The Villa of Mysteries (7 page)

No one was really listening. Peroni bristled. “Hey. Stupid old cop is sharing information here. Are you taking notes or am I speaking for my own benefit?”

“Shit,” Teresa Lupo whispered, glaring at the coin. “
Shit
.”

“You mean the body’s been in the peat for not much more than twenty years?” Costa asked.

“Not even that,” Falcone said.

They all turned to look at him. The inspector had returned to his briefcase and now had a folder in his hands. He opened it and took out a photograph. It was a portrait of a girl in her teens. She had long fair hair down to her shoulders. She was smiling for the camera.

He placed the photograph on the cadaver’s chest, over the X-ray of the skull. The features were identical.

“You knew?” She couldn’t believe this, couldn’t contain her amazement and anger. Peroni was chuckling, his shoulders rising and falling as if they were plugged into the mains.

Falcone was bent over, examining something on the girl’s left shoulder. A mark. A tattoo maybe.

“Just guessing to begin with. You have to remember, doctor. I didn’t get back from holiday till yesterday. I hardly had the time to dig this . . .” he waved the case folder, “ . . . out of the vaults.”

“You
knew
?” she repeated.

He bent down and looked at the mark on the girl’s skin. Costa did the same. It was a tattoo, circular, about the size of the coin: a howling, insane face with huge lips and long dreadlocks.

“It’s supposed to be a mask from an imperial Roman comedy,” Falcone said. “Dionysus was the god of theatre too. This was used by the Dionysian cults. You deserve that dinner, doctor. I’ll honour the bet. You were almost there. Just a couple of millennia out.”

Teresa Lupo pointed a stubby index finger at the inspector’s chest. “You
knew
? Eat your fucking dinner on your own.”

“So be it,” he answered. They watched him. Falcone couldn’t take his eyes off the tattoo. There was something going on inside the inspector’s head, something he didn’t seem much inclined to share.

“You’ll cancel the press conference,” he said.

“You bet,” she grumbled mutely. “But what should I say?”

“Make an excuse. Say you’ve got a headache. Tell them we don’t have the people, what with this flu thing and all. It’s the truth anyway.” He picked up the photograph from the dead girl’s chest and put it back in the envelope. Costa couldn’t help but notice Falcone hadn’t even let them see a name.

“Sir?” Costa asked, puzzled.

“Mr. Costa?” Falcone’s sparkling eyes gave nothing away. “It’s so nice to have you back with us.”

“What do you want us to do?”

“Catch a few crooks I imagine. Go help out down at the Campo. There’s a lot of pickpockets there at the moment.”

“I meant about this.”

Falcone took a final look at the corpse. “About this . . . nothing. The poor kid’s been lying in the mud for sixteen years. A day or two won’t make much difference.”

He rounded on all three of them. “And let me make one thing clear. I don’t want you breathing a word of what we have here to anyone. Not in this building. Not outside. I’ll call you when I need you.”

They watched him walk purposefully out of the room. Teresa Lupo stared at the body, her big, pale face a picture of misery and disappointment.

“I had it all worked out,” she moaned. “I knew exactly what happened. I talked to these academics and people. Jesus . . .”

“You heard him,” Costa said. “You did well. He meant it.”

Teresa was running her fingers over the dead girl’s mahogany skin. She didn’t need Nic Costa’s sympathy. She was over her disappointment already. It had been displaced by something new, something potentially more interesting.

The cadaver on her dissecting table was no longer a historical artefact. It was a murder victim. It required her attention.

Costa looked at the silver scalpel in her hand then looked at Peroni.

“The Campo it is,” he said and the older man nodded back in agreement.

“I GUESS there really is no rush,” Peroni said in the car. “I just wish Leo would talk to us some more. I hate getting left in the dark.”

Costa shrugged. He knew Falcone well enough not to let this bug him. “In his own time. It’s always like that.”

“I know. He’d be a disaster in vice. You got to take people with you all the way there.” Peroni must have watched Falcone work his way up the ranks. Their relationship was hard to fathom, half amiable, half suspicious. That was hardly unusual. Falcone was a smart, sound cop, one who trod a fine line sometimes when he felt a case merited it. He’d won plenty of respect for his talents. He was straight, unbending on occasion. But he didn’t give a damn about popularity. Sometimes, Costa thought, Falcone actually liked the antipathy and near-hatred he generated. It made tough decisions easier to take.

