The Villa of Mysteries

“It’s needed,” he said then added, with no small measure of pomposity, “I am a head of department, you know.”

“Of course,” she said ruefully, unable to take her eyes off the hankie which was burrowing away again.

“Would you like to see it?”

“What?”

“Our Villa of Mysteries? What else? Normally we don’t let people in without an appointment. And then we’re pretty choosy. You wouldn’t believe the amount of theft that goes on around here. Only a couple of weeks ago we had two Americans hunting around outside the gates with a metal detector, would you believe? Had to send a couple of lads to chase them off.”

“Quite. Later, perhaps.”

He seemed disappointed by her reaction. She should have looked more enthusiastic. “It’s not as famous as the one at Pompeü, of course, but that doesn’t make it less interesting.”

“Is it as big?”

“Oh yes. Bigger probably, once we finish digging.”

“As big as they get? Temples like this?”

He looked briefly uncomfortable, as if this was a question he hadn’t expected. “Temple’s not the right word. These places were more a private religious establishment. Temples tend to be more public.”

“Of course.” She thought about the dirt beneath the dead girl’s nails. It couldn’t have come from Ostia. It was Roman, no doubt about it. “I just wondered… if you find something so fascinating in the suburbs. What would a place like this be like in Rome?”

He sniffed. “Vast. Astonishing. It’s out there somewhere, I imagine. Waiting to be found. As I said in the book, it is the Palace of Mysteries. The wellhead of the cult. The place every acolyte wished to visit, perhaps, before they died. Not that anyone will give me the money to look for it, of course.” He stared sourly at the papers in front of him. “Even if I had the time.”

He was a curious mix of arrogance and self-pity. He liked to tantalize, too. Perhaps that was all his book amounted to, a kind of historical tease. “I would love to see around, Professor,” she said. “The thing is, I have some important questions I need to ask you first.”

He suddenly looked worried, off-guard. “You do?”

She folded her arms, placed her elbows on the desk and peered frankly into his beady eyes. Randolph Kirk didn’t look well and it wasn’t just the cold. He seemed tired, as if he hadn’t been sleeping much lately. Nervous too. “I’ve got to be honest with you. When I said I was a fellow academic who needed a little advice I wasn’t being entirely frank.”

“You weren’t?” he said quietly.

She pulled out her ID card. “Professor, strictly speaking this is not official business. Actually no one back at the Questura even knows I’m here so there’s no need to get worried or think this is a police thing in any way. I won’t waste your time with the reasons.”

You wouldn’t even believe them, she thought. You wouldn’t credit how stupid cops can be when it comes to using academic, intellectual resources.

“The point is this. I’m a pathologist attached to the state police. I’ve got a corpse on my slab right now that, for the life of me, looks as if it came from one of the selfsame rituals you described so accurately in your book. The corpse those same Americans who came here found. The papers wrote all about it.”

“They did?” he bleated. Randolph Kirk didn’t look as if he read papers much or watched TV.

“She’s got a tattoo on the shoulder. A mask. Screaming. She’s clutching a thyrsus. Fennel with a pine cone on the end. There’s grain in one of her pockets. Just the kind of thing you wrote about. The body was found not far from here. In peat, which preserved it and threw out conventional dating techniques, which confused me… us for a while.”

He shuffled in the old leather seat, making it swivel and squeak and squeal. “Oh.”

She was starting to find him annoying. “All that is just as you described in the book. She was sixteen, too. The right age. What’s different is this. Her throat was cut. From behind. One move, sharp knife.”

Teresa Lupo made the gesture, arcing her arm as if she were wielding the blade. Kirk’s florid cheeks went a shade paler and the hankie performed a double dance across his face.

“And it can’t be what I thought. She’s not a peat body from a couple of thousand years old, maybe sacrificed here and then buried in the bog. We know who she is. Or at least we think we do. And she died just sixteen years ago. They even put a coin in her mouth. A tip for the ferryman. Can you beat that?”

“No,” he whispered. “I can’t.”

“I just need to understand more about what motivated these people. What exactly did they hope to gain? Knowledge?”

He shook his head. “Not knowledge.”

“What then? Some kind of personal advantage? Or was it just like joining a club or something?”

He thought about those ideas. “A club,” he said. “That’s an interesting idea.”

Teresa was beginning to get exasperated. “I was hoping, because you knew so much about all these rituals, you could maybe help me. You see, there’s another girl. She went missing today and somehow…” she struggled for the right words to describe this odd situation, “… it all looks similar. It all looks as if something could happen the day after tomorrow, 17 March.”

“17 March?” He had another habit, too, when he wasn’t poking at his adenoids. He kept moving his glasses up and down his red, pockmarked nose with the forefinger of his right hand. Thinking, she guessed.

“You’re a police officer?”

“No,” she corrected him. “I’m a pathologist working with the police.”

“You didn’t tell them you were coming here. Why?”

“Because—” It was an odd question. The alarm bell that was beginning to sound somewhere at the back of her head was just plain stupid. It had to be. “Can you help me, Professor?”

The glasses were going up and down his nose. He didn’t look the physical type. He didn’t look anything much at all.

“You must excuse me,” Professor Randolph Kirk said, suddenly getting out of his chair. “I have a digestive problem. I really have to go.”

He paused at the door and looked back at her. “One moment, please. I may be a little while.”

Thirty minutes later, feeling more and more stupid, she got up and tried the handle. Randolph Kirk had locked it. She walked quickly to the window and took a good look at the frame. The ancient clasp for the latch had rusted long ago. It must have been years since anyone opened the thing.

“Shit,” she groaned. “Shit, shit, shit and double shit.”

There was just the trace of a signal on her mobile phone. She wondered who to call, what to say. Falcone was going to go ballistic. As if that were the biggest of her worries.

“Don’t sweat, girl. He’s an academic. He’s got a nose like a pineapple and flu bugs doing the Macarena in his veins. Unless he comes through that door wielding a pickaxe I’ve got no problem at all.”

All the same she looked around the room for something to use as a weapon. There was a small, short hammer on a filing cabinet, nothing more.

“Nic,” she murmured, starting to dial. “Come save me, Nic. Oh crap—”

The number rang once and then went dead. There was a sound outside. It was a motorbike. A powerful one, judging by the low rumble of the engine.

She stopped dialling and listened hard. This could be important.

After a couple of seconds, Teresa Lupo couldn’t hear a thing. Some unseen force, the pumping of her own blood in her ears maybe, was drowning out the sounds beyond the door and she felt she ought to be grateful. She was familiar with death, not with dying. Just then she was an outsider, overhearing some important dumb show happening in the shadows. Even when she was a real medical doctor and people died in hospital it was, somehow, appropriate. Nothing ever really came out of the blue, violently, as it did for so many of the customers on her shining silver table. But she knew nothing of what it was like to witness such an act.

And here it was, happening unseen just a few metres away, beyond the flimsy door of Professor Randolph Kirk’s office. Over the beating of her heart, she could hear the drama being enacted, like a scene from a radio play leaking out from a neighbouring window. The voices, two, both high, one rising, one falling in grim fear.

Then the scream and the report of a gun, so loud it blocked out everything.

Her breathing stopped for a moment. Something had happened then. A void had opened in her head, a blank page of expectation, and into it walked some dark, shrouded certainty that a human being, Professor Randolph Kirk to be precise, had, at that instant, ceased to be. A living person was gone from the earth and the scariest thing of all was that Teresa Lupo, in her imagination, felt as if something, his spirit perhaps, his departing shade, had stepped through her own body leaving a single word imprinted in her mind: run.

She couldn’t think straight. She could hardly catch her breath. There were footsteps and she found herself frozen, looking at the door, hearing someone rattle a set of unfamiliar keys at the lock, searching for the right one.

“TURN THAT DAMNED THING OFF,” Falcone barked. “I want to think.”

They were in Falcone’s office watching the clips of CCTV from the Campo when Costa’s phone rang. It sounded once before he hit the power button. The mood wasn’t good. Rachele D’Amato was nursing a tender ego and uninterested in pursuing any link with Suzi Julius. Falcone had scowled at a skimpy preliminary report on the Jamieson girl from Teresa Lupo. The video seemed predictable at first but it bothered Costa all the same.

The bike rider wore a shiny helmet with an opaque visor and a full-length black leather suit, just like a street punk out to do some bag-snatching. The girl had “tourist” written all over her. Here she was, dashing through the dwindling crowd in the Campo, dressed in tee-shirt and black jeans, a small canvas bag over her shoulder, right in front of the two uniformed carabinieri men who stood by their car yawning, uninterested. Costa couldn’t believe their lack of attention. Suzi seemed to be running from something, or so it seemed to him. It should have rung an alarm bell somewhere.

The rider’s wrist flicked on the throttle. There was something odd going on with the girl. He couldn’t work out whether she was laughing or crying. Then another figure came into view, sprinting: Miranda Julius fighting her way through the tangle of shoppers, yelling at her departing daughter’s back.

Costa wondered whether he was reading this all the wrong way. Sometimes cops took too much upon themselves. They walked into domestic situations that were best left alone. They interpreted events mistakenly and wound up with egg on their faces. Suzi reached the big, powerful bike, kissed the side of the helmet quickly, then hopped on the back, wrapping her arms around the rider’s waist. The machine bucked once as it went into gear. Then the two of them were off, bobbing and weaving through the crowds.

As the bike negotiated the corner of the square the girl turned round, one hand still clinging to the rider’s waist, looking for someone. Miranda halted then looked back at the carabinieri. She was panting, out of breath. Suzi brought her fingers to her lips and blew a farewell kiss across the Campo before the bike disappeared, out into the Corso.

Just a teenager running away with her boyfriend? Maybe, Costa thought. This was meant to look like some simple, domestic drama, almost enacted deliberately for public consumption. Maybe for the girl it was. But there was something wrong here. The bike didn’t have a number plate. Even street hoods didn’t favour black like that, with opaque visors. Nor did they like such big, powerful bikes. Little scooters were cheaper, more manoeuvrable. It was all too much of a giveaway.

“I don’t like it,” he said when the clip came to an end. “Why does the bike have no plate?”

Rachele D’Amato wriggled on her seat. “Can we focus on the task at hand, please? I’m not here to chase runaway teenagers.”

“It could be linked,” Falcone said. “Costa’s right. There’s something strange going on there.”

He got up and threw open the door of the office. The staff room was horribly depleted, no more than ten men at the desks, close to half the normal manning level thanks to the flu. Falcone looked at the officer nearest to the door.

“Bianchi. Who’s hottest on this CCTV stuff around here?”

The man thought about this for a moment. “You mean of the people who’re in? Me. Ricci’s the real expert but he’s home sneezing his eyeballs out. I can call him, though. Get some tips. What do you want?”

“Get some footage in from the cameras in the Corso. Find out where that bike went afterwards.”

Bianchi hesitated. “Er, that’s some job, sir. You get no more than a hundred metres or so coverage from each camera. I’ve been through this before. All you can manage is about a kilometre a day, no more. If he’s gone any distance we’re talking a week, if we’re lucky.”

Falcone scowled and scanned the office again. “Give it a day. Maybe he didn’t go far.”

“Sure,” Bianchi said.

“And get a couple of pictures out to the media. Keep it low key enough not to start a panic. Just say she’s a missing girl and we’re looking for information. Say there’s no reason for concern just now but we’d like to hear from her, or someone who’s seen her, all the same.”

“It’s done, boss,” Bianchi said and picked up the phone.

Then Falcone went back to his desk, closing the door behind him, and looked at D’Amato. “So tell me something about Wallis I don’t know.”

Her eyes widened. “Are you serious? The position as I understand it is he won’t talk to me at all. And when it comes to having a meaningful conversation, he won’t talk to you either.”

“I don’t think he’s his own man in this,” Costa said. “Not completely. It’s as if he’s looking behind him all the time. Why’s that?”

She cast him a cold glance. She knew the answer. She wanted to make them work for it.

“Well?” Falcone demanded.

She swore quietly under her breath. “Wallis fell out big time with the hood he was supposed to befriend. Emilio Neri.”

“We know that,” Falcone declared impatiently.

“Perhaps,” she snapped. “But do you understand the implications? Both sides, the Americans and the Sicilians, had to come in and keep those two apart. Big people don’t like that. Wallis’s punishment was retirement. The punishment sticks. My guess is that if they think he’s messing around again with things he shouldn’t, even talking too freely to us, he’s in big trouble.”

“And this Neri guy?” Peroni asked. “I remember him from my beat. What was his punishment?”

“A slap on the wrist,” she said. “Neri was on his home turf. He was bound to come out on top. Besides… Neri’s a different kind of animal. Wallis is educated. He’s got limits. He was in this for business reasons, not some personal vendetta. Neri would rob his grandmother’s grave if he felt like it and go home to boast.”

None of this helped them understand what had happened to Wallis’s stepdaughter, Costa thought. Or where Suzi Julius might be now.

“What if Neri was involved with the death of the girl?” he wondered. “Maybe that was the way he punished Wallis?”

“Neri’s a thug,” Falcone said. “If he wanted to kill someone, he’d kill Wallis himself.”

He nodded at D’Amato. “You’re wrong if you think Neri doesn’t have a code, by the way. Men like him still have some rules. They need them to maintain their position with their troops. Killing a teenage girl to punish another hood… It doesn’t look proper. It would damage his standing. Besides, he’d have to let it be known he’d done it, otherwise why bother? If he’d taken responsibility we’d have heard.”

