David Hewson - The Villa of Mysteries

“They’d do that for you if they thought you wouldn’t hit them.”

She glared at him. “You couldn’t stop staring at her. I couldn’t help noticing that.”

He ignored the remark and went over to the table by the girl’s single bed. There was a portfolio of photographs, black and white, printed in large format. He flicked through them: images from every war that had made the headlines in the last decade, Afghanistan, Palestine, Rwanda, places in Africa he couldn’t begin to identify. Teresa came to join him.

“Is that what she meant?” she asked. “When she said she went around photographing dead people?”

“She’s a war photographer apparently.”

Corpses lay still on the ground, broken, bloody. Lost children, their eyes like saucers, stared back at them from the prints. “Makes my job look kind of normal,” Teresa said. “What drives you to that kind of work? Particularly when you’ve got a kid waiting at home?”

“I don’t know.” Were the photos in the daughter’s room because Suzi liked them? Or because she kept asking herself that question too? There was something complicated going on here, he thought.

“If I had a mother who took photos like that I’d maybe think of running away myself,” Teresa said carefully. “You understand what I’m saying?”

He’d done plenty of missing kid inquiries. He knew what they felt like. And it wasn’t like this. “Of course I do. Half the time the kids aren’t running towards something; they’re running from it. Do you really think that’s what’s happening here? They’re on holiday, Teresa. I’ve dealt with more runaways than I can remember. I don’t recall one of them ever being a foreign tourist.”

“Point taken,” she said quietly. “All the same—”

There was a pile of family snaps on the bedside table. Miranda Julius did take them all the time. Most were of the girl, looking lovely, happy. A few were taken by someone else, a stranger perhaps, or a waiter. There they were outside the Villa Borghese, on the Spanish Steps, eating pizza, laughing. Nic Costa looked at them and felt a pang of guilt. If he was right, Suzi Julius could be in big trouble right now, trouble that would bring her mother pain and possibly grief, whatever the outcome. Pictures spoke, they told stories. These two were close. They loved each other.

Teresa was staring at them too. “Nice photographs,” she said simply. “Nice to know she doesn’t just snap dead people.”

For a moment he wondered: was there a small, bitter note inside Teresa Lupo’s voice, whispering: Look on with envy, because you’ll never know this, you’ll never feel the joy or the pain ?

“Can you imagine the feeling of responsibility?” she asked. “What it must be like? Knowing someone else depends on you that much?”

He thought of his own dead father. He did know it, but only from the point of view of the dependant.

“You can see it on her face,” she continued. “Whatever happened, whether there was a row or not, she’s just sitting in there asking herself, ”Is there something I could have done?“ ”

“It’s always like that,” he said by way of an explanation. “You’re a pathologist. It’s just that you don’t see it.”

She toyed with one of the best photos: the two of them laughing in a pale winter sun on the Ponte Sisto. “Just because it’s always like that doesn’t make it any easier.”

“No.” He wondered if the resemblance was just his memory playing tricks. It was hard to compare this living, breathing kid with the mahogany corpse on the silver table. “Does she really look like the dead girl? Or is that my imagination? Could the resemblance have sparked something? Made whoever was responsible sixteen years ago suddenly get the itch again?”

Teresa shrugged. “Pushing it a bit, isn’t it? She’s blonde, pretty, and young, if that’s what you mean. From the pictures I’d say she’s a bit on the thin side for most Italians. The mother’s more our size. I wish. Nic, there are skinny blonde kids in Rome all the time. Why would it take sixteen years for him to run across one again? Face it. She’s probably just one more runaway kid.”

He looked at the scattering of disjointed facts that faced them. “I don’t think so. It feels wrong. What the hell does it all mean? What does it say in that book you read? What exactly happens? Where do they get their victims from?”

“They’re not victims, Nic,” she insisted. “If you think that you’re misreading everything. What happened to them was a privilege, even if it didn’t feel like it at the time.”

“Unless it went wrong,” he reminded her.

“Unless it went wrong. But that can’t have happened often. These girls were gifts. Some of them were slaves handed over by their owners. Some were daughters led there by their own fathers. They went through the ritual. They came out changed. Acolytes of the god, remember. That must have meant something.”

“But what?” he muttered. “I still think this feels wrong.”

“Don’t ask me. I’m a pathologist. Not an archaeologist. Or a cop. Or a psychic for that matter. Listen to yourself. It feels wrong . Are you really going to go back out there and tell Falcone that?”

Yet he felt sure she had seen some kind of link too. He could recognize it in her face, the bright spark of intelligence mixed with the dread of what that new information could mean.

“You’re the only person I have right now who’s researched all this. Please—”

She sat down and sighed. “Don’t do this to me, Nic. Don’t take what I say as gospel. I don’t like being imprecise. I’m trained for the opposite.”

“Just point me somewhere. I’ll check it out. I promise. Tell me more about this ritual.”

“All I know is what I read. The ceremony was about the initiation of chosen girls into adulthood. On one particular day: 17 March. Sounds familiar? This was party time. There’d be men there, for sure. Priests, hangers-on, hoping they could get in on the fun. They drank, they danced, they swallowed every ancient Roman narcotic they could find. Then they did tricks to each other that would make a bunch of Hell’s Angels walk out of the room feeling things were going a little too far. But this was about the girls. It was about giving them something they could use in adulthood. An advantage, maybe. Or some kind of membership in a club they could use later on.”

Costa stared at her, expecting more. “Look,” she said. “The man who wrote the thing said himself it’s all guesswork. No one really knows what happened. All they know is that it got out of hand sometimes. It got bad enough for the Romans to ban it after a while. Long before the Christians came along with peace and love. It was all too much for them. They just carted off the organizers, put them to death somewhere, then relaunched the thing as some toned-down happy-clappy ceremony called the Liberalia. The same kind of stunt they pulled off to wind up with Christmas, if you recall. What preceded it? Who knows?”

He tried to make sense of this. “So maybe two thousand years later someone’s playing the same tricks? Using the same rituals?”

“We don’t know that. All you’ve got is a tattoo. A date—”

“And a dead body.”

She tried to look hopeful. “Which has no connection whatsoever with this girl. Be honest with yourself. The mother’s probably right. The kid’ll walk back in with a certain smile on her face thinking, ”Thank Christ I got that out of the way.“ Jesus, a virgin at sixteen. What kind of lives do these people lead?”

He wasn’t listening. He was doing the cop thing—opening drawers, looking into the contents, only with a touch more respect than most of them had. Nic Costa didn’t upend the things and turn the stuff out onto the floor. He just sifted carefully, as if he felt he were intruding.