Peroni lit a cigarette and blew the smoke out the window. “You asked Barbara Martelli out yet?”

Where did that one come from? Costa wondered. “Haven’t found the right occasion.”

Peroni stared at him with a face that said:
are you kidding me
?

“I’m not ready. OK?”

“At least that’s honest. How long’s it been since you went with a woman? You don’t mind my asking. We have these conversations in vice all the time.”

“I guess in vice you measure it in hours,” Costa answered without thinking and immediately wished he could bite back his words. Peroni’s face fell. He looked hurt.

“I’m sorry, Gianni. I didn’t mean that. It just slipped out.”

“At least we’re on first-name terms now. I guess that means we can say what we want to each other.”

“I didn’t—”

“It’s OK,” Peroni interrupted. “Don’t apologize. You have every right to tell me when I’m acting like a jerk.”

Peroni was more complicated than he liked to appear. That much Costa had come to understand. Some part of him wanted to talk about what had happened too, even if he felt he ought to make a play of avoiding the subject.

“Why did you do it, Gianni? I mean, you got a family. Then you go with a hooker.”

“Oh come on! It happens every day. You think it’s just single men get horny from time to time.”

“No. I just wouldn’t have thought it of you.”

Peroni let out a deep sigh. “Remember what I told you once? Everyone’s got that dark spot.”

“Not everyone lets it out.”

The big, ugly head shook slowly. “Wrong. One way or another they do. Whether they know it or not. Why did I do it? Won’t a simple answer do? The girl was damn beautiful. Slim and young and blonde. And young. Or did I mention that? Maybe she made me feel alive again. When you’ve been married twenty years you forget what that’s like. Yeah, before you say it, so does your wife. Blame me twice over.”

Costa said nothing, worried he might cross the line and destroy the delicate bonds the two of them had managed to build over the last few weeks.

Peroni’s damaged face wrinkled some more in puzzlement at his silence. “Oh. I get it. You’re thinking, ‘Who does this hideous bastard think he is? Casanova?’ ”

“You don’t look like the great Latin Lover. That’s all. If you don’t mind me saying so.”

“Really?”

“Really.” Costa knew what was going on here. He wondered if he dared ask.

“Are you calling me ugly? That happens from time to time, Nic. I have to tell you I don’t like it.”

“No . . .” Costa stuttered. He took a good look at that battered face. “I was just wondering.”

“What?”

“What the hell happened?”

Gianni Peroni burst out laughing. “You kill me. You really do. In all the time I’ve worked here you are the first person who’s come out and asked that question direct. Can you believe that?”

“Yes,” Costa said hesitantly. “I mean, it’s a personal question. And most people wouldn’t like the idea that you could take it the wrong way.”

He waved a huge friendly hand in Costa’s face. “What the hell do you mean a personal question? You guys have to look at this ugly mug every day you come to work. I got to live with it. This . . .” he pointed a fat index finger at his face, “. . . is just a fact of life.”

Costa felt he’d made progress of a kind anyway. “So . . . ?”

Peroni chuckled again and shook his head. “Unbelievable. Just between the two of us, OK? This goes no further? No one knows this. Most of the guys out there think I look like this through getting into a fight with a hood or something. They wonder what the other guy looks like too. I’m happy with things that way.”

Costa nodded his agreement.

“A cop did this to me,” Peroni said. “I was twelve years old. He was the village cop. I was the village bastard. I mean that literally. My mamma worked for the couple who owned the lone bar in town and got knocked up after the fair sometime. She always was a little naÏve. So I spend twelve years being the village bastard, getting the village bastard treatment all those years. Spat on. Beaten up. Laughed at in school. Then one day the moronic kid in the same class who was my principal tormentor went just a touch too far. Said something about my mamma. And I kicked the living shit out of him. First time I ever did that. You want the truth? It’s the
only
time I ever did that. Don’t need to now. I just look at people and go,
Boo .
. .”

Costa thought about it. “I can believe that.”

“Good. The stupid thing was, I forgot the moron I was beating up was the village cop’s kid. So Daddy comes along, and Daddy’s been drinking. One thing leads to another. He gets done with the strap and he’s still not happy. So he goes and gets these metal things he carries, just for protection you understand, and he puts them on his fists.”

