David Hewson - The Villa of Mysteries

“In case you haven’t noticed, this is not a good time for me,” Neri said. “That means it’s not a good time for you either, if you could just get it into your scrawny fucking head. There are bad things happening I don’t need at my age. Some of it of my own making maybe. Some of it because of other people who ought to know better. I just want you to understand.”

“Bad?” she asked, looking puzzled by his sudden frankness. “How bad, Emilio?”

There was a noise outside: a couple of cars drawing up. They went to the window. It had started to rain now. Thin lines of drizzle came down silvery black through the night, drenching the steady traffic on the Lungotevere.

Neri watched her eyeballing the men who got out of the cars. She was no fool. She knew their type. Normally he didn’t even allow them into the house.

“Why are they here?”

“You ever been in a war?” he asked, hating the word as he said it. Wars weren’t supposed to happen. They cost money. They could get you into big trouble with people who thought those days were past.

“Of course not.”

“Start learning,” he murmured, as much to himself as her. “These are what we call troops.”

“FOUR WHEELS GOOD, two wheels bad,” Teresa Lupo chanted to herself as the Seat lurched along the rough, potholed lane leading from the dig, topping a hundred and twenty as it tackled the bumps. She’d just made it to the car in time to see him stumble out of the portable office, still with the helmet and black visor in place, looking like some deadly insect hunting its prey.

Bugman was riding a motorbike. She was in a car. There had to be some advantage there. It was dark now too, with a little greasy rain falling from the sky. Four wheels good …

Except it didn’t mean much right then. The bike rider seemed to possess his own special brand of gravity. The Leon breasted the hard shoulder of the main road, leapt briefly into the air, and turned, tyres screeching, towards the airport.

When she managed to get control of the car once more, seeing with some relief the lights of the main terminal a couple of kilometres off in the distance, she plucked up sufficient courage to glance in the mirror. He’d made up ground. He must be riding the Honda from hell. It seemed to stick to the greasy road in a way the Seat couldn’t. They’d been a good three hundred metres apart when she approached the end of the track. Now half the gap she’d enjoyed had disappeared. The thing moved like crap off a hot shovel.

“Holy fuck,” she whispered idly and stared at the mobile phone on the seat. She didn’t even dare try to call again. She needed both hands on the wheel. She needed her mind set on survival, nothing else.

The car dropped into fourth, she floored the accelerator and roared past a couple of slow-moving trucks, one of which was just lumbering into the outside lane to overtake. The mirror was briefly a mass of metal as the two leviathans leaned into each other for dominance. Then the bike came through between them, squeezing into a gap no more than a metre or so wide, speeding ahead.

“Jesus.” She stared into the mirror. “What did I do? Where are the cops, for God’s sake?”

The terminal didn’t seem much closer just then. All her ideas of safety in its bright lights were starting to disappear. And anyway, her mind told her, Mr. Insect Head didn’t care about bright lights. She could run in and march straight up to check in at the Alitalia First Class desk and he’d still follow, all the way on his bright and shiny machine, pausing only to pump a couple of bullets into her head before riding out of the doors again, because that’s what men on motorbikes did.

Four wheels good …

The shape was getting closer all the time now. If he made a couple of flicks with his insect wrist he could draw right up at the driver’s window, even tap on the glass.

“To hell with that,” she said, and dragged the wheel hard over to the left, braking all the time.

The bike rider caught on quickly. He wasn’t going to plough straight into her side and pop his black frame right over the roof, thrown by the deadly weight of his own momentum. Instead he just put down a strong leather foot, slid the machine along the damp road, in control all the way, staring, staring.

“Point taken,” Teresa murmured, and hit the accelerator once more, straightened the Seat with a vicious lurch, and found herself heading straight for the no-entry barrier over a side road in construction just a hundred metres or so ahead.

There were men in white jackets and yellow hard hats working there. She held her hand on the horn, watching them scatter. The Leon went into a long, lazy sideways skid. She found the wheel twitching in her hands like a wild creature with a mind of its own.

Instinctively, she turned into the slide, felt the car come back under her control. Something smashed into the window behind her and exited out of the front windscreen, taking with it her vision of the road ahead. A circle of opaque shattered glass now sat between her and the black emptiness that was the world racing up to greet her. She glanced at the dashboard. It read ninety. She couldn’t hear a thing except the car screaming.

“Not a good day,” Teresa Lupo murmured, and was of a mind, for some reason, to take her hands off the wheel because there was something else demanding her attention.

A figure kept bobbing up at the driver’s window: long and black and deadly. Its arm was extended. The insect looked ready to sting.

Knowing it was stupid, and doing this very suddenly, very deliberately, she released her hands, crouched down in the driver’s seat, hands over her head, praying for protection, muttering over and over again that odd word they told you on the airplanes, “Brace, brace, brace…”

The Leon bounced once. The universe turned turtle. She was aware, for one brief moment, that things were not as they should be and wondered whether this was the start of the great secret called “death.” And then another unsettling thought, as the Leon rolled and bounced through the air, making her feel giddy and sick.

“Not Monkboy,” she murmured. “Let anybody do it but Monkboy.”

There was the noise of shrieking metal. A sharp pain stabbed at the top of her skull. She felt herself rolled around inside the dying Leon like a bean in a can.

Finally, the world stopped moving.

Teresa Lupo was upside down in the car. Something warm and sticky was dripping down her face: blood. She reached up and felt for the damage. Just a cut above her right temple.

“What fucking awful luck,” she gasped, and suppressed an urge to laugh.

There was a desperate, scrabbling sound at the driver’s door which was now pointed at the black night sky. She heard voices and cowered in the front seat, wondering if the insect had bred. All the world seemed hostile at that moment. Logic and plain humanity had disappeared from the planet.

Then cold air blew into her face. Faces peered at her. Men said all the usual things they liked to say about women drivers in these situations.

“Can you move?” someone wearing a yellow hat asked, holding out a hand.

She tried lifting herself. It worked. Just bruises, that was all. And a little cut in the hairline.

He had to be gone, she thought. He wouldn’t dare come into this mass of people, all of them extending their arms to her.

Teresa Lupo climbed out of the car, wondering whether she was about to burst into a fit of hysterical giggles. The Leon was on its side in what appeared to be the middle of a building site. A few metres away was a vast hole with concrete round the edges, a chasm cut into the earth big enough to take a train.

“Where’s the bike?” she asked.