The Villa of Mysteries

by David Hewson

  Demotion and the loss of salary were the least of Peroni’s concerns if Questura gossip was anything to go by. He wasn’t just admired for being a great cop. He was renowned throughout the building as a family man. His wife and his two teenage kids, one boy, one girl, were well known. Men and women on his squad dined regularly at the Peroni household. When they had problems, Peroni acted like a proxy father, offering advice, trying to keep them on track.

  All that had been shattered on a chill January evening. Peroni didn’t face prosecution. He’d broken no law. He’d just lost everything. His wife had gone back to Siena with both kids, demanding a swift divorce, shouting his betrayal from the rooftops. In a matter of weeks he’d gone from being an important cop, with a loving family, to a single, middle-aged man, alone, uncertain of his future career. And now Leo Falcone had put him in a car with Nic Costa, whose own position in the police appeared equally uncertain and directionless. Costa had no clear idea how to handle this. But then, he guessed, neither did Gianni Peroni.

  The two small Roman temples that sat beside the Piazza della Bocca della Verità were just beyond the window, a couple of perfect, circular shapes from a different, Arcadian world. It was a pleasant day with enough warmth in it to indicate spring was on the way. Nic Costa wished he could sit next to them for a while, thinking.

  Peroni turned to stare at him. “Shall we have the clearing of the air conversation now?”

  Costa looked into that intense, battered face and wondered how long it would take him to get used to sharing a car with someone who looked like a cartoon villain. “If you want.”

  “Let me be candid. It’s not so long since you went loony tunes. You did the drink thing too. Me, I just got caught with my pants down with a Czech hooker. For that I have to be the rehab warder. The way I see it is that if I can keep you straight for a month or so, and who knows maybe along the way we deal with a few criminals, I can get myself back in Leo’s good books. I can start climbing the ladder to what I do best, which is running a team, not sitting in some stinking squad car playing nursemaid to junior and keeping him away from the bottle. This is important to me, kid. I’ll do my best to keep Leo happy. But you have to help me. The sooner you do, the sooner you have me out of your hair and get someone normal. Understand?”

  Costa nodded.

  “And let me tell you something else. I hate the drink thing. I have watched too many men turn into boozed-up pieces of shit in my time. You do that to me and I will feel very cross indeed. You wouldn’t like me when I’m cross. No one does.”

  “I’ll try to remember that. Do I get something in return? A promise you’ll stay away from hookers?”

  Peroni glared at him and Costa, in spite of himself, couldn’t help feeling a little scared. “Don’t push it now. I know Leo’s looking out for you. The stupid bastard feels guilty for what happened when you got shot. God knows why. From what I hear you got yourself into that mess.”

  Costa refused to rise to the bait. “No, I mean it. I’m curious. Everyone thought they knew you. This stand-up, working-class guy with the perfect family, the perfect life. And now they think they got it wrong all along. And they wonder: was it them, or was it you? Who was doing the lying?”

  “Me,” Peroni said immediately. “But let me tell you. Everyone’s got that little dark spot inside them. Everyone wonders what it would be like to take it out for a walk once in a while. Even you. If you know what’s good for you.”

  “I thought that’s what you didn’t want to happen.”

  “I was talking about the drink. People who go that way do it for one purpose. To kill something. Maybe it’d be better if they did let the dark side out instead. Just now and again.”

  It was a kind of philosophy, Costa thought. Not one he expected from a cop, or the kind of cop Gianni Peroni was supposed to be.

  “And you tell me something, kid. I saw you walking into the building today with Barbara Martelli. Isn’t she the loveliest thing in the world? What if she just turned round one day, just when you were happily married and thought everything was stretching out neatly in front of you, just when you’re feeling a little old too. What if she said: Nic, I just wished I knew what it was like. Just the once. Where’s the harm? Who’s to know?”

  “I’m not married.”

  “I know. I said, what if?” Peroni waited for an answer and realized it wasn’t coming. “You should ask that girl out. She’s got something in her eyes when she looks at you. I notice these things.”