Peroni watched the cars go by out of the window. “I woke up in hospital two days later, face like a pumpkin, Mamma by my side. I couldn’t see a thing. The first thing she says is, don’t even think of telling anyone. He’s the village cop. Second thing she says is, don’t look in the mirror for a while.”

Costa sighed. “You could have told someone.”

Peroni gave him a frank look. “You’re a city kid, aren’t you?”

“I guess so.”

“It shows. Anyway, a couple of weeks later I come out of hospital and I notice things are different. People look at me and suddenly their eyes are on their shoes. A couple cross the road when they see me walking down the street. You know the worst thing of all? I was helping my uncle Freddo sell those pigs at weekends then. I went back to it. What else could you do? After a while he comes to me, tears in his eyes, and fires me. No one buys food from someone with a face like this. That was the worst thing of all at the time. I didn’t want to do anything else when I grew up except raise those pigs and sell them every weekend. Those guys . . . they all look
so
happy. But—”

He folded his arms, leaned back in the passenger seat, and glanced at Costa to make sure this point went in. “That was not to be. I became a cop instead. What else do you do? Partly to spite that old bastard who beat me up. But mainly, if you want to know, to even things up a little. I’ve never laid a finger on anyone in this job. Never would, not unless there was a very good reason and in more than twenty years I never found one. It’s a question of balance.”

Costa didn’t know how to respond. “I’m sorry, Gianni.”

“Why? I got over it years ago. You, on the other hand, have spent the last six months going loopy inside a bottle of booze. I’m sorry for you, kid.”

Maybe he deserved that. “Fine. We’re even now.”

Peroni was peering at him with those sharp, all-seeing eyes. “I will say this once, Nic. I am starting to like you. A part of me says that I will miss this time we’re spending together. Not that I wish to prolong it, you understand. But let me offer some sincere advice. Stop trying to fool yourself you’re something special. You’re not. There are millions of people out there trying to cope with fucked-up lives. We’re just two in the crowd. And after that little lecture . . .” he said, stretching up in his seat as Costa parked the car in a tiny space off the road by the ghetto, “. . . let me make a request.”

Peroni looked into his face hopefully. “Cover for me. I got something important to do. I’ll meet you back here at two.”

Costa didn’t know what to say. Bunking off for a couple of hours wasn’t unknown. He just didn’t think Peroni was the kind of cop to do it.

“Anything I should know about?” he asked.

“Just personal. It’s my daughter’s birthday tomorrow. I wanted to send her something that might make her think her father is not quite the jerk she’s come to believe. You can cope with the Campo on your own. Just don’t pick on any big bastards, OK?”

LEO FALCONE WAS READING the file on his desk, trying to focus on the case. He didn’t want to rush anything. Going public too quickly only alerted those he would wish to interview, though given how leaky the Questura had proved of late they probably knew by now anyway. The pause would also give him time to turn his mind back towards work after a solitary two weeks spent at a luxury beachside hotel in Sri Lanka. He had met no one of interest, and had scarcely sought the company of others. It was an unsatisfactory, tedious respite from routine that left him mildly disturbed. He was glad to be back at his desk and with a challenging case to tackle.

Even so, a rare note of self-doubt lurked at the back of his mind. Falcone had, to his surprise, been aware of his own loneliness during the long, drab holiday. It was now five years since his divorce. There had been women in that time, attractive, interesting women. Yet none had stimulated him sufficiently to take the relationship beyond the routine round of meals, the cinema, and the physical necessity of the bedroom. He’d come to realize the previous night — when, completely out of character, he’d consumed an entire bottle of a wonderful, deeply perfumed and expensive Brunello — that there had been only two real lovers in his life: his English wife Mary, who was now back in London, pursuing a legal career; and the woman who was the reason Mary left, Rachele D’Amato.

Here, in the light of day, obscured only slightly by the remains of a hangover, lay a curious coincidence. In Sri Lanka he had thought consciously about these two women for the first time in several years. When he returned to Italy, it was to find them ready to re-enter his life. Mary had written to invite him to her marriage, to another rich English lawyer, at a country house in Kent. He would find an excuse and decline. She would, he thought, expect this. The invitation came out of politeness, nothing more. His infidelity had wounded her deeply, and her abrupt departure, without the slightest attempt at reconciliation, hurt him more than he realized at the time. Or perhaps the pain came from Rachele D’Amato, who had abandoned him with the same degree of certainty Mary had shown, and rather less grace, the moment he became free.