David Hewson - The Villa of Mysteries

“If you’d asked I’d have looked the other way,” she said softly to herself. “I didn’t even warm to Booger Bill.”

Then her eye caught something else and she couldn’t work out whether the mist was cleating or had just become downright impenetrable.

She was shaken from this reverie by Falcone’s hand on her shoulder, his sharp, sour face, with its silver pointed beard, staring into hers.

“Thanks, doctor,” he said.

“It’s nothing.”

“No.” The inspector was making a point. She should have seen the signs. “I meant thank you. Now I have a dead cop too.”

“What?”

Falcone was turning his back on her, starting to walk away. She couldn’t believe it. Even Peroni seemed embarrassed.

“Hey?” she yelled.

He turned. She remembered a trick from when she’d briefly played women’s rugby, before they threw her off the team for too many fouls.

Teresa Lupo lunged out with her foot at Falcone’s falling leg, jerked him off balance, grabbed the arm of his jacket and had him down on the ground in one, letting his own weight do most of the work. Peroni was shaking his head, cursing again, looking at them as if they were beneath contempt. Rachele D’Amato watched this little drama in shocked silence. Teresa didn’t want to think about what the morgue team were doing. Holding their heads in their hands in all probability.

“Fuck it,” she mouthed, and dragged Falcone down to the corpse; she let go of him, then pointed to the dead woman’s shoulder, half ripped from its socket.

“See that?” she spat at him, forcing his head close up to the torn flesh. “ See that ?”

The inspector was breathless, struggling to regain some dignity.

“Yes,” he said and she believed she heard just a faint tinge of regret, apology even, in his cold reply.

It was small but distinct. Drawn with care into the flesh of Barbara Martelli’s ruined limb was an inky black mark. A tattooed face surrounded by a head of snakelike hair, and a grinning mouth with bulbous lips, howling, howling, howling.

“You’re welcome,” Teresa Lupo said softly to herself then barked at her men to load the body.

Venerdi

SPRING WAS ARRIVING WITH VIGOUR. EMILIO NERI HAD ordered the men to put some outside burners on the terrace. With them it was sufficiently warm for his family to eat their first breakfast of the year in the open air, overlooking the Via Giulia. It was eight in the morning. The house felt different. Neri had sent the servants away. He needed the room for his troops. The place was better without them. One of the foot soldiers had gone out to bring pastries and fruit from the Campo. Neri wasn’t that keen to make a move himself, not until he’d thought this through. There was another reason for talking on the terrace, out in the open, high above the cobblestones of the Via Giulia. The scumbags in the DIA would stop at nothing to nail him. Sometimes he thought they were bugging the house, recording every word he said. Sometimes he wondered if he was getting paranoid in his old age. Either way he would feel more comfortable seated beneath the wan rays of the morning sun, with the growl of traffic from the Lungotevere murmuring away in the distance behind, overlooked by no one.

Or perhaps that was a distant hope too. They could have cameras trained on him from somewhere, helicopters hovering overhead. This was the way the modern world worked, peering into your private existence, sneaking around, asking stupid questions. And all the while real life just turned to shit and no one ever really noticed.

Adele and Mickey sat side by side opposite him. They seemed even more antagonistic towards one another this morning. The performance—the word seemed appropriate to Neri—just went on and on. His son had arrived home not long before midnight, in a foul, uncommunicative mood. Some date had failed to show maybe. Neri didn’t know, and didn’t want to know. The happiness or otherwise of the kid’s dick was the last thing on his mind.

He had six soldiers downstairs, all equipped for the occasion should it arise. He’d called a few old compari from the past too, men who’d taken a back seat when they’d banked enough to keep them happy. He had called each one into his office separately, stared into their eyes looking for signs of disloyalty, finding none. Then he told them to keep the next few days free in case they were required. These were men who had reason to be grateful to him. They all knew some debts never got repaid in full. If there was to be a war, Neri would need every hand he could get. His was a Roman firm. He didn’t have the rigid, militaristic structure the Sicilians liked so much. He had no consigliere to turn to for advice, to negotiate with the other mobs to keep them sweet. He didn’t keep a bunch of capi running their soldiers beneath him. Just Bruno Bucci, who was a kind of skipper but never acted much in his own name.

Neri had always liked to do things himself. In the past there’d been time. Now, the more he thought about it, he was exposed by his own obsessive need for absolute control. Nothing could be delegated easily. There were insufficient troops on the ground. Rome hadn’t seen an all-out mob war in more than two decades. The game should have moved on from those days. People were supposed to be more civilized . They’d been fools, Neri included. Human nature didn’t change. It only went underground for a while. Now he had to adapt—and quickly.

Bucci walked up the metal stairs onto the terrace carrying breakfast on a tray: pastries, juice, coffee. Adele watched him place them on the table, nod respectfully to Neri then leave, and said, “Would anyone care to tell me what’s going on here? We’ve got a gorilla waiting on table. There’s people down below who don’t match the decorations. Why am I sharing my home with a bunch of zombies wearing black suits before I’m even out of pyjamas?”

Neri was going to have to say something about that. She was wandering around as if nothing had changed. She sat next to Mickey, beneath one of the burners, in a new silk outfit that looked like pure gold. There was nothing on underneath. She didn’t bother buttoning the front that well. He couldn’t help noticing. He didn’t want the men getting a free look too. He guessed people did get ideas around Adele, then wondered again about the way Mickey wouldn’t even look at her in his presence.

“You could try dressing a little earlier,” he said and gulped down some coffee, trying to think.

She sat there primly, one hand on the table, and gave Mickey an icy stare. “You woke me. Coming home late like that. Can’t you get hookers who work normal hours?”

Mickey smiled, his dyed blonde head lolling around stupidly. “What hookers? I got busy. It took me a long time to chase down all those debts. I was working. How about you?”

He was lying there. Neri knew it. Mickey’s brain lay behind his zip. Always had done. The kid was up to something, maybe some new private business on the side. Neri could see it in his face. “So what happened to your phone? We seem to have a lot of phone problems in this family.”

Mickey shrugged. He looked a little odd. There was sweat on his brow. His eyes rolled when he spoke. “Gone wrong. I’m getting it fixed.”

“Do that,” Neri snarled. “I got enough on my plate without having to worry about you two.”

The old man wondered how to phrase this. How much to tell them. Adele deserved to know for her own sake. Mickey probably thought it was owed him.

“We need to be careful,” he said. “Maybe, just maybe, there’s trouble.”

“From who? The Sicilians?” she asked immediately, and Neri wondered why the question came from her, not Mickey.