The Villa of Mysteries (47 page)

Wallis turned his head, listening, trying to work out if there was anyone else present in the pitch-black corridors. “I move in wider circles, Emilio.”

“Oh yeah. You’re
educated
. I forgot. Anyway, what does it matter? I promised you could have Mickey. I don’t break promises. You can do what you like. But the knife only.”

He slid the blade across the table. Wallis’s hand closed on it in an expert, practised grip. Mickey Neri, blind to the game, hung his head and sobbed behind the gag. “You can do him like he did the girl, Vergil, only—”

Neri hesitated. “Let’s give the kid a chance to talk first. Only fair—”

Watching the seated man opposite very carefully, he got up and tore the tape from Mickey Neri’s eyes in one rough sweep then did the same for his mouth. Mickey screamed from the pain, looked across the table at Vergil Wallis holding the knife and the noise died in his mouth.

“Jesus—” he whispered. “Dad, don’t do this to me.”

“Man’s got a right to know what happened to his girl,” Neri said severely. “Best get it off your chest, son. Best do that now before it’s too late.”

SHE’S YOU
, he says in a still, dead voice.

Who?

You.

Miranda takes his pained head, stares at him with two eyes from the present, kisses him, crying, shaking from the release.

He looks at the young Miranda Julius cowering in his imagination. Time has worked such changes on her face, removed so much. No lines. No cares. No jaded acceptance of an imperfect world.

You’re beautiful
, he says.

A thin, unconvincing laugh now, local, in his own piece of staggering space. Hers.

Only on the outside, Nic. The outside tells you nothing. The outside lies. The only truth lies in your imagination. Forgo that and there’s nothing but the dark
.

Shouts echo through the caverns. Ripples of fear and anxiety — real, not imagined — disturb the wakeful dream inside his head.

He tries to walk and stumbles. The chemical fire is raging unchecked through his head. She holds him. He trembles. He sweats.

There’s more
, she says.

“I JUST SCREWED HER,” Mickey bleated. “That’s all. She begged for it. All the time. I got bored, if you want to know. I wanted to mess around with the others like we were supposed to. She wouldn’t let me. It was just ‘Mickey, Mickey, Mickey.’ I said that wasn’t the point. She was supposed to mix it. She didn’t want to know. She—”

His nervous eyes flickered between the two men.

“She said you was just a bunch of dirty old bastards. She wasn’t putting it out for any of you. She just went on about love and stuff. Like the whole world was something special. Even her being knocked up was special, but I just wanted her down the clinic, get the thing out. Love? All I did was bang her.”

Wallis watched him, toying with the knife, saying nothing.

“See,” Neri suggested. “Like I said. The girl just didn’t want to play the game. Her choice, I guess. But why come along in the first place?”

Mickey nodded at Wallis. “ ’Cos he made her. It wasn’t some birthday present. He thought it’d be good for business. That’s what she said.”

Neri cocked his head to one side, thinking about this. “I find that hard to believe, Mickey. Vergil here is an educated man. He came up with the idea for that party after all. He fixed all that stuff with the robes and the flowers. I just brung the dope and some guys who might be grateful for a chance at some young ass. The girl must have guessed what was coming.”

“
None of them guessed
,” Mickey yelled. “You were so far out of it you didn’t even get that, did you? Him and that professor guy of his just filled them up with so much stuff then put them in a room full of old guys with hard-ons and bolted the doors. They didn’t get any choices. They did what you wanted. Then when it turned bad you thought you could shut them all up with a few promises and that was it.”

Neri stared at Wallis. “Is that right, Vergil? My memory’s not so great after all these years.”

The American shot Mickey a hateful glance. “That fool was shot full of so much dope—”

Neri nodded. “I agree there, Mickey. You’re just trying to avoid the truth. You knocked up this poor girl when you first met her in Sicily. You fucked her rigid that night we came here. Then what? She told you she was coming to me and Vergil to announce a little shotgun wedding? Or did the dope and the festivities just go a little too far and you woke up one moment with a knife in your hand, and her stone dead?”

“No!”

Neri grimaced. “This is going nowhere. We don’t have time to piss around forever. Maybe I should just let Vergil do his thing now.”

Mickey Neri turned on his father, pleading. “Will you listen, for chrissake? I went outside for a smoke. It was driving me crazy in here. All these old guys screwing everywhere, taking junk like they were twenty years younger. And this place. It’s like being dead. In the grave. I was out there maybe an hour. I thought I’d go home but I knew you’d be mad with me. Then I came back, into that room you gave us, and
she was there
. Like you saw.
It wasn’t me
.”

Neri’s mouth hardened into a tight bloodless line. He looked at his watch and said nothing.

“But it’s always the same,” Mickey snapped. “There’s shit around and who do you turn to? Me. You never once asked what happened. You just looked at her, looked at me, then shook your head like you always do. You know how many times I’ve seen that over the years?”

“The girl was dead, Mickey,” Neri said quietly. “You were the only one who was with her. I was supposed to be doing business with her stepfather who was just a couple of rooms away, out of his head, playing god or something, fucking everything that moved. If I’d hesitated then, if I’d let him know what had really been going on — you screwing the girl, getting her in the family way like that — you’d have been dead anyway. Did you ever stop to think of that?”

Mickey was quiet for a moment, a tiny light of clarity sparking in his head.

“No,” he mumbled.

A PART OF HIM is almost asleep, hiding behind closed eyes, listening to what she says. Another
sees
. The god is angry. The girl screams. Fists fly, nails tear. Through the dream he feels the pressure of their shrieking rebound off the damp and rocky veins that enclose them. A strong black arm pumps back and forth. She falls, blood pumping from her perfect lips.

He tears off the mask. A black face, rent by fury, demands obeisance, receives only scorn.

I’ll tell I’ll tell I’ll tell
, the girl screeches, furious.

The man moves behind her, raises his arm. Silver flashes in the yellow light. Two eyes glitter, terrified, hidden in the shadows, watching, witnessing.

Then the reverie ends. He opens his eyes and walks towards the voices and the light.

NERI GLANCED towards the shadows, wondering if it was Adele skulking round there now, then nodded towards Mickey.

“So, Vergil. What are you waiting for? Are you going to do him?”

Mickey’s head fell down on his chest. He began to sob.

“And then what?” the American demanded. “You shoot me.”

“Nah. What for? You lost a daughter? I lose a son. You probably find this hard to believe but I never killed someone without a reason. Even those cops outside my house had it coming to them. You? Well, you got me in all manner of trouble with them, but you did me a favour too. You reminded me I was ready for retirement. A man should know when to walk off this stage. You did, didn’t you?”

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
.