  Costa laughed. “Really?”

  “Really. And let me tell you one more thing. I knew her old man. He was in vice too until a couple of years ago. One of the meanest, most miserable bastards you ever saw. How he ever spawned a woman like that is beyond me. There. You got a good reason not to date her. You’d have to meet that old sonofabitch.”

  “Thanks.”

  “You’re welcome. You look like the sort of person who appreciates reasons for not doing things. Which is fine by me, until I talk myself out of this seat. Do we understand each other?”

  Costa didn’t get mad. In a way he felt relieved. At least he knew where he stood.

  “Is that out of the way now?” he wondered. “Can we just settle down to being old cop, young cop, cleaning up the streets of Rome?”

  But the big man in the passenger seat was waving at him to be quiet. The radio was squealing their number. Peroni picked up the mike and answered. They listened to the call. Nic Costa gunned the car and headed straight for Piramide and the autostrada out to the coast and the airport, casually flicking on the blue light and the siren to get the cars out of the way.

  “What a day,” Peroni groaned. “First I get baby-sitting duties. Now we’re the fire brigade. Hard to know which is worse.”

  Bobby Dexter’s determined expression was one Lianne recognized. It usually meant they were headed for trouble.

  “I’ll tell you what we’re going to do,” he said. “We’re going to take back a head for Tom Jorgensen to look at. One that’s a million times better than that piece of Greek shit of his.”

  She gaped at him, outraged. “What?”

  Bobby raised the shovel to shoulder height, holding it like an axe, a little breathless already from the anticipation. “Watch. Watch and learn.”

  He brought the metal down hard where the statue’s neck ought to be. Nothing much happened. Some dirt moved. But Lianne was yelling, louder than she’d ever done before.

  “Bobby Dexter,” she screeched. “What the hell are you doing? This thing’s like a piece of art or something. It’s history. You’re just going to smash it to pieces so you can make out your dick’s bigger than Tom Jorgensen’s?”

  He held the shovel high, swaying slightly. “What do you know about the size of Jorgensen’s dick?”

  “It was a figure of speech, moron.”

  Bobby Dexter blinked at her. He looked downright ugly. The light was failing now and the world was getting weird. He took one more swipe at the statue’s neck and missed, sending up a shower of stinking earth that bounced straight back into his face. A few grains fell into his mouth. He spat out the dirt as if it were poison.

  “If you break that statue, we’re over, Bobby,” she said, dead serious. “I mean it. I don’t go talking to my father. I get a lawyer. The moment we get back to Seattle.”

  He hesitated, staring at her as if wondering whether she really did mean it. “You tell me that when we’re back home with the best fucking piece of coffee table statuary in private ownership anywhere in Washington State. You’d be amazed what a nice piece of household ornamentation can do for dinner parties.”

  “Bobby—” she yelled.

  “Bullshit.” He took a final swing.

  This one connected. The sharp side of the spade went deep into the neck. There should have been a sharp, cracking sound that indicated a good clean break, one that went right across the stone in a level line with just enough randomness in it to look convincing. She knew Bobby well enough to understand
what he was thinking. There were probably ideas in his head already.

  But everything just went straight out of their heads a moment after the blade hit. Lianne Dexter realized right then that they’d been wrong, terribly wrong, both of them. They saw what they wanted to see. Not what was. Maybe there was a reason behind that. Because what was turned out to be the last thing they wanted to encounter anywhere on this planet, least of all on their own down a little lane, next to a stinking grey river in a country where their language skills extended only to ordering pizza, beer and wine.

  The blade didn’t strike hard stone. It met flesh, a kind of flesh anyway. Something that looked like leather, tanned, tough, but supple. The side of the spade cut straight through just where the neck met the shoulders, severing something that resembled a real human tendon, spattering both of them with a mixture of foul-smelling wet mud that seemed to have something distinctly organic, almost alive, inside it.

  Lianne’s face was covered with the peat gore that had spat back at them when he attacked the thing. She was spitting bits of it out of her mouth, sobbing, dry-retching as she did so.

