The Villa of Mysteries

by David Hewson

  It was a satisfactory situation. Vercillo made the best part of half a million euros a year keeping Neri out of harm’s way. And that secret code lent Vercillo some safety from the fat man’s wrath should things go wrong. Vercillo knew only too well what fate befell accountants who served their mob bosses badly. Foul up and you might get away with a vicious beating. Steal and you were dead. But do the job well, keep yourself out of sight, and hold a little key in your head that no one else could share . . . then, Vercillo reasoned, everyone could be happy. The authorities stayed at a safe distance. Neri knew that if Vercillo stumbled up the stairs from his office and fell beneath the wheels of the little 117 tourist bus the secrets of his empire would remain secure, unintelligible to the taxman and the DIA even if they found them. For his part, Vercillo maintained a measure of security, a hold over Neri that both men recognized without having to state it. This was convenient. It meant that he rarely had to call Neri except for information, and the big old hood hardly ever had to trouble him. This was the way it ought to be. He was an accountant. A money man. Not a foot soldier, out looking for trouble. He liked it that way.

  Vercillo had given Sonia, the secretary, a day off to go out and see her sick mamma in Orvieto. She’d turned thirty now. She wasn’t as much fun as she used to be. Soon he’d have to find a reason to fire her, get someone younger, someone more interesting, to take her place. He hated the thought. Vercillo always tried to steer away from confrontation. It was getting harder and harder these days. Neri’s business empire grew and grew, sometimes into areas that gave Vercillo room for concern. When he was a bookish teenager in Rome in the Sixties, during the brief period of economic happiness they called “Il Boom,” Vercillo expected the world to improve on a constant, incremental basis, becoming happier, more prosperous, more peaceful year by year. Instead, the opposite happened. The Red Brigade came, then went, then came back again. There were bombs everywhere, and madness. He’d lost a cousin in Israel to a suicide attack. Vercillo scarcely thought of himself as a Jew these days but the idea that someone could die like that, just walking down the street, going into the wrong café, appalled him. There was a need for more order in people’s lives. And some politeness too. Instead, all you got was this constant stream of bodies, foreigners pushing and shoving to get in front of everyone else. It had all gone wrong somewhere over the past forty years and, for the life of him, he couldn’t understand how or when.

  It was the tourists that got to him most. The English, drunk for every football game. The Japanese, constantly taking pictures, blundering into you on the street, not knowing a word of Italian. And the Americans, who thought they could do any damn thing they liked so long as they had a few dollars in their pocket. Rome would be better off without the lot of them. They intruded upon the native consciousness. They marred the place. Today especially. There was some kind of street theatre festival going on around the Colosseum down the road. They were setting up when he came to work. Commedia dell’Arte characters climbing into costumes. Africans. Orientals. And all the usual fraudsters pretending to be gladiators, trying to screw some cash out of the tourists for pictures.

  Beniamino Vercillo looked up from the desk in his dark little pit feeling grumpy, tasting the sour bile of growing disappointment in his mouth, then wondered how much his thoughts were random, how much the product of what he was half seeing out of the corner of his eye.

  In front of him, framed in the open doorway, was a figure from some stupid dream. It stood there like a crazy god wearing some kind of theatrical gown: a long red jacket, cheap brown sacking trousers. And a mask, one straight out of a nightmare, all crazy writhing hair, with a black gaping mouth, fixed in a lunatic grin.

  The figure took one step forward, theatrically, like an actor making a point. He had to be from one of the street troupes Vercillo saw earlier.

  “I don’t give to charity,” the little accountant declared firmly.

  The figure moved closer with two more of those stupid, histrionic strides. Vercillo’s head started to work, remembering something from long ago.

  “What is this shit?” Vercillo mumbled automatically. “What do you want?”

  “Neri,” the crazy god said in a calm, clear voice that floated out from behind the mask.

  Vercillo shivered, wondering if this was all some hallucination. “Who?”