“There’s still plenty of reasons to talk to him,” she suggested. “No harm done.”

“I get it! I get it!” Peroni said, a little too loudly. “That means, of course, the DIA still have to tag along because we got the mob in the loop. And if it’s just a plain murder inquiry it’s nothing to do with you.”

She shot him a savage glance. “I’m trying to help! Will you people kindly stop treating me like I’m the enemy?”

Peroni looked out the window and whistled.

“And the girl?” Costa wondered. “Suzi Julius? Where does she fit in?”

Falcone looked at the image frozen on the TV screen, of the Campo, with Miranda Julius static, staring at the route the bike had taken from the square. “I wish to hell I knew. Let’s hope she’s just another runaway kid. I don’t see how we can treat this as anything else but a missing teenager inquiry until I see something that says different. If there’s any indication this is something more—and I mean any—I want to know about it instantly. Until then…” he made sure Costa looked at him, “… let’s get our priorities straight. We have a murder case on our hands and that’s what we focus on. It’s the only thing we know for sure right now.”

“Suzi Julius is still alive—” Costa couldn’t get the picture of the mother’s face out of his head, all the pain there, and the fearful anticipation.

“I know that,” Falcone said firmly. “We’re doing all we can, Nic.”

“And we’re in too?” D’Amato asked. “You know the rules, Leo. This involves organized crime. Like it or not, the people you’re talking about here have been up to their necks in it for years. Neri, for one, still is.”

“Yeah, yeah. You’re in.” Falcone looked at his watch then looked at her. “Provided it’s share and share alike. Understood?”

She smiled. “How could it be otherwise?”

Falcone rose from his chair and the three of them got ready to follow him. “Let’s talk to the harpy in the morgue about that body. This report is skimpy and she knows it.”

Costa punched his phone back on as they left the room. He didn’t like losing the call. He didn’t want to be out of touch with anything for a moment.

It came alive halfway down the corridor, ringing straightaway. Teresa Lupo’s voice was so loud it almost hurt his ear.

There was a single, snatched message then the line went dead.

STUPID THINGS COME NATURALLY in some circumstances.

You think about throwing an ancient PC monitor through the jammed window of a dead academic’s portable office, knowing all along the frame was too small for you to squeeze through even if you succeeded.

You sit in a fake Roman villa on the Janiculum Hill and try to remember what it was like in the days when you had to scheme to stay alive.

And, in the case of Emilio Neri, whose phone had burned long and hot that afternoon, you storm around your rich man’s palace in the Via Giulia, amazed at the way the past can resurrect itself out of nowhere, cursing your errant son and your profligate wife, wondering where the hell they were when you needed to yell at them.

Fear and fury share the same ill-defined borders. Watching the door handle twist just an arm’s length away from her, Teresa Lupo felt both mad and scared as she tried to force some sense and reason into her head. Then blunt instinct took over. She stood to one side, by the hinges, gripping the puny hammer with both hands, waiting.

It took no more than a moment. The lock turned, the door began to open, slowly. She held her breath, wondering what he was expecting: a figure cowering in the corner. That had to be it.

“I don’t cower,” she whispered to herself, and waited until he’d pushed it to forty-five degrees, enough, she guessed, to get his body positioned in the potential vise between the door edge and the frame.

She had a pathologist’s muscles. She was carrying some excess weight too. She snatched some air into her lungs, stepped back briefly, then lunged with her shoulder into the centre of the plywood slab. It closed on the rider’s body. She bounced harder. Someone screamed: high-pitched, pained. Teresa Lupo darted round the edge of the door and saw him: a black figure in leather, face invisible behind the dark visor of the helmet. He was crouching, clutching his chest. Maybe she’d broken a couple of ribs. She hoped so. A long black pistol lay on the grubby office floor where he’d dropped it. She stabbed at the thing with her foot, was dismayed to see it slide only a metre or so away from him. Then she threw aside the hammer, grabbed the creep by the back of the helmet and yanked hard.

The biker fell into the room. He wasn’t a big guy. If she’d gone to self-defence lessons as she’d always intended, Teresa Lupo reckoned she could have taken him on there and then. Beaten him up a touch. Tied him to a chair. Waved a magic wand over the gun just in case. Been Linda Hamilton out of Terminator 2, all muscles and vengeance. Or something. Her head was running away with itself. Dangerous. She kicked him hard out of the way, struggled through the door, was glad to see the dim light of a clear early evening sky drifting through the bigger windows here.

The old cheap wood slammed shut behind her. She turned the key in the lock then snatched the bunch and threw them across the room, gasping, short of breath, trying to think about what to do next.

You look.

Professor Randolph Kirk lay on the floor in a bloody bundle, face uppermost, dead eyes staring at the ceiling. There was a ragged black hole in his forehead leaking gore. Automatically, she began to think of the autopsy. All the incisions, all the organs she’d have to examine, just so that she could come up with the obvious conclusion: this man died because someone pumped a piece of metal into his brain. I see no sign of improvement in his condition. The likelihood is that this is a permanent affliction.

With shaking fingers, Teresa Lupo dragged the phone out of her jacket pocket again, stabbing Nic Costa’s number on the keys, struggling to get it right, praying, praying.

His voice crackled in the earpiece, surprised, and sounding very young.

“Nic, Nic!” she yelled. “I’m in deep shit. Help me.”

There was silence on the line. She wondered whether that was really his breathing she could hear or just some digital static blowing in with the chemicals from the Mediterranean a kilometre away to the west.

“Just outside Ostia Antica,” she screeched. “The place I told you about. Please—”

Then there was a sound behind her, a sound so loud it just had to go down the phone and convince Nic Costa this was indeed serious. A sound that reminded Teresa Lupo she really was stupid in these matters.

He still had the gun.

“Idiot,” she hissed at herself, and dashed out the door, the blasts of the pistol, emptying its load into the lock, ringing behind her.

THREE POLICE Alfas sped past Piramide, sirens blaring, blue lights flashing. Falcone sat in the front vehicle, with Peroni driving down the middle of the road, pushing everything to one side. Costa held onto the dashboard, trying to make sense of things.

“Stupid bitch,” Falcone murmured. They’d talked to Monkboy who’d come clean about Teresa’s destination once they scared him witless. “Who does she think she is?”

“We should’ve talked to the man ourselves,” Costa volunteered.

Falcone leaned forward from the back seat and prodded his shoulder. “It was on my list for tomorrow, smart-ass. We take things one step at a time.” The inspector leaned back in his seat and stared at the lines of grey suburban houses flashing past the window. A red, poisoned sun was setting through the smog in the distance. The city looked grim and dead. “And we don’t go anywhere on our own. In case you two hadn’t noticed, we’re dealing with big boys here. I don’t want any risks. I hate funerals.”

Rachele D’Amato was in the car behind. Falcone had organized it that way.

“At the risk of repeating myself,” Peroni ventured, “do we really need the woman from the DIA along?”

“Who knows?” Falcone replied. “Until we get there.”

“This is some university professor she went to see, right?” Peroni wondered. “What’s a man like that got to do with the Mafia?”

Falcone said nothing. Peroni braked hard to avoid a street-cleaning truck, then wound down the window and began yelling obscenities into the smoggy evening air.

SHE CAME BACK at five thirty, laden down with shopping bags bearing the names of all the best designer labels. She looked perfect. Adele always did. Her red hair was newly trimmed and a little less red somehow, with a blonde tint shining from beneath. Not a strand was out of place. She wore a trouser suit in crumpled white silk and a grey mink jacket. Neri couldn’t work out whether they were new or not. She bought so many clothes he guessed she must throw half out each week just to make room for more.

He watched her go to the open kitchen and make herself a spremuta, topping up the juice with black Stolichnaya. “Where the hell have you been? I tried getting you on the phone.”

“Battery went flat.”

“Then charge the fucking thing next time you go out. If there is a next time. Maybe I’m introducing a curfew around here.”

She walked over and kissed him on the cheek, taking care to let her loose hand idly stroke the front of his trousers. “Bad day, sweetheart?”

“The worst. And where are my family when I need them?”

She blinked at him. She had long, very fine black eyelashes. He wondered how much they cost, how much of them was real.

“You need me?” Her hand went down again. He pushed it away.

“Don’t have time for that shit.”

“What else do I do for you?” she asked plainly. “What else is there?”

“You’re supposed to be a wife. You’re supposed to be here. Giving me some support. Instead I just got a couple of my own men and them stupid servants who piss around doing nothing downstairs.”

“Support? What kind of support do you want?”

He wished she’d just let this go. Normally she did. Lately, though, she’d been different. It began soon after Mickey had come to live with them. The kid was bad news, like a piece of grit getting inside an oyster, always rubbing away, making things worse, and no pearl at the end. Neri couldn’t help wondering what scams he was running on the side too, and keeping it quiet whenever he got asked. The stupid clothes and the dyed blonde hair were beginning to bug him. And the way he and Adele just kept going at each other. A thought floated across his mind. Sometimes, Neri knew, you saw what you wanted to see, what you were supposed to see. You never saw the truth.

“Never mind. Was Mickey out with you? He should’ve been back here hours ago.”

“Out with me?” She looked at him as if he were crazy. “Don’t you think I see enough of him lounging around in here? He’s your son. Not mine. You work out where he is, who he’s fucking now.”

Neri couldn’t believe his ears. She just didn’t talk like this. He raised the back of his hand. “Watch your mouth.”

Adele waved a long skinny finger in his face. “Don’t hit me, Emilio. Don’t even think of going down that road.”

He balled his fingers into a fist, made as if to swipe her with it, then stopped. There was too much going on to let distractions like this worm their way into his head. He could deal with Adele later. And Mickey if need be.

“Where is he?” Neri repeated.

“I haven’t seen him since this morning. He went out before midday. Maybe he’s out screwing some dumb hooker in his car. It’s what he likes to do, isn’t it?”

They’d argued about this before. Two months ago the police found Mickey shafting some cheap African whore in Neri’s own vintage Alfa Spyder down a back street off the Via Veneto. The stupid kid didn’t even know the law, which gave the cops the right to impound the car. It had taken all the powers of persuasion Neri possessed, and a substantial bribe, to get the thing back. Another expense. The cost of parenthood. Had Mickey learned? Probably not. The kid just didn’t care.

“Listen,” Neri said, taking Adele by her slender, bony shoulders, shaking her just a little. “Listen carefully.”

She pulled free, but she looked a little worried all the same. Maybe, Neri thought, she sensed the atmosphere was changing somehow, was wondering how it might affect her.

“In case you haven’t noticed, this is not a good time for me,” Neri said. “That means it’s not a good time for you either, if you could just get it into your scrawny fucking head. There are bad things happening I don’t need at my age. Some of it of my own making maybe. Some of it because of other people who ought to know better. I just want you to understand.”

“Bad?” she asked, looking puzzled by his sudden frankness. “How bad, Emilio?”

There was a noise outside: a couple of cars drawing up. They went to the window. It had started to rain now. Thin lines of drizzle came down silvery black through the night, drenching the steady traffic on the Lungotevere.

Neri watched her eyeballing the men who got out of the cars. She was no fool. She knew their type. Normally he didn’t even allow them into the house.

“Why are they here?”

“You ever been in a war?” he asked, hating the word as he said it. Wars weren’t supposed to happen. They cost money. They could get you into big trouble with people who thought those days were past.

“Of course not.”

“Start learning,” he murmured, as much to himself as her. “These are what we call troops.”

“FOUR WHEELS GOOD, two wheels bad,” Teresa Lupo chanted to herself as the Seat lurched along the rough, potholed lane leading from the dig, topping a hundred and twenty as it tackled the bumps. She’d just made it to the car in time to see him stumble out of the portable office, still with the helmet and black visor in place, looking like some deadly insect hunting its prey.

Bugman was riding a motorbike. She was in a car. There had to be some advantage there. It was dark now too, with a little greasy rain falling from the sky. Four wheels good…

Except it didn’t mean much right then. The bike rider seemed to possess his own special brand of gravity. The Leon breasted the hard shoulder of the main road, leapt briefly into the air, and turned, tyres screeching, towards the airport.

When she managed to get control of the car once more, seeing with some relief the lights of the main terminal a couple of kilometres off in the distance, she plucked up sufficient courage to glance in the mirror. He’d made up ground. He must be riding the Honda from hell. It seemed to stick to the greasy road in a way the Seat couldn’t. They’d been a good three hundred metres apart when she approached the end of the track. Now half the gap she’d enjoyed had disappeared. The thing moved like crap off a hot shovel.

“Holy fuck,” she whispered idly and stared at the mobile phone on the seat. She didn’t even dare try to call again. She needed both hands on the wheel. She needed her mind set on survival, nothing else.

The car dropped into fourth, she floored the accelerator and roared past a couple of slow-moving trucks, one of which was just lumbering into the outside lane to overtake. The mirror was briefly a mass of metal as the two leviathans leaned into each other for dominance. Then the bike came through between them, squeezing into a gap no more than a metre or so wide, speeding ahead.

“Jesus.” She stared into the mirror. “What did I do? Where are the cops, for God’s sake?”

