David Hewson - The Villa of Mysteries

“Do you realize,” she said out of nowhere, “that if I meet someone now and we have a kid, when that kid is Suzi Julius’s age I will be turned fifty? My God, who’s the virgin here?”

Costa opened the bottom drawer, slid his hand beneath a neatly folded nightdress and stared up at her.

“What?” she said.

He took out a couple of items: obscure things, hidden, wrong.

One was the stalk of some plant, dried. A pine cone was attached to the thinner end, clinging clumsily to the stump, held there with tape. It looked like a schoolkid’s craft project.

“She was working out how to make it,” Teresa said glumly.

“The name again?” he asked.

“Thyrsus.” She took it from him and sniffed the stem, her face deadly serious all of a sudden. “That’s fennel. Just like the one from the peat.”

“And this?” It was a plastic bag, full of seeds. Costa smelled the contents. “It’s not dope.”

“Not ordinary dope.”

She looked inside the bag, deeply miserable.

“Teresa?”

“I found something similar in the dead girl’s pockets. I’m waiting for the full lab report. From my limited culinary expertise I’d say it’s a mixture of herb seeds. Cumin. Coriander. Fennel again. Something hallucinogenic too maybe. Something fungal. Magic mushroom in all probability.”

He waited, wondering how she knew.

“According to the book it was part of the ritual. A small gift from the god. A thank you for what he was about to get in return.”

“Which was?”

She was silent.

“Guess,” he said. “Give me some female intuition.”

“If you got it right? Paradise. You lost your virginity, probably to some temple creep wearing that spooky mask from the tattoo just to look the part. This was about ecstasy. Physical ecstasy. Mental, spiritual—”

She screwed up her eyes, thinking, remembering. “The book said that, in public, 17 March was the day Roman boys attained their manhood. In private, the women achieved some special kind of status too. At least the ones who were hanging round the cult.”

“And if you got it wrong? If you said no… ?”

“Then I guess you met one very angry god.” She hesitated. “You really believe this poor kid’s a part of all this? And she thinks she’s just playing some game?”

He looked at the homemade wand and the little bag of seeds. “It’s a possibility, surely? We can’t ignore it.”

“There’s not enough here to push any of Falcone’s buttons.”

She was right. These were just coincidental wisps of smoke in some distant, hazy mirrors. There was nothing to suggest an answer to the biggest question of all: why her? Why an English kid who’d only been in Rome a week?

They returned to the living room. Miranda Julius was red-faced and puffy-eyed. Falcone must have been working her hard. She looked at them as they came in and read their faces instantly.

“What is it?” she asked.

Costa showed her the thyrsus and the packet of seeds. “Have you seen these before? Do you know what they are?”

She looked at them and shook her head. “I’ve no idea. Where did you find them?”

“In her bedroom,” Costa replied.

“What are they?” She could be crying again soon.

“It could be coincidence,” Costa said.

“It could be anything,” Falcone interjected. “We’ll log your daughter’s disappearance, Mrs. Julius. We’ll circulate her description. Usually these cases end with the child coming home. Usually they’ll call. Probably today.”

“Look,” Teresa interjected, “there’s time. There are a lot of loose ends to work on here. If…”

Falcone stood up, glowering at her. She knew when to shut up.

“Doctor,” he grunted. “Here’s the deal. I don’t go around cutting up bodies. You don’t go around interrogating potential witnesses.”

Costa thought, for one moment, she might hit him and wondered what would happen after that. Instead Teresa went over to Miranda Julius, sat next to her on the sofa, and put an arm around her shoulders.

Falcone led Costa and Peroni away from the women.

“This is serious,” Costa said. “I know it looks odd but—”

“Don’t tell me my job,” Falcone said curtly. “We’ve got one clear-cut case of murder and one missing teenager to add to the scores we get every week. There’s nothing that links them. Nothing you can count on. Be honest, Nic. If there were…”

Costa looked at Falcone. He wished the inspector wouldn’t play his cards so close to his chest so often. It was coincidence. But that didn’t mean they should reject it.

“We could hand out her picture to the media,” Costa suggested.

“And say what?” Falcone asked. “This is a girl who hasn’t been seen by her mother since this morning? Do you want us to look like fools?”

“I don’t care what we look like.”

Peroni patted Costa on the back. “Think about it, Nic. What’s there to go on?”

“Circulate the girl’s picture internally,” Falcone ordered, walking for the door, watching Teresa Lupo glower at him from the sofa, her arms still round the mother. “Make sure it gets seen all round. And pull out whatever CCTV footage we’ve got of the Campo. We can look at that later. You could be right, Nic. I just don’t feel ready to jump straight in at the moment. Besides, we’ve got an appointment.” He scowled at Costa. “And note that word ”we.“ Keep your friend from the morgue out of this. She’s got other work to do.”

THESE DAYS when Emilio Neri went out on his rounds he left most of the muscle work to Bruno Bucci, a muscular thirty-year-old hood from Turin. Bucci had been on the payroll since he was a teenager running dope dealers around Termini Station. Neri liked him, as an employee and as a man. He was taciturn, loyal and dogged. He knew when to talk and when to shut up. He never came back until the job was done, whatever it took. If Neri felt like slapping someone around personally, Bucci didn’t mind holding the yo-yo still, making sure he didn’t get any stupid ideas just because the individual rearranging his face was pushing sixty-six and wheezing and croaking like a set of malodorous old bellows.

Sometimes Neri wondered why Mickey hadn’t turned out this way. If that had happened, he’d feel a whole lot easier about what would become of his empire when he was too old to stay in the driving seat. Which could be sooner rather than later the way he was starting to feel. It wasn’t a question of age. Neri felt sure he could carry on for a good decade more without handing over the reins. Something else, boredom maybe, or a sense of being out of place, bothered him. The big house, the servants, even Adele lounging around like a pampered plaything… all these accoutrements of wealth and power now seemed unreal, almost improper, silky bars for a prison that threatened to drown him in luxury.

He ought to be thinking about the transition. He knew that. The problem was Mickey’s character. The kid did as he was told, mostly, but he was always chasing something on the side too, pursuing private scams that he liked to keep to himself. Neri had found himself forced to clean up this kind of mess—dope, women, money—too often. Mickey never lied when confronted like that. Neri just had to know to ask the right questions. He could put up with that when Mickey was twenty. Now it was getting tedious. Maybe there was some kind of a trade-off he could work. Bucci got to run the business, Mickey could sit back and take his cut from the proceeds.

Neri thought about this from Bucci’s point of view. He knew what any decent working-class hood with ambition would do in that position. Wait till the old man was out of the way then take the lot, leaving the spoilt brat to drive a cab or wake up dead one morning more likely. Maybe that was the way of the world, Neri reasoned. He’d have done the same. Families were imperfect entities. Nothing said they had to last forever.