  The creature opened its jacket, its right hand reached down towards a leather scabbard on its belt. Vercillo watched aghast as it withdrew a short, fat sword that gleamed in the fluorescent lights.

  The shining weapon rose, dashed through the air then dug deep into the desk in front of him, severing the phone cord, cutting straight through the sheaf of letters that sat in front of Vercillo.

  “Books,” the crazy god said.

  “No books here, no books here—”

  He was quiet. The point of the blade was at his throat, pricking into his dewlap.

  The crazy god shook his head. The blade pressed harder. Vercillo felt a sharp stab of pain, then a line of blood began to trickle down his neck.

  “He’ll kill me,” he murmured.

  “He’ll kill you?” It was impossible to guess what kind of face lay behind the mask. A determined one. Vercillo didn’t doubt that.

  He threw up his hands and pointed to the edge of the desk. The sword went down a fraction. Vercillo hooked a finger into the drawer handle and gently pulled. With the slicing edge never more than a couple of centimetres from his throat, he gingerly drew out a set of keys.

  “I need to get up,” he said, his voice cracking a little with the strain.

  The mask nodded.

  Beniamino Vercillo walked towards the wall of the office furthest away from the street. His hands trembling, the accountant turned the key in the security door of the safe then fumbled his way through the numbers on the lock. After a couple of attempts it swung open. He reached inside and withdrew something. The two of them returned to the table. Vercillo opened the large cardboard document box and stood back.

  The crazy god’s leather fingers dipped into the file and took out the pile of papers there. He threw them on the desk, not saying a word, anger leaking out invisibly from behind the static grin. These were just numbers. Numbers and numbers. Unintelligible.

  Vercillo quivered, frightened, and wished to God he’d taken an office on the ground floor, with a window out onto the street. Not this stupid, cramped cave where anything could go on unseen by the busy world outside.

  “Code,” the god said simply, pointing at the lines of letters on the pages in front of them.

  He tried to think straight. He tried to imagine the consequences. It was impossible. There was only one consequence which mattered.

  “If I tell you—?”

  The lunatic head stared at him, no emotion in its features, nothing human there at all.

  “If I tell you . . . I can go?”

  He could run. Vercillo had some private money in places no one could ever find. He could go somewhere Neri’s wrath would never find him. Australia maybe. Or Thailand, where the girls were young, and no one asked any questions. He looked around the drab little office, thought of his drab old clothes. Maybe this was fate doing him a favour. All his life he’d spent in the service of the fat hood, pretending to be something he wasn’t. Lying, cheating, telling himself it was OK all along because, whatever Neri did to earn his money, none of the blood sat on his own fingers. He’d lied to himself there. Neri touched him. Always. It was one reason he started messing with girls. Neri offered him the chance, introduced him to that world. It was one way of keeping him in line.

  The idea of retirement, of putting distance between him and this bleak existence built on nothing more than numbers, was suddenly appealing.

  Besides, a stray thought wondered, what’s the alternative? You’re an accountant. Not a foot soldier.

  “You can go,” the crazy god said, and again Vercillo found himself trying to place the accent, trying to imagine the human face behind it
: young, undoubtedly, but not rough, not like Neri’s henchmen.

  Vercillo picked up the phone. The crazy god briefly raised the sword, forgetting, it seemed to Vercillo, that he’d already cut the cord. The omission cheered the little accountant. There was something human behind the mask after all.

  “It’s OK,” Vercillo explained. “This is it. Watch.”

  He set a page—a stream of unintelligible letters—next to the phone. “It’s simple. The person it refers to is identified by his phone number. Everything that comes after is a number too. What’s owed. What the interest rate is. What’s been paid.”

  It felt stupidly exhilarating. In twenty-five years he’d never had this conversation with anyone.

  The crazy god stared at the characters on the table, matching them off with the phone keypad using the point of the sword.

