David Hewson - The Villa of Mysteries

It was morning. A warm spring morning, just after seven. The city was already alive beyond the window, cars and people, sounds so familiar, so normal that it took her a moment to remember this was no ordinary day.

She’d called in help, from the carabinieri and the health department, from anywhere she could think of, old, retired colleagues, med students looking for some experience. For the moment it had been a question of coping rather than discovering, filing material as she thought of it. Then, sometime after three, she’d placed her head on the desk and fallen fast asleep. Silvio Di Capua had had similar ideas. He was still curled up in a crumpled, foetal heap on the floor in the corner of the morgue. A couple of admin people, only one of whom she recognized, were busy with paperwork. A bunch of medic types were working at the tables: the little accountant had just reached his place in the queue. Barbara Martelli’s father was next.

“Any more signed up for the ride?” she asked the admin men.

“No.”

“Thank God for that.” She wasn’t sure she could cope with another damned corpse. She wasn’t sure she could cope with the ones she’d got. Her nose felt as if someone had jammed a couple of wads of leaky cotton wool up each nostril. Her throat was like sandpaper. Sweat soaked her hair. Teresa Lupo looked a mess. She knew it and she didn’t care.

Then a figure came through the door, Gianni Peroni, so fresh and alert it was unnatural.

He walked over and peered into her eyes, curious, a little judgemental perhaps.

“What drugs are you on that make you so bright and chirpy?” she asked. “And do you have any for me?”

“Let me buy you a coffee. Outside this place. By the way, have you seen Nic?”

“No…” The question puzzled her. She’d almost forgotten she belonged to a world beyond those shining tables.

“Come,” he said, and took her weary arm then led her down the corridor, out into the waking morning.

It was the beginning of a beautiful day. She could even hear birdsong. Or perhaps, she thought, her mind had some preternatural acuity after the recent shocks. Her head didn’t feel right. It hadn’t for a while. Something was different after the sleep, though. She felt exhausted, drained, physically and mentally. But there was a measure of control inside this state too, and that was welcome.

Peroni led her to the café around the corner, ordered two big black coffees, stirred some sugar sludge from the glass on the counter into his cup, then did the same for hers.

“When you work vice,” he said, “you come to know about getting through the night. You get to like it after a while. The world’s more honest then somehow. People don’t have to look you in the face when they’re lying. You get to know about the value of coffee too. Here…”

He held up his cup and, instinctively, she clipped it with hers.

“What do you want?” she asked.

“Tidings of joy. Information. Enlightenment. For one thing, I’d like to know who Professor Randolph Kirk phoned to start all this crap.”

“Nic asked me that too,” she said. “Tell you what. I’ll ask old Randolph when I get back.”

“You do that. Any further gems for me?”

“Stand in the queue. It’s a long one. How’s Falcone doing? How’s that woman of his?”

He made a tilting motion with his hand. “She’s still in intensive. She’ll pull through. That woman’s made of stone. As for Leo, I dunno. He’s not looking lovelorn anymore. Maybe that pisses him off too. Who cares? We got work to do. Big work, Teresa, maybe bigger than even we can handle. We need to get somewhere fast. So you see why I’m here? We need all the help we can get.”

She found herself thinking seriously about Gianni Peroni for the first time. He wasn’t the arrogant, bent vice creep she’d first thought. Underneath that curiously ugly exterior he possessed some stiff, unbending spine of integrity that made his disgrace all the more poignant, all the less understandable. Falcone and Nic Costa were lucky to have him around, although she wondered how much the older man appreciated that.

“When are you going back to your old job?”

Peroni winked. It was a comic gesture. She almost found the energy to laugh. “Between you and me? As soon as this shit is over. I bumped into my old boss in the corridor during the night. They drafted him in too. Nice guy. Understanding guy. He had some warm words for old Gianni. Thank Christ. This detective stuff is not my scene. It brings you into contact with the wrong sort of people.”

She waited a moment to make sure she understood that last statement correctly. “And vice doesn’t?”

“In vice you just meet people who want to mess with your body. These guys are forever hanging around those who just can’t wait to mess with your head.” She didn’t say anything. “But then I think you know that already.”

“Possibly,” she conceded. “So tell me what you want me to do.”

“Me?” Peroni replied. “Hell, I don’t know. None of us has a clue where to begin here. We haven’t had a gang war in Rome in living memory. If that’s what it is—”

“What else could it be?”

“Search me. But if it is a gang war it’s a pretty one-sided affair, don’t you think? Somehow from behind his iron gates, with no troops whatsoever except a few golf buddies, the American whacks Neri’s accountant and lays out all those documents that mean Neri has to take to his heels. At least I guess that’s how he feels. Then the fat man goes ballistic and puts a little leaving present outside his own house for us.”

She knew what he meant. “It’s a funny kind of war.”

“Sort of unbalanced, don’t you think? And Wallis. He’s just sitting there in that big house of his, twiddling his thumbs, looking as if butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth. The DIA’s bugging his phones. Bugging him direct too, I suspect, because they just love playing with those toys of theirs. He’s not retaliating. He’s not doing a damn thing as far as we can work out.”

Teresa sat up straight. She could talk cop again, and she liked that. She smoothed down the crumpled front of her blue shirt, wondered if it wasn’t time to lose a little weight from the old frame. She was big-boned. That was what her mamma always said. But she could get fit if she wanted. She could meet these men at their own game. “What about Barbara Martelli’s old man? You’re telling me Wallis didn’t do that?”

“Now there,” he said with a sudden assurance, “we do know something. Wallis had nothing to do with it. Not unless he’s running Neri’s family for him. We got a good ID from a man who was seen leaving the building. The guy saw someone go in before Martelli got shot. It was Neri’s own son did that one. Dumb bastard left prints too. Makes sense. I guess Neri thought Martelli might tell us what was really going on in that fuck club of theirs. So he sent his boy round. Still doesn’t add up to a war. Not in my book.”

“Unless it’s over already,” she suggested. “The American’s thrown in the towel.”

Peroni didn’t look convinced. “Maybe. A part of me hopes that’s so. The trouble is, I can’t help thinking that if that is the case we’ll never get to the bottom of anything. We never get to understand why poor Barbara whacked the professor and then drove into that big hole chasing you.”

This repetitive refrain was beginning to piss her off. “Poor Barbara… Why’s she always ”poor Barbara“?”

He seemed surprised by the question. “Because she’s dead, Teresa. And whatever happened, whatever she tried to do to you, it wasn’t her . It was something else. Something that affected her. Surely you can see that?”

She could, but she didn’t want to face it just then. She’d come close to the edge herself at times. There was craziness in the air.