  She stopped for a moment and watched Bobby bend down to look closely at the thing, just a hint of reverence in his face.

  On the ground in front of them, partly severed from the body by the spade, was the head of a young girl, sixteen, seventeen, no more, dressed in a classical gown, holding some large, ceremonial wand in her left hand. The force of the blow had removed most of the solid cake of peat that had sat on her features. What they saw now was her face which, beneath the crud, seemed beautiful. She had a high forehead and prominent cheekbones. There wasn’t a wrinkle in sight on her flawless leather skin. Her eyes were closed. Her lips were partly open as if she were uttering a final, dying sigh. She had perfect teeth which were just closed together with a hint of pearly whiteness showing through the brown stain of the earth. Her long hair was tied back behind her neck and matted into solid strands. Her expression was one of utmost peace. She looked, Lianne Dexter thought, happy, which was, she knew, ridiculous in the circumstances.

  And just in case they were in any doubt about the nature of this object before them there was the matter of the neck. When Bobby had come down hard with the shovel he’d done what he hoped: split through into the interior. Bobby and Lianne Dexter were now looking at the inside of another human being’s throat and it was black and complicated and messy, with bones and sinews and passages that looked vaguely familiar from some distant school lesson in anatomy.

  “Holy shit,” Bobby muttered and started shivering.

  A 747 swooped low over them. They felt the heat of its breath. They inhaled the chemical stink of its fearsome engines. When the roar of its gross presence diminished Bobby Dexter became aware of another noise. It was his wife, screaming.

  “No,” he pleaded. “Not now, Lianne. I’m trying to think for chrissake.”

  Then he gave up altogether. Two men, one short, one tall, were walking towards them, staring intently. Some way behind them there was something else: a red fire engine struggling down the lane trying to reach the charred and smoking remains of the Clio.

  The men were waving badges. They didn’t look sympathetic.

  The older cop was a bull-necked gorilla of a man with a disfigured, scowling face and piercing, aggressive eyes that looked as if they could see everything. The younger, shorter one was staring at the thing in the ground, the shit-coloured cadaver with the head all to one side where Bobby had lopped it with the shovel.

  “This day just gets stranger,” Gianni Peroni murmured. “Pinch me. Tell me I’m dreaming.”

  “You’re not dreaming,” Nic Costa replied. He couldn’t stop looking at the object half-hidden in the mud. Not for the weeping woman who looked as if she’d thrown up and was now hunched in a ball down by the edge of the river. Or the man, who held a shovel uncertainly in his hands, his body swaying rhythmically.

  A man who, for no reason at all, suddenly pointed the spade at both of them and, with a slow, effortful slur to his voice, said, “Listen. Don’t fuck with me. Don’t even think about it. I’m an American citizen.”

  The Ides of March

  “How long has she been lying there? Answer me that.”

  Teresa Lupo stood next to the brown cadaver that lay at a stiff, awkward angle on the shiny steel table in the morgue. The pathologist looked even more proprietorial than usual about the corpse in her care, and immensely pleased with herself too. It was two weeks now since Nic Costa and Gianni Peroni had encountered the body and the screaming American couple by the muddy banks of the Tiber, just a couple of kilometres from the sea at Ostia. Bobby and Lianne Dexter were back home in Washington State, talking to lawyers about their divorce and who should have custody of the cats, still feeling lucky to have escaped Europe without facing a single charge (which proved, Lianne thought, exactly what kind of people they were over there anyway). Costa and Peroni had, in the meantime, become, if not quite a team, partners of a kind, able to get through the day with a sense of shared duty and the promise that soon their artificial relationship would be over.

  The body had made international headlines for a few days. Somehow a photo had been smuggled to the media, showing the serene, frozen face that had emerged from the chemical-smelling peat. It was a genuine mystery. No one knew how old the body was. No one knew whether the girl had died of natural causes or was the victim of some obscure crime. There was wild speculation in some of the Italian tabloids, stories which talked about ancient cults that had killed followers who had somehow failed the entry ceremony.

