by David Hewson
Wallis glared at both of them. “I’m sorry to hear that. Really. But I’m still asking the same question. What the hell has it got to do with me?”
“You do remember Mickey?” Falcone asked.
Wallis’s dark eyes glittered at them. “OK. Yeah. I remember him. He was a jerk. Just like his father. That still doesn’t explain why he should be putting out a call for me to run errands. I’m not dumb. This little punk wants my hide or something.”
“Your hide?” Peroni asked. “Mr. Wallis. Please. You’re big time. This is Mickey Neri we’re talking about here. You don’t honestly believe he’s got the nerve to take on the likes of you, do you?”
Peroni watched the American’s face. Pride was such a powerful emotion.
“I don’t deal with punks like this,” Wallis said in the end.
“So why are you here?” Falcone wondered.
“Just being a good citizen, that’s all. You get one of your guys to take this stuff, go run this errand.”
“Won’t work,” Peroni said. “You heard the man. It’s you or nothing.”
“You want my help?” There was a touch of disdain in his expression. “These women have nothing to do with me. This cop’s your problem. You hear what I’m saying? This is not my business.”
Falcone held up his hands. “I agree. Besides, we have a policy. We don’t give in to ransom demands. Even ones as unusual as this.”
Wallis pulled his coat around him, ready to go. “Then there’s nothing else to discuss. You keep the camera. You keep the money.” But he didn’t move. Falcone glanced at Peroni and wondered: were they thinking the same thing? Vergil Wallis wanted to do this run. He liked the idea of giving the cops information, probably because Mickey Neri had virtually signed a confession with that stupid piece of video. But something inside Wallis was nagging him to go through with this idea.
Peroni pushed a piece of paper across the table. “Mickey Neri—”
“Fuck Mickey Neri,” Wallis interjected.
He put a hand lightly on Vergil Wallis’s shoulder and Gianni Peroni was amazed to discover something about himself. He found a certain degree of pleasure in pushing this man around a little. He could, if he tried, start to enjoy it.
“Vergil, Vergil,” he said mildly. “Calm down now. This is your decision, no one else’s.”
Wallis picked up the paper and stared at it, his eye drawn to the fancy stamp of the state lab letterhead sprawled across the top.
“We just want you to be informed. That’s all.”
THEY SAT on the bed, Miranda Julius next to him, shivering in his arms, wearing little more than a short tee-shirt, huddled under the old, dull coverlet, staring into his face.
“Where is he?” Costa asked.
“I don’t know. My door’s locked, like yours. I haven’t heard anyone there most of the night.”
She held his wrist, turned it and looked at the watch. It was now just after eight. “He said he’d be back for me around nine thirty.”
“To do what?”
She shook her head. “I don’t know anymore.”
Costa thought about the voice he’d heard the night before. “It was the man you saw in the picture? Mickey Neri?”
She nodded. “He phoned me last night, Nic. Said he wanted to talk. Said I had to dye my hair like this so that he’d know me. Not that that makes any sense, of course.” Her face went down, close to his chest. “I just wasn’t thinking.”
He looked at the walls again and knew: this was the place, the scene of the photographs, one room of several in Randolph Kirk’s seedy subterranean pleasure palace, each with a bed, each with a history. And in one Eleanor Jamieson had surely died.
She put a hand to his head. “Are you all right? I heard him hit you. It sounded horrible.”
“I’m fine,” he said, and took her hands, looked hard into her frightened eyes. “Miranda. We need to work out how to get out of here. I don’t know what this guy’s up to but it isn’t good.”
There were so many threads of possibilities running inside his head. He didn’t know which was true, which imagination. Neri on the run, fleeing the evidence left at his accountant’s. The bomb outside the old hood’s house. How in spite of that he’d pressed Peroni so hard to chase the sighting of Suzi even though his colleagues lay stricken and wounded on the ground around him. Was this a kind of treachery? It seemed the right decision at the time. Just now, though, his head refused to clear sufficiently to understand what had happened afterwards.
