David Hewson - The Villa of Mysteries

He put a hand on Falcone’s arm. “Leo,” he gasped, snatching for breath. “This is crazy. We could bring the whole thing down on her.”

The tall inspector continued to claw at the rubble and brick. Peroni grabbed him roughly by the shoulder. “ Leo !”

Falcone stopped. He looked lost just then. Peroni had never seen him this way. It was unnerving. They needed Falcone to keep his cool. The shaky department was beginning to pivot around him. There was no one else. “The rescue people are here. They know what they’re doing. This is their job. Let’s stick to ours, huh?”

Vehicles were arriving all around, fire trucks with shifting gear, their officers moving quietly among the carnage of the blast, trying to assess how best to proceed, paramedics in vivid yellow jackets, wondering where to start.

“She’s breathing,” Falcone murmured. “I can see it—”

Rachele D’Amato was alive, just. Peroni nodded at a bunch of paramedics placing black plastic sheets over several unmistakable forms. “She’s lucky. We got at least three dead already.”

Peroni knew it could have been even worse. If the riot men around the corner had been standing outside their van instead of in it. If the media animals had bothered to stick around to see what this was really about. It was too much for his head to handle right then. This was premeditated slaughter on a scale the city had never known, a calculated act of murder.

Two firemen elbowed past, took a good look at Rachele D’Amato, then yelled at Falcone and Peroni to get out of the way.

“We were trying to help,” Peroni shouted back.

“Nice of you,” the lead fireman retorted, dragging some gear behind them, calling for a back-up team to bring some lifting equipment. “Now give us some room.”

Falcone closed his eyes for a moment, trying to quell the fury. He gripped the man by the shoulder.

“I’m the officer in charge here—” he began to say. Something in the man’s eyes made him stop.

“I don’t care who the hell you are,” the fireman bellowed back. “We’re here to get these people out, mister. If you stand in my way God help you.”

“OK, OK,” Peroni said softly, putting a hand on Falcone, gently guiding him away.

The firemen weren’t even listening. The two of them were on the ground, carefully scraping rubble away from her body, yelling for more gear and paramedics.

Falcone watched them, his face a picture of misery. “Gianni? You got any cigarettes? I was trying to give it up.”

Peroni brushed some of the dust off his sleeves, then did the same for Falcone. The two men were filthy and they’d hardly even noticed. “When it comes to cigarettes, I’m always prepared. Walk with me. I’m flattered, by the way, to hear you using my first name again. I thought, perhaps, we’d never get back to that.”

Falcone followed him to the far side of the road, putting just enough distance between them and the wreck of Neri’s house to be out of the immediate stench of smoke and dust. Three more ambulances tore down the cobblestones and screeched to a halt next to the emergency rescue unit. New teams of paramedics burst out of their brightly lit interiors and started to work the scene. A short line of black cars arrived behind them. Both Falcone and Peroni knew what that meant. The big guys were coming in to pass judgement: men from the security service, the bureaucrats, the hierarchy of the DIA. This was no longer a simple crime investigation. It bordered on terrorism, and that changed the name of the game.

Peroni used his sleeve to wipe some debris off the bonnet of a Renault Saloon and they sat down. He lit a cigarette and passed it over. Falcone’s slim, tanned hands were shaking. He took a couple of drags at the thing then cursed and threw it to the ground.

“You know how much those things cost?” Peroni asked. “I’m the only man in the Questura who buys them straight and honest. No black market stuff for this boy.”

“Yeah,” Falcone grunted. “You and your cock-eyed ideas about honesty. I don’t get it. You were the one man in vice I thought we could trust. Then you go and ruin it all over a woman. What for?”

Peroni cast a sideways glance at Falcone. He was a handsome man, in a hard, emotionless way. This inability to address the real seat of his fears—his apparent concern for Rachele D’Amato—was a rare weakness, one that made him briefly more human. “She was a beautiful woman, may I remind you. A hooker, true, but let’s not leave out all the salient facts. People make fools of themselves from time to time, Leo. There’s a crazy gene in all of us. You convince yourself otherwise. You say to yourself, nah, the job’s bigger than this. Or the marriage. Or the kids. You think: I can just push these thoughts back into the dark where they belong. Then one day, just when you’re least expecting it, the crazy gene wakes up and you know it’s pointless trying to fight. For a while anyway. Because fighting could be even worse. You’re just beating up on yourself. But I think you already know that.”

Falcone glanced back at the chaos across the road. “A bomb, a bomb. What the hell is Neri thinking?”

Peroni’s mind had been working along the same lines. “You think it has to be him? He had enemies. The American for one.”

Falcone stared dolefully at the firemen working to free Rachele D’Amato. “Why would any of them bomb an empty building? No one’s that stupid. Neri knew we were coming. The bastard left us this as a present and—”

Falcone was struggling to tie the ends together in his head. Peroni hated seeing him filled with doubt like this. “And it doesn’t make sense. This is so final. He can’t talk his way out of this one. He can’t pick up the phone and bribe some politician, some cop to look the other way.”

That was true, Peroni thought. This was the end of Neri’s career. There was no other possibility. Or, to be more precise, it was the act which Neri was using to announce the closure of his time in Rome. Something, the papers on the dead accountant’s desk, some threat they failed to understand, must have convinced him there could be no turning back. He had to flee, to seek anonymous sanctuary somewhere he hoped the Italian state could no longer reach him.

Peroni thought of the body, the brown, shining body in Teresa Lupo’s morgue. Everything led back to that first corpse. Every event that followed stemmed from its discovery, and still they had no idea why, no clue to explain the strange and deadly demons that flew out of the ground once that small patch of peat near Fiumicino was exposed to the light of day.

Falcone turned a sudden, sharp gaze on him, the one that said: don’t lie, don’t even think of it . “Tell me the truth. Do you think I’m losing it? Is this getting too much for me?”

“What?” Peroni stared at him, almost lost for words. “Since when did you get to be super-human? This is too much for all of us. This…” he waved a hand at the scene across the road, “… is the world gone mad. Not just that bastard Neri.”

There was a sound from the house. The lifting gear around Rachele D’Amato was being cranked into action. The firemen were shouting to each other. Timbers were moving. Walls were starting to shake. And there was more light now. The bright, unforgiving light of the TV cameras, back to see what they were supposed to witness all along.

Falcone stood up and shook the dirt and dust off himself, getting ready to go back. Peroni was with him instantly, a hand on his arm.

“Leo,” he said. “There’s nothing you can do. And whatever state that woman’s in, you can’t change it. Furthermore, if she does wake up, she’ll be livid to find you sitting by the bed like some dumbstruck husband.”