The Villa of Mysteries

by David Hewson

  “You think I don’t read the papers? You think I don’t hear things?”

  “So?” Falcone persisted.

  Neri nodded at Mickey. “You remember some black guy way back then? Rings a bell for me. Not much more.”

  “Sure,” Mickey agreed, looking more nervous than ever. “He and some kid were with us on vacation for a while. They were both history freaks or something. Couldn’t stop talking about all that crap. Museums and stuff. Turned me off.”

  “And you remember his stepdaughter?” D’Amato asked.

  “A little,” Mickey conceded. “I thought she was his, if you get my meaning. A black guy with a skinny blonde thing around him. What would you think?”

  Falcone considered this. “Are you saying there was some relationship between Wallis and the girl?”

  “No,” he replied defensively, looking at his father for guidance. “I dunno.”

  “He was some jumped-up piece of work,” Neri added. “Who the fuck knew what was going on? I’ll say this, though. Met a few like him in my time. They come here, think they can do business, never have to pay nothing in the way of an entrance fee just because of who they are. Yeah, and one more thing. You ever seen a black guy with a blonde in tow he wasn’t fucking?”

  D’Amato shook her head, unhappy with this idea. “She was his stepdaughter.”

  “Oh right,” Neri sneered. “That makes a difference. Tell me. If you found some rich Italian guy shacked up with a teenager, smiling at her all the time like he owned her, you’d say that about him, huh? You don’t think maybe there are some double standards here? Men like that can’t keep their hands still. Can you imagine what it’d be like to get a couple at the same time? Mother and daughter? You go ask him about that. Not me.”

  He had a point. Falcone understood that. Maybe Wallis was just a great actor. Maybe this show of grief was just that, a show.

  “What about you, Mickey?” D’Amato asked suddenly.

  “What about me?” he stuttered.

  “Did you like the look of her? Was she your type?”

  He glanced nervously, first at Adele, then at his father. “Nah. Too skinny. Too stuck up. She talked all the history shit he did. What’s someone like that gonna do with someone like me?”

  Rachele D’Amato smiled. “So you remember her well?”

  “Not much,” he murmured.

  Neri waved his big arm. “Fuck this. Why are we talking about some kid who went missing ages ago? What’s this got to do with us?”

  They said nothing.

  “Right,” Neri continued. “Now that’s out of the way maybe you can go. This place is starting to smell bad. I want some fresh air in here.”

  Rachele D’Amato smiled at Mickey. “What about Barbara Martelli, Mickey? Was she your kind of woman? Not skinny at all. Got a good job as a cop too.”

  His eyes went round and round, flitting between his stepmother and Neri. “Who? Who? Dunno what the hell you’re talking about. Who?”

  “The woman who was in the papers, dummy,” Neri snarled. “The cop who got killed yesterday. They say she offed someone. That right? What is it with the police force today? How’s a man supposed to trust anyone?”

  “I ask the questions,” Falcone said. “Where were you yesterday, Mickey? Give me your movements, morning to night.”

  “He was here with me all day,” Adele Neri insisted. “All day. And in the evening too.”

  “We were all here together,” Neri added. “Apart from a little lunch outing I had with one of my employees. He can vouch for me. We can vouch for one another. You got any reason to think otherwise?”

  Rachele D’Amato took two photographs out of her briefcase: Barbara Martelli in uniform and one of her old man, back in the days when he was on the force. “Her father was a cop. He was on your payroll.”

  “Me?” Neri whined. “Pay cops? Don’t you think I pay enough already what with the taxes round here?”

  “When did you last talk to Martelli?” Falcone asked. “When did you last speak to his daughter?”

  “Don’t recall ever making their acquaintance. And I’m speaking for us all now. Understand? If you’ve got something that says otherwise you go show it to a lawyer. Except you don’t have anything. Otherwise we wouldn’t be talking like this now, would we?”

  She put the photos back in her bag. “Those men downstairs,” she said.

  “We were thinking of having a card game later. They’re good guys.”

  “Make it last,” Falcone ordered. “Make it last a long time. I don’t want to see them on the streets. You got that?”

