The Villa of Mysteries

by David Hewson

  “You believe that?” Mickey yelled, bright eyes bulging, terrified. “Are you telling the truth? ’Cos if you are we’re both dead, mister.”

  “I’m dead already, moron.” Martelli coughed. And coughed some more. Then it was as if something had come alive inside him, as if the cancer had got scared by all this noise and violence too. A big, black pain rose up from inside his guts, freezing what little sensation remained in his spine, making his mind go blank with the agony.

  “Eeeeeeeeeeeee—” Toni Martelli screeched, rocking from side to side in the chair, trying to keep hold of the shotgun in his arms, which had a life of its own now, wanted to call time on this craziness and go for a walk somewhere else.

  There was morphine somewhere. Barbara kept it safe for him. He’d not needed it since she died. Something seemed to kill the needling agony the sickness inflicted on him from time to time. Now it was back, with a vengeance, clouding his vision, dimming his thoughts.

  Martelli couldn’t stand it any longer. He let go of the rifle, let it fall on his lap, and, with his free hand, started spinning the wheelchair, as hard and as fast as he could, fumbling for where he left the ammunition. Two cartridges made their way into the chamber, and for the life of him he couldn’t remember willing them there. Two explosions rocked the room. The first blew out the big window looking onto the courtyard. Through the shattered glass came the sound of the football match, a wild, insane roar, blaring out of the neighbouring sitting rooms, where another noise, the lowing, frightened murmur of people, was growing too.

  The second went in the opposite direction, somewhere towards the figure of Mickey Neri, who’d now thrown himself off the chair, trying to find cover.

  Martelli’s head cleared a little and the pain diminished. The chair stopped going round and round. The stupid screeching noise died in his throat. And at that moment Toni Martelli knew this was the end, one way or another. Neri’s offer was meaningless. A bigger, blacker fate was rising up to grip him now, and all the hoodlums in the world couldn’t keep it from his throat.

  Mickey Neri was writhing around on the floor. Martelli heard his desperate shrieks, wondered how badly he’d hit the kid, and shook his head.

  “Listen to the little rabbit,” he croaked. “What makes him squeal? The pain? Or knowing what’s gonna end it? You got no balls, boy?”

  “You crazy old fucker,” Mickey whispered from somewhere beyond Martelli’s receding vision. “I could give you something. We could both walk out of this.”

  “You got nothing for me,” Martelli said simply. “No one’s got a damn thing I can use anymore.” He raised the gun, knowing there was just the one cartridge left and this had to count, because if it didn’t Mickey Neri would somehow walk out of this place alive, and that, surely, was a crime.

  Then he coughed some more, coughed and coughed, until the sound of his own breathing entered his ears, grew and grew.

  Toni Martelli was choking on his own blood, wondering where this had come from, why the doctors never told him it would end this way. The shotgun still lay on his lap but he hadn’t the strength to touch it. And Mickey Neri had stopped wriggling around on the ground. He was half out in the open now, looking up, a little hope in his eyes. The little jerk wasn’t even hurt.

  “What the fuck—” Martelli tried to mumble, but it all came out wrong because his mouth was full of stuff, his head was all over the place.

  And the pain . . .

  Different this time.

  He looked down at the gun. It was covered in blood. His own. It came out of his chest somehow, poured down the front of his shirt.

  He wanted to get angry. He wanted to kill someone.

  A woman walked into view from the door. A skinny woman with red hair and a face that made him feel fear.

  “Who the fu—?” Toni Martelli began to say.

  She had a gun in her hand. She held the weapon purposefully, the way you were supposed to.

  Mickey Neri crawled to his knees and looked up as if the light of God was shining out of her bright, glittering eyes.

  The woman shook her head, disappointed. The red hair moved slowly in the light of the old apartment.

  “You do it like this,” she said, then walked up to Toni Martelli, smiled briefly, coldly into his face, and put a bullet into his brain.