  Nic Costa hadn’t taken any notice. It was pointless to speculate until Teresa Lupo had passed judgement. Now she had made up her mind. They had been summoned to the morgue for ten that morning. At noon Teresa planned to give a press conference outlining her findings. The very fact she’d arranged this herself without asking advance permission from Leo Falcone spoke volumes. It meant she was confident there was no criminal investigation on the way. He and Peroni had simply been invited along out of politeness. They found the specimen; they deserved to hear its secrets revealed. Costa wished Teresa had left them out of it. He was starting to get the feel for police business again, starting to like the idea he could be good at it. If this really was a closed case, he’d rather be somewhere else, dealing with a live one.

  The three of them—Falcone, Peroni and Costa—sat on a cold, hard bench watching her make a few last-minute, fussy observations of the corpse. Costa understood what this was: a dry run for the press conference which would be part of her re-entry into police life. Teresa Lupo had briefly quit her job after the Denney case, vowing never to return. She had been close to Luca Rossi and felt the pain of his death as much as anyone in the station. More, perhaps, than Nic Costa. More certainly than Falcone who, while quietly racked by guilt over the loss of his man, was too obsessed by the job to be distracted for long.

  Grief chased her from the tight, close embrace of the force. Grief brought her back to the fold. She was like the rest of them: hooked, incapable of staying away. She loved getting to know her customers, trying to understand their lives and what had brought them to her slab. Unravelling these mysteries fulfilled her and now she was starting to show it, Costa thought. She was carrying a little less weight. The ponytail had gone, replaced by a businesswoman’s crop, black hair short and sculpted carefully to hide the outline of her heavy neck. She had a large, animated face and slightly bulbous blue eyes that darted around constantly. There was something a touch obsessive inside the woman, something that quickly chased away most men who tried to get close to her. Maybe that was what made her the pathologist the cops always wanted on their side, however fierce her temper, however sharp her tongue . . .

  “Ten years. Twenty max,” Peroni suggested. “But what do I know? I’m just a busted vice cop. You got to bear the responsibility for any screw-ups I make, Leo. I’m used to dealing with people I know are guilty from the outset. All this detection stuff . . . it’s
not my thing.”

  Falcone put a hand to his ear. “Excuse me?”

  “Sir,” Peroni said meekly. “You got to bear the responsibility, sir.”

  Falcone sat there in a grey suit that looked as if it were new that morning, letting his fingers run through his angular, sharp-pointed silver beard, staring at the body, thinking. He’d returned from a holiday somewhere hot only the day before. A deep walnut tan stained his face and his bald scalp. It was almost the colour of the corpse on the slab. The inspector seemed miles away. Maybe his head was still on the beach, or wherever he went for enjoyment. Maybe he’d been through the force disposition. There was a flu epidemic gripping the city. People were calling in sick from everywhere. The Questura had so many empty desks that morning it looked like Christmas Day.

  Teresa was grinning. Peroni had said exactly what she wanted to hear. “That’s a good and sensible suggestion, even for a busted vice cop. Your basis for it being . . .”

  He waved his hand at the table. “Look at her. She’s a touch messed up but she don’t stink too bad. Nothing going mouldy. I’m sure you people have seen worse. Smelled much worse too probably.”

  She nodded. “The smell’s from the treatment. She’s been lying in a shower ever since we got her here. Fifteen per cent polyethylene glycol in distilled water. I’ve been doing a lot of research on this girl. Reading books. Talking to people. I’m in touch with some academics in England by e-mail who know exactly how to handle a body in this condition. After ten weeks or so maybe we’ll need to get her freeze-dried to finish the job properly.”

  “Don’t we get to bury her in the end?” Costa wondered. “Isn’t that what you’re supposed to do with dead people?”

  She screwed up her big pale face in amazement. “Are you kidding me? Do you think the university would allow it?”

  “Since when did she belong to them?” he asked. “However old she is, she was a human being. If this isn’t going to become a crime investigation, what’s the problem? When does a corpse turn into a specimen? Who decides?”