The Villa of Mysteries

by David Hewson

  The older man put his hand on Costa’s arm. “Nic. You heard Falcone. He said you could be right. But think this through. You just got back on the job. There are people in the Questura who happen to believe Falcone’s crazy to give you a second chance at all. You’re on probation. Just like me.”

  “And you think that if I push this I can ruin your chances along with my own?”

  “If you want to look at it that way, yeah,” Peroni conceded. “That’s a part of it. But mainly I’m thinking about you. Honest. I got to know you a little these last couple of weeks. Sometimes you take things on yourself. Someone else’s problem becomes yours.”

  “Thanks for the compliment.”

  “It’s a backhanded one. The flip side is that’s a great way to get screwed. Or screw yourself.”

  “I won’t screw up, Gianni. Forget about me. What about the missing girl? What if these two are connected? All that stuff about the rituals—”

  Peroni sighed and shook his head. “A piece of vegetable and some seeds? Look, they don’t call her Crazy Teresa for nothing. I love her as much as anyone, but you got to admit this is stretching things. Even if she has it half right about the corpse, there’s no way it can have anything to do with the Julius girl. They’re sixteen years apart. They have absolutely nothing in common except the looks. What are you saying? Someone’s still doing all this mumbo-jumbo? How come we heard nothing all this time? You think Rome hasn’t seen a pretty teenage blonde since the girl in the peat?”

  It was a good question. He’d thought about it too. “Maybe it went all right before. Maybe someone only gets killed if there’s a foul-up. If the girl suddenly doesn’t want to play ball. I don’t know.”

  Peroni nodded. “So all the Julius girl has to do is let this creep have his way with her? Then she gets free?”

  More than that, Costa thought. He recalled what Teresa had said about the book. The girl gets rewarded. She gets a taste of paradise. She becomes an initiate, part of the club. And the next time round she sees the ritual from the inside. She watches someone else become.

  “Maybe,” he said.

  “Doesn’t seem a big deal. Women have been getting on that way since we all crawled out of the slime.”

  Gianni Peroni came from a different generation. Costa reminded himself to keep that in mind. “In this century it’s a big deal.”

  Peroni gave him a sharp look. “Sorry. Just the dinosaur in me talking. Let’s forget it, huh? My advice is: we just keep our heads down and do as we’re told. That is the way of progress in the modern police force.”

  There was the rumble of a sports car. A black Alfa Romeo coupe drove up and parked close to Falcone’s vehicle. Costa watched as an elegant woman in a serious dark jacket and tight skirt, cut to just above the knee, climbed out and, very gingerly, embraced Falcone, kissing him lightly on the cheek.

  Peroni closed his eyes. “Oh shit. There goes my nap. There really is no God after all. Or if there is he’s a bastard. Behold, one more reason to listen to what the dinosaur’s saying. Know who that is?”

  Costa shook his head.

  “The ice maiden from the DIA. Rachele D’Amato. Big number there these days too. Does things like setting up stings in brothels and you wouldn’t tell anyone in vice first if you did that, would you? Listen. Never, ever do you mess with her, understand? Not until you make inspector class and even then I’d wear gloves. She’s the woman Falcone was porking way back until his wife found out. What the hell is she doing here? Come to that, what the hell are we doing here? I am living in darkness with you people.”

  Falcone and the woman were talking animatedly outside the gates. It was a professional conversation, from the woman’s side anyway.

  “Anything else I need to know about her?”

  “Oh yes,” Peroni added. “She hates cops. At least . . . let me be more precise. She has a thing about us. Maybe it comes from her experience with Falcone. We’re all assholes. Crooked assholes too in all probability. Before stiffing me she took down two men from narcotics last year for receiving backhanders.”

  “More fool them,” Costa scowled. He hated bent cops. He couldn’t work out why anyone had any sympathy for them in the Questura.

  “Oh, I forgot,” Peroni groaned. “You’re the one with a conscience. Let me tell you something, kid. These were good guys. They put a lot of people in jail who deserved to be there. Until you’ve worked that beat yourself I suggest you don’t prejudge people. In that line of work it’s sometimes hard to be black and white, because if you are, no one talks to you at all.”