The terminal didn’t seem much closer just then. All her ideas of safety in its bright lights were starting to disappear. And anyway, her mind told her, Mr. Insect Head didn’t care about bright lights. She could run in and march straight up to check in at the Alitalia First Class desk and he’d still follow, all the way on his bright and shiny machine, pausing only to pump a couple of bullets into her head before riding out of the doors again, because that’s what men on motorbikes did.

Four wheels good…

The shape was getting closer all the time now. If he made a couple of flicks with his insect wrist he could draw right up at the driver’s window, even tap on the glass.

“To hell with that,” she said, and dragged the wheel hard over to the left, braking all the time.

The bike rider caught on quickly. He wasn’t going to plough straight into her side and pop his black frame right over the roof, thrown by the deadly weight of his own momentum. Instead he just put down a strong leather foot, slid the machine along the damp road, in control all the way, staring, staring.

“Point taken,” Teresa murmured, and hit the accelerator once more, straightened the Seat with a vicious lurch, and found herself heading straight for the no-entry barrier over a side road in construction just a hundred metres or so ahead.

There were men in white jackets and yellow hard hats working there. She held her hand on the horn, watching them scatter. The Leon went into a long, lazy sideways skid. She found the wheel twitching in her hands like a wild creature with a mind of its own.

Instinctively, she turned into the slide, felt the car come back under her control. Something smashed into the window behind her and exited out of the front windscreen, taking with it her vision of the road ahead. A circle of opaque shattered glass now sat between her and the black emptiness that was the world racing up to greet her. She glanced at the dashboard. It read ninety. She couldn’t hear a thing except the car screaming.

“Not a good day,” Teresa Lupo murmured, and was of a mind, for some reason, to take her hands off the wheel because there was something else demanding her attention.

A figure kept bobbing up at the driver’s window: long and black and deadly. Its arm was extended. The insect looked ready to sting.

Knowing it was stupid, and doing this very suddenly, very deliberately, she released her hands, crouched down in the driver’s seat, hands over her head, praying for protection, muttering over and over again that odd word they told you on the airplanes, “Brace, brace, brace…”

The Leon bounced once. The universe turned turtle. She was aware, for one brief moment, that things were not as they should be and wondered whether this was the start of the great secret called “death.” And then another unsettling thought, as the Leon rolled and bounced through the air, making her feel giddy and sick.

“Not Monkboy,” she murmured. “Let anybody do it but Monkboy.”

There was the noise of shrieking metal. A sharp pain stabbed at the top of her skull. She felt herself rolled around inside the dying Leon like a bean in a can.

Finally, the world stopped moving.

Teresa Lupo was upside down in the car. Something warm and sticky was dripping down her face: blood. She reached up and felt for the damage. Just a cut above her right temple.

“What fucking awful luck,” she gasped, and suppressed an urge to laugh.

There was a desperate, scrabbling sound at the driver’s door which was now pointed at the black night sky. She heard voices and cowered in the front seat, wondering if the insect had bred. All the world seemed hostile at that moment. Logic and plain humanity had disappeared from the planet.

Then cold air blew into her face. Faces peered at her. Men said all the usual things they liked to say about women drivers in these situations.

“Can you move?” someone wearing a yellow hat asked, holding out a hand.

She tried lifting herself. It worked. Just bruises, that was all. And a little cut in the hairline.

He had to be gone, she thought. He wouldn’t dare come into this mass of people, all of them extending their arms to her.

Teresa Lupo climbed out of the car, wondering whether she was about to burst into a fit of hysterical giggles. The Leon was on its side in what appeared to be the middle of a building site. A few metres away was a vast hole with concrete round the edges, a chasm cut into the earth big enough to take a train.

“Where’s the bike?” she asked.

The man who’d helped her out looked into the dead mouth of the hole and pointed downwards. “Not good,” he said. “Boy, was he moving.”

“How deep is it?”

“Very deep. We’re doing some work on the metro.”

“Wow,” she said, and couldn’t stop herself beaming, in spite of the bruises and what felt like a cracked rib.

There were sirens in the distance. The lights of police cars. She thought about Falcone and his temper. Then she thought about Randolph Kirk and a lost girl called Suzi Julius, who was the point of all this in the first place.

“We’re getting a crane in,” the man said. He hesitated. “Did you two argue or something? We called a doctor.”

Teresa Lupo nodded, smoothing down her clothes, trying to put on a professional face, wondering how she could even begin to square this with Falcone.

“A doctor?” she asked. “Thanks, but I’m fine.”

The man gave her an odd look and nodded at the big black chasm in the ground. “For him…”

“Oh?” She walked to the edge of the hole and peered into nothingness. Then Teresa Lupo picked up a big block of smashed concrete and launched it into the air, watching it tumble downwards and yelled, “Impudent fucking bastard…”

She came back and took the man by the arm. He flinched.

“I can deal with him,” she said with a smile. “I’m a doctor. I’m with the police too. So go tell the rubberneckers to run along now. Nothing to see here.”

POLICE TAPE RAN around the site of Randolph Kirk’s excavations. Floodlights stood over his portable office illuminating the bloodstains on the bare floor. Monkboy had been assigned the job of dealing with the body. Teresa Lupo had argued, with some justification, that she should be kept away through a conflict of interest. In truth, she wanted to be with the second team, watching the cranes lower a recovery section down into the big black hole near Fiumicino, waiting for them to come back with a corpse, desperate to see it transformed from the dark insect of her imagination into a real and dead human being.

Falcone had deferred to her judgement. He didn’t even look mad. Maybe he was saving his fury for a time when she’d feel it more.

Nic Costa watched Monkboy and his men remove the corpse. Falcone stood to one side with Rachele D’Amato, deep in some private conversation, Peroni eyeing them, making grumpy noises all the time.

“She’s here for the duration,” Costa said when he could stand no more. “Best learn to live with it.”

“But why? This guy didn’t work for the mob. He was a professor, for God’s sake.”

“We don’t know,” Costa said. “We know less than we did a couple of hours ago.”

Suzi Julius was somewhere, though, even if her name, and her mysterious disappearance, were now sinking deep into the squad’s collective unconscious, despatched there by bigger, more pressing events. Maybe she was nearby. Here, even, dead already because all those well-laid plans for two days hence suddenly seemed impractical. He glanced around the site, at the other office and the low, hulking shape of the old Roman villa.

“I’m going walkabout,” he announced. “Falcone won’t miss me.”

There was nothing of any interest in the other office. The villa looked more promising. It could have been an old church or something: brick walls, loose, crumbly mortar. The darkness hid most of the detail but he guessed the building was that familiar pale honey colour he knew from the spent masonry on the Via Appia Antica where he’d grown up. The place was about forty metres square with an open courtyard at the front full of wrecked stones and, fenced off, a small mosaic, unidentifiable in the dark. The colonnaded entrance was open to the air. He walked in and found himself inside a cold, dank anteroom with two adjoining chambers on either side running back into the heart of the building. They were open too, and empty. The centre of the place must have been a windowless hall. The design was odd. This couldn’t be a normal home. It didn’t make sense.

There was an old wooden panelled door blocking the way to the interior, with a padlock on a rusty chain keeping it closed. He went back to the car and returned with a big torch and a crowbar. It took a minute to prise the rusty links from the lock. Then the torch made a bright arc into the pitch-black interior, illuminating the shadows on the walls. The place seemed empty: just a bare room. So why was there a padlock on the door? What was it protecting?

He made a careful circumnavigation of the small, windowless space: nothing. Then, just before he gave up, his foot stumbled on something. It was a wooden panel on the floor, built into the ancient brickwork. Modern, by the looks of it. And it had a padlock too, bright and shiny, hooked through a clasp.

Costa worked at it with the crowbar and forced the fastening free. When he removed the panel he exposed a series of narrow, shallow steps leading down into blackness, a subterranean cavern of some kind.

There were lights here too. Wires ran down one side of the steps, with a switch cut into the rough wall at the base of the stairs. A bare bulb, perhaps the first of several, dangled ahead in the darkness. Nic Costa didn’t know anything about archaeology but that struck him as odd. Surely they would use portable floods? A string of bulbs seemed like normal lighting, the kind you got in a hall.

Costa checked himself. You were supposed to do these things in twos. It was possible there was someone else around. This could be a perfect place to hide, to stay out of sight until it was all over.

And then drag Suzi somewhere else. Or just leave a body on the mouldy earth.

“No time,” he said to himself. Besides, he was sick of the way they kept giving him that tired look whenever he mentioned the girl.

He took his gun out of its holster, hugged the wall, and walked down into the subterranean cavern, step by step. The temperature immediately seemed to fall a couple of degrees. The place had the dank, fungal smell of something rotten.

There wasn’t a sound. At the bottom he flipped the switch on the wall and walked through a doorway so low he had to duck to get through.

The room was brightly lit. This must, he realized, have been restored somewhat. It was impossible that original wall paintings could have remained so bright and vivid for two thousand years. Or maybe they weren’t original at all. Maybe someone painted them there recently for some reason.

Nic Costa looked at them and thought: here lie nightmares. And maybe that was what they really were. Some desperate effort to take this poison out of the human mind, to exorcize it by transforming the living demons inside a man’s head into images on some ancient, pagan wall.

They ran around the rectangular chamber in a series of frames, each with the same bright red background behind the detail. A figurative mosaic frieze of dolphins and sea monsters capped every scene. Painted columns divided one frame from the next. The pictures were designed, he understood, to be viewed as a series, a set of linked images which told a story. From what he recalled of Teresa’s brief lecture that morning, it had to be that of an initiation into the Dionysian mysteries.

To his right, covering the short wall by the door, was what he assumed to be the beginning of the tale. An imposing male figure, the god himself perhaps, reclined lazily on a golden throne, with a horned satyr on each side, both peering into silver water bowls. At his feet lay a young woman, her face covered by a veil, holding a phallic object topped with a pine cone: Teresa’s thyrsus. The long wall next to this contained three further frames. A naked child read out loud from a scroll. Three female dancers, hands clasped together, faces ecstatic, turned around an urn. An old crone in a dark robe, crouched on a decaying tree trunk, peered malevolently at a beautiful young woman seated in front of a mirror, toying with her hair.

The main wall opposite the entrance was occupied by a single work. The young woman was entering the presence of the god. Black slaves scourged her with whips. Satyrs played lutes in the background. There was terror on the initiate’s face. The god leered hungrily at her from his throne.

Costa turned to face the left wall. Here were more rituals: scourging, drinking, dancing, coupling. The four frames depicted an orgy but one that sat at the edge of sanity, like something from the imagination of a Roman Hieronymus Bosch. In the corners of the images there were revellers who were unconscious or vomiting. A pregnant mother suckled a child on one breast and a goat on the other. Women lay on their backs embracing horses and lions. Two girls were engaged in a bloody fight, rolling on the floor, scratching at each other’s eyes.

And in the last image an execution: one woman walked on, blind-folded, towards the god. The second was killed, her throat cut from behind by a grinning satyr who pressed his groin against her buttocks.

He turned to face the final frame, the counterpart to the first, set on the other side of the door. The god still sat on his throne but now he wore a mask, the obscene screaming mask that was the source of the tattoo he’d seen on both the dead Eleanor Jamieson and the living Suzi Julius. They were poor imitations. In the god’s face lay a blind, hungry fury that couldn’t be reduced to a scrawl on flesh.

The initiate was naked, half standing over him, face forward, as he savaged her from behind, his hand reaching round to grip her left breast hard between his fingers. Her face was partially covered with a veil. Her mouth was a wide-open screaming rictus of agony. The shape of his massive erection was visible beneath her open legs. Satyrs and hangers-on watched avidly, with wild eyes and open, hungry mouths.

Was this the ordeal Wallis’s stepdaughter had refused? Costa wondered. Perhaps in a room very much like this? And if she hadn’t, where would she be now? Anywhere, he realized. If Teresa was right, this villa was just an outpost. Somewhere in Rome there stood the Villa of Mysteries, the heart of the cult, a hidden temple, just like this one, buried beneath the earth.

It didn’t add up. One man, surely, would not go to these strange lengths. Randolph Kirk couldn’t have been the figure racing a bike across the Campo with Suzi Julius happy on the back. That was someone young, someone she knew.

Costa tried to think practical thoughts. This wasn’t an active dig. There was no sign of recent excavation. Yet people did come here regularly. He could see the odd cigarette butt and a few sweet wrappers. The university maintained the site. They would use it for study, surely.

He walked around the corners, using the torch to illuminate the darker parts.

Something bright lurked close to the image of the god and the screaming initiate. He took a plastic envelope out of his pocket, bent down and picked it up. It was an elastic hair-band, bright red, green and yellow, Rastafarian colours, the kind a young girl would use. He searched the rest of the room as best he could. There was nothing else of obvious interest.

Then he walked back up the stairs, back to the portable office. It was getting late now. Falcone looked tired, gloomy. D’Amato stood silent by his side.

“The scene-of-crime people can take a look at the place once they’re done here,” he said after listening to Costa’s ideas. “There’s probably nothing left from sixteen years ago, Nic, if that’s what you’re thinking. Besides, Lupo already said she was probably killed somewhere in the city.”

“I know,” he answered and held up the hair-band. “But this isn’t sixteen years old.”

Rachele D’Amato peered at the plastic bag. “It’s the kind of thing a child would wear,” she said. “Did they let children in there on visits?”

He thought of the pictures on the walls. “I can’t imagine they’d allow that.”

