The Villa of Mysteries (27 page)

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Authors: David Hewson

Tags: #Fiction, #Mystery & Detective, #General

BOOK: The Villa of Mysteries
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“No.” He’d put on a bunny suit himself for a while and been inside. He’d seen what was there. He couldn’t get the idea of that damned mask out of his head. “I just don’t like jumping to conclusions.”

“We could never pin anything on him,” she went on. “Vercillo was smart. He needed to be. He kept books for Neri. Of that I’m pretty sure. Not that you’ll ever find a sheet of paper to prove it.”

A piece of the puzzle fell into place in his head. Falcone thought of the scene inside the dead man’s office and knew she was wrong for a change, though he kept the news to himself.

“Why would someone murder Neri’s accountant? Has he been taking from the boss?”

She’d considered that already. “It’s hard to imagine. He’d know what the result would be if he got found out. I don’t think Neri would send round a man in a mask either. Vercillo would just be there one moment and gone for good the next.”

“Then what?” he wondered.

“We had some intelligence,” she said eventually. “Early yesterday evening four, maybe five suspicious Americans flew in to Fiumicino. Separate airlines, separate classes for a couple. As if they didn’t know each other. It could be Wallis beefing up his army.”

Falcone stroked his pointed beard. He hated the way she seemed to know so much about the mob, how she seemed to understand their movements instinctively. The DIA were supposed to do that. All the same it left him feeling cheated. “What army? You said he was retired.”

“He is but that doesn’t mean he’s stupid. You saw the security on that place of his. Vergil Wallis doesn’t let his guard slip, any more than Neri does. Men like that have to be careful, retired or not.”

Falcone wondered: could this be Wallis’s first act of vengeance? Then there was a bustle down the street. It was Monkboy and the rest of the path team — except Teresa Lupo — arriving, unusually late.

“What took you?” Falcone barked at them. Silvio Di Capua just put his head down and stumbled onto the staircase. He looked scared.

“You’re saying these men have been summoned?” Falcone asked her.

“Maybe.”

He thought back to the cool way Wallis had greeted them. “It could make sense I guess. If he thinks there’s a war on the way. He didn’t look like a man getting ready for war to me.”

She gave him a sideways glance, as if she thought he was being naÏve. “You should never take these people at face value, Leo. Not even Neri. That was a performance this morning too, though not one I understand. Perhaps Vergil Wallis just feels he has no choice but to get some muscle around him.”

Falcone grimaced and started walking for the door. She raced to keep up with him.

The bunny suits had their helmets off. They were busy, dusting, poking, peering into corners, putting things into envelopes. Falcone glowered at Monkboy trembling over the corpse. Beniamino Vercillo was pinned to his old leather chair by a curving sword through the chest. His body had fallen forward a fraction. It was plain to see that the blade had been thrust up through the ribcage, exiting to the right of the spine and impaling itself into the back of the chair.

Vercillo was a thin man. Falcone wondered how much force such a blow would take. Crazy Teresa would know. She always did know this kind of thing. But she wasn’t there and Monkboy looked out of his depth, surrounded by a bunch of junior morgue assistants waiting to be told what to do.

“Where is she?” Falcone demanded.

“Who?”

“Who the hell do you think? Your boss.”

“Had to go out,” Silvio Di Capua stuttered. “She’ll be here soon.”

Falcone was astonished she would have the nerve to play these games twice in twenty-four hours. “Go out where?” he bellowed.

Di Capua shrugged, looking miserable and scared.

“Get her here,” Falcone barked. “Now. And where the hell are Peroni and Costa? Didn’t anyone call them like I asked?”

“On their way,” one of the bunny suits mumbled. “They went back to the Questura. Didn’t know you were out. They got something, they said.”

“Jesus,” Falcone cursed. “It’s about time someone got something. What’s going on around here?”

Then he stopped. Rachele D’Amato was standing by the late accountant’s body, looking at the table, smiling. There were papers everywhere, printouts from computers, pages from a typewriter that seemed to pre-date these. Even a couple written in a careful, childlike hand.

