The Villa of Mysteries

by David Hewson

  “No. And I still don’t believe it was enough for you.”

  “You’re a bad judge of character. Is that because you don’t have the same feelings the rest of us have? Or you’re just scared of them? We’ve all got to let go sometimes. Even you.”

  Falcone nodded at the pictures. “This is letting go?”

  “Probably all it is. Listen, Leo. Unless you’ve got the stomach for it, don’t complicate things. There’s something really bad about this whole thing. Why don’t we just get that girl out from wherever she is then close the door and let the dead stay dead?”

  Falcone stared at the pile of photographs. “There could be any amount of information in here. They could be invaluable.”

  “Hand those over to the people upstairs and they’ll smile, say thanks, and hate you forever because you just made their lives hell.”

  “If I gave them to the DIA—”

  “If you gave them to the DIA they’d be all over you, telling you how wonderful you are, and what a credit to the police. Maybe you’d even get the D’Amato woman back in your bed. Then you know what? In six months your career would be dead. You’d be running traffic, cutting up credit cards ’cos you can’t afford them anymore. And the DIA wouldn’t want to know you. Nor would she. No one likes a man who passes the buck, particularly one as dirty as this. You know that already if you’re honest with yourself.”

  Falcone took one last look at the pictures then turned his back on them. “Do it,” he ordered.

  Peroni laughed, picked them up and pressed them into Falcone’s hands.

  “No, sir,” he said, then walked out of the room, closing the door behind him, and paused for a moment, listening. It didn’t take long. Soon there was the whir of distant electric teeth.

  Rachele D’Amato was walking down the corridor towards him, smiling, looking as if she owned the place.

  “You moved in?” Peroni wondered.

  She didn’t answer, just gave him a cold look that said it all.

  Peroni pointed at the door. “You go easy with our boy in here. Some of us have fond feelings for him even if he doesn’t feel that way about himself. We don’t like the idea he might get hurt twice.”

  “You have absolutely no worries on that front.”

  “Yeah. Just joking.” He grinned. “I know. Really. I know. Nothing could bring you two back together, could it?”

  “I got a call asking me to come. You people should talk to each other more often.” She pointed towards an open door at the end of the corridor. “There.”

  Vergil Wallis sat stiff-backed, eyes closed, waiting patiently.

  When Bucci opened up it was hard to stop him. Neri listened until he’d heard enough then motioned for him to shut up. “You could have told me, Bruno. You owed me that.”

  “I didn’t—” Bucci looked scared. He was hunting for the right words. “I talked with Mickey about it. Once. He said you knew. It was part of the deal.”

  Neri’s big shoulders heaved in a humourless laugh. “Part of the deal?”

  “Yeah,” Bucci replied coolly. “Pretty stupid of me, huh? The thing is . . . I don’t like the idea of you getting fucked around.” He flashed a cold stare at Neri. “But it’s not easy telling a man his wife’s cheating on him. With his son. I don’t know how to handle that kind of thing. I guess I knew Mickey was lying. To be honest though, I wondered how grateful you’d be if I came running with the news.”

  Now that Neri thought about it, Bucci had been acting a little odd for the past few weeks. He was a good man, a loyal lieutenant. Neri could understand his point of view too. Mickey’s perfidy was outside the box. He couldn’t expect a street hood like Bucci to get involved in that kind of family betrayal.

  “It’s Mickey, you know,” Bucci said suddenly. “Not her. I’m not saying you shouldn’t blame her, but I don’t think she wants it. Not really. You don’t see Mickey the way the rest of us do. He just doesn’t give up. He just goes on and on until you give him what he wants.”

  Neri thought about that. “But she’s got other men, right?”

  “I don’t think so. You want my honest opinion? It’s just boredom. Nothing more.”

  Boredom. Neri could understand that one all right.

  “I’m sorry, boss,” Bucci said softly. “If you want me to ship out or something when this is done I’ll understand. I don’t like letting you down.”