She took his hands and looked earnestly into his face. “Listen to me, Nic. He’s desperate somehow. He just wants money.”
“How much?” It wasn’t the question he wanted to ask.
“Pretty much everything I have. Not that it matters.” She sighed and looked down at the bed. “I got the impression that perhaps his plans had changed. To be honest with you I don’t care. Suzi’s alive. I saw her. She was here before he threw me into this dump. I just want her free. I’d give everything I’ve got for that.”
He tried to remember now: perhaps there were two female voices in the darkness last night, before he was struck down.
“Where is she now?”
“I don’t know.” She shrugged. “This place seems to be full of rooms like this. Perhaps he just likes using them. Perhaps—”
Her face darkened and he knew what she was thinking.
“Perhaps it’s not just about the money after all,” she continued. “I don’t care so long as I have her back. I had to make some calls back home to organize the money. Maybe he’s keeping her somewhere just to make sure I haven’t pulled any tricks. She’s collateral. If she’s lucky. I’m sorry, Nic. I know I should have called. But—”
Her eyes bored into him, blue, unrepentant. “I knew what you’d do. You’d turn this into a cop thing. I couldn’t take that risk. And it’s just money.”
Costa took the phone out of his jacket and looked at the screen again. It was still dead. He stared around the room trying to think of some way to escape.
“We can’t get out, Nic,” she whispered. “I tried. We’re here till he comes back. What kind of place is this?”
Her mouth was so close to his neck he could feel her breath, damp, hot, alive. She was shivering against him.
“A kind of temple, maybe?”
“To what?”
He knew that instinctively. They both did. “To losing it.”
In spite of everything she was calm now in some way he couldn’t quite comprehend. Perhaps it was simply knowing that Suzi was alive.
She shivered violently. His arms went round her. Miranda Julius reached down and took out a small silver pill case from her bag then shook two tiny tablets, sugar-coated and red, into her palm.
“I need these,” she said, shaking. Her eyes closed, her white, perfect neck went back. Costa couldn’t stop looking at her, feeling her pain and her need, pinioned to the bed by her agonised beauty.
It happened swiftly. She moved fully into his arms. Her slender hand gripped the hair at the nape of his neck. Her mouth closed on his, soft, wet and enticing. He responded. Their lips joined. Her tongue ran beyond his teeth, her hands beginning to tear at his shirt, firing something red and senseless in his imagination.
He thought he heard her whisper his name, then the tongue returned, probing, hard, insistent, finding the deepness in his throat. There was just the hint of something solid on the tip, something that made him swallow and, in the heat of the moment, scarcely notice the act.
Nic Costa closed his eyes, not thinking, letting her hands do their work, rising when he was bidden, feeling her straddle him, panting, demanding, feeling the heat rise between them, drowning out the doubts in his head.
In the fevered stream of his imagination painted figures watched from the walls, eyes bright, gaping mouths laughing, particles of dead, dry dust coming alive, waiting for the ancient siren song to rise in her throat, waiting for the ecstasy to bind them.
At some point afterwards
he closed his eyes and slept. When he woke she was quietly singing a line from an old song, one his father possessed among that ancient pile of vinyl back in the farmhouse off the old Appian Way. He recognized it: Grace Slick fronting Jefferson Airplane, all those years ago. Miranda Julius was softly chanting the same refrain over and over again.
“One pill makes you bigger,” she sang in a low, breathy voice that ran through his head like a dream.
“HE’S OFFERING me what?”
Emilio Neri couldn’t believe his ears. Maybe he’d misjudged the kid all along. It was now almost eight thirty. He’d just finished breakfast in the cellar of the safe house on the Aventine Hill, after the best solitary night’s sleep that he could remember in years. Bruno Bucci made the choice. Neri had forgotten he even owned the place. The radio and TV stations were now blurting out his name as the chief culprit for the previous night’s bomb blast. One of the newspapers had even put up a reward for anyone who helped track him down. None of this worried him. Bucci was a good guy. He’d done his homework. He’d paid the right people, sealed the lips of those who might be tempted to go for the main chance. The Albanian mob reckoned they could spirit Neri out of the country late that afternoon. By midnight he’d be in North Africa. In a couple of days he’d find himself in Capetown, ready for a little holiday, in preparation for the trip across the southern Atlantic to his new home. Once he was beyond his native shores no one could touch him. A long line of money would grease his path all the way, from one understanding state to the next.