They were just numbers, a sea of numbers, spilling everywhere. Apart from a single sheet with text on it, scrawled in a different style of writing, using a black felt-tip pen left by the paper. The ink looked fresh. The page depicted a phone keypad and beneath it a selection of numbers copied from the typed page next to it. The relevant section was ringed on the original page. Falcone had realized almost immediately what it was: the key to a code. A date. A phone number. An amount. And then some more codes that were impenetrable, because they probably related to the kind of transaction involved. Maybe, with more work, they could crack them too. This was a rich and generous gift. A deliberate escalation of the odds.

She reached for the papers, elated. He stopped her.

“We haven’t gone over those yet,” he cautioned. “Afterwards, you’ll get to see them. I promise.”

“Do you know what this is?”

“I didn’t. From what you’ve said, I think I do now.”

She was ecstatic, triumphant. He wished he could share her elation. “These go back years. We can put Emilio Neri away for good. We may be able to nail anyone who did business with him. Have you thought of that, Leo?”

“Right now I’m thinking about a murder,” he answered. Then he wondered: was that the direction you were supposed to take in the circumstances? Did this bloody dumb show exist in order to make you miss a larger though more subtle point? He couldn’t work up any enthusiasm for the information that lay on the table. However useful it was, something about its provenance troubled him. This wasn’t the way the mobs normally went to war, killing underlings, leaving damning information on their enemies for the police. Not without some payoff anyway.

For a fleeting moment he wished he’d never left that beach in Sri Lanka, never caught the plane home to these complexities. He’d felt old recently. The renewed, chaste presence of Rachele D’Amato did his mental state no good at all. The pressure was something he could take. It was the doubts that bothered him. He wanted certainties in his life, not shadows and ghosts.

“Where the hell is everyone?” he scowled, and felt, for the first time in many a month, the edges of his temper beginning to fray.

 

 

THE MOMENT TERESA LUPO LEFT Regina Morrison’s office Monkboy was on the line, screaming for all he was worth, making it dead plain that Falcone was possibly in the foulest mood in history and wanted her on the scene
now
. She drove through the choked streets, thinking about what she had heard, not wondering for a moment how she would explain her absence or the fact that, for the second time in two days, she’d wilfully trodden on cop territory.

Dead people didn’t run away. There was nothing she could do for this new corpse that Silvio Di Capua couldn’t. All the hard work came later. Falcone would surely realize that. Most of all,
she had a result
. She didn’t expect him to be grateful. She didn’t expect to get bawled out either. While the rest of them were stumbling around in the dark, grasping at cobwebs, she’d found something concrete: the photograph of Barbara Martelli and Eleanor Jamieson in the private files of Professor Randolph Kirk, a man the lovely Barbara had despatched so efficiently the day before.

“Shithead,” she mouthed, with precious little enthusiasm, at a white van blocking the street. Some Chinese guy was unloading boxes out of the back and, very slowly, running them into a little gift shop. She looked into the window. It was full of the crap cheap Chinese gift shops sold: bright pink pyjamas, plastic back-scratchers, calendars with dragons on them. It all seemed so
irrelevant
.

She opened the window and yelled, “Hey. Move it.”

The man put down the box he was carrying, turned and said something which sounded very like “Fluck you.”

Red mist swirled in front of her eyes. She pulled out her ID card, hoping the state police seal would do the trick, waved it in his direction and screeched, “No, asshole, fluck
you
.”

He hissed something underneath his breath that made her glad she didn’t understand Cantonese, then slowly climbed into the van and started to clunk it through the gears.

The riddle still hung in front of her, grey, shapeless. Was her own presence at the site merely a rotten coincidence? Did Barbara decide to off the professor anyway — maybe through some recurring bad dreams — then add the one and only witness to the list? Had Kirk called her to say someone was around asking awkward questions, in such a panic that she decided to shut him up for good? Was that what a Maenad did? Dispose of the god if he lost his sparkle? Or did Kirk phone someone else, someone who knew Barbara Martelli, understood she’d become a Maenad somewhere along the way and just given her the job:
out you go, girl, it’s whacking time, and don’t forget to clear up any prying pathologists who happen to walk into the firing line
.

They’d never know. The first thing the cops had checked was the phone records. She’d asked that morning. They hadn’t a clue whom Kirk had called. There was no redial button on Kirk’s ancient handset. The phone company didn’t log local calls.