  Neri’s grey eyes shone with amusement. It was a good show of contrition. “You let me down? Come on, Bruno. Let’s not play games with each other.”

  “All the same—”

  Neri stared at him and Bucci fell silent. “All the same nothing. Let me tell you a little secret. I’ve been getting bored too. Been thinking about that for a while. I got a little house in Colombia. Way away from all the trouble. No one can touch me there.” He nodded upstairs, in the direction of Adele and Mickey. “And I could leave some excess baggage behind too.”

  “Sure.” Bucci nodded.

  “Would you run things for me when I’m gone? All straight and honest? This shit with the DIA won’t come close to you, I promise. There’s just my name in those files. I’d be wanting to give a few people some leaving presents, you understand. Something to remember me by. I owe them that. But you get a clear run. Nothing touches your name.”

  Bucci shuffled awkwardly on the chair. “You want me to act like I’m the boss?”

  “No. I want you to be the boss. I can’t do this forever. Someone’s got to take over. I’d rather it was a man of my choosing, not some bastard from outside.”

  “I could do it,” Bucci said. “I don’t think Mickey would be too keen.”

  “Mickey, Mickey. Leaving this Adele crap to one side . . . what do you think of him? Be honest. Say I could straighten him out. Would it be worth it? Is he ever going to make something?”

  “I don’t know,” Bucci said carefully. “I don’t feel qualified to make that judgement. There’s things he’s been doing I don’t understand.”

  “What things?”

  Bucci rolled open his big hands in a gesture of despair. “I dunno. Things he don’t want any of us to hear about. And I’ll tell you this, boss. He’s good at that. Keeping stuff quiet.”

  Neri wondered about all the crap that had come out into the open these past couple of days. Falcone wasn’t going to leave them alone. It was only a matter of time before he came back, maybe with papers, turning the place upside down. “We’re going to have to hole up here for a couple of hours. There’ll be cops swarming front and back. You get busy, Bruno. Find out how long we’ve got before they come calling again. Find out where they got people waiting out there, who needs to be paid to make those guys out there look the other way for a while. When we can crawl out from under their noses, we go out to play.”

  “To play?”

  Neri laughed. “Yeah. If I’m going into retirement I want one last piece of fun first. I got some evening up to do, all round. When that’s done I’m gone. You call someone. Make sure I can get the hell out of here come tomorrow night, some way nice and discreet. The Albanian boys can do something. They owe me favours.”

  Bucci blinked. “Tomorrow night?”

  “That too soon for you?” Neri cast an eye around the room. “I got to tell you, Bruno, I can’t wait to be out of this dump.”

  Bucci didn’t seem too happy.

  “What’s up?” Neri asked. “I’m offering you your own empire on a plate.”

  “Don’t get me wrong. I’m grateful. I’ll see you right. But there’s . . . stuff I can’t control.”

  It was obvious what he meant. “You’re still worried about Mickey?”

  Bucci shrugged. He was too polite, too respectful to push it. Neri looked at Bruno Bucci and wondered why he never got a son like that. Bucci was the one guy he could rely on. And if he wanted to fuck with Mickey when the time came, what the hell? To his surprise, it wasn’t the news about him and Adele that made him feel that way. He just wasn’t particularly warm to his
own flesh and blood at that moment. They messed up his life. They leeched off him and gave nothing back in return. This wasn’t what family was supposed to be about. As he got older, as he felt less need for the physical pleasures that Adele could deliver with her own particular skill, he was, he realized, beginning to feel happier in the company of men. He knew where he stood with them. So long as he kept to his part of the deal—being a good, fair, profitable boss—they would stick by him.

  The old man smiled. “The kid’s right. It’s time he got tested. Go get him. Tell him to meet me, up on the terrace.”

  “The terrace?” Bucci asked.

  Neri was already walking towards the stairs. “You heard,” he said.