Falcone raised a grey eyebrow. “You think so? These are liberated days. Look, it’s late. If you think there’s something to chase here, go and see the mother. On your own. We’re a little short of men. If she recognizes it, try the lab. There must be millions like it. We need to know for sure. Then get some rest. We’re all going to be working overtime tomorrow.”

“You can say that again,” D’Amato whispered.

Costa saw them exchange a glance. He wondered if something was going on between them and whether that could cloud the man’s normally excellent judgement.

Then Falcone took him to one side, peered inquisitively into his face. “How are you doing? You look dog-tired. You been drinking recently?”

“No,” Costa snapped. “Are you my boss or my keeper?”

“A little of both. For now anyway.”

Falcone’s phone rang. He listened then said, “Wait for me.”

Costa hesitated, wanting to know the news.

“We’ll follow you part of the way,” Falcone said. “That was the crew at Fiumicino. They’re about to bring up the body. It seems Crazy Teresa can’t wait to get her hands on it.”

“Can you blame her?” D’Amato wondered.

“Damned right I can,” Falcone murmured, walking away so quickly they had to struggle to keep up.

THE RAIN HAD STOPPED. The heart of Rome was growing silent. A generous moon now stared down at its own hard reflection in the black shiny waters of the Tiber. The day’s warmth had fled, a reminder that winter was relinquishing its grip with a slowly dying reluctance.

Adele Neri lay alone in the bedroom. Her husband was still up, talking long and hard to the bleak, grey men he’d invited into their lives. Their voices crept beneath the closed door, intruding into her most private thoughts. Mickey was nowhere to be seen. Nor had he called. It was unusual, but not unexpected. He’d been crazier than normal recently. Some of it was due to the dope. Some of it was down to the deals on the side, and his terror that his father would find out about them. But most of it came from this sudden and fierce fixation for his stepmother, one she had no intention of discouraging. She liked the way he thought of her and the things she could do to him drove Mickey wild. Adele had some power over Emilio, but it was muted, fixed by boundaries, and always had been. Now it was waning too. Emilio was feeling his age, realizing that change would soon be inevitable.

Mickey was different. He’d do just about anything she asked. Anything. And he was young. He didn’t thrash away for a couple of minutes then roll over and go to sleep, grunting, snoring. He gave her something back. Although, when she thought about it, Adele Neri realised those gifts no longer contained the attraction for her they once had. The physical world had limitations. With age came a realization that there were more intangible goals in life: power, control, security. The ability to shape one’s own destiny.

Mickey wasn’t the only one she held in thrall like this either. When she thought about it, she was amazed she’d got away with her secret lovers for so long. She’d been careful, discreet, and sure to choose those who knew better than to boast. All the same Emilio Neri was a curious and vengeful man. There was a look in his eye just now that she didn’t like. He’d find out one day, and then she could only guess at what he’d do. There was, she thought, an inevitability to a life like hers: a period of infatuation, a time of spent satisfaction, then the final leg of the journey, ennui, sloth, disaster. Unless you planned. Unless you moved when the moment came. Emilio was getting slow and stupid. It was time, she thought, to think of the succession, before the hourglass ran dry and the empire crumbled to dust.

NIC COSTA PARKED THE CAR outside the looming bulk of the old Roman theatre, walked to the apartment and pressed the doorbell. He was still fighting to clear his head, to make some sense of what was happening. It was like untangling a skein of wool.

“Yes?” Her voice sounded anxious, expectant. He could hear the disappointment, fear perhaps, when he answered.

“It’s just a small thing,” he said quickly. “I have to check. I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be,” she murmured and let him in.

Miranda Julius was alone in the living room which was still echoing to the buzz of traffic on the Lungotevere. She was wearing loose white-cotton pyjamas and a red dressing gown. Her fair hair was still damp and dark from the shower. She appeared younger somehow. Maybe it was her eyes, which seemed wider than he recalled, and shone a bright, intense blue. The pain lent her face a delicate, stressed beauty. He couldn’t start to imagine how she felt.

She took one look at him and said, “There’s no news, is there?”

“No. Sorry.”

She sighed. It was what she expected, he thought. “Do you want a drink? Or is that out of bounds?”

She was clutching a glass of red. He remembered how many times he’d dived into that rich, fragrant lake since his father died, and the struggle required to get out and shake yourself dry. The longing never disappeared.

“Just a small one,” he said and straightaway she went into the kitchen and came out with a bottle of Barolo, a good year, an expensive one.

“This all goes tonight. I couldn’t sleep. I just keep wondering… Didn’t anyone see her?”

He’d watched women in these situations before. Sometimes they went to pieces. Sometimes they just turned inside themselves. Miranda Julius was different. She seemed determined not to let the agony of her daughter’s disappearance defeat her. He hoped this act of defiance would last.

“No,” he answered honestly. “It’s early. This isn’t good or bad. It’s just how it is. She could still just be another runaway for all we know. You’d be amazed how often that happens.”

She raised her glass. “Thanks, Nic. Thanks for trying.”

Then she poured his, clumsily. Some of the purple liquid stained his jacket.

“Sorry,” she apologized, dabbing at the fabric with a tissue. “Had a couple of glasses earlier. It helps.”

“Don’t worry.”

He tried the wine. It tasted gorgeous: rich and full of subtle delights.

Costa pulled the plastic envelope out of his pocket. “This is a very long shot but I have to ask. Do you recognize this? Did Suzi have something like it?”

She stared at the coloured hair-band. “Yes… yes, I think so. But they’re not exactly rare.”

“I know. Is it still here?”

He followed her to the girl’s bedroom. They sorted through the piles of clothes and the drawers. Everything was very tidy, he thought. There was a handful of bands in a bedside drawer. None in the same style.

“Where did you find it?” she asked.

“It could be anybody’s. I’ll get the lab to look. I need something of hers they can check it with. A hairbrush?”

There were two on the dressing table. She nodded. He took the biggest. It was full of stray blonde hair, soft and golden, a couple of shades lighter than her mother’s.

The blue eyes shone at him, unyielding. “Nic… where?”

“Someone was killed out near the airport this afternoon. A university professor who was working on an excavation. He could have been involved with some kind of cult. There was a villa there. It seems to have been used for some kind of ceremony, perhaps recently. We don’t know.”

“Killed?”

“We don’t know why. I doubt there’s a connection at all. There’s no evidence Suzi went there. We’ll check the hair-band, of course.”

“Was there—?” She clutched the glass, her shoulders hunched. “This ceremony. Had someone else been hurt there too? Before?”

“We don’t know that anything’s happened to Suzi,” he said firmly.

“But you know something you’re not telling me. This ritual. This isn’t the first time, is it?”

“Maybe not,” he conceded.

“And someone died then?”

“Sixteen years ago. It’s a long time.”

The blue eyes fixed on him. “Who was she?”

“I can’t tell you. In any case it’s probably just coincidence.”

He could see she didn’t believe him. Miranda Julius walked back into the living room and poured more wine, standing by the table, nervous, uncertain of herself. He followed, watching her. She was shivering. He put down his glass and, very gently, held her by the shoulders. “I can get someone to come and stay here, Miranda. A policewoman. You don’t have to be alone.”

There was an intensity about her at that moment, as if she were grasping for something important. Costa was suddenly aware that he felt attracted to this odd, damaged woman, against all his better judgement.

“You know the thing about kids?” she asked. “They drive you mad. They keep you sane too. It took years to work out, that was why I stayed away from Suzi. If I lived with her she’d force me to be responsible. She’d make me try to become something I’m not. So I just dumped her, somewhere safe, somewhere invisible, and went wherever I felt like. Places that made sense to me because they were stupid and pointless and perhaps I could forget she even existed.”

“What changed?” he asked.

“You think something changed?”

“You’re here. You came with her. From what you’ve said that wouldn’t have happened a while ago.”

She seemed to appreciate this insight. He took away his hands. There were thoughts rising in Nic Costa’s head he didn’t want there.

“I wanted to do what was right for once,” she said. “It was almost as if I’d forgotten about her. Forgotten about a part of me—”

She refilled their glasses quickly and gulped at the wine.

“She deserved better than that. So I went out and bought the tickets, booked this place. It was a last-minute thing. It seemed a good idea. Just get up and go somewhere. Together.”

“Why now?”

She didn’t seem to want to think about this too much. There was pain there. He wondered why he wanted to know.

“Because I needed someone, I guess. There was a gap in my life and, in my own selfish way, I thought perhaps it was time to fill it with family.”

She turned her head to one side, remembering. “Last year, when I was still working, I was in yet another shitty hole in the Middle East, watching people shoot the crap out of each other. I had a man at the time. A reporter. French guy. He made me laugh. That was all. But it was enough. All I needed. Then one day he climbed into a jeep and—”

She put down the wine glass and came close to him, peering into his eyes, shaking her head. “It was just a car crash. Can you believe it? All those years, both of us had been walking past bullets, driving over land mines. And then one day he’s going down the road and the idiot behind the wheel turns right instead of left. Bang, they’re over a cliff. Dead.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Why?” she asked severely. “You didn’t know him. You don’t know me.”

Her breath smelled of wine, her body of something else. Expensive perfume.

“And I didn’t love him. I liked him. Respected him. Before all this happened I’d promised myself I’d dump him. That ought to make it easier. Instead it makes it worse.”

She reached forward and splayed her fingers across his chest. Costa stepped back, put his hands up and said, “Miranda. You’re upset. Let me get a woman officer in here.”

“Don’t want one.” Her voice was slurred but more through tiredness than drink, he thought.

“Sorry,” she whispered. “It’s a habit I have when things start to go wrong. Sleeping with strangers. You know something?”

He didn’t dare say a word. His head was racing to places he wanted to avoid.

“Sometimes it helps. Sometimes it’s the best thing, the kindest thing, you can find.”

Gently, she placed her arms around him, let her damp head fall onto his chest. Nic Costa felt the warmth of her lips brush his neck.

“I don’t want to be alone tonight. Please. Just hold me if that’s what you want. But don’t leave me. Please—”

He pulled himself away, and it was the hardest thing. “I have to go. I’ll call you in the morning. This will work out. I promise.”

There was a hungry, desperate look in her eyes.

“Of course,” she said, and it was impossible for him to read what she was thinking.

It was cold outside, with a little light rain falling gently as a veil in front of the moon. He walked to his car thinking how close he’d been to giving in, whether she was right, and whether it mattered at all.

TERESA LUPO WAS JERKED AWAKE by the bright lights of the crane swinging its burden out of the artificial cavern. The gurney swayed from side to side as if it were teasing her. She yawned and looked at her watch. It was close to midnight. The day seemed endless. Her bruised body hurt like hell. She needed sleep desperately. Yet a man had tried to kill her. This was a new experience. His corpse deserved her attention. For her own sake she needed to peer into his dead eyes searching for some meaning.

Falcone had been on the phone for almost an hour before she nodded off. After the brief factual account she gave of what happened in Randolph Kirk’s office he’d hardly spoken to her. If that was as far as the punishment went, she would be lucky. Teresa Lupo had overstepped the mark several times over and she knew it. But if it helped, if it found Suzi Julius, if it began to unravel the riddle of Eleanor Jamieson’s death, everything would be worthwhile. Perhaps everything would be forgiven.

Rachele D’Amato sat in her own car, talking to no one. The morgue crew, short staffed because they had divided between Kirk’s site and the airport, did their work mutely, knowing something was wrong. Here were three arms of the state, Teresa reflected: the police, the morgue and the DIA. And none of them talking to each other much. Private matters, bruised egos and past relationships had intruded into what should have been a professional, impersonal assignment. She was as much to blame as any of them.

“To hell with it,” she whispered to herself. “If we find out just one more thing about the girl we’re better off than we were.”

Falcone walked over with Peroni. D’Amato got out of the car and joined them. All three looked dog-tired. “We’ve got a body,” the inspector grunted. “I presume you want to see.”

“You bet.” She’d spent hours waiting for them to find a safe way of bringing it to the surface. They’d had to bring in extra machinery, longer cables, teams of men in white hats who disappeared into the ground looking grumpy and puzzled by why they were there. It wasn’t a crime scene. It was a construction site.

Now that the corpse was here, on the ground, strapped to a gurney that shone under the artificial sun of the crane lights, Teresa Lupo didn’t feel as keen to see it face to face as she had earlier. The image of the black-headed insect trying to take away her life was one that would stay with her a long time.

“What do you want from me?” she asked as they walked towards the small team gathered by the trolley, on the side away from the pit.

“Identification would be useful,” Falcone said.

“I can take the helmet off: I can go through his pockets. What about the bike?”

“Checked that already,” Peroni replied. “The number was false but we managed to ID it from the code on the frame. Stolen from Turin three weeks ago. They’ve been losing a lot of high-powered machines from there recently. They think it’s some kind of organized ring.”

“It is,” D’Amato added. “The Turin mob ship them here all the time. We’ve got intelligence. Neri’s involved in that. He’s not the only one. But—”

“Later,” Falcone said.

They stood over the corpse which lay face up on the gurney, limbs awry, pointing at crazy, unnatural angles, like a broken doll. The left arm was almost wrenched from its socket. Bare skin was visible next to bone and torn flesh from the shoulder joint. Teresa Lupo ordered them to turn off the big, bright lights of the crane. They were dazzling her. They had enough illumination of their own with the kit they’d brought along.