  The big old hood was shaking his head. “So Romans don’t get to walk their own town now? Is that what you’re saying? Jesus. Here I am taking this shit. Here I am listening to your dumb threats and all this crap about things you don’t know. And that American bastard’s just walking round doing what he likes. No one’s asking him whether he was screwing that girl. No one’s asking him if he’s been paying off dumb cops to get what he wants.” He waved a fat hand at them. “You tell me. Why’s that? Are you people just plain stupid or what?”

  Falcone stood up. Rachele D’Amato followed suit.

  “Nice seeing you again,” Neri barked. “Don’t feel the need to rush back.”

  “Do you know what tomorrow is?” Falcone asked.

  “Saturday. Do I get a prize?”

  “Liberalia.”

  Neri screwed up his slack face in an expression of distaste. “What? This some new European holiday they’re pressing on us now? Don’t mean a thing to me.”

  “It does,” Falcone said. “It means that if you know what’s good for you, you stay right here. You don’t get in my way.”

  “Wow,” Neri sneered. “This is what cops do now. Make a few empty threats.”

  “It’s good advice. I remember you. Years ago, when I was just a detective. I watched you, I know you.”

  “Yeah? You think so?”

  “And the thing is, you’ve changed. You’re older. You look weaker somehow. Let me tell you something. You’re not the man you were.”

  “Bullshit!” Neri yelled, getting onto his feet, waving his big arms in the air. “Get the fuck out of here before I throw you down the stairs, cop or no cop.”

  Falcone wasn’t listening. He had his phone to his ear and was engrossed in the call. There was something in his face that made them all go quiet and wait for what came next.

  “I’ll be straight there,” Falcone murmured.

  “Leo?” D’Amato asked. “Is something wrong?”

  He looked at Emilio Neri. “Maybe. Does the name Beniamino Vercillo mean anything to you?”

  “All these stupid questions—” the old man grumbled.

  “Well?”

  “Not a damn thing. Why d’you ask?”

  “Nothing,” Falcone replied with a shrug. “He’s a stranger. Why worry? Watch the news. Pay some bent cop to tell you first. Who cares? I’ll let myself out.”

  “Mickey!”

  Neri pointed at the two of them. Mickey led Falcone and Rachele D’Amato downstairs, going first so that he got a chance to turn round now and again and get a good look at her long, lithe legs moving out from underneath the short skirt.

  The visitors were sitting around a table in the big room on the first floor, reading papers, smoking, playing cards.

  “I recognize a few familiar faces,” Falcone said. “Is this the kind of company you keep, Mickey?”

  “Don’t know what you mean.” Mickey Neri continued on to the big front door, with its security cameras and multiple electronic locks.

  Rachele D’Amato ducked out of the way of the lens and smiled at him. “You should be smart, Mickey. It’s important to be smart in a situation like this.”

  “A situation like what?”

  “Change,” she said and handed him her card. “Can’t you just feel it in the air? That’s my private number. Call if you want to talk. I could keep you out of jail. If things turn bad, I could even ke
ep you alive.”

  He glanced upstairs to make sure no one was listening.

  “G-g-get out of here,” Mickey Neri mumbled.

  The scene-of-crime men pulled on their white bunny suits then clambered down the iron staircase into the basement office off the Via dei Serpenti. Falcone watched them, mentally trying to work out the manpower disposition inside the Questura. With the officers already inside that brought the total contingent on the murder scene to six. It wasn’t enough. The Questura was getting desperately stretched. He’d already got people trying to persuade the sick to rise from their beds. Even with the few who complied, he was still struggling to keep every thread of the investigation—Randolph Kirk, Barbara Martelli, Eleanor Jamieson and, just possibly, the Julius girl—fully staffed. It was the spring holiday season. A quiet time of the year, or so everyone supposed. The gaps were already starting to appear. He wished he had more people to despatch to watch Neri and Wallis, make sure they didn’t develop any stupid ideas. He wished, too, he had time to think about Suzi Julius. Falcone shared some of Costa’s fears, though he was reluctant to act in the present circumstances until some hard facts emerged to link her directly to the Jamieson case. There was still no evidence to suggest this was anything other than a wayward teenager out for some fun. He couldn’t afford to waste the men he had on hypothetical crimes when there were real ones demanding his attention.