  There was only so much a man could do with his hands. Brick and glass and rubble tore at Peroni’s fingertips. The coarse, choking dust filled his mouth, solidified in his eyes. Every time he and Falcone tried to snatch something away from Rachele D’Amato’s torn, unconscious body, another piece of debris seemed to fall around them to fill its place. Neri’s house was losing its solidity, just like the world itself. The ancient structure was on the point of collapse, a huge hole rent in its belly. There was so little time. Falcone was grappling with an ancient timber beam that had shattered like an overlong, rotten tooth and now lay across her chest. It refused to move and it occurred to Peroni that maybe this was for the best. In the dark it was impossible to see what part of the wrecked building depended on the rest for support. If they shifted the wrong thing, the fragile remnants of wall around them could so easily topple down too.

  He put a hand on Falcone’s arm. “Leo,” he gasped, snatching for breath. “This is crazy. We could bring the whole thing down on her.”

  The tall inspector continued to claw at the rubble and brick. Peroni grabbed him roughly by the shoulder. “Leo!”

  Falcone stopped. He looked lost just then. Peroni had never seen him this way. It was unnerving. They needed Falcone to keep his cool. The shaky department was beginning to pivot around him. There was no one else. “The rescue people are here. They know what they’re doing. This is their job. Let’s stick to ours, huh?”

  Vehicles were arriving all around, fire trucks with shifting gear, their officers moving quietly among the carnage of the blast, trying to assess how best to proceed, paramedics in vivid yellow jackets, wondering where to start.

  “She’s breathing,” Falcone murmured. “I can see it—”

  Rachele D’Amato was alive, just. Peroni nodded at a bunch of paramedics placing black plastic sheets over several unmistakable forms. “She’s lucky. We got at least three dead already.”

  Peroni knew it could have been even worse. If the riot men around the corner had been standing outside their van instead of in it. If the media animals had bothered to stick around to see what this was really about. It was too much for his head to handle right then. This was premeditated slaughter on a scale the city had never known, a calculated act of murder.

  Two firemen elbowed past, took a good look at Rachele D’Amato, then yelled at Falcone and Peroni to get out of the way.

  “We were trying to help,” Peroni shouted back.

  “Nice of you,” the lead fireman retorted, dragging some gear behind them, calling for a back-up team to bring some lifting equipment. “Now give us some room.”

  Falcone closed his eyes for a moment, trying to quell the fury. He gripped the man by the shoulder.

  “I’m the officer in charge here—” he began to say. Something in the man’s eyes made him stop.

  “I don’t care who the hell you are,” the fireman bellowed back. “We’re here to get these people out, mister. If you stand in my way God help you.”

  “OK, OK,” Peroni said softly, putting a hand on Falcone, gently guiding him away.

  The firemen weren’t even listening. The two of them were on the ground, carefully scraping rubble away from her body, yelling for more gear and paramedics.

  Falcone watched them, his face a picture of misery. “Gianni? You got any cigarettes? I was trying to give it up.”

  Peroni brushed some of the dust off his sleeves, then did the same for Falcone. The two men were filthy and they’d hardly even noticed. “When it comes to cigarettes, I’m always prepared. Walk with me. I’m flattered, by the way, to hear you using my first name again. I thought, perhaps, we’d never get back to that.”

 
Falcone followed him to the far side of the road, putting just enough distance between them and the wreck of Neri’s house to be out of the immediate stench of smoke and dust. Three more ambulances tore down the cobblestones and screeched to a halt next to the emergency rescue unit. New teams of paramedics burst out of their brightly lit interiors and started to work the scene. A short line of black cars arrived behind them. Both Falcone and Peroni knew what that meant. The big guys were coming in to pass judgement: men from the security service, the bureaucrats, the hierarchy of the DIA. This was no longer a simple crime investigation. It bordered on terrorism, and that changed the name of the game.

  Peroni used his sleeve to wipe some debris off the bonnet of a Renault Saloon and they sat down. He lit a cigarette and passed it over. Falcone’s slim, tanned hands were shaking. He took a couple of drags at the thing then cursed and threw it to the ground.