“He’s smaller than I remember,” she said. Maybe that always happens, she thought. Normally she just saw dead people. She had no idea what they were like breathing, talking, being alive.

Falcone gazed at his watch and sighed.

“Patience,” she murmured and crouched down, wondering how she felt, whether she could draw up the customary amount of respect for the dead that she tried to bring to every autopsy.

The rider was probably gone the moment he hit the wall of the pit, before his shattered body fell to the bottom of the hole with the bike. His neck was broken, crushed down onto his right shoulder. The helmet had withstood the impact—just. A crazed pattern on the crown marked the impact. The black visor was covered in scratches and mud and dust.

“Poor bastard,” she whispered automatically, and scraped away at the fastening straps. Ordinarily she’d tell Falcone to get lost. Tell him it was too awkward to try to remove the thing here, close to midnight, out in the freezing dead land by Fiumicino. He could wait till they got back to the morgue, with her tools and her easy tricks of the trade. But he didn’t want to wait, and neither did she. The man was dead anyway. It wasn’t going to be a pretty funeral whatever happened.

Teresa Lupo asked one of the morgue assistants to bring over a medical bag, took out a scalpel, carefully cut open the clasps then, as gently as she could, pulled the helmet back towards the top of the head. There was some initial resistance. She adjusted the position of the skull and found an easier path. The plastic moved under the pressure of her fingers, the wrecked corpse nodded forward, and slowly, with great caution, she tugged the fragmented casing free.

Matted yellow hair, coated in blood, fell beneath her fingers.

Peroni turned his back on them, swearing constantly. No one spoke for a minute.

Beneath the bright portable arc lights lay Barbara Martelli, the traffic cop most men in the Questura had, at some stage, fantasized about. Her blonde locks fell in spent and bloodied curls around a face that wore a pained, final sneer. Her dead eyes were half open. Her teeth, normally so bright and white and perfect, betrayed the signs of her cruel death. Behind full, curled lips now turning pale, the gore had risen in her throat, staining them a dark, sticky black.

“For chrissake,” Peroni yelled at no one behind her. “For chrissake.”

Teresa Lupo reached down and unzipped the jacket, revealing beneath the torn leather the unmistakable female form. Martelli still wore her uniform shirt. A wet, black stain was seeping through her chest, up towards her throat. She remembered the woman well. She looked so unlike any other female cop. Sometimes she’d watch her walk through the station, knowing every male pair of eyes was following her, and a good many female ones too. She’d wonder how it felt to be that attractive, how much maintenance you needed to do on a body that looked as if it just fell out of bed perfect every morning. She’d been jealous. It all seemed so petty now. Teresa Lupo was at a loss to put together any of these pieces. Why Barbara Martelli of all people should be the hitman—sorry, hitperson—deputed to despatch Randolph Kirk to hell. Whether Martelli had decided to extend these deadly privileges to the hapless pathologist locked in the next room on her own initiative, with a little on-the-spot improvisation, or whether she was under orders. And whose? It was as if time were running backwards: with every passing minute they knew less and the world got murkier and more illogical.

“If you’d asked I’d have looked the other way,” she said softly to herself. “I didn’t even warm to Booger Bill.”

Then her eye caught something else and she couldn’t work out whether the mist was cleating or had just become downright impenetrable.

She was shaken from this reverie by Falcone’s hand on her shoulder, his sharp, sour face, with its silver pointed beard, staring into hers.

“Thanks, doctor,” he said.

“It’s nothing.”

“No.” The inspector was making a point. She should have seen the signs. “I meant thank you. Now I have a dead cop too.”

“What?”

Falcone was turning his back on her, starting to walk away. She couldn’t believe it. Even Peroni seemed embarrassed.

“Hey?” she yelled.

He turned. She remembered a trick from when she’d briefly played women’s rugby, before they threw her off the team for too many fouls.

Teresa Lupo lunged out with her foot at Falcone’s falling leg, jerked him off balance, grabbed the arm of his jacket and had him down on the ground in one, letting his own weight do most of the work. Peroni was shaking his head, cursing again, looking at them as if they were beneath contempt. Rachele D’Amato watched this little drama in shocked silence. Teresa didn’t want to think about what the morgue team were doing. Holding their heads in their hands in all probability.

“Fuck it,” she mouthed, and dragged Falcone down to the corpse; she let go of him, then pointed to the dead woman’s shoulder, half ripped from its socket.

“See that?” she spat at him, forcing his head close up to the torn flesh. “See that?”

The inspector was breathless, struggling to regain some dignity.

“Yes,” he said and she believed she heard just a faint tinge of regret, apology even, in his cold reply.

It was small but distinct. Drawn with care into the flesh of Barbara Martelli’s ruined limb was an inky black mark. A tattooed face surrounded by a head of snakelike hair, and a grinning mouth with bulbous lips, howling, howling, howling.

“You’re welcome,” Teresa Lupo said softly to herself then barked at her men to load the body.

Venerdi

SPRING WAS ARRIVING WITH VIGOUR. EMILIO NERI HAD ordered the men to put some outside burners on the terrace. With them it was sufficiently warm for his family to eat their first breakfast of the year in the open air, overlooking the Via Giulia. It was eight in the morning. The house felt different. Neri had sent the servants away. He needed the room for his troops. The place was better without them. One of the foot soldiers had gone out to bring pastries and fruit from the Campo. Neri wasn’t that keen to make a move himself, not until he’d thought this through. There was another reason for talking on the terrace, out in the open, high above the cobblestones of the Via Giulia. The scumbags in the DIA would stop at nothing to nail him. Sometimes he thought they were bugging the house, recording every word he said. Sometimes he wondered if he was getting paranoid in his old age. Either way he would feel more comfortable seated beneath the wan rays of the morning sun, with the growl of traffic from the Lungotevere murmuring away in the distance behind, overlooked by no one.

Or perhaps that was a distant hope too. They could have cameras trained on him from somewhere, helicopters hovering overhead. This was the way the modern world worked, peering into your private existence, sneaking around, asking stupid questions. And all the while real life just turned to shit and no one ever really noticed.

Adele and Mickey sat side by side opposite him. They seemed even more antagonistic towards one another this morning. The performance—the word seemed appropriate to Neri—just went on and on. His son had arrived home not long before midnight, in a foul, uncommunicative mood. Some date had failed to show maybe. Neri didn’t know, and didn’t want to know. The happiness or otherwise of the kid’s dick was the last thing on his mind.

He had six soldiers downstairs, all equipped for the occasion should it arise. He’d called a few old compari from the past too, men who’d taken a back seat when they’d banked enough to keep them happy. He had called each one into his office separately, stared into their eyes looking for signs of disloyalty, finding none. Then he told them to keep the next few days free in case they were required. These were men who had reason to be grateful to him. They all knew some debts never got repaid in full. If there was to be a war, Neri would need every hand he could get. His was a Roman firm. He didn’t have the rigid, militaristic structure the Sicilians liked so much. He had no consigliere to turn to for advice, to negotiate with the other mobs to keep them sweet. He didn’t keep a bunch of capi running their soldiers beneath him. Just Bruno Bucci, who was a kind of skipper but never acted much in his own name.

Neri had always liked to do things himself. In the past there’d been time. Now, the more he thought about it, he was exposed by his own obsessive need for absolute control. Nothing could be delegated easily. There were insufficient troops on the ground. Rome hadn’t seen an all-out mob war in more than two decades. The game should have moved on from those days. People were supposed to be more civilized. They’d been fools, Neri included. Human nature didn’t change. It only went underground for a while. Now he had to adapt—and quickly.

Bucci walked up the metal stairs onto the terrace carrying breakfast on a tray: pastries, juice, coffee. Adele watched him place them on the table, nod respectfully to Neri then leave, and said, “Would anyone care to tell me what’s going on here? We’ve got a gorilla waiting on table. There’s people down below who don’t match the decorations. Why am I sharing my home with a bunch of zombies wearing black suits before I’m even out of pyjamas?”

Neri was going to have to say something about that. She was wandering around as if nothing had changed. She sat next to Mickey, beneath one of the burners, in a new silk outfit that looked like pure gold. There was nothing on underneath. She didn’t bother buttoning the front that well. He couldn’t help noticing. He didn’t want the men getting a free look too. He guessed people did get ideas around Adele, then wondered again about the way Mickey wouldn’t even look at her in his presence.

“You could try dressing a little earlier,” he said and gulped down some coffee, trying to think.

She sat there primly, one hand on the table, and gave Mickey an icy stare. “You woke me. Coming home late like that. Can’t you get hookers who work normal hours?”

Mickey smiled, his dyed blonde head lolling around stupidly. “What hookers? I got busy. It took me a long time to chase down all those debts. I was working. How about you?”

He was lying there. Neri knew it. Mickey’s brain lay behind his zip. Always had done. The kid was up to something, maybe some new private business on the side. Neri could see it in his face. “So what happened to your phone? We seem to have a lot of phone problems in this family.”

Mickey shrugged. He looked a little odd. There was sweat on his brow. His eyes rolled when he spoke. “Gone wrong. I’m getting it fixed.”

“Do that,” Neri snarled. “I got enough on my plate without having to worry about you two.”

The old man wondered how to phrase this. How much to tell them. Adele deserved to know for her own sake. Mickey probably thought it was owed him.

“We need to be careful,” he said. “Maybe, just maybe, there’s trouble.”

“From who? The Sicilians?” she asked immediately, and Neri wondered why the question came from her, not Mickey.

Neri waved an impatient hand at her. “Nah. Listen to me. We’ve got nothing to worry about from our own people. We know each other. We go back years. Do you think I’ve spent half my life crawling around those peasants for no good reason? We’re safe there, provided we let them suck a little blood now and then.”

“Who then?” she asked again, and Neri couldn’t take his eyes off Adele. She was holding a piece of pastry with her delicate, skinny hand and she couldn’t stop herself yawning, didn’t even try to stifle it or cover her face. This was all so distant from her life.

“We had,” Neri said calmly, “a little problem way back when the boy was just a teenager. With some Americans.”

Mickey took a deep breath. “That’s over and done with.”

Neri smiled unpleasantly at his son across the table. “Maybe someone thinks otherwise. Maybe someone thinks we’re responsible.”

“Are we?” Adele stared at him with those wide-open, guileless eyes. It was, Neri thought, perhaps the worst question anyone should ask in the circumstances.

“People have got short memories,” he said. “Do you remember what you were doing sixteen years ago?”

“Sure,” she answered. “Don’t you? I was learning how to fuck. It seemed a useful skill to acquire.”

“Yeah, well, not everything happens below the waist,” he snapped. Not always, Neri thought. “What matters is that we take care. This is our town. Until everyone realizes that, I want you two to stay here, where I can look after you.”

Adele shot Mickey a theatrical glance of pure distaste. “You want me stuck here with him? Like a prisoner?”

Neri watched the two of them, thinking. “Try to see it as therapy. A break from shopping.”

“Sometimes,” Adele murmured, “I just can’t stop laughing around this place.”

Mickey giggled. The kid looked odd. A touch red-faced. Maybe he was back on the dope again, Neri thought. That was all he needed.

“Me neither,” Neri grunted, then got up from the table and waddled downstairs to talk to the men. His family depressed him sometimes.

Adele watched him go. Mickey closed his eyes in delight. It was a beautiful morning. There were a couple of gulls screaming in the sky. A helicopter hovered somewhere overhead, maybe getting a good view of what was going on. Her fingers gripped him tightly, stroking, cajoling, running up and down with a certain, insistent rhythm, as they had throughout his father’s tedious lecture. His dick sat upright, begging, in her hand beneath the table.

A finger crept close to the rim. Some insistent flood was moving, racing north. She lifted the tablecloth. Adele’s head went down, dipping towards Mickey’s groin. He felt her soft red hair fall beneath his hand. Her lips closed on the heat rising from inside him, her tongue performed two perfect circles of pleasure.

Mickey yelped, couldn’t help it. When he opened his eyes she was back above the table, dabbing a napkin to one corner of her mouth, the tip of her scarlet tongue just visible.

“Did she do that for you, Mickey?” Adele asked, when she was done. “This slut of yours last night?”

“I told you,” he answered dreamily. “I was working.”

“I hope that’s true.” She was looking at him in an odd way. Adele had changed the last couple of days, he thought. There was something she wanted, something more than just the fucking.

“Did you listen to what he said?” she asked.

“Hard to pay attention to your old man when your stepmother’s jerking you off under the table.” It was too. He was making a genuine point there, though it all came out like a wisecrack.

“Maybe I shouldn’t do it anymore. Maybe I should give this up altogether before he finds out.”

He blinked, unable to countenance the thought.

“Or maybe,” she continued, “I should tell him you made me. You wouldn’t leave me alone. I could just throw myself at his feet and beg for mercy. He’d listen, you know.”

He twitched and with it came the occasional stammer he had from time to time, when he was stressed. “D-d-don’t joke about stuff like that, Adele.”

Her hand gripped his arm. Her slim fingers bit into his flesh. “We need to get serious, Mickey. You need to listen. He’s old. He’s out of his depth. He doesn’t know what he wants to do. And the Sicilians… You know these people?”

“They’re friends,” he explained, trying to give the words some conviction.

“They’re associates. If they think he’s weak or out of line they’ll just walk in and hand all this to someone else. And you’ll be dead in a car somewhere out in the stinking countryside, while I go back to doing tricks for any rich old jerk who can’t get it up anymore.”

