The Villa of Mysteries (37 page)

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Authors: David Hewson

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

BOOK: The Villa of Mysteries
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Peroni thought of the body, the brown, shining body in Teresa Lupo’s morgue. Everything led back to that first corpse. Every event that followed stemmed from its discovery, and still they had no idea why, no clue to explain the strange and deadly demons that flew out of the ground once that small patch of peat near Fiumicino was exposed to the light of day.

Falcone turned a sudden, sharp gaze on him, the one that said:
don’t lie, don’t even think of it
. “Tell me the truth. Do you think I’m losing it? Is this getting too much for me?”

“What?” Peroni stared at him, almost lost for words. “Since when did you get to be super-human? This is too much for all of us. This . . .” he waved a hand at the scene across the road, “. . . is the world gone mad. Not just that bastard Neri.”

There was a sound from the house. The lifting gear around Rachele D’Amato was being cranked into action. The firemen were shouting to each other. Timbers were moving. Walls were starting to shake. And there was more light now. The bright, unforgiving light of the TV cameras, back to see what they were supposed to witness all along.

Falcone stood up and shook the dirt and dust off himself, getting ready to go back. Peroni was with him instantly, a hand on his arm.

“Leo,” he said. “There’s nothing you can do. And whatever state that woman’s in, you can’t change it. Furthermore, if she does wake up, she’ll be livid to find you sitting by the bed like some dumbstruck husband.”

“Really?” Falcone gave him a familiar, cold look. “You know her well enough to say that?”

“I know she’s just as married to the job as you are. And when she does get conscious the first thing she’ll ask is what you’ve done to get the sons of bitches who did this. You offer a bunch of flowers and you’ll get it straight back into your face. Now am I right?”

Falcone glanced at him and Peroni wondered if he had read everything the wrong way. “You think that’s what this is about, Gianni? Me and her?”

“I dunno,” he mumbled, and Peroni realized that at that moment he really didn’t. There was more going on in Falcone’s head than he appreciated.

“She’s got another man,” Falcone said flatly. “She told me so.”

“Gimme a break,” Peroni answered immediately. “Does she look like a woman with a man in tow? She’s just playing with you, Leo. Women are like that.”

“Maybe.”

Falcone was focused on the meeting going on across the road. The men from the black cars were engaged in an impromptu conference near the sight of the blast. He knew, surely, he ought to go and join them. He ought to answer their questions, try to keep them happy.

Peroni looked at the shattered building and sighed. “For God’s sake, Leo. It’s times like this people look to you. If you’re riddled with self-doubt, how the hell do you expect them to go on? Here—”

He lit another cigarette and offered it. Falcone accepted reluctantly.

“Listen to your friend Gianni, please. Because he’s just got a stupid vice cop brain in his skull and this primitive organ doesn’t have a clue what’s going on here. All these crazy genes bouncing around tonight. Where’d they come from, Leo? What the hell for? Who flipped that switch and why?”

Falcone scratched his chin and said nothing.

“This is good,” Peroni said carefully. “This is indicative of cerebral activity. Come on. Reel off some options.”

Falcone shook his head miserably and threw the cigarette away.

“You are costing me big time, man,” Peroni groaned. “OK, let me change the subject. How about this? You can bawl me out. Sometime over the past half hour — don’t ask when exactly because I can’t tell you — Costa went off on his own, chasing this wild goose story about some blonde girl over in Cerchi. He didn’t want to. Or rather, he did but he didn’t want to let it show. So I told him to get his ass on the road anyway. Who knows? Anyway, it was me giving orders. So bust my ass.”

There was a flicker of interest in Falcone’s face. Peroni was glad even that much was there.

“It was just a report of a blonde girl?” Falcone asked. “Just that she looked like Suzi Julius?”

“Nothing more,” Peroni agreed. “You seemed to think — this was just before the big bang event took place — it was worthy of attention, I believe.”

“It was. Hell, it
is
.” Falcone wasn’t looking across the street now. His mind was getting back into gear. “Or maybe—”

“Maybe what?”

The old Falcone was lurking there somewhere. The one who didn’t let go. And the men in black across the road were starting to look around them, wondering why no one had seen fit to acknowledge their presence.