But now, as luck would have it, a little temptation had got in the way, and Emilio Neri knew the moment he heard it nothing would induce him to walk away from Mickey’s offer.
“Tell me again,” he said. “Just so I know I’m not dreaming.”
Bucci grimaced, unhappy with the idea from the outset. “If you forgive him, if you let him and Adele live, you can have Wallis on a plate. He just wants some money, that’s all. And some guarantees.”
“Guarantees?” Neri waddled around the room, shaking his head. “Tell you what. Get him back on the phone. Let me talk to the kid. I’ll give him guarantees. Why didn’t he call me direct anyway? I’m his father, aren’t I?”
Bucci shook his head. “He won’t speak with you, boss. He’s pissed off with you. Says you expected Toni Martelli to off him last night. Seems to think that was an insult or something.”
“Yeah.” Neri laughed. “Maybe it was. But Martelli’s dead and he’s alive. So where’s the insult now? How much does he want?”
“A cut of the action,” Bucci said gloomily. “Ten per cent of everything going forward.”
Neri slapped Bucci cheerfully around the cheeks. “Hey, don’t look so miserable, Bruno. There’s plenty to go round. Be realistic. Nothing’s ever fixed in stone, now, is it?”
“Whatever you want, boss.” Bruno Bucci said that a lot, Neri thought. It could get annoying.
“Did you know anything about this?” he asked. “Mickey snatching this girl on the side? Be honest now. I’m not pissed off with you.”
Bucci threw back his big shoulders as if it were some kind of insult. “No. You’d have been the first to know. He’s always up to stuff. Stupid little bastard. Why fuck around with crap like that? What’s the point?”
“His dick’s the point. Some things never change.”
Bucci sighed and gave Neri a knowing look. “Stupid—”
“Don’t be ungrateful, Bruno. When the word gets around about this nonsense you come out looking good. No one wants a lunatic running things. You get the business. I get retired. And that black bastard Vergil Wallis gets dead, which is a good lesson for anyone who thinks they can fuck with this house in the future. Understand?”
“Sure.” He really didn’t look happy. “Look, boss. We made lots of good plans here. I can get you out of the country, no problem. If we start messing around like this, I don’t know—”
Neri smiled. “You can do it.”
“Why not let me or one of the boys handle Wallis? We can see to him.”
“Yeah.” Neri grinned. “Mickey and Adele too, huh? You think I’m stupid?”
Bucci was silent. Neri patted him on the shoulder. “Hey, I’d do the same thing myself. Hell, you will do it when I’m out of the way. Let’s not fool ourselves otherwise. But I got a score to settle with Vergil Wallis. Got some personal questions I’d like answered too. He whacked that little accountant of mine. He gave all them private papers to the DIA. It’s thanks to him I get to retire now. I wanna show him a little gratitude. Understand?”
“I understand. But is it worth the risk?”
“Yes,” Neri snapped. “It’s worth the risk. Besides, with you planning things, there is no risk. Am I right?”
Bucci looked at him oddly. There was something going on in his head Neri couldn’t see. “Am I right, Bruno?”
“I never asked you for anything, boss. Let me ask now. Just this one thing. Stick to what we’ve got. No distractions. Just go and enjoy being retired. I’ll look after things.”
Neri would have given up on him then, changed his mind completely. But he was too far down the road and Bucci, he guessed, understood that already. “I’m still running things right now,” Neri snarled. “You do the fuck what I say. A man’s gotta leave a few memories behind him. They got last night. Now they’re gonna get Wallis too. That’s my legacy, Bruno. Don’t fuck with it.”