“What are you saying?” She was starting to scare him. Mickey liked Adele. Maybe this was love even. Weird things happened in spring.

“I’m saying—” She hesitated, thinking. “We need to be prepared.”

There was a sound beyond the balcony: cars, sirens. They went to the edge and looked down to the narrow street. Mickey took a deep breath then stepped back. He never did like heights. He didn’t like what he saw down there either: a fleet of blue vehicles swarming across the cobblestones, blocking the narrow street completely. At their head, close to the church on the Tiber side of the road, a tall, distinguished-looking man had stepped out of an unmarked Alfa. With him was a woman: elegant, well-dressed, young.

“Shit,” he murmured, then pulled back from the edge, head swimming. On the floor below the bell rang repeatedly, insistent.

COSTA GOT INTO THE QUESTURA early and took the hair-band and the brush over to forensic. The surly-looking lab assistant in the white coat sniffed at the plastic envelopes.

“What case do I assign them to?”

“Excuse me?”

“We got some new cost management procedures sent down from above. You got to tell me the case so I can lay it against the right budget.”

Costa sighed. “The missing teenager. Suzi Julius. I need to know if the hair on both of them match. By this afternoon.”

The man’s eyebrows rose. He was about forty, short, skinny, with a long bloodless face. He held the plastic bag up to the light on the desk and took a good look at the contents.

“I can tell you right now, Detective. They don’t match.”

“What?”

“Take a look for yourself. The hair’s a different colour.”

Costa snatched the bag off the man and stared at the contents. Maybe the man was right. There was a subtle difference in the hair colour. The sample on the hair-band from the villa was darker. Perhaps it did come from someone else. Or maybe it had been stained by the ochre earth on the floor.

“Is a person’s hair colour the same everywhere on the head?” he asked.

“Not unless they’ve done a very, very good dye job.”

“Then do me a favour,” Costa begged. “Satisfy my curiosity. Check.”

The assistant grunted and made a note. “This is gonna look good on the weekly audit. We’re half down on manning right now ”cos of the stinking flu. I think I’m coming down with it myself. Don’t expect miracles.“

“So how long?”

“Three days minimum,” the man replied. “It’s the best I can do in the circumstances. Sorry.”

“Jesus…” Costa murmured and went back to the office to find Peroni slumped in a chair at his desk, eyes closed, face grey and downcast.

“Morning,” Costa said.

“You left out the word ”good.“ I approve. You got a visitor. The Englishwoman’s outside.”

Costa gave him a sharp look.

“Hey,” Peroni protested. “Don’t get grumpy with me. I offered to listen. Seems you’re her main man. No Nic Costa, no talkie talkie.”

Costa went out to the reception area. Miranda Julius sat on a bench looking miserable. There were bags beneath her eyes.

He led her through to a reception room, past Teresa Lupo who scuttled along the corridor, head down.

Peroni followed and pulled up a chair at the desk, staring at her. “What can we do for you, Mrs. Julius?” he asked. It was, Costa guessed, a deliberate act, an attempt to make it clear they were a partnership, and she had to deal with both of them.

“Have you heard anything? Anything at all?”

Peroni frowned. “We’ll be in touch the moment we have some information. I promise.”

“So what are you doing?” she demanded. “What about the hair-band you found? Do you know for sure if it’s Suzi’s or not?”

The two men looked at each other. “Tell you what,” Peroni said. “I’ll just go ask about that outside.”

Costa watched him leave. “It takes time,” he said. “Everything takes time. You weren’t sure about that hair-band yourself. It’s probably just something left there by someone else. A school party.”

A school party out to study some Roman porn, he thought. Or a bunch from the university.

She leaned over the table and gripped his arm, peering into his face with that unavoidable intensity he was coming to know. “Nic. My daughter is missing. I heard on the TV all that speculation about rituals. You found those stupid things of hers in the apartment. What if she’s mixed up in this?”

He nodded. “As of now, there’s nothing to link Suzi directly with what happened in Ostia. Why should there be? Do you know either of these people on the news? The university professor? The policewoman?”

“No.”

Miranda Julius had the look he’d seen so often in these cases, a mixture of fear and self-loathing.

“Suzi ran away,” he said. “Probably with some stupid kid she met when you weren’t around. We’re circulating her photo everywhere. Someone will see it. Someone will recognize her. That’s if she doesn’t call you first.”

She looked at her watch. “I’m sorry. It’s just that I feel so… helpless.”

“It’s understandable. As I said, I can get someone to be with you if that’s what you want.”

“No,” she replied immediately. “There’s no need.” She paused. “I’m sorry. About last night. Embarrassing you like that. It was inexcusable.”

“Forget it.”

“No,” she said firmly. “I won’t forget it. Most men… well, I know what most men would have done. I guess… thanks.”

He didn’t want to prolong this particular line of conversation. “What are you going to do now?”

“Just walk around the place. Think. Hope. Just sitting in that stupid apartment on my own is driving me crazy. She’s got my mobile if she needs it.”

He gave her his card. “Call me. Anytime. For any reason. Even if there’s no news. If you just want to talk.”

She put the number in her bag. “Don’t take this the wrong way,” she said hesitantly. “I didn’t mean it last night when I said I had a habit of doing that. Sleeping with strangers. It wasn’t strictly true. I don’t want you to think… it was just automatic.” She glanced directly into his eyes for a moment.

Peroni saved him. He walked back into the room, shaking his head, saying there was no news from forensic, but they were still looking, they were starting to take phone calls from the public.

Then he sat down next to her, took off his jacket and placed it round the back of the chair, looking serious, businesslike. “We’re doing the best we can, Mrs. Julius,” Peroni added. “If there’s anything you can think of that’s occurred to you since yesterday…”

She clutched her arms tightly to her chest and nodded forward, a tense, nervous gesture. Her fair hair bobbed with the momentum of the sudden movement. “Nothing.” Then she came to life briefly. “No. I’m sorry. I’m not thinking straight. Last night, after you’d gone, I found one of those throwaway cameras in Suzi’s room. I got it developed just now. There’s nothing there. It’s just… stuff. Places. A young man. It’s just the usual holiday snapshots, though. No pictures of specific people, not that I can see. But you’re welcome to it.”

“That could be incredibly useful,” Peroni said confidently. “This is exactly the kind of help we need, Miranda.”

Costa looked at his partner and realized he was beginning to like him. A lot. They both knew there was nothing in the photos. Peroni was just helping her feel involved.

She reached into her canvas shoulder bag, took out an envelope of prints and handed them to Costa. He flicked through them: all the usual tourist jaunts. The Spanish Steps. The Trevi Fountain. The Colosseum. Suzi had done the rounds.

“We’ll take a close look,” he promised.

They saw her out, watched her leave.

“I hate lying to people,” Peroni said when she was out of earshot. “We’ve had three calls, and all them from the usual nutcases. I can’t believe no one’s seen the kid.”

“That’s exactly what happened with the Jamieson girl.”

Peroni looked sceptical. “Come on, Nic. I know enough about these things to understand this is what happens half the time. Let’s not leap to conclusions. That poor woman knows we’re doing that anyway and it’s just scaring her stupid.”

Costa sighed. Peroni was right.

“The trouble is,” Peroni went on, “I’m just like everyone else here. I can’t stop thinking about Barbara. It’s driving me crazy. What the hell went wrong there? Her old man is an asshole. A crook and a cheat and a bully. Barbara seemed so different. I used to look at her and think: yeah, you can beat off all the crap you get in this world, so long as you try. And I was wrong, wasn’t I? She’d got the poison just like the rest of us. Only worse. Why?”

Costa had seen Falcone briefly before he went to forensic. He knew where they were supposed to go next. “You worked with her old man?”

“I had that privilege,” Peroni replied, suspicious all of a sudden. Then he looked Costa in the eye. “Oh no. Don’t tell me. Falcone wants you and me to go have a little talk with the bastard. Please, for God’s sake tell me I’m wrong.”

Costa threw his hands open in exasperation. “You know him, Gianni. It makes sense, doesn’t it? The men who went round to talk to him last night came away with less than nothing.”

Peroni picked up his jacket from the chair and stood up, grimacing. “Why does this have to happen to me? Let me ask you something, Nic. I’ve got a daughter too. She’s just at that age where you start to see something adult beginning to emerge from all the kid stuff. So how’d you spot if they’re going down that road? How’d you know they’re not sucking some dark part out of you that you can’t even see yourself?”

The big ugly face stared at Costa, full of bewilderment and something close to grief. “If I couldn’t spot that in Barbara Martelli, if she could take all of us in so easily, how are you supposed to know?”

Costa was only half listening. There wasn’t time to deal with Peroni’s guilt. There was scarcely time to flick through the snaps again, seeing what he saw before, just familiar pieces of stone and crowds of people, tourists mainly. A sea of expressionless faces keeping all their secrets.

“I have no idea,” he said.

SHE HAD ACHES AND PAINS from the car crash. A plaster was attached to part of her scalp where she’d headbutted the dashboard. Still, this should have been a good morning in the Rome city morgue, one full of interest. Two fresh bodies on the slab. A blank cheque to start running whatever tests she liked on the curiously mummified corpse of Eleanor Jamieson. The work had never been this promising, not in the eight years she’d worked there. Nevertheless, Teresa Lupo leaned against the exterior wall that linked her office to the Questura, hunched deep in thought, puffing on the third cigarette of the day. Events were moving around her. Falcone had left with an entire team. Nic Costa and Peroni had nodded goodbye as they set off a few minutes later. And they were all, she suspected, headed in the wrong direction.

One obsessive thought had filled her head when she took the risk and drove to Ostia: a young girl called Suzi Julius was in big trouble and didn’t know it. Somehow this kid had walked into the hands of a lunatic. An intelligent, careful lunatic, true, but a lunatic all the same. At best she might get off with being raped, and probably not in the missionary position either. At worst…

Teresa thought of the tanned, leathery body on the slab and, for the first time in her career, began to wonder whether the job was finally beginning to get to her. Was it possible her fears for Suzi Julius were really just a manifestation of something else, a deep and growing malaise with the innate futility of what she did? She liked her work. Occasionally she came up with something that helped. She was good, better than average, which was why the authorities tolerated her behaviour. But whatever she did, however smart, however prescient, it always occurred after the event. You could comfort yourself with the thought that putting away some murdering creep could—just possibly—have prevented him killing someone else in the future. It still didn’t bring back the ones who were already dead. She was, when push came to shove, just a prurient mourner at their funeral, offering tears and sympathy and nothing else. She helped, but it wasn’t enough. Not in Teresa Lupo’s eyes anyway.

And now she wasn’t even doing that. When she’d gone to Ostia there’d been, at the back of her mind, the hope that she would find something to prove the bigger picture, to make it plain that some odd strand of recurring history linked Eleanor Jamieson’s death with Suzi Julius’s disappearance. It had to be that way. There was no longer any question of it in Teresa’s head, even though she was unable to rationalize her certainties. Falcone was a good cop. Give him the evidence, give him the cards to play, and there could be no one better on the case. But she’d seen the look in his eyes when he sat in the apartment in the Teatro di Marcello the previous day. He already had one certain murder, albeit a crime that was sixteen years old. Next to this—and the gangland connections that were common knowledge around the station even before she left for Ostia—the wilful disappearance of a teenage girl seemed, if not unimportant, certainly minor.

The thyrsus, the dates, the curious collection of seeds… all the evidence she and Nic Costa had found in Suzi’s bedroom carried insufficient weight. Maybe Suzi had been hooked on some Dionysian cult on the Internet. There were plenty there. Teresa had checked that morning. Maybe the tattoo on the shoulder was just one of the things kids did. Still, she didn’t really believe this for a moment. Falcone probably felt the same way. But without something stronger, something he could work on, he was lost.

Which was, she thought again, why she’d broken all the rules and driven out to see Professor Randolph Kirk, expecting to find Harrison Ford touting answers and bumping, instead, into Booger Bill who could only offer more complications and unfathomable mysteries. It was the worst possible decision in the world, and not just because it could end up getting her fired. With Kirk’s death, Falcone got another real crime to sink his teeth into, another spur to push Suzi Julius further to the back of his consciousness. When Teresa got chased by the helmeted beetle on a superbike, only to discover later it was an off-duty cop who was trying to whack her, and one whom most of the Questura lusted after daily, everything moved onto a different level altogether. A missing teenager became peripheral.

Teresa had sent Monkboy walkabout gathering gossip in the Questura that morning, before starting the autopsy on Barbara Martelli, a task she did not relish. Monkboy was good at this. The cops half pitied, half ridiculed him, and along the way he picked up all manner of information. He’d yet to report back. She knew, though, what he’d say. No one had seen Suzi Julius. Try as they might, no one had found any reason to believe this was anything more than the usual: a teenager trying to find out what adulthood was all about, not caring how shit-scared her mother might be in the meantime.

She’d taken a quick walk through the station herself too and seen the looks in their faces, understood what they’d have said if she raised the subject. So there’s this gorgeous traffic cop with hair the colour of gold and tits that never quite fit beneath her leather bike suit. One day this angel, this sex goddess with shades and a Ducati, whacks some university professor guy for no apparent reason. After which she tries similarly to off Rome’s resident eccentric pathologist only to wind up dead herself down some stinking pit outside Fiumicino. And you’re asking about a missing teenager who, when last seen, was smiling, waving a weirdly intense mamma goodbye as boyfriend number one drives her off in search of a suitable source of condoms? Does the word “priority” have no meaning where you come from? Do you ever stop to wonder how that sobriquet “crazy” came about?