  Costa stared at his partner. He wished he could understand Peroni better. Sometimes the man said things that disturbed him.

  “Whatever,” Peroni continued. “The bitch has balls, I’ll say that for her. Word was someone put out a contract on her a year back. When she found out she drove round to his house, walked in on him and his old woman over breakfast and . . . reached an understanding.”

  The DIA people did walk a dangerous line. Costa knew one who’d been badly injured in a bomb blast in Sicily. There weren’t just cops in the force either. Some lawyers were in there too. Somehow that seemed to make them easier targets in the eyes of the mob.

  “Is she still on the list?”

  “She’s alive, isn’t she?”

  Peroni climbed out of the car and walked to the gates, Costa dogging his footsteps. Rachele D’Amato was slim, in her thirties, a type Costa recognized: businesslike, serious, but not above turning on the attraction to get her way. She had plenty to work with. She was just a touch taller than Nic Costa, with the kind of figure other women hated to see. The suit emphasized her slender waist. Her jacket hung open to reveal a tight, cream silk shirt, cut revealingly low. She had a hard, beautiful face, with a phoney smile accented by deep-red lipstick, and immaculate, long brown hair, pulled back from her forehead and tied behind. Costa could imagine Falcone with her. They’d make a convincing couple. He just wondered how much mutual trust they’d ever manage to share.

  “Not that I’m complaining but why’s a civilian here?” Peroni wondered.

  Rachele D’Amato turned and smiled. “Oh. Let me remember the name. It’s Detective Peroni. Right?”

  “Yeah.” He grinned. “And there was me thinking you wouldn’t recognize me with my clothes on. You know, I don’t recall you looking at my face for one moment that memorable evening. Ah well. Meet the DIA lady, Nic. Rachele D’Amato. She’s just so cute, isn’t she? Why don’t we get them that pretty in the police?”

  Costa smiled and said nothing.

  “So,” Peroni continued. “You just passing or something? No need to answer. Nice that you should stop by and say hello. This, by the way, is what we call police work. You’re currently looking at the only three cops in Rome with clear nasal passages, though I cannot guarantee how long that will stay true for my veggie-eating partner here. Best you run along in case something nasty happens.”

  Falcone gave him a filthy look then pressed the button on the videophone. “Miss D’Amato is here because I asked for her help.”

  Peroni wasn’t about to give up. “You mean this is a brothel too? Jeez. They show up in the strangest places these days. Oh, oh. Icy stare time. I got it wrong. This guy’s some kind of hood? No! Don’t recall any of them living in this part of town. Place looks like it ought to belong to some playboy or something.”

  It was a shrewd observation. The main house lay a good hundred metres beyond the big secure gates. It resembled a reproduction imperial villa, a single-storey palace built around an open patio. An avenue of classical statues lined the pathway up to the house. At the end there was what looked like a fishpond and a fountain.

  Rachele D’Amato looked Costa up and down while Peroni stood there, grinning. “I don’t know you. Leo made you his partner. You must have done something very bad.”

  “Nic Costa,” he replied, and held out his hand. “I like challenges.”

  “Me too, kid,” Peroni growled.

&n
bsp; “Well, that’s the formalities done,” she said. “I’m here because you can’t do this without me. Sorry, but that’s the way it is these days. Wallis has antecedents. He doesn’t worry me now, but he’s got a past. And he knows people who do worry me. Is that enough?”

  Costa watched as a face filled the videophone screen: a middle-aged black man, handsome, speaking perfect Italian.

  “Police,” Falcone said, holding up his card. “We need to talk.”

  “What do you want?” the man asked.

  “It’s about your stepdaughter, Mr. Wallis. We’ve found a body. We need identification. Now please.”

  Costa watched the head on the screen. Falcone’s words gave the man pain.

  “Come in,” Vergil Wallis murmured, and the lock on the gates began to buzz.

  Silvio Di Capua had learned a lot in the three years since he became Teresa Lupo’s deputy pathologist in the morgue. She’d taught him tricks of the autopsy trade they never told you in medical school. She’d shown him any number of smart-ass quips to make when cops fainted or threw up. She’d ingratiated him into the Questura too, introduced him to people so that he became her eyes and ears, the source of most of the hot gossip running through the station. Above all, though, Teresa had revealed to Di Capua—a good Catholic boy brought up by monks, a man who, at the age of twenty-seven, had still never been out with a member of the opposite sex—the unbridled joys of language when freed from the restraints of custom, taste and dignity.

