slab right now. Nothing’s going to happen today. Trust me. I need a break. I need to think.”

The pale, flabby face blushed off-pink. “You’re going somewhere,” he said accusingly. “I know you. This is like yesterday all over again. You’re going somewhere and it isn’t good at all.”

“I just thought I’d—”

“No!
No
! Do
not
tell me because I don’t want to hear. Two wrongs don’t make a right—”

“I wasn’t wrong! Stupid maybe. But two stupids just make you . . . stupid. And most of the jerks in there think that of me anyway. So where’s the harm?”

“Please.” His little hands were together now, praying. “I beg of you, Teresa. For my sake. Don’t do this. Whatever it is.”

She kissed him lightly on the cheek and watched the blood make a big rush all the way from his jowls to his eye sockets. “Nothing’s going to happen, Silvio. Listen to your friend Teresa. Just hold the fort for an hour and then I’ll be back. And they’re none the wiser.”

He looked wrecked. He looked terrified. “An hour. Is that an earth hour? Or one of those special hours you have on that planet of yours?”

“Silvio, Silvio,” she sighed. “Tell me. What could possibly go wrong?”

BENIAMINO VERCILLO WAS a measured, organized man. He liked to start work early, at seven prompt each weekday morning, seated at his desk in the cellar of a block off the Via dei Serpenti in Monti. The place abutted a busy optician’s on the street. It was a fixed-rent single room of just twenty-five square metres, with no windows, just a door to the iron steps leading down from the street. Space enough to house Vercillo and the female secretary who had been servicing him, in more ways than one, these last ten years. After the bus ride from the quiet suburb of Paroli near the Via Veneto he took breakfast — a cappuccino and a cornetto — every morning in the café across the road. Lunch was a piece of pizza rustica from one of the local shops. By six he was back home, work done for the day, ready for the life of a middle-aged Roman bachelor. Vercillo was now fifty-two. He preferred plain dark suits, pressed white shirts, a dark tie and old, worn shoes. He was, it seemed to him, the most insignificant man to walk this busy little street that ran from the dull modern thoroughfare of Via Cavour over to the fashion shops in Via Nazionale.

This was, at least, the public image he wished to present, and for good reason. Vercillo was Emilio Neri’s bookkeeper. In his head lay every last detail of the big hood’s Italian investments, legitimate and crooked. Those that could be written down sat stored on the single PC in Vercillo’s office, ready to be transcribed for the annual tax forms, accurate down to the last cent. Vercillo was a good accountant. He knew what he could get away with and what would push the tax inspectors too far. Those items that were of a more delicate nature, Vercillo recorded differently. First to a prodigious memory, honed from the mathematical tricks he used to pull to impress the teachers when he was at school. Then written down, using a code Vercillo never revealed to anyone — least of all Emilio Neri — and kept in a safe, hidden in the walls of his subterranean office.

It was a satisfactory situation. Vercillo made the best part of half a million euros a year keeping Neri out of harm’s way. And that secret code lent Vercillo some safety from the fat man’s wrath should things go wrong. Vercillo knew only too well what fate befell accountants who served their mob bosses badly. Foul up and you might get away with a vicious beating. Steal and you were dead. But do the job well, keep yourself out of sight, and hold a little key in your head that no one else could share . . . then, Vercillo reasoned, everyone could be happy. The authorities stayed at a safe distance. Neri knew that if Vercillo stumbled up the stairs from his office and fell beneath the wheels of the little 117 tourist bus the secrets of his empire would remain secure, unintelligible to the taxman and the DIA even if they found them. For his part, Vercillo maintained a measure of security, a hold over Neri that both men recognized without having to state it. This was convenient. It meant that he rarely had to call Neri except for information, and the big old hood hardly ever had to trouble him. This was the way it ought to be. He was an accountant. A money man. Not a foot soldier, out looking for trouble. He liked it that way.

Vercillo had given Sonia, the secretary, a day off to go out and see her sick mamma in Orvieto. She’d turned thirty now. She wasn’t as much fun as she used to be. Soon he’d have to find a reason to fire her, get someone younger, someone more interesting, to take her place. He hated the thought. Vercillo always tried to steer away from confrontation. It was getting harder and harder these days. Neri’s business empire grew and grew, sometimes into areas that gave Vercillo room for concern. When he was a bookish teenager in Rome in the Sixties, during the brief period of economic happiness they called “Il Boom,” Vercillo expected the world to improve on a constant, incremental basis, becoming happier, more prosperous, more peaceful year by year. Instead, the opposite happened. The Red Brigade came, then went, then came back again. There were bombs everywhere, and madness. He’d lost a cousin in Israel to a suicide attack. Vercillo scarcely thought of himself as a Jew these days but the idea that someone could die like that, just walking down the street, going into the wrong café, appalled him. There was a need for more order in people’s lives. And some politeness too. Instead, all you got was this constant stream of bodies, foreigners pushing and shoving to get in front of everyone else. It had all gone wrong somewhere over the past forty years and, for the life of him, he couldn’t understand how or when.