  Rachele D’Amato’s black Alfa pulled up on the pavement and he watched her get out, watched the way she angled her slender legs carefully so that the tight red skirt she was wearing didn’t ride up too much. For a brief moment Falcone let other thoughts dominate his mind. She was thirty minutes behind him. She’d had to call in at the DIA office on the way. He really had no idea what was going on there behind closed doors.

  “She doesn’t need to be here,” he reminded himself, then managed to work up a smile. “Not at all.”

  She walked up, eyeing him. “Leo?”

  “I don’t recall issuing an invitation, Rachele. This isn’t an open house. You don’t get to walk into every investigation we have.”

  She nodded at the door. A couple of the bunny suits were coming out again, taking off their helmets to light cigarettes. The path was clear for the rest of them to go in. “Don’t I get to take a look? You really believed Neri then? You think this guy was a complete stranger?”

  “According to what we know Beniamino Vercillo was an accountant. We don’t have a thing on him. He was just a little man. Lived in Paroli on his own. The safe’s open. It’s probably robbery or something.”

  She eyed the men by the iron staircase, not believing a word. Falcone resented the idea that she always seemed one step ahead of him. “Is that so? I listened on the radio. I gather you have a witness.”

  “You shouldn’t go near our radios,” he said. “That’s not part of the deal.”

  “I’m saving time. For all of us. What happened?”

  He sighed. “A girl in the optician’s saw a character in a kind of costume going in. Something theatrical. With a mask. There’s a street theatre troupe performing down at the Colosseum so she didn’t think too much of it. We checked. They’re performing Euripides. The Bacchae. One of their costumes is missing. I’ve got men interviewing every last one of them. The trouble is they were rehearsing at the time. Either they’re all liars or it’s someone else who stole the costume. No one saw a soul coming out. It’s—”

  Everything was going wrong, heading off in different directions. It denied him the time to think, the opportunity to focus on what mattered. “It’s the last damn thing I need right now.”

  D’Amato didn’t look impressed.

  “Are you going to tell me or do I have to guess?” Falcone sighed. “We really aren’t working together on this one, are we? Am I the problem? Do you want to liaise with someone else instead?”

  Her hand went to his arm. Slim, delicate fingers. He recalled their touch. “I’m sorry, Leo. It’s not you. It’s me. You’re right. This is all . . . out of sync somehow. The DIA’s no different from you, really. We expect things to happen the way they always did. None of this fits a template.”

  “You can say that again. So Vercillo wasn’t some boring little accountant?”

  She laughed and it reminded him of how she once was: young, carefree. And how much that used to affect him. “You didn’t really think that, did you, Leo?”

  “No.” He’d put on a bunny suit himself for a while and been inside. He’d seen what was there. He couldn’t get the idea of that damned mask out of his head. “I just don’t like jumping to conclusions.”

  “We could never pin anything on him,” she went on. “Vercillo was smart. He needed to be. He kept books for Neri. Of that I’m pretty sure. Not that you’ll ever find a sheet of paper to prove it.”

  A piece of the puzzle fell into place in his head. Falcone thought of the scene inside the dead man’s office and knew she was wrong for a change, though he kept the news to himself.

  “Why would someone murder Neri’s accountant? Has he been taking from the boss?”

  She’d considered that already. “It’s hard to imagine. He’d know what the result would be if he got found out. I don’t think Neri would send round a man in a mask either. Vercillo would just be there one moment and gone for good the next.”

  “Then what?” he wondered.

  “We had some intelligence,” she said eventually. “Early yesterday evening four, maybe five suspicious Americans flew in to Fiumicino. Separate airlines, separate classes for a couple. As if they didn’t know each other. It could be Wallis beefing up his army.”

  Falcone stroked his pointed beard. He hated the way she seemed to know so much about the mob, how she seemed to understand their movements instinctively. The DIA were supposed to do that. All the same it left him feeling cheated. “What army? You said he was retired.”

