David Hewson - The Villa of Mysteries

“Whose?” Peroni demanded.

“Man said it came from some woman called Miranda Julius. She’d ordered it collected overnight. Little guy was petrified. Can’t say I blame him. So why am I expected to act the bagman for this woman’s ransom money?”

Peroni glanced at Leo Falcone, checking he wasn’t going too far. “The word is Emilio Neri and his boy have fallen out big time. Over what exactly we don’t know. This Julius girl, maybe. That’s not Emilio’s style. It seems pretty clear Mickey’s the one who snatched her in the first place. Now he’s got our guy too. And the mother. He could use the money. Maybe he wants to give up the life and open a café or something.”

Wallis glared at both of them. “I’m sorry to hear that. Really. But I’m still asking the same question. What the hell has it got to do with me?”

“You do remember Mickey?” Falcone asked.

Wallis’s dark eyes glittered at them. “OK. Yeah. I remember him. He was a jerk. Just like his father. That still doesn’t explain why he should be putting out a call for me to run errands. I’m not dumb. This little punk wants my hide or something.”

“Your hide?” Peroni asked. “Mr. Wallis. Please. You’re big time. This is Mickey Neri we’re talking about here. You don’t honestly believe he’s got the nerve to take on the likes of you, do you?”

Peroni watched the American’s face. Pride was such a powerful emotion.

“I don’t deal with punks like this,” Wallis said in the end.

“So why are you here?” Falcone wondered.

“Just being a good citizen, that’s all. You get one of your guys to take this stuff, go run this errand.”

“Won’t work,” Peroni said. “You heard the man. It’s you or nothing.”

“You want my help?” There was a touch of disdain in his expression. “These women have nothing to do with me. This cop’s your problem. You hear what I’m saying? This is not my business .”

Falcone held up his hands. “I agree. Besides, we have a policy. We don’t give in to ransom demands. Even ones as unusual as this.”

Wallis pulled his coat around him, ready to go. “Then there’s nothing else to discuss. You keep the camera. You keep the money.” But he didn’t move. Falcone glanced at Peroni and wondered: were they thinking the same thing? Vergil Wallis wanted to do this run. He liked the idea of giving the cops information, probably because Mickey Neri had virtually signed a confession with that stupid piece of video. But something inside Wallis was nagging him to go through with this idea.

Peroni pushed a piece of paper across the table. “Mickey Neri—”

“Fuck Mickey Neri,” Wallis interjected.

He put a hand lightly on Vergil Wallis’s shoulder and Gianni Peroni was amazed to discover something about himself. He found a certain degree of pleasure in pushing this man around a little. He could, if he tried, start to enjoy it.

“Vergil, Vergil,” he said mildly. “Calm down now. This is your decision, no one else’s.”

Wallis picked up the paper and stared at it, his eye drawn to the fancy stamp of the state lab letterhead sprawled across the top.

“We just want you to be informed. That’s all.”

THEY SAT on the bed, Miranda Julius next to him, shivering in his arms, wearing little more than a short tee-shirt, huddled under the old, dull coverlet, staring into his face.

“Where is he?” Costa asked.

“I don’t know. My door’s locked, like yours. I haven’t heard anyone there most of the night.”

She held his wrist, turned it and looked at the watch. It was now just after eight. “He said he’d be back for me around nine thirty.”

“To do what?”

She shook her head. “I don’t know anymore.”

Costa thought about the voice he’d heard the night before. “It was the man you saw in the picture? Mickey Neri?”

She nodded. “He phoned me last night, Nic. Said he wanted to talk. Said I had to dye my hair like this so that he’d know me. Not that that makes any sense, of course.” Her face went down, close to his chest. “I just wasn’t thinking.”

He looked at the walls again and knew: this was the place, the scene of the photographs, one room of several in Randolph Kirk’s seedy subterranean pleasure palace, each with a bed, each with a history. And in one Eleanor Jamieson had surely died.

She put a hand to his head. “Are you all right? I heard him hit you. It sounded horrible.”

“I’m fine,” he said, and took her hands, looked hard into her frightened eyes. “Miranda. We need to work out how to get out of here. I don’t know what this guy’s up to but it isn’t good.”

There were so many threads of possibilities running inside his head. He didn’t know which was true, which imagination. Neri on the run, fleeing the evidence left at his accountant’s. The bomb outside the old hood’s house. How in spite of that he’d pressed Peroni so hard to chase the sighting of Suzi even though his colleagues lay stricken and wounded on the ground around him. Was this a kind of treachery? It seemed the right decision at the time. Just now, though, his head refused to clear sufficiently to understand what had happened afterwards.

She took his hands and looked earnestly into his face. “Listen to me, Nic. He’s desperate somehow. He just wants money.”

“How much?” It wasn’t the question he wanted to ask.

“Pretty much everything I have. Not that it matters.” She sighed and looked down at the bed. “I got the impression that perhaps his plans had changed. To be honest with you I don’t care. Suzi’s alive. I saw her. She was here before he threw me into this dump. I just want her free. I’d give everything I’ve got for that.”

He tried to remember now: perhaps there were two female voices in the darkness last night, before he was struck down.

“Where is she now?”

“I don’t know.” She shrugged. “This place seems to be full of rooms like this. Perhaps he just likes using them. Perhaps—”

Her face darkened and he knew what she was thinking.

“Perhaps it’s not just about the money after all,” she continued. “I don’t care so long as I have her back. I had to make some calls back home to organize the money. Maybe he’s keeping her somewhere just to make sure I haven’t pulled any tricks. She’s collateral. If she’s lucky. I’m sorry, Nic. I know I should have called. But—”

Her eyes bored into him, blue, unrepentant. “I knew what you’d do. You’d turn this into a cop thing. I couldn’t take that risk. And it’s just money.”

Costa took the phone out of his jacket and looked at the screen again. It was still dead. He stared around the room trying to think of some way to escape.

“We can’t get out, Nic,” she whispered. “I tried. We’re here till he comes back. What kind of place is this?”

Her mouth was so close to his neck he could feel her breath, damp, hot, alive. She was shivering against him.

“A kind of temple, maybe?”

“To what?”

He knew that instinctively. They both did. “To losing it.”

In spite of everything she was calm now in some way he couldn’t quite comprehend. Perhaps it was simply knowing that Suzi was alive.

She shivered violently. His arms went round her. Miranda Julius reached down and took out a small silver pill case from her bag then shook two tiny tablets, sugar-coated and red, into her palm.

“I need these,” she said, shaking. Her eyes closed, her white, perfect neck went back. Costa couldn’t stop looking at her, feeling her pain and her need, pinioned to the bed by her agonised beauty.

It happened swiftly. She moved fully into his arms. Her slender hand gripped the hair at the nape of his neck. Her mouth closed on his, soft, wet and enticing. He responded. Their lips joined. Her tongue ran beyond his teeth, her hands beginning to tear at his shirt, firing something red and senseless in his imagination.