It was the tourists that got to him most. The English, drunk for every football game. The Japanese, constantly taking pictures, blundering into you on the street, not knowing a word of Italian. And the Americans, who thought they could do any damn thing they liked so long as they had a few dollars in their pocket. Rome would be better off without the lot of them. They intruded upon the native consciousness. They marred the place. Today especially. There was some kind of street theatre festival going on around the Colosseum down the road. They were setting up when he came to work. Commedia dell’Arte characters climbing into costumes. Africans. Orientals. And all the usual fraudsters pretending to be gladiators, trying to screw some cash out of the tourists for pictures.

Beniamino Vercillo looked up from the desk in his dark little pit feeling grumpy, tasting the sour bile of growing disappointment in his mouth, then wondered how much his thoughts were random, how much the product of what he was half seeing out of the corner of his eye.

In front of him, framed in the open doorway, was a figure from some stupid dream. It stood there like a crazy god wearing some kind of theatrical gown: a long red jacket, cheap brown sacking trousers. And a mask, one straight out of a nightmare, all crazy writhing hair, with a black gaping mouth, fixed in a lunatic grin.

The figure took one step forward, theatrically, like an actor making a point. He had to be from one of the street troupes Vercillo saw earlier.

“I don’t give to charity,” the little accountant declared firmly.

The figure moved closer with two more of those stupid, histrionic strides. Vercillo’s head started to work, remembering something from long ago.

“What is this shit?” Vercillo mumbled automatically. “What do you want?”

“Neri,” the crazy god said in a calm, clear voice that floated out from behind the mask.

Vercillo shivered, wondering if this was all some hallucination. “Who?”

The creature opened its jacket, its right hand reached down towards a leather scabbard on its belt. Vercillo watched aghast as it withdrew a short, fat sword that gleamed in the fluorescent lights.

The shining weapon rose, dashed through the air then dug deep into the desk in front of him, severing the phone cord, cutting straight through the sheaf of letters that sat in front of Vercillo.

“Books,” the crazy god said.

“No books here, no books here—”

He was quiet. The point of the blade was at his throat, pricking into his dewlap.

The crazy god shook his head. The blade pressed harder. Vercillo felt a sharp stab of pain, then a line of blood began to trickle down his neck.

“He’ll kill me,” he murmured.

“
He’ll
kill you?” It was impossible to guess what kind of face lay behind the mask. A determined one. Vercillo didn’t doubt that.

He threw up his hands and pointed to the edge of the desk. The sword went down a fraction. Vercillo hooked a finger into the drawer handle and gently pulled. With the slicing edge never more than a couple of centimetres from his throat, he gingerly drew out a set of keys.

“I need to get up,” he said, his voice cracking a little with the strain.

The mask nodded.

Beniamino Vercillo walked towards the wall of the office furthest away from the street. His hands trembling, the accountant turned the key in the security door of the safe then fumbled his way through the numbers on the lock. After a couple of attempts it swung open. He reached inside and withdrew something. The two of them returned to the table. Vercillo opened the large cardboard document box and stood back.

The crazy god’s leather fingers dipped into the file and took out the pile of papers there. He threw them on the desk, not saying a word, anger leaking out invisibly from behind the static grin. These were just numbers. Numbers and numbers. Unintelligible.

Vercillo quivered, frightened, and wished to God he’d taken an office on the ground floor, with a window out onto the street. Not this stupid, cramped cave where anything could go on unseen by the busy world outside.

“Code,” the god said simply, pointing at the lines of letters on the pages in front of them.

He tried to think straight. He tried to imagine the consequences. It was impossible. There was only one consequence which mattered.

“If I tell you—?”

The lunatic head stared at him, no emotion in its features, nothing human there at all.

“If I tell you . . . I can go?”

He could run. Vercillo had some private money in places no one could ever find. He could go somewhere Neri’s wrath would never find him. Australia maybe. Or Thailand, where the girls were young, and no one asked any questions. He looked around the drab little office, thought of his drab old clothes. Maybe this was fate doing him a favour. All his life he’d spent in the service of the fat hood, pretending to be something he wasn’t. Lying, cheating, telling himself it was OK all along because, whatever Neri did to earn his money, none of the blood sat on his own fingers. He’d lied to himself there. Neri
touched
him. Always. It was one reason he started messing with girls. Neri offered him the chance, introduced him to that world. It was one way of keeping him in line.

The idea of retirement, of putting distance between him and this bleak existence built on nothing more than numbers, was suddenly appealing.

Besides, a stray thought wondered, what’s the alternative? You’re an accountant. Not a foot soldier.

“You can go,” the crazy god said, and again Vercillo found himself trying to place the accent, trying to imagine the human face behind it: young, undoubtedly, but not rough, not like Neri’s henchmen.

Vercillo picked up the phone. The crazy god briefly raised the sword, forgetting, it seemed to Vercillo, that he’d already cut the cord. The omission cheered the little accountant. There was something human behind the mask after all.