  “You know how much those things cost?” Peroni asked. “I’m the only man in the Questura who buys them straight and honest. No black market stuff for this boy.”

  “Yeah,” Falcone grunted. “You and your cock-eyed ideas about honesty. I don’t get it. You were the one man in vice I thought we could trust. Then you go and ruin it all over a woman. What for?”

  Peroni cast a sideways glance at Falcone. He was a handsome man, in a hard, emotionless way. This inability to address the real seat of his fears—his apparent concern for Rachele D’Amato—was a rare weakness, one that made him briefly more human. “She was a beautiful woman, may I remind you. A hooker, true, but let’s not leave out all the salient facts. People make fools of themselves from time to time, Leo. There’s a crazy gene in all of us. You convince yourself otherwise. You say to yourself, nah, the job’s bigger than this. Or the marriage. Or the kids. You think: I can just push these thoughts back into the dark where they belong. Then one day, just when you’re least expecting it, the crazy gene wakes up and you know it’s pointless trying to fight. For a while anyway. Because fighting could be even worse. You’re just beating up on yourself. But I think you already know that.”

  Falcone glanced back at the chaos across the road. “A bomb, a bomb. What the hell is Neri thinking?”

  Peroni’s mind had been working along the same lines. “You think it has to be him? He had enemies. The American for one.”

  Falcone stared dolefully at the firemen working to free Rachele D’Amato. “Why would any of them bomb an empty building? No one’s that stupid. Neri knew we were coming. The bastard left us this as a present and—”

  Falcone was struggling to tie the ends together in his head. Peroni hated seeing him filled with doubt like this. “And it doesn’t make sense. This is so final. He can’t talk his way out of this one. He can’t pick up the phone and bribe some politician, some cop to look the other way.”

  That was true, Peroni thought. This was the end of Neri’s career. There was no other possibility. Or, to be more precise, it was the act which Neri was using to announce the closure of his time in Rome. Something, the papers on the dead accountant’s desk, some threat they failed to understand, must have convinced him there could be no turning back. He had to flee, to seek anonymous sanctuary somewhere he hoped the Italian state could no longer reach him.

  Peroni thought of the body, the brown, shining body in Teresa Lupo’s morgue. Everything led back to that first corpse. Every event that followed stemmed from its discovery, and still they had no idea why, no clue to explain the strange and deadly demons that flew out of the ground once that small patch of peat near Fiumicino was exposed to the light of day.

  Falcone turned a sudden, sharp gaze on him, the one that said: don’t lie, don’t even think of it. “Tell me the truth. Do you think I’m losing it? Is this getting too much for me?”

  “What?” Peroni stared at him, almost lost for words. “Since when did you get to be super-human? This is too much for all of us. This . . .” he waved a hand at the scene across the road, “. . . is the world gone mad. Not just that bastard Neri.”

  There was a sound from the house. The lifting gear around Rachele D’Amato was being cranked into action. The firemen were shouting to each other. Timbers were moving. Walls were starting to shake. And there was more light now. The bright, unforgiving light of the TV cameras, back to see what they were supposed to witness all along.

  Falcone stood up and shook the dirt and dust off himself, getting ready to go back. Peroni was with him instantly, a hand on his arm.

  “Leo,” he said. “There’s nothing you can do. And whatever state that woman’s in, you can’t change it. Furthermore, if she does wake up, she’ll be livid to find you sitting by the bed like some dumbstruck husband.”

  “Really?” Falcone gave him a familiar, cold look. “You know her well enough to say that?”

  “I know she’s just as married to the job as you are. And when she does get conscious the first thing she’ll ask is what you’ve done to get the sons of bitches who did this. You offer a bunch of flowers and you’ll get it straight back into your face. Now am I right?”

  Falcone glanced at him and Peroni wondered if he had read everything the wrong way. “You think that’s what this is about, Gianni? Me and her?”

  “I dunno,” he mumbled, and Peroni realized that at that moment he really didn’t. There was more going on in Falcone’s head than he appreciated.

  “She’s got another man,” Falcone said flatly. “She told me so.”