Bucci grunted something incomprehensible.
“So when do we wrap this up?” Neri demanded. “Where?”
“He’s gonna call us back.”
Emilio Neri thought about his son. And about Adele. Maybe this was all her doing. Maybe this was her way of convincing Mickey she could set him up for life. What a pair they’d make. She’d be screwing the chauffeur before Christmas.
“You know there’s just one thing I don’t understand,” Neri said, more to himself than to Bruno Bucci. “How the hell has Mickey talked Wallis into walking out into the open like that? After all this time? Is he just getting dumb in his old age or what?”
“Maybe he’s thinking of retirement too,” Bucci suggested. “Maybe he wants to even things out.”
Emilio Neri grinned. “Oh, he’s retiring. That’s for sure.”
THEY CLUTCH EACH OTHER on the cold, damp bed. His too-bright eyes, the pupils now dilated, dart everywhere, to places he doesn’t want to see. She watches, face close to his, her breath on his skin, smiling, thinking.
He looks into her eyes and just at that moment, when she’s caught him completely, she says, in a new voice, a low voice that seems as if it should belong to someone else, “Every good deed needs a witness, Nic. Every crime has to meet with some punishment. Without that—”
He’s laughing, can’t help himself, can’t believe the words coming out of his mouth.
Call the cops, he says. That’s what we’re here for.
She slides her slim, taut body onto his chest. Firm fingers grip him, force his eyes to look into hers. Then she turns his head and he looks once more at the shapes on the walls, writhing, laughing, chattering in some unknown language. He closes his eyes. From somewhere deep inside, somewhere he can’t discern, comes a voice, rough and cruel, rumbling up from the guts through a crazy mask’s bulbous lips.
It says, Look, you fucker, look. You got to in the end.
No. He knows the word never leaves his throat.
Sounds from beyond the wooden door. People. Events. Real, perhaps. Or memories, shadows of the past seeping into the present.
I think, she says, there was a girl here once. Years ago, but not so distant we ought to forget. A young girl. Others too. But this girl was special.
Everyone’s special, he murmurs. How?
She was beautiful. Everyone’s beautiful. After a fashion.
The rough voice laughs from behind the hidden mask, a sound filled with scorn.
Hot breath enters his ear, a torrent of words that transform into pictures inside his head. He sees them now, forced
into his imagination by what he hears and the pulsing elements roaring through his veins. They both have a stiff schoolgirl stance, backs to him, arms behind, fists clenched. Long blonde hair falls over slim shoulders onto sackcloth robes. A garland of flowers hangs around each too-young neck, a smaller one crowns each shining head. Carnations for love, lilies for death. Their smell fills the room, bright and harsh and cloying, with something else beneath it, a narcotic perfume worming its way into every hidden corner of every head.
One figure turns and he sees Barbara Martelli, now sixteen years younger than the woman he never really knew, long locks down to her waist, smiling face full of warmth, pleased to see someone.
Barbara opens her mouth. No sound emerges. She is a gift. He understands that just by looking at her, the way she stands, the way she beckons, and something in Barbara’s face seems to say she’s aware of this too.
Her slim arms, tanned, still a little chubby from her youth, reach out, seeking a man’s touch and the gift it will bring.
Barbara knows, he thinks. Barbara wants.
Miranda’s lips, damp and scorching, move against his ear.
She whispers, Look.
A second figure turns and he feels his heart become stone, feels the air disappear from his lungs.
Eleanor Jamieson stands in front of him, alive and smiling, and Miranda is right. She is more beautiful than any of them, not because of how she looks, but from the simple light that shines from her eyes, the naÏve, unworldly light of innocence begging to be dimmed because it burns too brightly for the rest. This is her undoing. Men will see this flame, perhaps women too, and want to suck on its power, steal the life from within it, jealous of its intensity. And she understands none of this. She simply smiles, and beckons.
She doesn’t know, fuckhead, the old voice croons. She doesn’t have a clue.
Eleanor Jamieson opens her perfect mouth and smiles.