  Until she came along he’d been of the opinion that Italian was the structured, civilized tongue he knew from books and newspapers and conversation with fellow students in the monastery school. Teresa Lupo dispelled this myth within a matter of weeks, filling his head with all manner of slang and colloquialisms so colourful and bizarre that, for the naÏve and awestruck Silvio Di Capua, it was as if he had entered some new and glorious world.

  Even three years on he found listening to her in full, florid flow a thrilling experience, one that revealed arcane, hidden dimensions of profundity to a language transformed from that of his childhood. He swore like a trooper now too, not always appropriately and, he knew, without her masterful timing. On occasion he muffed his words, which had led to some awkward situations and, once, almost got him beaten up by a uniformed gorilla who misinterpreted a friendly jibe as some obscure hint at unnatural private practices.

  Sometimes he wondered if he were in love with his boss. In his imagination this occurred in a wholesome, chaste and ethereal way, one that precluded physical sex, something Silvio Di Capua found as baffling and undesirable now as it was when first described to him in all its squalor fifteen years before in the school dormitory.

  Nor would he dwell long on these thoughts. Di Capua accepted his failings. He was marginally shorter than Teresa. His thick black hair had begun to fall out when he was eighteen. Now it formed a priestly fringe around his bald skull, which, out of laziness, he allowed to grow lank and long. His voice was a scratchy falsetto that some found deeply annoying. He was chubby running to fat. His face was so blandly amorphous he had to reintroduce himself to people all the time. And he looked a good ten years younger than his true age. Silvio Di Capua’s life was an incidental happening in the passing of human history and he knew it. Nevertheless, that didn’t stop his admiring Teresa Lupo to the point of adoration, more with every new day of this warm spring.

  There was, also, the matter of the nickname which had been inflicted on him the previous year by a garrulous traffic cop and stuck with a dogged and annoying persistence. No one dared call Teresa Lupo “Crazy Teresa” to her face. Silvio Di Capua’s standing within the morgue was less sure. He just had to learn to answer to it. On occasion even Teresa used the damn thing.

  He’d just pushed the body from the bog back into what the morgue drones now called the shower when the thug from plainclothes appeared at the door. There was a dead junkie fresh on the slab awaiting Di Capua’s attention. Teresa had done a little work on the corpse—the usual overdose precheck, this time on a grubby hirsute man who’d been stripped for the examination—then passed it over to him with a few brief instructions before grabbing her coat and leaving. He was head down into the PC, logging some records, lost in thought.

  “Hey, Monkboy,” the cop barked. “Why don’t you go to Google and type in ‘a life’? But before you do, tell me where Crazy Teresa is. Falcone says he wants that autopsy on his desk soonish and I, for one, don’t wish to disappoint him.”

  Di Capua looked up from the screen and scowled at the moron. “Doctor Lupo is away from her desk.”

  The detective was messing with some of the specimen trays, picking up scalpels, touching stuff he was supposed to leave alone. He sniffed over the corpse and then, gingerly, with the end of a pair of forceps, flicked the dead man’s grey, flaccid penis.

  “Listen, sonny. Don’t get snappy with me. It’s bad enough dealing with her. What’s with that woman? It’s like the red flag’s flying every day of the month. Don’t tell me you got the same problem?”

  Di Capua got up and walked in between the jerk and the cadaver, pushing the cop out of the way. “You should never go near junkies unless you’ve had the right injections,” he said. “There’s a theory doing the rounds now that you can catch AIDS just from the smell. Did you know that?”

  The cop took one step back. “You’re kidding me.”

  “Not at all. The early symptoms are very like this flu that’s doing the rounds. Sore throat. Mucus.” He paused. “And a nose so itchy you just can’t stop scratching it.”

  The cop sniffed then started dabbing at his face with a grubby handkerchief. Di Capua pointed at the sign that hung on the wall above the dissecting table. “I don’t suppose you happen to read Latin?”

