The Villa of Mysteries (43 page)

She took a long, professional look at the cadaver in front of them, and picked up each dead wrist in turn. “Has he been washed?”

“Sure!” Monkboy answered. “And I gave him a manicure and dental floss too. What do
you
think?”

“Just wondered.”

“Wondered what?”

She was starting to get annoyed with him now and didn’t mind if it showed. “Wondered, as it happened, whether he’d got around to scribbling something on his hands or his wrists. Something like a phone number. Disorganized people do that kind of thing. Or am I not supposed to know that? Doesn’t it fit the fucking job description?”

“Yes,” he answered mutely. “Sorry.”

She went back to the desk, retrieved her notes from the previous day and called Regina Morrison, heard the surprise at the end of the line.

“You have the time to call me?” said the dry Edinburgh voice. “I’m amazed. Things can’t be as busy as the newspapers say.”

“Oh, but they are,” she snapped. “Busier, actually. Now can you tell me please, Regina? Did Randolph Kirk keep some kind of personal address book at the college? Did you pick that up on your rounds?”

There was a pause on the end of the line. Teresa had remembered enough to pronounce the woman’s name correctly. That wasn’t enough, though. She wanted some deference, and right then there just wasn’t the time. “No. So this isn’t a social call?”

“What about a pocket diary? Did you see him use something like that? One of those electronic organizers perhaps?”

A long sigh made its way out of the earpiece. “Clearly you didn’t spend enough time in Randolph’s company to gain a true picture of the man. That was the most messed-up technologically challenged disaster of a human being I ever met. I wouldn’t trust him in the company of a toaster.”

“Damn. So you’re saying he just kept it all in his head?”

“All what? He didn’t know anyone.”

But he did. He had to. He made a call and then the crap hit the fan. Except it couldn’t be like that. The crap had to be on its way already. All she’d done was accelerate it a touch, speed up the machine a little. Nevertheless,
he made a call
.

She slammed down the phone, aware that Regina Morrison was, to her astonishment, uttering noises that sounded very like an offer of dinner.

“What is wrong with these people?” she wondered out loud.

She walked back over and stared at the corpse of Randolph Kirk, wishing she could wake him up for one minute and ask a few simple questions.

Her head was back in Kirk’s office now, watching him work at his nose with that disgusting piece of cloth.

“Booger Bill, Booger Bill,” she whispered to herself, aware that Monkboy looked ready to call in the men from the funny farm at any moment. “Never in my life have I seen a handkerchief in that condition, not even in the middle of a flu epidemic. “Not even—”

Monkboy watched her, petrified. “You’re not leaving this room,” he warned. “I will lock that door, I will swaddle you in bandages, I swear—”

“Oh my God,” she gasped, then foxed him altogether. She was smiling beatifically.

“Please—” he whined.

“His clothes, Silvio. I want them. Now.”

THEY ARE DRESSED, moving, through the door, out into the cold and the caves, his legs as heavy as lead, detached from his control. She has to help him round this baffling labyrinth of tunnels, stumbling in and out of the yellow pools of light cast by the random bulbs that hang from the ceiling.

Stay in the shadows
, he says.
Until I tell you
.

They enter another room and she holds him, keeping them both close to the wall, in the darkness. It’s a large chamber, one he remembers, well lit in the centre. He notices now that there is a table at its centre, dusty, with rickety chairs, maybe as many as twelve. An ancient wand — his head searches for the name Teresa Lupo gave it, thyrsus — lies at one end, in front of a chair that is high-backed and grander than the rest. A theatrical mask, with the familiar gaping mouth and dreadlocks, sits next to it, black-eyed, a dead totem, waiting to be reanimated.

The walls are what he recollects best from the night before. Picture upon picture, blonde on blonde, the same shining colour as Miranda’s hair now. Suzi Julius and Eleanor Jamieson, young and innocent, laughing for the camera, thinking they’d live forever. They haunt the room like ghostly, incandescent twins, their glittering eyes following everything.

Miranda Julius darts into the light and picks up the thyrsus, waves it in the air. Specks of dust dance in the yellow light. The smell of ancient fennel, faintly sweet, reaches his nostrils.

She replaces the wand, returns and looks at him. There are voices, distant ones. This curling, twisting tangle of caverns could encompass scores of chambers. He tries to think for both of them.

Her hand is on his arm. Her eyes are bright orbs alight in his face.

There is a dark alcove set back from the table. He pulls her further into the shadows and the effort makes his head hurt, his breath comes in snatched pants.

He takes her face in his hands. His head’s starting to clear now. He can hear his own voice and it’s real.

“Miranda. The best thing we can do is find a way out of here. Find some help and come back for Suzi.”