She was starting to think like a cop now and it scared her. All these possibilities lay in the dark, limitless recesses of the imagination, a place she was trained to avoid. A place that, if she were honest with herself, had begun to scare her. That was why she started blubbing in front of a complete stranger, why it took her a good fifteen minutes to recover sufficient composure to get on with the day. That and the shitty virus fighting it out with two quick shots of Glenmorangie in her bloodstream. Life would be so much easier if the dead could come back and talk, just for a little while. She’d drive over to the morgue, stare at the mummified cadaver that had once been Eleanor Jamieson, and murmur,
Tell Teresa all about it, sweetie. Get it off your mahogany chest
.

Still, that corpse had spoken to someone. It had said:
not everything dies
. And Suzi Julius, with her fateful blonde looks, had sparked something too. Cause and effect didn’t respect mortality.

The white van lumbered off the pavement and rolled down towards the low shape of the Colosseum at the end of the street. Teresa Lupo’s new yellow Fiat, provided by the insurance company and already sporting a couple of fresh dents, sat stationary in the road. The horns behind her began to yell.

She wound down the window and yelled back at the creep in the Alfa on her tail. “Can’t you see I am
thinking
, you crapulent piece of pus?”

Then she put the car gently into gear and drove down the Via dei Serpenti at a measured, steady pace, trying to put her thoughts in order.

When she walked into Beniamino Vercillo’s cellar she felt like putting her hands over her ears, like running away from everything and finding some oblivion in a long, cold drink. She’d seen this so many times before, the path team hanging round the corpse, waiting to be told what to do, the scene-of-crime men in their white bunny suits combing the place for shards of information. And Falcone, this time with the woman from the DIA, standing at the back, watching everything like a hawk, throwing questions at Nic Costa and Peroni, unhappy, uncommunicative.

The tall inspector broke off from barking at his men. “And where’ve you been? In case you haven’t noticed there’s work to be done.”

She held up both hands in deference. “Sorry,” she answered meekly. “Don’t feel the need to ask how I am. I get people trying to kill me most days.”

Falcone demurred slightly. “We need you.”

“I’ll take that as an apology though a simple sorry would have sufficed. How’s it going with the missing girl by the way?”

“What?”

“The girl?”

Falcone scowled at her. “Leave the live ones to us.”

She looked at the body behind the desk. There’d been so many over the years, it was like being on a factory line. Now something was different. When Teresa Lupo looked at this corpse, the professional, unconscious side of her already assessing what she saw, a low, rebel voice started sounding in her head, getting louder and louder and louder, until it drowned out everything else, the blood, the questions, the tension and the fears.

“I can’t do this anymore,” she murmured, and wondered who was speaking: her or the rebel voice. And whether they were, perhaps, one and the same.

Monkboy hovered over the body, watching her, waiting for a lead.

The voice got louder. It was her voice.

“Is anybody
listening
here?” she yelled, and even the forensic people dusting down the office furniture became still.

“I can’t do this anymore,” Teresa Lupo said again, more quietly. “He’s dead. That’s all there is to say. There’s a girl out there still breathing and here we are, like undertakers or something, staring at a corpse.”

She felt a hand on her arm. It was Costa.

“Don’t try that one,” she murmured. Her hands were shaking. Her head felt as if it might explode. She could hardly open the bag, hardly get her hands around the file Regina Morrison had given her, find the strength to take out the pictures. “I trained as a doctor. I learned how to distinguish the symptoms from the disease. This is irrelevant. This is a symptom, nothing else. This—”

She scattered several of the photos on the table, over the sheets of numbers, obliterating them. She made sure the most important one, Barbara and Eleanor
before
, was on the top.

“—This is the disease.”

Falcone, Costa, Peroni and Rachele D’Amato had to push their way through the men in bunny suits to get a good look. Someone swore softly in amazement. The girls looked even more beautiful now, Teresa thought. And it was so easy to imagine Suzi Julius just walking into the frame, shaking hands with them, not knowing they were both dead, sixteen years apart, but dead is dead, dead is a place where the years don’t matter.

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