David Hewson - The Villa of Mysteries

A PART OF HIM is almost asleep, hiding behind closed eyes, listening to what she says. Another sees . The god is angry. The girl screams. Fists fly, nails tear. Through the dream he feels the pressure of their shrieking rebound off the damp and rocky veins that enclose them. A strong black arm pumps back and forth. She falls, blood pumping from her perfect lips.

He tears off the mask. A black face, rent by fury, demands obeisance, receives only scorn.

I’ll tell I’ll tell I’ll tell , the girl screeches, furious.

The man moves behind her, raises his arm. Silver flashes in the yellow light. Two eyes glitter, terrified, hidden in the shadows, watching, witnessing.

Then the reverie ends. He opens his eyes and walks towards the voices and the light.

NERI GLANCED towards the shadows, wondering if it was Adele skulking round there now, then nodded towards Mickey.

“So, Vergil. What are you waiting for? Are you going to do him?”

Mickey’s head fell down on his chest. He began to sob.

“And then what?” the American demanded. “You shoot me.”

“Nah. What for? You lost a daughter? I lose a son. You probably find this hard to believe but I never killed someone without a reason. Even those cops outside my house had it coming to them. You? Well, you got me in all manner of trouble with them, but you did me a favour too. You reminded me I was ready for retirement. A man should know when to walk off this stage. You did, didn’t you?”

Wallis made a lazy wave with the knife point and said nothing.

“Besides,” Neri continued, “if I just walk away from this mess and leave you sitting in the middle of it, you’re going to have so much explaining to do. Reading about all that from somewhere nice and warm and safe could be real amusing. I might just die laughing.”

“You might,” Wallis said, and allowed himself a smile.

“An eye for an eye then,” Neri said, returning the gesture. “Just as it should be. We agreed? All this nonsense ends here?”

“Yeah,” Wallis said. “It ends here.”

Neri looked at him approvingly. “That’s good. You don’t mind if I ask one more thing though? Just a tiny detail that bothers me.”

The big American had let go of the knife now. His hands were flat on the table, behind the pile of money, unseen.

“It does?”

“One of my cop friends told me the oddest thing. He said that when they found that poor kid she had a coin in her mouth. Some accident, I thought. Then he looks at me the way you look at me. As if I’m dumb or something. Seems this has some significance , Vergil. People used to put it there for a reason. You think Mickey knew that reason? I didn’t. We didn’t put it there when we got rid of the body out near the airport. See, we’re not educated .”

Neri picked up the gun in front of him and angled it halfway across the table. “Oh, but you are. I guess you’d know what that reason is. Kind of a nice reason, my cop friend told me. It says farewell, sorry maybe. That professor of yours would know too. But let’s face it. He was just some little pervert you picked up along the way to sort things out for you. He didn’t have the spunk to kill someone. Besides, why? If you’d gone in there, on the other hand… Maybe not taking no for an answer. Maybe finding out about Mickey’s little present. Or wondering how the hell you were going to square screwing her with her mother afterwards.”

Wallis’s black eyes burned across at him.

“One thing I do remember, Vergil, and it’s so clear it’s like yesterday.” Neri nodded at the mask at the head of the table. “You really liked wearing that stupid thing a lot. And when you wore it, you know something? I think you thought you really were some kind of god. One who was better than the rest of us. One who could do what he liked to just anybody and never feel the consequences. Which is why you came here really. You’re scared that little secret might work its way into the light of day, aren’t you? You just want to keep it good and buried, preferably with Mickey’s name on it instead.”

Neri looked at his son then at Wallis, blinking back the fury. “You’re no god. None of us is. You just fuck up the world pretending. Because of that—because I failed to see it—I’ve been punishing this poor, dumb son of mine for years.”

He waved the gun at the figure across from him. “Jesus, Vergil. I wish I had more time with you. I wish I could do this some other way and—”

The explosion burst through the gloom. Emilio Neri found himself flying backwards in his chair, clutching his chest, feeling something turn his guts inside out. He landed on the floor, upright enough to see Wallis’s hand emerging from the money pile, clutching a small pistol taped beneath one of the bundles.

“Bruno—” he croaked, through a mouth filling with blood, into the reddening darkness.

THE UNIFORMED MEN lined Bucci and three of his sidekicks against the wall just off the main road. Bucci had that punk look on his face, the one Falcone and Peroni knew so well. The one that said, you can ask and ask and ask but no one’s saying .

“You got any idea what they were doing?” Falcone asked the uniformed sergeant.

Gianni Peroni had recognized Bucci as the leader straightaway. Had gone straight up and pushed his face into his, one bull neck against the other.

“No,” the sergeant replied. “They were walking by the time we stopped them. I guess they saw us first.”

Falcone walked over to Bucci and said, “I don’t have time to waste on you, sonny. I got a man out there somewhere and if he dies I promise you your life won’t be worth living. Neri’s old goods here. You stick with him, you go down with him. Understood?”

Bucci looked at the other three hoods with him and laughed. “You hear that? What’s this town coming to? When a decent Italian man can’t walk down the street without some ugly fucking cop coming and staring in his face?”

“Ugly?” Gianni Peroni asked. “You calling me ugly? No one ever called me ugly before. I take that as an insult.”

Bucci laughed. His shoulders jerked in that punk way the cops all knew. “Yeah. Ugly. Ugly as—”

It came so quickly even Falcone didn’t expect it. Peroni dabbed his big head forward in a single blow, stomped his bone-hard temples straight into Bucci’s nose. The big hood fell backwards onto the wall, blood and snot streaming down his face, gasping for air. Then Peroni butted him again, twice, punched a big fist into his guts, got him on the ground and laid in a flurry of stiff kicks. Bucci writhed there, screaming, bleeding, and Peroni took hold of the man next to him, a skinny-looking jerk in his thirties with mud-green eyes now as big as saucers, grabbed his shoulders, pulled back ready to strike.

“Down the road in some fucking cave, man,” the jerk whined. “Don’t hit me. Please.”

Gianni Peroni didn’t wait for anyone else. He was first into the dark stinking mouth of the caverns. In seconds he was fighting to find his bearings under the dull yellow lights that ran through the labyrinth, leading into the blackness.

MICKEY NERI WHIMPERED. He’d pissed himself. The hot stream felt like acid against his leg.

“Don’t do this, mister. P-p-p-please.”

Wallis stalked him with the knife. The big American couldn’t take his eyes off the mask with its dead eyes watching them.

“Got to,” Wallis murmured, coming round to stand behind the figure strapped in the chair. He reached down, grabbed a hunk of Mickey’s hair in his fist, jerked back his head, held the silver blade over the pale throat below.

THEY WATCH, hidden in the black corner, and two times collide in Nic Costa’s head. What he sees before him now is no god, just a man, bright beneath the single yellow bulb, angling himself behind the screaming shape on the chair, pitiless, determined.