“I’m not messing with you now, Leo. Either you pull yourself together or someone at the Questura’s going to be sending you back on leave and finding some young smart-ass to warm your seat. Probably for good.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Falcone conceded. “Maybe it’s what Rachele said all along. A war. And somehow the Julius girl—” He waved his hand at the mess across the street, “All these people, they’re just, what do they call it? Collateral damage. Bodies caught in the crossfire. It’s a
war
. Neri against Wallis. Or Neri against us, the world, everything. I don’t know.”

Peroni didn’t feel convinced. “Don’t wars need something to start them?”

“The girl. Wallis’s stepdaughter. Neri or maybe his son did something to her. Wallis wants payback. This is Neri getting his revenge in first. Against all of us.”

“You people do live in a complicated universe. How’d you get there?”

“It’s not ‘there.’ It’s not even part way ‘there.’ ”

“So what do we do? What
are
cops supposed to do in a war?”

Falcone gave him a withering look. “Do we have men outside Wallis’s place?”

“No. The DIA took that one, remember?”

“Yeah,” Falcone nodded, thinking. “You remember what Wallis said?”

“Every word. But remind me.”

“ ‘War is the natural state of humanity.’ ”

“Bullshit,” Peroni protested. “Lethargy’s the natural state of humanity. Look at this mess! What’s natural about that?”

“Nothing,” Falcone said, looking at his watch. “Everything, if you’ve got the ‘crazy gene.’ We’re seeing this all wrong, Gianni. We’re trying to rationalize something that’s not rational.”

Peroni patted his shoulder. “Hey! See! You can still sound like the old Leo when you want to. Can we go out and do cop stuff now, please? This isn’t a place for the likes of us. You can phone the hospital later. We got work to do. Furthermore—” he pointed to the men across the street, who were starting to look thoroughly pissed off. “ — I believe your presence is required.”

Falcone nodded and walked over to talk to them. Peroni sat on the bonnet of the car and lit another cigarette, trying to think his way around what he had just heard. From across the road the inspector’s sombre voice rose in the darkness. He was yelling at these anonymous men, arguing his case, refusing to back down, and it was music to Peroni’s ears. Falcone really didn’t give a damn. It made him unique. It made him invaluable. It was the reason his men followed him everywhere, even though half the time they couldn’t stand him.

In the harsh artificial moon of the TV lights across the road a stretcher moved out from the rubble. Rachele D’Amato was headed for an ambulance, a team of men around her, one of them holding a drip. Peroni could just about make out her face. She was unconscious. If he was honest with himself, she looked dead. He thought again about what Falcone had said, and the distinct impression he’d had that it was curiosity, not jealousy, that lay behind his interest. She didn’t look like someone with a man in tow. She was, surely, just saying:
back off, Leo
. Nothing more than that. It was a measure of Falcone’s awkwardness in these matters that he just couldn’t see this.

And now he was watching the stretcher too, still talking to the men in dark suits, his face impassive. Then he murmured one quiet oath and stomped off, to stand by the doors to the ambulance.

Peroni walked over to his side. “Leo. She’s in good hands.”

“I know.”

Falcone’s mind was turning somewhere else. Peroni didn’t know whether to feel pleased or sorry. “So what’d they say?”

The cold grey eyes just stared at him.

“OK, OK,” Peroni conceded. “Stupid question. They said: ‘go fix this shit.’ I get the message.”

Falcone scowled at the suits getting back into their cars. “Never mind what they said. I want the Julius girl. Have you heard from Costa?”

“Not yet.”

“Get him.”

So Peroni called. And called again, getting madder and madder because of so many things: the dead ring at the end of the line, Falcone’s cagy diffidence, his own confused state of mind. Then he phoned the control room asking if Nic Costa had checked in.

The woman handler couldn’t believe her ears. “Do you know what’s going down in this city tonight, Detective? I got bombs. I got people screaming blue murder about some shooting in San Giovanni. And you want me to find out which bar your partner fell into?”

“He don’t drink!” Peroni barked down the phone.

Except maybe he did now. Maybe they all ought to. Maybe something made sense if you saw it through a musky mist of red wine.

“Yeah, right,” the handler snarled. “Maybe he’s gone to choir practice.”

Then the line went dead and Gianni Peroni still didn’t
know
what to do. He thought about what the handler had said and felt his mind starting to turn again.

“Shit,” Peroni murmured.

“Where the hell is he?” Falcone wondered, taking his eyes off the ambulance screaming away down the narrow road, lights flashing, Klaxon screaming.