They had a point. A cop point. But she’d seen something else on their faces. When they looked at her it was as if they somehow felt she was to blame. If she’d never driven out to Ostia, Barbara Martelli and Randolph Kirk would still be alive, and we’d all be none the wiser about why one would, if a person was to press all the right/wrong buttons, render the other stone dead.

“Yeah, but—” she said out loud, stabbing a finger at an imaginary antagonist standing in front of her, arguing with the thin, fume-filled air of a Roman spring. “Not knowing doesn’t mean there wasn’t something bad there all along. We just didn’t understand what it was, or why it existed.”

And we don’t now, she thought miserably. We know nothing.

“Could’ve happened anyway,” she mumbled to herself. “Not my fault. Ignorance isn’t bliss.”

The back door to the station opened. Monkboy stumbled out and shambled towards her, head down, not wanting to meet her eyes.

“Silvio,” she said cheerfully. “My man. My eyes and ears. Tell me, darling. What are they saying about your beloved boss hereabouts? Am I up for Commissioner next? Or should I think of running for President instead?”

He leaned back on the wall next to her, accepted a cigarette, lit it with all the skill and precision of a nine-year-old, took one deep puff then had a coughing fit.

“You don’t have to smoke for my sake,” Teresa observed. “Frankly, Silvio, I’d prefer it if you didn’t smoke at all. You don’t look like a smoker. These things don’t fit your face.”

Obediently, he threw the cigarette on the floor and stamped on it with his foot. “They’re all assholes. All cops. Every last one of them.”

She took his arm, leaned into his shoulder and, just for a second, twiddled girlishly with his lank, long hair. It required her to duck down a little. Silvio was not the tallest of men. “Tell me something I don’t know, dear heart. What about the Julius girl?”

“They’ve got nothing new.”

“So what are they doing?”

“Falcone’s gone to see a hood or something. They sent Costa and the weird-looking guy with him to dig up Barbara Martelli’s past. Try to work out why she’d want to kill the professor dude.”

“And me. Let’s not forget that, Silvio. She tried to kill me too.”

“Yeah.” His eyes darted across the yard.

“And?” She wasn’t letting him go just then. There was more to come.

“They’re pissed off with you, Teresa. They are really pissed off.”

“That makes a change.”

“No.” His round, liquid eyes came to fall on her and for a moment she actually felt guilty for getting him this scared. “You don’t get it. I’ve never heard them talk like this before. It’s as if—”

He didn’t want to say any more.

“As if it’s my fault?”

He stared at his shoes. “Yeah.”

She thought of slapping him out of this state, then decided it might not be the best decision in the circumstances.

“But it isn’t. Is it? Look at me, Silvio, for God’s sake.”

He did. His mournful face wasn’t a pretty sight.

“Say ”It’s not your fault, Teresa.“ ”

“It’s not your fault, Teresa.”

“Good. So what is their… theory, if you can call it that.”

“They don’t have one. They think there’s some mob connection with the mummy girl from way back. They think—and this is something they do not want to face—that Barbara Martelli was getting paid by one side to keep tabs on things. Informing. Running errands.”

She couldn’t get that black helmet bobbing at the car window out of her head. “That was an errand?”

“They don’t really know, Teresa. They’re still in shock I think.”

“And Randolph Kirk? Where’s he supposed to fit in?”

“When you started talking to him someone got worried he might blab about something or other and sent Barbara out to whack him and nip it all in the bud. They didn’t want witnesses either so she went after you.”

“The prof being in the mob too, then. I mean, that’s how most Mafiosi hide out from the cops these days, isn’t it? By holding a chair in classical antiquities at the University of Rome or something?”

“Didn’t get that far,” he mumbled. “Didn’t like to ask.”

“And they really think the Julius kid is just coincidence?”

“They don’t know what to think. You know what they’re like. They’re primitive organisms. They don’t multitask. There’s only so much they can handle at any one time. Also they got lots of staff off with this virus thing. Hell, so have we.”

She ran a hand through her hair. She hadn’t been as careful as normal with it that morning. It was a mess, if she were honest with herself. Just like the old days. “But, Silvio. Suzi Julius is still alive. At least until tomorrow, if I’m right. Doesn’t anyone understand that?”

He muttered something about priorities and how it was unfair to throw all this at him, then looked helpless again. She hated herself for venting her anger on this hapless minion. It was cruel, unjustified. It was the kind of thing cops did.

“Sorry,” she whispered. “It’s not aimed at you. It’s aimed at me if you want to know.”

He put his hand on her arm, which was, all things considered, a little creepy. “Let’s just go back inside, Teresa. We’ve got work to do and you and me are just about the only two people here right now who aren’t sneezing up buckets. Let’s keep our heads down and get on with things until it all blows over. They’re paid to deal with this crap, not us. If we stay quiet, maybe it’ll all go away. They’ll find what they want and forget about the rest.”

Which was a nice idea, she thought, and one that had not a snowball in hell’s chance of becoming reality.

“There’s nothing in there you and the rest of the team can’t handle,” she said abruptly. “Let’s face it. You don’t need to be a genius to know how the beautiful Barbara and the professor died. And the bog girl’s there more for the science than the criminology. We might as well admit it. We’ve got no answers for them. We should be trying to make sure Suzi Julius doesn’t go into our in-tray instead.”

He took his hand away. He looked scared. “That’s what they get paid to do. We’ve got a big workload on. I can’t cope on my own.”

“You can cope, Silvio,” she said. “You can cope better than you know.”

“What if something else happens? What if—”

She took his arm again, smiling. “Look. Statistics. How many violent deaths do we get in Rome? There’s a week’s quota lying on the slab right now. Nothing’s going to happen today. Trust me. I need a break. I need to think.”

The pale, flabby face blushed off-pink. “You’re going somewhere,” he said accusingly. “I know you. This is like yesterday all over again. You’re going somewhere and it isn’t good at all.”

“I just thought I’d—”

“No! No! Do not tell me because I don’t want to hear. Two wrongs don’t make a right—”

“I wasn’t wrong! Stupid maybe. But two stupids just make you… stupid. And most of the jerks in there think that of me anyway. So where’s the harm?”

“Please.” His little hands were together now, praying. “I beg of you, Teresa. For my sake. Don’t do this. Whatever it is.”

She kissed him lightly on the cheek and watched the blood make a big rush all the way from his jowls to his eye sockets. “Nothing’s going to happen, Silvio. Listen to your friend Teresa. Just hold the fort for an hour and then I’ll be back. And they’re none the wiser.”

He looked wrecked. He looked terrified. “An hour. Is that an earth hour? Or one of those special hours you have on that planet of yours?”

“Silvio, Silvio,” she sighed. “Tell me. What could possibly go wrong?”

BENIAMINO VERCILLO WAS a measured, organized man. He liked to start work early, at seven prompt each weekday morning, seated at his desk in the cellar of a block off the Via dei Serpenti in Monti. The place abutted a busy optician’s on the street. It was a fixed-rent single room of just twenty-five square metres, with no windows, just a door to the iron steps leading down from the street. Space enough to house Vercillo and the female secretary who had been servicing him, in more ways than one, these last ten years. After the bus ride from the quiet suburb of Paroli near the Via Veneto he took breakfast—a cappuccino and a cornetto—every morning in the café across the road. Lunch was a piece of pizza rustica from one of the local shops. By six he was back home, work done for the day, ready for the life of a middle-aged Roman bachelor. Vercillo was now fifty-two. He preferred plain dark suits, pressed white shirts, a dark tie and old, worn shoes. He was, it seemed to him, the most insignificant man to walk this busy little street that ran from the dull modern thoroughfare of Via Cavour over to the fashion shops in Via Nazionale.

This was, at least, the public image he wished to present, and for good reason. Vercillo was Emilio Neri’s bookkeeper. In his head lay every last detail of the big hood’s Italian investments, legitimate and crooked. Those that could be written down sat stored on the single PC in Vercillo’s office, ready to be transcribed for the annual tax forms, accurate down to the last cent. Vercillo was a good accountant. He knew what he could get away with and what would push the tax inspectors too far. Those items that were of a more delicate nature, Vercillo recorded differently. First to a prodigious memory, honed from the mathematical tricks he used to pull to impress the teachers when he was at school. Then written down, using a code Vercillo never revealed to anyone—least of all Emilio Neri—and kept in a safe, hidden in the walls of his subterranean office.

It was a satisfactory situation. Vercillo made the best part of half a million euros a year keeping Neri out of harm’s way. And that secret code lent Vercillo some safety from the fat man’s wrath should things go wrong. Vercillo knew only too well what fate befell accountants who served their mob bosses badly. Foul up and you might get away with a vicious beating. Steal and you were dead. But do the job well, keep yourself out of sight, and hold a little key in your head that no one else could share… then, Vercillo reasoned, everyone could be happy. The authorities stayed at a safe distance. Neri knew that if Vercillo stumbled up the stairs from his office and fell beneath the wheels of the little 117 tourist bus the secrets of his empire would remain secure, unintelligible to the taxman and the DIA even if they found them. For his part, Vercillo maintained a measure of security, a hold over Neri that both men recognized without having to state it. This was convenient. It meant that he rarely had to call Neri except for information, and the big old hood hardly ever had to trouble him. This was the way it ought to be. He was an accountant. A money man. Not a foot soldier, out looking for trouble. He liked it that way.

Vercillo had given Sonia, the secretary, a day off to go out and see her sick mamma in Orvieto. She’d turned thirty now. She wasn’t as much fun as she used to be. Soon he’d have to find a reason to fire her, get someone younger, someone more interesting, to take her place. He hated the thought. Vercillo always tried to steer away from confrontation. It was getting harder and harder these days. Neri’s business empire grew and grew, sometimes into areas that gave Vercillo room for concern. When he was a bookish teenager in Rome in the Sixties, during the brief period of economic happiness they called “Il Boom,” Vercillo expected the world to improve on a constant, incremental basis, becoming happier, more prosperous, more peaceful year by year. Instead, the opposite happened. The Red Brigade came, then went, then came back again. There were bombs everywhere, and madness. He’d lost a cousin in Israel to a suicide attack. Vercillo scarcely thought of himself as a Jew these days but the idea that someone could die like that, just walking down the street, going into the wrong café, appalled him. There was a need for more order in people’s lives. And some politeness too. Instead, all you got was this constant stream of bodies, foreigners pushing and shoving to get in front of everyone else. It had all gone wrong somewhere over the past forty years and, for the life of him, he couldn’t understand how or when.

It was the tourists that got to him most. The English, drunk for every football game. The Japanese, constantly taking pictures, blundering into you on the street, not knowing a word of Italian. And the Americans, who thought they could do any damn thing they liked so long as they had a few dollars in their pocket. Rome would be better off without the lot of them. They intruded upon the native consciousness. They marred the place. Today especially. There was some kind of street theatre festival going on around the Colosseum down the road. They were setting up when he came to work. Commedia dell’Arte characters climbing into costumes. Africans. Orientals. And all the usual fraudsters pretending to be gladiators, trying to screw some cash out of the tourists for pictures.

Beniamino Vercillo looked up from the desk in his dark little pit feeling grumpy, tasting the sour bile of growing disappointment in his mouth, then wondered how much his thoughts were random, how much the product of what he was half seeing out of the corner of his eye.

In front of him, framed in the open doorway, was a figure from some stupid dream. It stood there like a crazy god wearing some kind of theatrical gown: a long red jacket, cheap brown sacking trousers. And a mask, one straight out of a nightmare, all crazy writhing hair, with a black gaping mouth, fixed in a lunatic grin.

The figure took one step forward, theatrically, like an actor making a point. He had to be from one of the street troupes Vercillo saw earlier.

“I don’t give to charity,” the little accountant declared firmly.

The figure moved closer with two more of those stupid, histrionic strides. Vercillo’s head started to work, remembering something from long ago.

“What is this shit?” Vercillo mumbled automatically. “What do you want?”

“Neri,” the crazy god said in a calm, clear voice that floated out from behind the mask.

Vercillo shivered, wondering if this was all some hallucination. “Who?”

The creature opened its jacket, its right hand reached down towards a leather scabbard on its belt. Vercillo watched aghast as it withdrew a short, fat sword that gleamed in the fluorescent lights.

The shining weapon rose, dashed through the air then dug deep into the desk in front of him, severing the phone cord, cutting straight through the sheaf of letters that sat in front of Vercillo.

“Books,” the crazy god said.

“No books here, no books here—”

He was quiet. The point of the blade was at his throat, pricking into his dewlap.

The crazy god shook his head. The blade pressed harder. Vercillo felt a sharp stab of pain, then a line of blood began to trickle down his neck.

“He’ll kill me,” he murmured.

“He’ll kill you?” It was impossible to guess what kind of face lay behind the mask. A determined one. Vercillo didn’t doubt that.

He threw up his hands and pointed to the edge of the desk. The sword went down a fraction. Vercillo hooked a finger into the drawer handle and gently pulled. With the slicing edge never more than a couple of centimetres from his throat, he gingerly drew out a set of keys.