  There were pictures of Suzi Julius everywhere. Blow-ups from Miranda’s original snaps carpeted the whiteboard on the main wall of the operations room. Smaller colour copies were pinned to people’s PCs, scattered across desks. Costa walked Miranda Julius through the twenty-strong team, introducing her to a couple of people along the way, making sure she understood how important the case had become to them. Then they went along the corridor to a smaller room where a further group of officers, most of them female, were manning the phones set up to handle any calls that came in from the public appeals. Suzi’s picture was on the TV now. More photos would soon be in the papers. They had an anonymous hotline into the station ready for anyone who answered their plea for even a hint of a sighting. The full-scale hunt for Suzi was under way. But like every other case of its kind that Costa had worked on there was, at the onset, a frustrating lack of information. No one had seen her since she was driven out of the Campo dei Fiori the day before. Not a single clue to her movements had appeared in the three hours since Falcone gave the green light to turn the Julius case into an abduction inquiry.

  He led her into a small interview room overlooking the courtyard behind the Questura. She sat down immediately and said, “I know you’re looking, Nic. You don’t have to prove that to me.”

  “I just wanted you to see it for yourself.”

  The stress was starting to show. The impression Nic Costa had first had of her—as a model who’d gone into something manual just to prove she was more than she looked—came back to him. She sat on the other side of the table, hunched inside a plain black bomber jacket, snatching anxiously at a cigarette, trying to blow the smoke out the half-open window. Her sharp, intelligent eyes never left him.

  “Do you have any idea where she is?”

  Costa was careful with his answer. “It takes time.”

  She stared out the window, squinting at the bright, late afternoon sun. “I ought to say it again. I’m sorry. About last night. It must have been very embarrassing for you.”

  The sudden close contact they shared continued to bother him. He could, he knew, have gone along with her so easily. “Forget it. I have.”

  For a moment an odd look, almost like anger, crossed her face. He wondered if he’d said the right thing.

  “Sometimes I drink,” she said. “Not to blot things out. It’s just that events can make more sense that way. Or it appears they do. I don’t imagine you understand what I’m talking about.”

  He’d never forget the lost days after his father died, when he would sit alone in the old man’s wheelchair for hours on end, talking to the bottle, trying to gauge how much of the hurt was physical, from his wounds, how much existed in his head alone. And how easy it would be to drown both in booze.

  “I understand. Will you promise me something?”

  “I don’t like making easy promises,” she answered quickly. “You disappoint people if it turns out you can’t keep them.”

  “It’s just this. We need you, Miranda. We need you to think about anything we find. Possibly to react to it. I just don’t know. But when that moment happens, it’s important for all of us, Suzi most of all, that you’re not—” He let the sentence drift off into nowhere.

  “Drunk?” she wondered. “Don’t worry. That won’t happen.”

  “It’s not a great idea being on your own. Isn’t there someone from home who can come? You mentioned your mother.”

  “She’s on holiday at the moment. In California. I spoke to her this morning. What with the time difference, changing tickets . . . she can’t be here until Sunday.” She gave him a sudden intense glance. “By then . . . We’ll know, won’t we?”

  There was no avoiding an honest answer. “I think so. All the same . . . I could arrange for a woman officer to be with you.”

  “I’ll be fine,” she said firmly. “I don’t need to be treated like a victim. Suzi’s the victim here. She’s the one I want to help. You just do your job and I’ll try my best. Any way I can.”

  “Good,” he said, then reached for the tape recorder button, dictated the standard header to the interview—date, time, subject, interviewee, officer—and tried to think of the right questions, the ones that would unlock something hidden, something lost inside Miranda Julius’s complex, hurting head.

  “Is there anything new that’s occurred to you?”

  “Not really.” She shook her head, as if she hated herself for being like this. “I keep trying to think of something. There’s nothing that stands out I haven’t mentioned already.”

  “The people you’ve met here—”

  “They’re just people. People in shops. People in cafés. People in restaurants. We’ve talked to them. Of course we have. But nothing stands out. It never went beyond just being polite.”