“I dunno,” he replied. “But there’s trouble in San Giovanni now too. That address ring a bell?”

 

 

CERCHI RAN beneath the overhanging escarpment of the Palatine Hill, all the way from the Tarpean cliff behind the Capitol to the busy modern street of San Gregorio that led to the Colosseum. Nic Costa had parked next to the open space that was once the Circus Maximus, wishing the tip-off had led him somewhere else. At night this was a seedy part of town, a haunt of down-and-outs and drug dealers who lurked in unlit corners, out of sight of the authorities.

He’d been to all five sites which Regina Morrison’s records suggested were linked to Randolph Kirk. They were complex places, with multiple entrances, not all of them obvious. It took time but every last one seemed boarded up, abandoned long ago. He’d shown Suzi’s photo to some of the stragglers in the area. Most were too scared or too doped up to talk any sense, and the few that had their wits about them were unwilling to help a lone cop. Peroni was right: Cerchi was a big street.

He thought about his partner and the rest of the team who’d been close to the blast outside Neri’s house. Costa felt guilty about leaving them, but Peroni was insistent. One more pair of hands would make no difference, and they had a duty to Suzi Julius too. They had, in all truth, neglected her. Miranda knew that just as well as they did. The knowledge lay in her intelligent, all-seeing eyes. And it was a neglect that could be hard to rectify.

So what do you do
? Costa wondered.

Go home, a weary inner voice said.
Sleep
.

He walked back towards his car, realizing how dog-tired he was, and how welcoming it would be to fall into the big, empty double bed in the old house off the Appian Way and listen to the comforting rustle of ghostly voices down the corridor. At that moment he remembered how important family, that tight, near-perfect bulwark against the cruelties of the world, was to him.

Even a family torn apart by tragedy.

The thought pricked his conscience. His father’s premature death still haunted him. Nic Costa wouldn’t wish that pain on anyone. It was now nearly midnight. If they were right, sixteen years before Eleanor Jamieson had been butchered, victim of some obscure ceremony involving . . . who? The family of a Rome hood? A bunch of sleazy hangers-on out for fun and unaware that Neri’s cameras were filming their tricks? Suzi Julius could face a similar fate at any time over the next twenty-four hours, for no reason but bad luck, the misfortune of her looks, of turning the wrong corner at the wrong moment. And no one had the slightest idea of where she might be. Neri and his son had disappeared leaving a bloody trail of destruction behind them. Vergil Wallis, this time round anyway, seemed to be out of the loop. They had no real lead, just chaos and anarchy and violence.

He took one last look around him and narrowed his eyes at a pool of half shade along the street. Twenty metres or more away something had moved, dashing into the shadow of the great Palatine cliff. A head of bright blonde hair disappearing into the darkness, with another shape, that of a man moving close behind. It could just be a pair of lovers. It could just be the break they’d been praying for.

Costa patted his jacket, feeling the Beretta safe in its holster, and walked towards the shadows, listening to the sounds of the night: the chatter of sleepy pigeons, the low rumble of traffic speeding past the grassy stadium, the scuttering of rats among the crumbling rock face that sat beneath the remains of the imperial palaces.

 

 

A DISTANT VOICE, just recognizable as female, pleading, echoed out from the cavern mouth, now more visible in the leaking radiance of a bright yellow light within.

Nic Costa took out his phone and knew what he’d see. He was directly under the lee of the Palatine’s rock face. The signal was blocked by the stone. The sensible thing to do would be to walk back out into the street, make contact with Falcone, call in help. But he had to keep the girl within his reach. Besides, this could just be a couple of secretive lovers. He didn’t like heroics, but this time, there seemed no alternative. So he crept into the shadows, letting his back fall against the dusty rock wall, edging his way forward towards the light, towards the sound which was the voice of a man now, talking so low Costa couldn’t make out the words.

He aimed for the sound and it wasn’t easy. The place was a complex of dimly lit chambers, interlinked, set in a chain from the entrance, which was, Costa suspected, just one of many, eaten into the hill like giant rat holes. The site should have been on Randolph Kirk’s list. Maybe it was and Regina Morrison just hadn’t got to hear of it. Or perhaps, if it was Kirk’s most private sanctum, his holy of holies, he kept it private for his own good reasons.

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