  “It’s clever,” Vercillo added. “Just remember to use Q for zero and Z for one.” It was too. It meant you could encrypt the number “2” in any one of three ways—A, B or C—and anyone with a phone could still get the right answer in seconds. People assumed codes were designed to hide words, not numbers. As long as they kept to that idea the code was pretty much impossible to crack. It wouldn’t fool the FBI, not in the end. But it could fool a lot of people. It would fool Emilio Neri and in some curious way that was all that mattered.

  The crazy god laughed and there was something wrong inside the sound.

  “Is that what you want?” Vercillo asked.

  The mask didn’t say a thing.

  “I—” Vercillo wanted praise, or gratitude even. There was nothing. “Maybe I could give you more.”

  “Don’t need more,” the crazy god murmured, beginning to move, beginning to lift the short, sharp blade higher.

  “You said—” Then Vercillo fell silent. There was no point in talking to a sword. There was no point in anything at all. The world was mad. The world was a mask leering at him, getting bigger, crazier with every diminishing second.

  Barbara Martelli had lived with her old man in a first-floor apartment on the Lateran Square. The communal front door faced the site of the first St. Peter’s built by Constantine. The place had five big rooms, a quiet view over the internal courtyard, and plenty of expensive furnishings with a personal, feminine touch. She must have bought them, Costa thought. Peroni had brought along the file from the previous night’s visit, which they’d read in the car outside. The old man had said little but the background was interesting. It contained more than either of them had expected. When they walked in Costa thought about some of the older papers, with their vague, unproven allegations, took one look at old man Martelli and knew straightaway where the money came from.

  He was in his mid-fifties and skeletally thin, hunched in a shiny wheelchair, staring back at them with cold, dead eyes. Still, Costa could imagine what he would have been like in his prime. Not that different from Peroni: fit, strong, dogmatic. He didn’t look well now, and it wasn’t just grief. Costa knew that kind of sickness, recognized the signs. The patchy hair from the chemotherapy. The dead, desiccated look in the eyes. And Martelli was still smoking like crazy too. The place reeked of stale tobacco.

  Martelli stared at Gianni Peroni and shook his head. “Jesus, talk about bad apples,” he snarled. “I heard you got busted from vice. Didn’t realize they busted you down this far. You enjoying it, huh?”

  “Yeah,” Peroni said. “Does a man good to get kicked in the teeth from time to time. This detective stuff’s interesting too. We always used to think we had the short end of the stick in vice, Toni. We didn’t. You know why?”

  The sick old man just glared at him.

  “In vice,” Peroni continued, “we knew we were dealing with shit all along. The only question was how bad it was, and how much stuck to us along the way.” He waved a hand at Costa. “These guys don’t have that privilege. They try to assume everyone’s innocent before they find out otherwise. Trust me. This really cramps your style. Fortunately, I haven’t learnt that trick.”

  “If you could’ve kept your pecker in your pants, you wouldn’t be needing it,” Martelli retorted.

  Peroni grimaced. He really didn’t like this man. “So I keep telling myself. Why are we talking like this, Toni? Me and the boy came round here to offer our condolences. We both knew Barbara. We loved that girl. We’re in shock over what happened. So why are we making a fight out of things? You want some answers just the same as we do.”

  Martelli started coughing like crazy, a cruel, rasping hack. It must have hurt. When he finished he took two gulps of snatched air then wheezed at them, “I said everything I had to say last night. Can’t you leave a father alone with his thoughts?”

  Peroni pulled up a chair next to Martelli, sat down, gave Costa a look that said “watch this” and lit a cigarette. “I know, I know. It’s that asshole Falcone. He just pushes and pushes.”

  Martelli snorted. “I remember him. He wasn’t such hot stuff. How come he made inspector? Don’t they have any reliable men left these days?”

  “Some,” Peroni replied. “A few. How’re you doing? People still ask after you.”

