David Hewson - The Villa of Mysteries

Vercillo had given Sonia, the secretary, a day off to go out and see her sick mamma in Orvieto. She’d turned thirty now. She wasn’t as much fun as she used to be. Soon he’d have to find a reason to fire her, get someone younger, someone more interesting, to take her place. He hated the thought. Vercillo always tried to steer away from confrontation. It was getting harder and harder these days. Neri’s business empire grew and grew, sometimes into areas that gave Vercillo room for concern. When he was a bookish teenager in Rome in the Sixties, during the brief period of economic happiness they called “Il Boom,” Vercillo expected the world to improve on a constant, incremental basis, becoming happier, more prosperous, more peaceful year by year. Instead, the opposite happened. The Red Brigade came, then went, then came back again. There were bombs everywhere, and madness. He’d lost a cousin in Israel to a suicide attack. Vercillo scarcely thought of himself as a Jew these days but the idea that someone could die like that, just walking down the street, going into the wrong café, appalled him. There was a need for more order in people’s lives. And some politeness too. Instead, all you got was this constant stream of bodies, foreigners pushing and shoving to get in front of everyone else. It had all gone wrong somewhere over the past forty years and, for the life of him, he couldn’t understand how or when.

It was the tourists that got to him most. The English, drunk for every football game. The Japanese, constantly taking pictures, blundering into you on the street, not knowing a word of Italian. And the Americans, who thought they could do any damn thing they liked so long as they had a few dollars in their pocket. Rome would be better off without the lot of them. They intruded upon the native consciousness. They marred the place. Today especially. There was some kind of street theatre festival going on around the Colosseum down the road. They were setting up when he came to work. Commedia dell’Arte characters climbing into costumes. Africans. Orientals. And all the usual fraudsters pretending to be gladiators, trying to screw some cash out of the tourists for pictures.

Beniamino Vercillo looked up from the desk in his dark little pit feeling grumpy, tasting the sour bile of growing disappointment in his mouth, then wondered how much his thoughts were random, how much the product of what he was half seeing out of the corner of his eye.

In front of him, framed in the open doorway, was a figure from some stupid dream. It stood there like a crazy god wearing some kind of theatrical gown: a long red jacket, cheap brown sacking trousers. And a mask, one straight out of a nightmare, all crazy writhing hair, with a black gaping mouth, fixed in a lunatic grin.

The figure took one step forward, theatrically, like an actor making a point. He had to be from one of the street troupes Vercillo saw earlier.

“I don’t give to charity,” the little accountant declared firmly.

The figure moved closer with two more of those stupid, histrionic strides. Vercillo’s head started to work, remembering something from long ago.

“What is this shit?” Vercillo mumbled automatically. “What do you want?”

“Neri,” the crazy god said in a calm, clear voice that floated out from behind the mask.

Vercillo shivered, wondering if this was all some hallucination. “Who?”

The creature opened its jacket, its right hand reached down towards a leather scabbard on its belt. Vercillo watched aghast as it withdrew a short, fat sword that gleamed in the fluorescent lights.

The shining weapon rose, dashed through the air then dug deep into the desk in front of him, severing the phone cord, cutting straight through the sheaf of letters that sat in front of Vercillo.

“Books,” the crazy god said.

“No books here, no books here—”

He was quiet. The point of the blade was at his throat, pricking into his dewlap.

The crazy god shook his head. The blade pressed harder. Vercillo felt a sharp stab of pain, then a line of blood began to trickle down his neck.

“He’ll kill me,” he murmured.

“ He’ll kill you?” It was impossible to guess what kind of face lay behind the mask. A determined one. Vercillo didn’t doubt that.

He threw up his hands and pointed to the edge of the desk. The sword went down a fraction. Vercillo hooked a finger into the drawer handle and gently pulled. With the slicing edge never more than a couple of centimetres from his throat, he gingerly drew out a set of keys.

“I need to get up,” he said, his voice cracking a little with the strain.

The mask nodded.

Beniamino Vercillo walked towards the wall of the office furthest away from the street. His hands trembling, the accountant turned the key in the security door of the safe then fumbled his way through the numbers on the lock. After a couple of attempts it swung open. He reached inside and withdrew something. The two of them returned to the table. Vercillo opened the large cardboard document box and stood back.

The crazy god’s leather fingers dipped into the file and took out the pile of papers there. He threw them on the desk, not saying a word, anger leaking out invisibly from behind the static grin. These were just numbers. Numbers and numbers. Unintelligible.

Vercillo quivered, frightened, and wished to God he’d taken an office on the ground floor, with a window out onto the street. Not this stupid, cramped cave where anything could go on unseen by the busy world outside.

“Code,” the god said simply, pointing at the lines of letters on the pages in front of them.

He tried to think straight. He tried to imagine the consequences. It was impossible. There was only one consequence which mattered.

“If I tell you—?”

The lunatic head stared at him, no emotion in its features, nothing human there at all.

“If I tell you… I can go?”

He could run. Vercillo had some private money in places no one could ever find. He could go somewhere Neri’s wrath would never find him. Australia maybe. Or Thailand, where the girls were young, and no one asked any questions. He looked around the drab little office, thought of his drab old clothes. Maybe this was fate doing him a favour. All his life he’d spent in the service of the fat hood, pretending to be something he wasn’t. Lying, cheating, telling himself it was OK all along because, whatever Neri did to earn his money, none of the blood sat on his own fingers. He’d lied to himself there. Neri touched him. Always. It was one reason he started messing with girls. Neri offered him the chance, introduced him to that world. It was one way of keeping him in line.

The idea of retirement, of putting distance between him and this bleak existence built on nothing more than numbers, was suddenly appealing.

Besides, a stray thought wondered, what’s the alternative? You’re an accountant. Not a foot soldier.

“You can go,” the crazy god said, and again Vercillo found himself trying to place the accent, trying to imagine the human face behind it: young, undoubtedly, but not rough, not like Neri’s henchmen.

Vercillo picked up the phone. The crazy god briefly raised the sword, forgetting, it seemed to Vercillo, that he’d already cut the cord. The omission cheered the little accountant. There was something human behind the mask after all.

“It’s OK,” Vercillo explained. “This is it. Watch.”

He set a page—a stream of unintelligible letters—next to the phone. “It’s simple. The person it refers to is identified by his phone number. Everything that comes after is a number too. What’s owed. What the interest rate is. What’s been paid.”

It felt stupidly exhilarating. In twenty-five years he’d never had this conversation with anyone.