David Hewson: The Villa of Mysteries

He got up and went for the spade, picked it up, felt the weight of the thing in his hands then stared avidly at the queer brown form half buried in the peat.

Lianne looked at him, a cold tangle of dread beginning to form in her stomach.

“Bobby?” she asked, half pleading. “ Bobby ?”

NIC COSTA DROVE the unmarked police Fiat east along the city side of the main riverside drag. Gianni Peroni, the partner assigned to him that morning, was in the passenger seat filling his face with a panino leaking roast pork at the edges. He was a big, muscular man approaching fifty, with an unforgettable face. Somewhere along the line—and Costa just knew he was going to have to ask before long—Peroni’s features had walked into a wall or something. His nose was crushed worse than any Costa had seen on a rugby player. His forehead sank low over a couple of bright, smart piggy eyes. A vicious scar ran diagonally across his right cheek. Just to complete the picture Peroni cut his grey hair as short as possible, a crew crop, like a US marine. In a neat dark suit and a crisp white shirt and tie, he looked like a thug dressed up for a wedding. It was station lore that the man had never once raised a fist to a customer in his career. He didn’t need to, Costa thought. People took one look at him, gulped and came clean. It was one reason why Peroni was known far and wide as one of the most popular and respected inspectors in the force, the last man Nic Costa expected to be sharing his car with as an equal.

“I don’t know how they dare call this porchetta ?” Peroni grumbled. “Where I come from… it’s this little town near Siena. All farmers and stuff, too ordinary to get the tourists. Now there they do porchetta , every damn weekend. My uncle Freddo was a farmer. He showed me how. You’d kill the pig, you’d bone it. You’d take out the liver and soak it in grappa and stuff. Then you’d stay up all night roasting the thing. Freddo used to say that was the only night of the week he slept with a pig that didn’t snore.”

Peroni watched him, waiting for a reaction. “OK. Maybe you had to meet his missus to understand that one. Anyway that was porchetta . All hot and fresh and lots of crackling too. This shit’s been sitting in the fridge for days. Want some?”

Costa eyed the pale dry meat. “Not while I’m driving, thanks. Anyway, I don’t eat meat.”

Peroni shrugged then wound down the window and ejected the greasy paper out into the rising temperature of a Roman spring morning. “Oh yeah, I forgot. Your loss.”

Costa took his eyes off the busy riverside road for a second and looked at Peroni. “That’s littering. You don’t do it from my car.”

“You mean, ”That’s littering, sir .“ ”

“No,” Costa insisted. “I mean what I said. You’re just another cop. You heard Falcone.”

Peroni’s oddly stiff face suddenly became animated. “Equal rank, equal rank. How can Leo do this to me? Jesus, the stuff he’s got away with and no one busts his ass. Leo and I are meant to be buddies, for God’s sake. What does friendship mean in this world?”

Costa had made up his mind the moment he knew Peroni was his new partner. He wasn’t taking any crap. He wasn’t behaving like a subordinate. Maybe that was why Falcone fixed this in the first place. It was a lesson, perhaps a kind of punishment, for both of them.

Gianni Peroni’s crime was now well known throughout the Questura, told and retold with a certain awe, a fable about how even the brightest and the best could fall from grace, and for such small temptations too. For years he’d worked his way up through the vice squad, with never a taint of corruption to his name. As inspector he’d busted three of the biggest hooker rings in the city and managed to stem the infiltration of the prostitute trade by the vicious Albanian crooks who’d started to muscle in on territories elsewhere. He never went out of his way to make friends. He never hid the fact that, at heart, he remained a working-class farm boy from Tuscany who didn’t feel comfortable mixing with the upper strata of the force. All the same, Peroni’s name had been marked out for big things. If he didn’t look so weird and scary maybe they’d have happened by now too. Then he blew everything, one night some weeks before, an occasion that rapidly made its way into the hands of a gleeful press.

It was meant to be a sting operation organized by the Direzione Investigativa Anti-Mafia, the civilian force outside police control specifically aimed at halting mob activity. The DIA had set up a fake brothel in Testaccio, manned by real hookers brought in from Bologna. In three weeks it had run up enough clientele to attract the attention of the big-time pimps who would, the DIA knew, soon be round asking for either a cut or the heads of the men creaming off the profits.

Three heavies did turn up one Thursday night. When the DIA pounced they took in the brothel’s customers, just out of interest, and went through their wallets before handing them on to the police as a free gift. Gianni Peroni had the misfortune to be in the room of a blonde Czech girl when they walked through the door. No amount of talking on his part was able to extricate him from the mess. Word got back to the Questura. Peroni was first suspended then sent crashing back to earth as a lowly plainclothes detective. And he was supposed to feel lucky. Had it been anyone else, an entire career would have disappeared down the drain.

Demotion and the loss of salary were the least of Peroni’s concerns if Questura gossip was anything to go by. He wasn’t just admired for being a great cop. He was renowned throughout the building as a family man. His wife and his two teenage kids, one boy, one girl, were well known. Men and women on his squad dined regularly at the Peroni household. When they had problems, Peroni acted like a proxy father, offering advice, trying to keep them on track.

All that had been shattered on a chill January evening. Peroni didn’t face prosecution. He’d broken no law. He’d just lost everything. His wife had gone back to Siena with both kids, demanding a swift divorce, shouting his betrayal from the rooftops. In a matter of weeks he’d gone from being an important cop, with a loving family, to a single, middle-aged man, alone, uncertain of his future career. And now Leo Falcone had put him in a car with Nic Costa, whose own position in the police appeared equally uncertain and directionless. Costa had no clear idea how to handle this. But then, he guessed, neither did Gianni Peroni.

The two small Roman temples that sat beside the Piazza della Bocca della Verità were just beyond the window, a couple of perfect, circular shapes from a different, Arcadian world. It was a pleasant day with enough warmth in it to indicate spring was on the way. Nic Costa wished he could sit next to them for a while, thinking.

Peroni turned to stare at him. “Shall we have the clearing of the air conversation now?”

Costa looked into that intense, battered face and wondered how long it would take him to get used to sharing a car with someone who looked like a cartoon villain. “If you want.”

“Let me be candid. It’s not so long since you went loony tunes. You did the drink thing too. Me, I just got caught with my pants down with a Czech hooker. For that I have to be the rehab warder. The way I see it is that if I can keep you straight for a month or so, and who knows maybe along the way we deal with a few criminals, I can get myself back in Leo’s good books. I can start climbing the ladder to what I do best, which is running a team, not sitting in some stinking squad car playing nursemaid to junior and keeping him away from the bottle. This is important to me, kid. I’ll do my best to keep Leo happy. But you have to help me. The sooner you do, the sooner you have me out of your hair and get someone normal. Understand?”