David Hewson - The Villa of Mysteries

“Me too, kid,” Peroni growled.

“Well, that’s the formalities done,” she said. “I’m here because you can’t do this without me. Sorry, but that’s the way it is these days. Wallis has antecedents. He doesn’t worry me now, but he’s got a past. And he knows people who do worry me. Is that enough?”

Costa watched as a face filled the videophone screen: a middle-aged black man, handsome, speaking perfect Italian.

“Police,” Falcone said, holding up his card. “We need to talk.”

“What do you want?” the man asked.

“It’s about your stepdaughter, Mr. Wallis. We’ve found a body. We need identification. Now please.”

Costa watched the head on the screen. Falcone’s words gave the man pain.

“Come in,” Vergil Wallis murmured, and the lock on the gates began to buzz.

SILVIO DI CAPUA HAD LEARNED A LOT in the three years since he became Teresa Lupo’s deputy pathologist in the morgue. She’d taught him tricks of the autopsy trade they never told you in medical school. She’d shown him any number of smart-ass quips to make when cops fainted or threw up. She’d ingratiated him into the Questura too, introduced him to people so that he became her eyes and ears, the source of most of the hot gossip running through the station. Above all, though, Teresa had revealed to Di Capua—a good Catholic boy brought up by monks, a man who, at the age of twenty-seven, had still never been out with a member of the opposite sex—the unbridled joys of language when freed from the restraints of custom, taste and dignity.

Until she came along he’d been of the opinion that Italian was the structured, civilized tongue he knew from books and newspapers and conversation with fellow students in the monastery school. Teresa Lupo dispelled this myth within a matter of weeks, filling his head with all manner of slang and colloquialisms so colourful and bizarre that, for the naÏve and awestruck Silvio Di Capua, it was as if he had entered some new and glorious world.

Even three years on he found listening to her in full, florid flow a thrilling experience, one that revealed arcane, hidden dimensions of profundity to a language transformed from that of his childhood. He swore like a trooper now too, not always appropriately and, he knew, without her masterful timing. On occasion he muffed his words, which had led to some awkward situations and, once, almost got him beaten up by a uniformed gorilla who misinterpreted a friendly jibe as some obscure hint at unnatural private practices.

Sometimes he wondered if he were in love with his boss. In his imagination this occurred in a wholesome, chaste and ethereal way, one that precluded physical sex, something Silvio Di Capua found as baffling and undesirable now as it was when first described to him in all its squalor fifteen years before in the school dormitory.

Nor would he dwell long on these thoughts. Di Capua accepted his failings. He was marginally shorter than Teresa. His thick black hair had begun to fall out when he was eighteen. Now it formed a priestly fringe around his bald skull, which, out of laziness, he allowed to grow lank and long. His voice was a scratchy falsetto that some found deeply annoying. He was chubby running to fat. His face was so blandly amorphous he had to reintroduce himself to people all the time. And he looked a good ten years younger than his true age. Silvio Di Capua’s life was an incidental happening in the passing of human history and he knew it. Nevertheless, that didn’t stop his admiring Teresa Lupo to the point of adoration, more with every new day of this warm spring.

There was, also, the matter of the nickname which had been inflicted on him the previous year by a garrulous traffic cop and stuck with a dogged and annoying persistence. No one dared call Teresa Lupo “Crazy Teresa” to her face. Silvio Di Capua’s standing within the morgue was less sure. He just had to learn to answer to it. On occasion even Teresa used the damn thing.

He’d just pushed the body from the bog back into what the morgue drones now called the shower when the thug from plainclothes appeared at the door. There was a dead junkie fresh on the slab awaiting Di Capua’s attention. Teresa had done a little work on the corpse—the usual overdose precheck, this time on a grubby hirsute man who’d been stripped for the examination—then passed it over to him with a few brief instructions before grabbing her coat and leaving. He was head down into the PC, logging some records, lost in thought.

“Hey, Monkboy,” the cop barked. “Why don’t you go to Google and type in ”a life“? But before you do, tell me where Crazy Teresa is. Falcone says he wants that autopsy on his desk soonish and I, for one, don’t wish to disappoint him.”

Di Capua looked up from the screen and scowled at the moron. “ Doctor Lupo is away from her desk.”

The detective was messing with some of the specimen trays, picking up scalpels, touching stuff he was supposed to leave alone. He sniffed over the corpse and then, gingerly, with the end of a pair of forceps, flicked the dead man’s grey, flaccid penis.

“Listen, sonny. Don’t get snappy with me. It’s bad enough dealing with her. What’s with that woman? It’s like the red flag’s flying every day of the month. Don’t tell me you got the same problem?”

Di Capua got up and walked in between the jerk and the cadaver, pushing the cop out of the way. “You should never go near junkies unless you’ve had the right injections,” he said. “There’s a theory doing the rounds now that you can catch AIDS just from the smell. Did you know that?”

The cop took one step back. “You’re kidding me.”

“Not at all. The early symptoms are very like this flu that’s doing the rounds. Sore throat. Mucus.” He paused. “And a nose so itchy you just can’t stop scratching it.”

The cop sniffed then started dabbing at his face with a grubby handkerchief. Di Capua pointed at the sign that hung on the wall above the dissecting table. “I don’t suppose you happen to read Latin?”

The cop stared at the words. Hic locus est ubi mors gaudet succurrere vitae . “Sure. It says, ”You don’t have to be crazy to work here but it helps.“ ”

“Not quite. ”This is the place where death rejoices to teach those who live.“ ”

“What kind of crazy shit is that?”

Di Capua looked down at the corpse. The bloodless Y-incision Teresa had made earlier, from the shoulders to mid-chest then down to the pubic region, sat on the dead man’s flesh as dark, narrow lines. The same feature ran across the scalp which was now loose, ready to be reflected back to enable entry to the skull. Ordinarily, if they had the staff, he’d expect some assistance, but Teresa was gone and, what with the flu epidemic, there was no one else around. Except the cop.

“Pathologist shit,” he replied, and with a firm, sure hand took out the vibrating saw, turned back the loose scalp and began carefully to carve open the skull vault from the front.

The cop turned white then belched.

“Don’t throw up in a morgue, please,” Di Capua cautioned him. “It’s bad luck.”

“ Shit ,” the man gasped, watching goggle-eyed the path the small electric saw was taking.

“The preliminary report’s over there,” Di Capua said, nodding towards Teresa’s desk and the folder that sat next to the PC. “Note that word ”preliminary.“ It’s just a scant first look. And next time, for your information, the name is Silvio. Or Dr. Di Capua. You got that?”

“Yeah,” the cop answered with a burp.

He watched the idiot vacate the room, clutching the report with one hand and his mouth with the other.

“What is all the fuss?” Di Capua wondered out loud. “It’s just a body, for chrissake.”