  He placed one of the photos from Suzi’s camera on the table. Randolph Kirk was there at the edge of the crowd by the Trevi Fountain, staring directly into the camera with an odd, focused expression.

  “Do you recognize him?”

  She peered at the picture. “No. I’ve never seen him before. Not until I saw the paper this morning. My Italian’s not great but I get the message. He was the man killed out at this archaeological place, wasn’t he?”

  “Yes.”

  She came directly to the point. “You think he had something to do with this other murder too? The girl from sixteen years ago?”

  “There’s evidence that he used young girls for his own . . . entertainment. With others.”

  She swore under her breath. “So what happens now? Where is she, Nic? Just locked up somewhere this monster’s left her? Waiting to be found? It could take forever. God—” She closed her eyes for a moment. “I can’t bear to think of her like that. It’s just so horrible.”

  “We’re circulating her picture everywhere. Someone must have seen her.”

  “None of this makes sense. Suzi wouldn’t just disappear with a man like that. It’s preposterous. He’s old. Look at him. What could he possibly offer her? You don’t think he was on that motorbike, do you?”

  “No,” he admitted. “Maybe he just found her. Someone else did the rest.”

  “But why Suzi? Why her?”

  “Bad luck,” he said with a shrug. “Coincidence. These cases are sometimes just that. Kirk seemed to have a fondness for blondes. Maybe she reminded him of someone else.”

  She knew immediately what he was talking about. “The dead girl you found? I saw pictures of her. They do look similar, I suppose.”

  “It’s just a theory. We have two avenues to work on here. We can do all the usual things. Make sure as many people as possible see her picture. Monitor the calls we get from that. And we can work to try to understand what really happened. Why Kirk played these games. Who with, and where.”

  “It could be anywhere, couldn’t it?” she asked.

  “No.” There was an important point here somewhere, he thought. This was a ritual. It didn’t take place at the Villa of Mysteries in Ostia. Teresa’s careful forensic work had proved that much already. Kirk had to have another location, larger, more important. In the city most probably. Perhaps Suzi was there now, trapped, waiting. But for whom?

  “I need you to look at some more pictures,” he said, and reached for the files.

  Miranda Julius
stared at a standard police ID photo of Barbara Martelli. “I saw her picture in the papers too,” she said. “Blonde. She was another one of his women? The police officer?”

  “We think so.”

  “Was that why she killed him?”

  “We’ve no idea,” he admitted. “Have you seen her before, Miranda? Please. Think. Is it possible you or Suzi met her somewhere? Anywhere.”

  She sighed. “We’ve asked the police for directions a few times, I suppose. Maybe we talked to her. I don’t know. I don’t think I’d remember one way or another.”

  “OK. Point taken. How about him?”

  He placed a photo of Vergil Wallis on the table.

  “No,” she said immediately. “Is he Italian?”

  “American. Have you talked to any Americans since you arrived?”

  She couldn’t understand the point of the question. “I don’t think so. I think I’d remember someone as distinctive as that. What’s the meaning of this, Nic? Why would an American be involved in this kind of thing?”

  “Bear with me,” he said. “We have to keep trying. Do you know this man?”

  She looked at a photo of Beniamino Vercillo. “No.”

  “Him?” Emilio Neri’s big, ugly face glared up at her from the table.

  She shook her head. “He looks like a crook. He looks . . . horrible. Are these the kind of people you think could have Suzi? She’d never go away with someone like that. She’s not stupid.”

  Costa shuffled through the pile of pictures. “That was taken in the Questura, when we were interviewing him about something. He doesn’t always look like that. People have different faces for different occasions. You have to try to think beyond what you see sometimes.”

  “Thanks for the advice,” she said icily.

  “Look.”

  This was a new set of pictures, ones they’d brought in from a photographer covering a social evening at the opera. Neri was there in his other guise, as an art-loving businessman, his wife at his side. They were both dressed to the nines, Neri in a dinner suit, Adele wearing a long, tight-fitting silk gown.