David Hewson - The Villa of Mysteries

Monkboy hovered over the body, watching her, waiting for a lead.

The voice got louder. It was her voice.

“Is anybody listening here?” she yelled, and even the forensic people dusting down the office furniture became still.

“I can’t do this anymore,” Teresa Lupo said again, more quietly. “He’s dead. That’s all there is to say. There’s a girl out there still breathing and here we are, like undertakers or something, staring at a corpse.”

She felt a hand on her arm. It was Costa.

“Don’t try that one,” she murmured. Her hands were shaking. Her head felt as if it might explode. She could hardly open the bag, hardly get her hands around the file Regina Morrison had given her, find the strength to take out the pictures. “I trained as a doctor. I learned how to distinguish the symptoms from the disease. This is irrelevant. This is a symptom, nothing else. This—”

She scattered several of the photos on the table, over the sheets of numbers, obliterating them. She made sure the most important one, Barbara and Eleanor before , was on the top.

“—This is the disease.”

Falcone, Costa, Peroni and Rachele D’Amato had to push their way through the men in bunny suits to get a good look. Someone swore softly in amazement. The girls looked even more beautiful now, Teresa thought. And it was so easy to imagine Suzi Julius just walking into the frame, shaking hands with them, not knowing they were both dead, sixteen years apart, but dead is dead, dead is a place where the years don’t matter.

“Where did you get these?” Falcone asked, furious.

“Randolph Kirk’s office. This morning.”

“What?” he roared.

“Don’t rupture something,” she said quietly. “You didn’t look there. You weren’t even interested.”

“I didn’t have the damn time!”

His long brown nose was sniffing at her. She thought of the drinks Regina Morrison had given her. The bastard never missed a thing.

“Jesus Christ, woman,” he snapped. “You’ve been drinking. This is the end. Because of you—”

He didn’t finish the sentence. He was too livid.

“Because of me what?” she yelled back. “What? Your beautiful traffic cop is dead? Is that what you think?” She stared at the men in the room. “Is that what you all think? May I remind you of one fact? Your beautiful traffic cop was a cold-blooded murderer. Maybe she did it for herself. Maybe she did it because someone told her to. But she killed someone. She’d have killed me too if I’d let her. I didn’t cause any of this. It was just there waiting to happen, and if it had been somebody else maybe there’d be two victims, more even, lying in the morgue right now, not one. Hell, maybe there are, maybe there have been more over the years. And we wouldn’t know. Because Barbara Martelli would still be riding that bike of hers, smiling sweetly all the time to fire up all your wet dreams, because none of you, not one, could possibly believe what she really was. Thanks to me you found out. Sorry—” She said this last very slowly, just to make sure the point went in. “I apologize. That’s the trouble with the truth. Sometimes it hurts.”

“You have damaged this investigation,” Falcone said wearily. “You have overstepped your position.”

“There’s a missing girl out there!”

“We know there’s a missing girl out there,” Falcone replied, and threw the four photos Peroni had given him onto the table to join the others. “We know she’s been abducted. We know, too, that somehow these things are all linked. This is a murder inquiry and an abduction inquiry and I will allot what precious resources I have in my power to try and ensure no one else gets killed.”

“Oh,” she said softly, staring at the pictures. “I’m sorry.” She was shaking her head. She looked utterly lost. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I’ve got the flu, I think. What a pathetic excuse.”

Costa took her arm again and this time she didn’t resist. “Go home,” he said. “You shouldn’t be working anyway. Not after what happened yesterday.”

“What happened yesterday is why I’m working. Don’t you understand?”

“Teresa,” Silvio Di Capua bleated. “We need you.”

“You heard the man,” she whispered, knowing the tears were standing in her eyes again, starting to roll, starting to be obvious to them all, like a sign saying, Look at Crazy Teresa, she really is crazy now . “I’m sorry, Silvio. I can’t do this… shit anymore.”

The place stank of blood and the sweat of men. She walked to the door, wanting to be outside, wanting to feel fresh air in her lungs, knowing it wasn’t there anyway, that all she’d inhale was the traffic smog of Rome, waiting to poison her from the inside out.

And she was thinking all the time: what was it the crazy god offered Barbara Martelli and Eleanor Jamieson really? Freedom from all this crap? A small dark private place where you were what you were and no one else looked, no one else judged, where duty and routine and the dead, dull round of daily life were all a million miles away because in this new place, just for a moment, you could persuade yourself you had a part of some god inside you too? Could that have been the gift? And if it was, could anyone in the world have turned it down?

EMILIO NERI REFUSED TO SKULK around like a criminal, hiding from everything, a fugitive for no good reason at all. But even without an unwelcome visit from the cops and the DIA he could read the signs, digest the intelligence coming in through the channels he’d created over the years. He had to face decisions, make choices, and for the first time in his life he found that difficult. This was a new, unprecedented situation. Until he made up his mind how to proceed he felt he had little choice but to hole up in the house, trying not to let Adele and Mickey’s endless bickering get on his nerves. It was time to stop pretending he could lead from the front, as he had twenty years before, when he moved from capo to boss. Now he had to act his age, directing his troops, being the general, keeping their trust. He was getting too old for the tough stuff. He needed others to do the work.

There were risks too. He wondered what they thought in the ranks. When he was with the men, he had them tight in his hand. Now he was in danger of seeming aloof, his grip less sure. Adele and Mickey didn’t help either. A man who couldn’t control his own family could hardly demand respect from the ranks. He’d asked Bruno Bucci to keep an ear open to listen for any whispered remarks that might be the first indication of revolt. These were hazardous times, and not just from the obvious direction. Whatever he said in private, he had to make sure the Sicilians remained happy. He had to convince the foot soldiers it was in their interests to keep their hats in the ring with him too. Money only went so far. He needed to cement their respect, to continue to be their boss.

Then Bucci came in with more news about Beniamino Vercillo. The cops were trying to keep things quiet, but Neri’s mob had good sources. They mentioned the oddest part of the case: that the killer had been wearing some kind of ancient theatrical costume. This was, it seemed to Neri, a message, surely. The situation was more serious than he had foreseen. For a while, he was dumbstruck, floundering in his own doubts with no one to turn to. He blamed himself. As soon as he’d known a war could be on the way—as soon as those reports of American hoods coming in through Fiumicino reached him—he should have acted. If conflict was inevitable, the advantage always lay with the party that struck first. The Americans understood that lesson instinctively. Instead, he’d hesitated, and now they’d punished him in the most brutal and unexpected of ways.