  “Gimme a break,” Peroni answered immediately. “Does she look like a woman with a man in tow? She’s just playing with you, Leo. Women are like that.”

  “Maybe.”

  Falcone was focused on the meeting going on across the road. The men from the black cars were engaged in an impromptu conference near the sight of the blast. He knew, surely, he ought to go and join them. He ought to answer their questions, try to keep them happy.

  Peroni looked at the shattered building and sighed. “For God’s sake, Leo. It’s times like this people look to you. If you’re riddled with self-doubt, how the hell do you expect them to go on? Here—”

  He lit another cigarette and offered it. Falcone accepted reluctantly.

  “Listen to your friend Gianni, please. Because he’s just got a stupid vice cop brain in his skull and this primitive organ doesn’t have a clue what’s going on here. All these crazy genes bouncing around tonight. Where’d they come from, Leo? What the hell for? Who flipped that switch and why?”

  Falcone scratched his chin and said nothing.

  “This is good,” Peroni said carefully. “This is indicative of cerebral activity. Come on. Reel off some options.”

  Falcone shook his head miserably and threw the cigarette away.

  “You are costing me big time, man,” Peroni groaned. “OK, let me change the subject. How about this? You can bawl me out. Sometime over the past half hour—don’t ask when exactly because I can’t tell you—Costa went off on his own, chasing this wild goose story about some blonde girl over in Cerchi. He didn’t want to. Or rather, he did but he didn’t want to let it show. So I told him to get his ass on the road anyway. Who knows? Anyway, it was me giving orders. So bust my ass.”

  There was a flicker of interest in Falcone’s face. Peroni was glad even that much was there.

  “It was just a report of a blonde girl?” Falcone asked. “Just that she looked like Suzi Julius?”

  “Nothing more,” Peroni agreed. “You seemed to think—this was just before the big bang event took place—it was worthy of attention, I believe.”

  “It was. Hell, it is.” Falcone wasn’t looking across the street now. His mind was getting back into gear. “Or maybe—”

  “Maybe what?”

  The old Falcone was lurking there somewhere. The one who didn’t let go. And the men in black across the road were starting to look around them, wondering why no one had seen fit to acknowledge their presence.

  “I’m not messing with you now, Leo. Either you pull yourself together or someone at the Que
stura’s going to be sending you back on leave and finding some young smart-ass to warm your seat. Probably for good.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” Falcone conceded. “Maybe it’s what Rachele said all along. A war. And somehow the Julius girl—” He waved his hand at the mess across the street, “All these people, they’re just, what do they call it? Collateral damage. Bodies caught in the crossfire. It’s a war. Neri against Wallis. Or Neri against us, the world, everything. I don’t know.”

  Peroni didn’t feel convinced. “Don’t wars need something to start them?”

  “The girl. Wallis’s stepdaughter. Neri or maybe his son did something to her. Wallis wants payback. This is Neri getting his revenge in first. Against all of us.”

  “You people do live in a complicated universe. How’d you get there?”

  “It’s not ‘there.’ It’s not even part way ‘there.’ ”

  “So what do we do? What are cops supposed to do in a war?”

  Falcone gave him a withering look. “Do we have men outside Wallis’s place?”

  “No. The DIA took that one, remember?”

  “Yeah,” Falcone nodded, thinking. “You remember what Wallis said?”

  “Every word. But remind me.”

  “ ‘War is the natural state of humanity.’ ”

  “Bullshit,” Peroni protested. “Lethargy’s the natural state of humanity. Look at this mess! What’s natural about that?”

  “Nothing,” Falcone said, looking at his watch. “Everything, if you’ve got the ‘crazy gene.’ We’re seeing this all wrong, Gianni. We’re trying to rationalize something that’s not rational.”

  Peroni patted his shoulder. “Hey! See! You can still sound like the old Leo when you want to. Can we go out and do cop stuff now, please? This isn’t a place for the likes of us. You can phone the hospital later. We got work to do. Furthermore—” he pointed to the men across the street, who were starting to look thoroughly pissed off. “—I believe your presence is required.”