  The cop stared at the words. Hic locus est ubi mors gaudet succurrere vitae. “Sure. It says, ‘You don’t have to be crazy to work here but it helps.’ ”

  “Not quite. ‘This is the place where death rejoices to teach those who live.’ ”

  “What kind of crazy shit is that?”

  Di Capua looked down at the corpse. The bloodless Y-incision Teresa had made earlier, from the shoulders to mid-chest then down to the pubic region, sat on the dead man’s flesh as dark, narrow lines. The same feature ran across the scalp which was now loose, ready to be reflected back to enable entry to the skull. Ordinarily, if they had the staff, he’d expect some assistance, but Teresa was gone and, what with the flu epidemic, there was no one else around. Except the cop.

  “Pathologist shit,” he replied, and with a firm, sure hand took out the vibrating saw, turned back the loose scalp and began carefully to carve open the skull vault from the front.

  The cop turned white then belched.

  “Don’t throw up in a morgue, please,” Di Capua cautioned him. “It’s bad luck.”

  “Shit,” the man gasped, watching goggle-eyed the path the small electric saw was taking.

  “The preliminary report’s over there,” Di Capua said, nodding towards Teresa’s desk and the folder that sat next to the PC. “Note that word ‘preliminary.’ It’s just a scant first look. And next time, for your information, the name is Silvio. Or Dr. Di Capua. You got that?”

  “Yeah,” the cop answered with a burp.

  He watched the idiot vacate the room, clutching the report with one hand and his mouth with the other.

  “What is all the fuss?” Di Capua wondered out loud. “It’s just a body, for chrissake.”

  There were bigger things to worry about. Teresa, for one thing. Where she’d gone, feeling so mad he didn’t even dare question her wisdom. Why she was poking her nose into police work. Again. And, most of all, why she never noticed the way he felt.

  “Do you know what month this is?” Vergil Wallis asked. “The month of Mars. Do you know what that means?”

  They sat in the main room of the fortified villa on the Janiculum Hill. The place was odd: half oriental, half classical Roman. There were statues from imperial tim
es, copies maybe, next to delicate porcelain vases covered in Japanese designs: chrysanthemums and country scenes sparsely populated with stick figures. A slight, pretty, oriental girl in a long white smock served tea. Wallis scarcely noticed her presence.

  In a brief conversation as they walked to the villa Rachele D’Amato had told them the man was long gone from the mob and now spent most of his time in Italy or Japan, source of his twin obsessions. In retirement he was a history freak: imperial Rome and the Edo period. Wallis looked about fifty, a good ten years younger than his true age. He was tall, fit and strong. His dark hair was cropped short. He possessed an alert, fine-featured face dominated by large, intelligent eyes which were constantly active. Without the benefit of D’Amato’s briefing, Costa would have said he had the dignified bearing of an intellectual or an artist. There was just one outward sign of his past that she’d warned him about. Before coming to Rome as an emissary for his bosses, Wallis had lived in Tokyo for several years, liaising with the Sumiyoshi-gumi, one of the three big Japanese yakuza families. Somewhere along the way the little finger of his left hand had gone missing in some kind of brotherhood ritual with the Japanese mob. Unlike most ex-yakuza gangsters, he didn’t try to disguise the loss with a prosthetic. Maybe Wallis seemed to think himself above that kind of trick. Or past it, if they were to believe Rachele D’Amato. It occurred to Costa, too, that this act was in itself a ritual, one of belonging, in this case brotherhood. If Teresa Lupo was right, something similar had claimed the life of his stepdaughter.

  “War,” Costa said. “Mars is the god of war.”

  Wallis beckoned to the girl for more green tea. “Right. But he was much more than that. Indulge me. This is how I amuse myself these days, for half the year anyway, when I’m here.” His Italian was near perfect. If Nic Costa closed his eyes he could have convinced himself he was in the presence of a native. Wallis’s soft, intelligent tones sounded like those of a university professor. “Mars was the father of Romulus and Remus. In a sense he was the very father of Rome. They worshipped him more for that than his warlike aspect. The month of Mars was about the health of the state, which for Romans meant the health of the world. It was about rebirth and renewal through the exercise of power and force.”