There’s such fear in her face. She embraces him, her hands reach behind his back for something unseen, her head moves to the back of his neck, lips bite hard on the skin there. She’s moving, pressing herself now to his lips. She lunges forward, kisses him, thrusts herself into his mouth, probing, probing, feeling the softness. And this time he is certain. A tiny object rides the tip of her long, strong tongue until it reaches the back of his throat. He gags, begins to fall, and a voice somewhere in his head sings,
one pill makes you bigger
.

He opens his eyes and sees her lips moving to the words as she holds him, blocking his mouth with his fingers until he swallows.

SILVIO DI CAPUA LOOKED at the object on the table, shivered then let out a long, pained groan. It was Randolph Kirk’s handkerchief, a piece of once-white pristine fabric now crumpled into a compact ball held tightly together by a random collection of solidified green and grey gloops.

“Don’t turn squeamish on me, Silvio,” she said. “Scalpel?”

“Oh come on,” he complained. “You want me to find you a surgical mask too?”

Teresa Lupo gave him the extra cold look, the one she saved for special occasions. “Wouldn’t be a bad idea, would it?”

He grumbled and passed her the instrument. “This is insane. This is the most insane thing I have seen in these recent insane times.”

“Booger Bill wrote those numbers down somewhere,” she insisted. “It wasn’t on the back of his hand. It wasn’t on the cuffs of his shirt. And there was more stuff on this damn hankie than mere snotballs. It was only my natural reticence that stopped me remembering this before.”

She could swear he stamped his little feet on the tiles at that. “Teresa! There’s something creepy about this need of yours to please. Even if you’re right we shouldn’t be doing this. We should be handing it over to forensic.”

“This is human snot, Silvio.
Our
territory.”

“Excuse my pointing this out but we are not looking for snot. Snot we have by the bucket. We are looking for some phone number this weird, dead bastard has thoughtfully written down, hopefully in indelible ink, in between the snot. Which, all things taken into consideration, is both a very strange thing to do and indubitably a job for forensic.”

She found a point of entry and began to ease the fabric, holding down one end with the gloved fingers of her left hand. “If you’d met Professor Randolph Kirk in the flesh you wouldn’t be saying that. You’d think it the most normal thing in the world, as normal as—”

An entire corner of the fabric fell over under the pressure of the blunt side of the blade.

“I did surgery once, Silvio,” she said proudly.

“On a hankie?”

“Adaptability, my man. We live in modern times. Adaptability is everything. Behold . . .”

There were numbers there. Six of them, written in a tiny, cramped hand, mostly so old the ink was blurring into the fabric. One she recognized straightaway. It was Regina Morrison’s. This really was his address book. She hated to think what the rest were. A dry cleaners? Did Randolph Kirk even grace such an establishment?

But one was more promising. The ink was fresh, the strokes of his spidery hand unblemished. This number had never gone through the wash like the others. Maybe, she thought, written just a day or two before he died.

“Gimme that report,” she ordered.

He clutched the thing to his chest. “This is not right. Not right at all. We should just pass this information on to the people who need it and let them decide what it’s worth. It isn’t our job—”

The ferocity of her gaze stopped him dead.

“Silvio, if you tell me one more time what my job is I will, I swear, fire you and fire you good. In case you hadn’t noticed, those lovely policemen out there are busy chasing all the big things they like to think of as their prey. People who plant bombs. People who kill and kidnap other people. Were I to walk into their midst bearing a hankie, albeit one of more than minor interest, I would be inviting their ridicule. Who knows? They might even invent a name for me. What do you think? Crazy Teresa? How does that sound, huh?”

He swallowed noisily and said nothing.

“Gimme.”

He passed it over. She scanned the numbers that came with the report Monkboy had purloined from the Questura that same morning, counting off the names.

“Neri’s home. Neri’s mobile. Mickey’s mobile. That office they keep down near the station, Barbara Martelli . . .
shit
.”

“Probably his aromatherapist.”

“Shut up!”

“Teresa! Give it to the cops. They just type it into their computer and up pops a name.”

“You are so naÏve,” she hissed. “So very, very naÏve.”

Then her eyes fell on the pad of paper next to his list. Her own notes from the past couple of days, starting from the morning, just forty-eight hours before, when she’d planned to unveil to the world Rome’s newest archaeological asset, a two-millennia-old bog body.

“Different lifetime,” she whispered. “Different—”

She stared at the paper, unable to believe what she saw.

“Teresa?”

There was no mistake. It was impossible but it had to be true, and what it meant for everything was quite beyond her. She needed to see Falcone immediately, needed to pass the whole damn thing straight over to him, retire to a quiet corner bar somewhere and drown her wildest thoughts in drink.

“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.