  “He is but that doesn’t mean he’s stupid. You saw the security on that place of his. Vergil Wallis doesn’t let his guard slip, any more than Neri does. Men like that have to be careful, retired or not.”

  Falcone wondered: could this be Wallis’s first act of vengeance? Then there was a bustle down the street. It was Monkboy and the rest of the path team—except Teresa Lupo—arriving, unusually late.

  “What took you?” Falcone barked at them. Silvio Di Capua just put his head down and stumbled onto the staircase. He looked scared.

  “You’re saying these men have been summoned?” Falcone asked her.

  “Maybe.”

  He thought back to the cool way Wallis had greeted them. “It could make sense I guess. If he thinks there’s a war on the way. He didn’t look like a man getting ready for war to me.”

  She gave him a sideways glance, as if she thought he was being naÏve. “You should never take these people at face value, Leo. Not even Neri. That was a performance this morning too, though not one I understand. Perhaps Vergil Wallis just feels he has no choice but to get some muscle around him.”

  Falcone grimaced and started walking for the door. She raced to keep up with him.

  The bunny suits had their helmets off. They were busy, dusting, poking, peering into corners, putting things into envelopes. Falcone glowered at Monkboy trembling over the corpse. Beniamino Vercillo was pinned to his old leather chair by a curving sword through the chest. His body had fallen forward a fraction. It was plain to see that the blade had been thrust up through the ribcage, exiting to the right of the spine and impaling itself into the back of the chair.

  Vercillo was a thin man. Falcone wondered how much force such a blow would take. Crazy Teresa would know. She always did know this kind of thing. But she wasn’t there and Monkboy looked out of his depth, surrounded by a bunch of junior morgue assistants waiting to be told what to do.

  “Where is she?” Falcone demanded.

  “Who?”

  “Who the hell do you think? Your boss.”

  “Had to go out,” Silvio Di Capua stuttered. “She’ll be here
soon.”

  Falcone was astonished she would have the nerve to play these games twice in twenty-four hours. “Go out where?” he bellowed.

  Di Capua shrugged, looking miserable and scared.

  “Get her here,” Falcone barked. “Now. And where the hell are Peroni and Costa? Didn’t anyone call them like I asked?”

  “On their way,” one of the bunny suits mumbled. “They went back to the Questura. Didn’t know you were out. They got something, they said.”

  “Jesus,” Falcone cursed. “It’s about time someone got something. What’s going on around here?”

  Then he stopped. Rachele D’Amato was standing by the late accountant’s body, looking at the table, smiling. There were papers everywhere, printouts from computers, pages from a typewriter that seemed to pre-date these. Even a couple written in a careful, childlike hand.

  They were just numbers, a sea of numbers, spilling everywhere. Apart from a single sheet with text on it, scrawled in a different style of writing, using a black felt-tip pen left by the paper. The ink looked fresh. The page depicted a phone keypad and beneath it a selection of numbers copied from the typed page next to it. The relevant section was ringed on the original page. Falcone had realized almost immediately what it was: the key to a code. A date. A phone number. An amount. And then some more codes that were impenetrable, because they probably related to the kind of transaction involved. Maybe, with more work, they could crack them too. This was a rich and generous gift. A deliberate escalation of the odds.

  She reached for the papers, elated. He stopped her.

  “We haven’t gone over those yet,” he cautioned. “Afterwards, you’ll get to see them. I promise.”

  “Do you know what this is?”

  “I didn’t. From what you’ve said, I think I do now.”

  She was ecstatic, triumphant. He wished he could share her elation. “These go back years. We can put Emilio Neri away for good. We may be able to nail anyone who did business with him. Have you thought of that, Leo?”

  “Right now I’m thinking about a murder,” he answered. Then he wondered: was that the direction you were supposed to take in the circumstances? Did this bloody dumb show exist in order to make you miss a larger though more subtle point? He couldn’t work up any enthusiasm for the information that lay on the table. However useful it was, something about its provenance troubled him. This wasn’t the way the mobs normally went to war, killing underlings, leaving damning information on their enemies for the police. Not without some payoff anyway.