David Hewson - The Villa of Mysteries

He swallowed noisily and said nothing.

“Gimme.”

He passed it over. She scanned the numbers that came with the report Monkboy had purloined from the Questura that same morning, counting off the names.

“Neri’s home. Neri’s mobile. Mickey’s mobile. That office they keep down near the station, Barbara Martelli… shit .”

“Probably his aromatherapist.”

“Shut up!”

“Teresa! Give it to the cops. They just type it into their computer and up pops a name.”

“You are so naÏve,” she hissed. “So very, very naÏve.”

Then her eyes fell on the pad of paper next to his list. Her own notes from the past couple of days, starting from the morning, just forty-eight hours before, when she’d planned to unveil to the world Rome’s newest archaeological asset, a two-millennia-old bog body.

“Different lifetime,” she whispered. “Different—”

She stared at the paper, unable to believe what she saw.

“Teresa?”

There was no mistake. It was impossible but it had to be true, and what it meant for everything was quite beyond her. She needed to see Falcone immediately, needed to pass the whole damn thing straight over to him, retire to a quiet corner bar somewhere and drown her wildest thoughts in drink.

“Where’s the darling inspector?” she asked. “I am filled with an urgent desire to speak with him.”

“Went out fifteen minutes ago, mob-handed and ready for action. Got tons of people with him. Busy man.”

“Hmm.” Her mind was racing. Nic Costa was out there somewhere, wrapped up deep in all this shit. There was no time for niceties. “Do you still come to work on that little motorbike, Silvio?”

“Sure but what the fu—” His pale cheeks flared with a sudden rush of blood. “ Oh no, no, no, no, no …”

She gripped him by the collar of his white medical jacket and jerked so hard that his face was just a couple of inches away from hers.

“Gimme the keys now. I’ve got to talk to Falcone.”

He pulled himself back, folded his podgy arms to give himself a little dignity and displayed as much hurt as his featureless face could manage. “You want to take my motorbike and catch up with Falcone to talk to him? That’s it, isn’t it?”

“Yes, Silvio,” she said calmly. “That’s it.”

“OK,” he said very slowly. “Here’s the deal. Do you know what this is?”

She looked at what he was holding and realized he had a point.

“This,” said Silvio Di Capua, “is what we earthlings call a phone.”

THE TUNNEL RAN beneath the Quirinale Palace, cut straight through rock, four hundred metres, built originally for tram cars, now choked by traffic trying to shortcut the hill above. Big tourist coaches were double-parked on the Piazza di Spagna side to dump their contents for the short walk to the Trevi Fountain. Construction lorries working on the endless repairs in the Via Nazionale habitually blocked the opposite end. It was, in theory, the easiest way from the Questura to most points east. Falcone had dictated this was the route to take, Peroni with Wallis in front, the cover cars following some discreet distance behind.

Peroni didn’t feel at home. He slunk behind the wheel wishing someone else had picked the short straw. This was so far from vice, so distant from the world he knew, he felt like an interloper, just waiting to make some stupid mistake.

They drove straight into the tunnel and hit the jam a third from the end. He banged on the wheel then looked in the mirror. Falcone and the back-up cars were nowhere to be seen. Maybe they’d made it in before the traffic fouled up. Maybe not.

Wallis, mute and expressionless in the passenger seat, took the phone out of his pocket and stared at the little screen. “Not much use in here.” He tapped the mike wired behind the lapel of his leather coat. “This isn’t either.”

Peroni eyed the man in the adjoining seat and wished he could shake off the idea that something somewhere was deeply wrong. “So, Vergil,” he said amicably. “Here’s an opportunity for the both of us. Get this off your chest, man. You can tell me what’s really going down here and nobody but the two of us gets to know.”

Wallis peered at him imperiously. “You’re a very suspicious human being. I’m doing you a big favour. A measure of trust wouldn’t go amiss.”

Peroni shot him a filthy look. “Trust. Excuse me, Mr . Wallis, but I don’t buy this retirement story. I didn’t when that poor bitch Rachele D’Amato spun it for me. I didn’t when I met you. Leopards don’t change their spots. Crooks don’t do the cops favours. Come on. I got a friend involved in this. Level with me.”

Wallis took a deep breath and looked up at the grimy roof of the tunnel. The air in the car was disgusting, just a thin stream of oxygen fighting to get through the clouds of carbon monoxide getting pumped out by the jam around them.

“You know what’s up there?”

“Changing the subject? Understandable I guess. Yeah. Mr. President in his pretty palace. Don’t you just love him? I used to work guard duty at the Quirinale when I wore short pants.”

Wallis gave him a condescending glance. “Interesting. I meant historically.”

“Oh. Excuse me. I’m Italian. What the hell would I know about history?”

“That’s where the Sabines lived. You remember the story? It had rape in it. Gives the thing some modern currency.”

Peroni did remember that story vaguely. It was important. Romulus or Remus, one or the other, stole some women and had to get their act together to clean up afterwards. And out of that mess—out of rape and murder—came Rome. “They lived up there? I thought they came from miles away. I thought they were like foreigners or something.”

“Up there,” Wallis replied, pointing again. “But that’s an interesting reaction, you know. Maybe we like to deal with bad memories that way. By thinking that the only people who got affected were from someplace else, a long way away. It makes everything so much easier.”

“You can say that again.” There was a gap in the traffic out in the daylight ahead. They’d be gone soon. “You know, I kind of admire you for knowing so much about history and stuff. When you grow up on top of it you tend not to notice things. I still don’t understand why, though.”

“Why?” Vergil Wallis shook his head and actually laughed. It was a pleasant sound. It even made Gianni Peroni feel a little less jumpy. “Because it’s Rome. It’s where we all came from, in a way. It’s about how good things can be. And how bad if we choose to make them that way.”

“Really?” Peroni got ready to kick the car into gear.

“Really.”

“You know,” Wallis said in that low, calm drawl of his. “I enjoy talking to you. I think that, in different circumstances, we could maybe have a mutually enlightening conversation.”

“Point taken, point taken.” The idiot up ahead was slow to get moving. Peroni fell angrily on the horn. “All the same, Vergil. I still think you’re a lying sonofabitch.”

“That’s your privilege. Tell me. Whatever happens now, you’ve got Neri and the kid anyway, haven’t you? You know the old man planted that bomb. Now I gave you that camera, you got Mickey too. They’re finished whatever.”

“True.” Peroni found his attention split. Between the gap opening up in the traffic ahead and the sudden loop in Wallis’s conversation.

“So what if the two of us cut a deal? You just give me a spare thirty minutes dealing with this asshole in my own way. After that I call and you get to come in and do what you want.”

Peroni looked at him and knew at that moment he wasn’t driving this black hood anywhere except back to meet Falcone. Something was getting played here he didn’t understand.