  “Don’t give me that shit. I hadn’t seen a soul from the Questura in months till last night. Now I can’t sleep for the doorbell ringing.”

  Peroni shrugged and stared at the walls.

  “Is it long since you retired, Signor Martelli?” Costa asked.

  “Six years. The moron I was working with complained about my cough. Next thing you know they’re doing X-rays, sending me down to the hospital. Medical leave. Compulsory retirement.”

  “He did you a favour,” Costa said. “My father died of cancer. The sooner it’s caught—”

  “A favour.” Martelli’s dark eyes stared back at him. “That’s what you call it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, here I am. Still coughing. Still feeling like shit. With my hair falling out and my guts with a mind of their own. Some favour. I could’ve worked a few more years. I could’ve done the job. Then what? Maybe they side me with some dumb kid who doesn’t know his left hand from his right and gets me walking straight into one of them nice immigrant types we got working the Termini dope run these days. All knives and guns and shit we never had to deal with till they came along. Hell, I wasn’t cut out for retirement.”

  The man seemed consumed by his own self-pity. They’d come to talk about the death of his daughter. Instead it seemed Toni Martelli only had time to think about himself, how everything that happened affected his own fragile identity. Costa tried to recall Barbara more closely and found it impossible. There was, now that he came to think of it, something fleeting about her, a kind of brittle anonymity masquerading as friendliness. Maybe that was all an act too, like the show she put on of being just another cop. There had to be some answers in this over-grand apartment and in the head of her father. He knew that nothing would be prised out into the light of day readily. Toni Martelli had crawled out from underneath some serious corruption allegations scot-free, and went on to take home a full pension. He wasn’t the type to offer up the truth for nothing.

  “So you and Barbara must have worked together?” Costa asked.

  “Depends what you mean by ‘together.’ I worked vice and dope mainly. She was traffic. We met in the corridors. We said hello. We didn’t talk about what we did if that’s what you mean. A good cop leaves things in the office. Maybe you’re not old enough to understand that.”

  “Were you glad she joined the force?”

  He shuffled, uncomfortable. “Yeah. At the time. Why shouldn’t I be?”

  “Who gave her the job, Toni?” Peroni asked.

  “Don’t recall.”

  Peroni scratched his crew-cut, thinking. “One of those bent guys you liked, huh? What was the name of that big goon you were pally with? The one that did time for taking money from Neri a couple of years ago? Filippo Mosca, wasn’t it?”

  “I don’t have to take this shit,” Martelli wheezed.

&nbs
p; Peroni smiled, leaned over and took hold of his scrawny knee. “That’s the trouble, Toni. That’s the worst thing of all. You do.”

  “Where’s her mother? Does she know?” Costa wondered.

  “Back home in Sicily. Of course she knows.” Martelli’s dead eyes glared at him. “They got TV and papers in Sicily, haven’t they? How couldn’t she know?”

  “You should have called her, Toni,” Peroni said. “You got to bury these things sometimes.”

  A skeletal finger cut through the air in front of Peroni’s face. “Don’t fucking tell me what to do. Don’t go places you don’t belong. That woman walked out on me for no good reason. She can rot in hell for all I care.”

  Peroni’s face lit up at Martelli’s reaction. “She left right around the time Barbara joined up, didn’t she? Any connection there?”

  “Just get out of here.”

  It wasn’t grief that was eating the man up. It was hatred, and fear maybe.

  “Is there something we can do?” Costa asked. “Help make arrangements?”

  Martelli’s eyes fixed on the carpet. “Nope.”

  “Is there nothing at all you want to tell us?”

  He didn’t say a word.

  Peroni leaned back and closed his eyes. “This is such a nice apartment. I wish I could afford something like it. You know, I could just sit here all day, smoking, thinking. You got anything to eat, Toni? You want me to send the boy out and fetch something in while we wait for you to get your voice back? Couple of beers? Some pizza?”