“I need to get up,” he said, his voice cracking a little with the strain.

The mask nodded.

Beniamino Vercillo walked towards the wall of the office furthest away from the street. His hands trembling, the accountant turned the key in the security door of the safe then fumbled his way through the numbers on the lock. After a couple of attempts it swung open. He reached inside and withdrew something. The two of them returned to the table. Vercillo opened the large cardboard document box and stood back.

The crazy god’s leather fingers dipped into the file and took out the pile of papers there. He threw them on the desk, not saying a word, anger leaking out invisibly from behind the static grin. These were just numbers. Numbers and numbers. Unintelligible.

Vercillo quivered, frightened, and wished to God he’d taken an office on the ground floor, with a window out onto the street. Not this stupid, cramped cave where anything could go on unseen by the busy world outside.

“Code,” the god said simply, pointing at the lines of letters on the pages in front of them.

He tried to think straight. He tried to imagine the consequences. It was impossible. There was only one consequence which mattered.

“If I tell you—?”

The lunatic head stared at him, no emotion in its features, nothing human there at all.

“If I tell you… I can go?”

He could run. Vercillo had some private money in places no one could ever find. He could go somewhere Neri’s wrath would never find him. Australia maybe. Or Thailand, where the girls were young, and no one asked any questions. He looked around the drab little office, thought of his drab old clothes. Maybe this was fate doing him a favour. All his life he’d spent in the service of the fat hood, pretending to be something he wasn’t. Lying, cheating, telling himself it was OK all along because, whatever Neri did to earn his money, none of the blood sat on his own fingers. He’d lied to himself there. Neri touched him. Always. It was one reason he started messing with girls. Neri offered him the chance, introduced him to that world. It was one way of keeping him in line.

The idea of retirement, of putting distance between him and this bleak existence built on nothing more than numbers, was suddenly appealing.

Besides, a stray thought wondered, what’s the alternative? You’re an accountant. Not a foot soldier.

“You can go,” the crazy god said, and again Vercillo found himself trying to place the accent, trying to imagine the human face behind it: young, undoubtedly, but not rough, not like Neri’s henchmen.

Vercillo picked up the phone. The crazy god briefly raised the sword, forgetting, it seemed to Vercillo, that he’d already cut the cord. The omission cheered the little accountant. There was something human behind the mask after all.

“It’s OK,” Vercillo explained. “This is it. Watch.”

He set a page—a stream of unintelligible letters—next to the phone. “It’s simple. The person it refers to is identified by his phone number. Everything that comes after is a number too. What’s owed. What the interest rate is. What’s been paid.”

It felt stupidly exhilarating. In twenty-five years he’d never had this conversation with anyone.

The crazy god stared at the characters on the table, matching them off with the phone keypad using the point of the sword.

“It’s clever,” Vercillo added. “Just remember to use Q for zero and Z for one.” It was too. It meant you could encrypt the number “2” in any one of three ways—A, B or C—and anyone with a phone could still get the right answer in seconds. People assumed codes were designed to hide words, not numbers. As long as they kept to that idea the code was pretty much impossible to crack. It wouldn’t fool the FBI, not in the end. But it could fool a lot of people. It would fool Emilio Neri and in some curious way that was all that mattered.

The crazy god laughed and there was something wrong inside the sound.

“Is that what you want?” Vercillo asked.

The mask didn’t say a thing.

“I—” Vercillo wanted praise, or gratitude even. There was nothing. “Maybe I could give you more.”

“Don’t need more,” the crazy god murmured, beginning to move, beginning to lift the short, sharp blade higher.

“You said—” Then Vercillo fell silent. There was no point in talking to a sword. There was no point in anything at all. The world was mad. The world was a mask leering at him, getting bigger, crazier with every diminishing second.

BARBARA MARTELLI HAD LIVED with her old man in a first-floor apartment on the Lateran Square. The communal front door faced the site of the first St. Peter’s built by Constantine. The place had five big rooms, a quiet view over the internal courtyard, and plenty of expensive furnishings with a personal, feminine touch. She must have bought them, Costa thought. Peroni had brought along the file from the previous night’s visit, which they’d read in the car outside. The old man had said little but the background was interesting. It contained more than either of them had expected. When they walked in Costa thought about some of the older papers, with their vague, unproven allegations, took one look at old man Martelli and knew straightaway where the money came from.

He was in his mid-fifties and skeletally thin, hunched in a shiny wheelchair, staring back at them with cold, dead eyes. Still, Costa could imagine what he would have been like in his prime. Not that different from Peroni: fit, strong, dogmatic. He didn’t look well now, and it wasn’t just grief. Costa knew that kind of sickness, recognized the signs. The patchy hair from the chemotherapy. The dead, desiccated look in the eyes. And Martelli was still smoking like crazy too. The place reeked of stale tobacco.

Martelli stared at Gianni Peroni and shook his head. “Jesus, talk about bad apples,” he snarled. “I heard you got busted from vice. Didn’t realize they busted you down this far. You enjoying it, huh?”

“Yeah,” Peroni said. “Does a man good to get kicked in the teeth from time to time. This detective stuff’s interesting too. We always used to think we had the short end of the stick in vice, Toni. We didn’t. You know why?”

The sick old man just glared at him.

“In vice,” Peroni continued, “we knew we were dealing with shit all along. The only question was how bad it was, and how much stuck to us along the way.” He waved a hand at Costa. “These guys don’t have that privilege. They try to assume everyone’s innocent before they find out otherwise. Trust me. This really cramps your style. Fortunately, I haven’t learnt that trick.”

“If you could’ve kept your pecker in your pants, you wouldn’t be needing it,” Martelli retorted.

Peroni grimaced. He really didn’t like this man. “So I keep telling myself. Why are we talking like this, Toni? Me and the boy came round here to offer our condolences. We both knew Barbara. We loved that girl. We’re in shock over what happened. So why are we making a fight out of things? You want some answers just the same as we do.”

Martelli started coughing like crazy, a cruel, rasping hack. It must have hurt. When he finished he took two gulps of snatched air then wheezed at them, “I said everything I had to say last night. Can’t you leave a father alone with his thoughts?”

Peroni pulled up a chair next to Martelli, sat down, gave Costa a look that said “watch this” and lit a cigarette. “I know, I know. It’s that asshole Falcone. He just pushes and pushes.”

Martelli snorted. “I remember him. He wasn’t such hot stuff. How come he made inspector? Don’t they have any reliable men left these days?”

“Some,” Peroni replied. “A few. How’re you doing? People still ask after you.”

“Don’t give me that shit. I hadn’t seen a soul from the Questura in months till last night. Now I can’t sleep for the doorbell ringing.”

Peroni shrugged and stared at the walls.

“Is it long since you retired, Signor Martelli?” Costa asked.

“Six years. The moron I was working with complained about my cough. Next thing you know they’re doing X-rays, sending me down to the hospital. Medical leave. Compulsory retirement.”

“He did you a favour,” Costa said. “My father died of cancer. The sooner it’s caught—”

“A favour.” Martelli’s dark eyes stared back at him. “That’s what you call it?”

“Yes.”

“Well, here I am. Still coughing. Still feeling like shit. With my hair falling out and my guts with a mind of their own. Some favour. I could’ve worked a few more years. I could’ve done the job. Then what? Maybe they side me with some dumb kid who doesn’t know his left hand from his right and gets me walking straight into one of them nice immigrant types we got working the Termini dope run these days. All knives and guns and shit we never had to deal with till they came along. Hell, I wasn’t cut out for retirement.”

The man seemed consumed by his own self-pity. They’d come to talk about the death of his daughter. Instead it seemed Toni Martelli only had time to think about himself, how everything that happened affected his own fragile identity. Costa tried to recall Barbara more closely and found it impossible. There was, now that he came to think of it, something fleeting about her, a kind of brittle anonymity masquerading as friendliness. Maybe that was all an act too, like the show she put on of being just another cop. There had to be some answers in this over-grand apartment and in the head of her father. He knew that nothing would be prised out into the light of day readily. Toni Martelli had crawled out from underneath some serious corruption allegations scot-free, and went on to take home a full pension. He wasn’t the type to offer up the truth for nothing.

“So you and Barbara must have worked together?” Costa asked.

“Depends what you mean by ”together.“ I worked vice and dope mainly. She was traffic. We met in the corridors. We said hello. We didn’t talk about what we did if that’s what you mean. A good cop leaves things in the office. Maybe you’re not old enough to understand that.”

“Were you glad she joined the force?”

He shuffled, uncomfortable. “Yeah. At the time. Why shouldn’t I be?”

“Who gave her the job, Toni?” Peroni asked.

“Don’t recall.”

Peroni scratched his crew-cut, thinking. “One of those bent guys you liked, huh? What was the name of that big goon you were pally with? The one that did time for taking money from Neri a couple of years ago? Filippo Mosca, wasn’t it?”

“I don’t have to take this shit,” Martelli wheezed.

Peroni smiled, leaned over and took hold of his scrawny knee. “That’s the trouble, Toni. That’s the worst thing of all. You do.”

“Where’s her mother? Does she know?” Costa wondered.

“Back home in Sicily. Of course she knows.” Martelli’s dead eyes glared at him. “They got TV and papers in Sicily, haven’t they? How couldn’t she know?”

“You should have called her, Toni,” Peroni said. “You got to bury these things sometimes.”

A skeletal finger cut through the air in front of Peroni’s face. “Don’t fucking tell me what to do. Don’t go places you don’t belong. That woman walked out on me for no good reason. She can rot in hell for all I care.”

Peroni’s face lit up at Martelli’s reaction. “She left right around the time Barbara joined up, didn’t she? Any connection there?”

“Just get out of here.”

It wasn’t grief that was eating the man up. It was hatred, and fear maybe.

“Is there something we can do?” Costa asked. “Help make arrangements?”

Martelli’s eyes fixed on the carpet. “Nope.”

“Is there nothing at all you want to tell us?”

He didn’t say a word.

Peroni leaned back and closed his eyes. “This is such a nice apartment. I wish I could afford something like it. You know, I could just sit here all day, smoking, thinking. You got anything to eat, Toni? You want me to send the boy out and fetch something in while we wait for you to get your voice back? Couple of beers? Some pizza?”

Martelli shook his head. “She was thirty-two years old, for God’s sake. A grown woman. You think she told me everything? It just makes no sense. She got here around three thirty after she came off duty. A little while later there’s a call and next thing I know she’s putting on that leather gear of hers, off for a ride. Hell, it was a nice day. I thought maybe she was doing it for fun. Maybe she was going to meet someone. I don’t know.”

“She didn’t say anything?” Costa asked.

Martelli turned to look at Peroni. “Where did you get Junior? Is this one of them work experience things the schools do?” The bony finger jabbed at Costa from across the room. “If she’d said anything I’d have mentioned it. I didn’t do the job you think you’re doing for more than thirty years without learning to put one foot in front of the other.”

“Of course,” Costa nodded and thought again: where was the grief? Was Toni Martelli just holding it all inside? Or was there something that overwhelmed even that? Fear? A sense that his own skin might be at risk now too?

“We could get someone round to talk to you. We could get you counselling.”

“Send round some grappa and a few packs of cigarettes. Counselling? And they wonder why the force has gone to pieces.”

“We could get you protection,” Costa suggested.

“Why would I need that?”

“I don’t know. You tell me. Barbara had secrets. That much we do know. Maybe some people think she shared them with you.” Costa leaned forward. “Maybe she did.”

“Don’t try fishing with me, kid,” Martelli snapped. “Ate up minnows like you for dinner in my time. You ask something sensible or you get the hell out of here. I was planning to watch some football.”

It was as if what had occurred was an everyday event. Or that Martelli refused to allow it to touch him, scared perhaps of the consequences. Costa couldn’t begin to understand this strange old man at all.

Peroni looked at his watch then at Costa. They both knew they were getting nowhere.

Costa persisted. “Tell me, Mr. Martelli. Did Barbara have a boyfriend?”

The bleak, old eyes glared at him. “Nothing special.”

“Any names? Did you ever meet them?”

“No.” He lit a cigarette, took a deep gulp then closed his eyes. “None of my business. None of yours either.”

Peroni nudged him, smiling. “It is now. We got to pry into Barbara’s bedroom, Toni. We got to do that for her sake as well as ours. Did she always come home at night? Or did she stay with them?”

“You two getting off on this?” Martelli asked.

Costa was unmoved. “Did she leave any phone numbers where you could contact her when she was out?”

The old man went silent again, staring at them sullenly. He was thinking, though. There was some kind of revelation going on inside his head.

“She didn’t go for men,” he said. “Don’t get me wrong. She didn’t go for women either. She wasn’t interested. Not for a long while now. I…”

Just for a moment he looked pained. “I wish she had fucked off with someone, got married, had kids. Instead of all this shit. All this lonely, lonely shit…”

“Why was she lonely?” Peroni asked. “Barbara of all people? I mean, she could have had any man she wanted. Why wouldn’t she try a couple out just for size?”

“I dunno,” he grunted, recovering his composure. “Why ask me? She never told me nothing.”

Nic Costa felt an intense dislike for this desiccated man. Peroni had hit on something too. Barbara never did go out with anyone, though she must have been asked all the time. Was she scared of men? Had something happened that made her incapable of maintaining an everyday relationship?

“I wasn’t interested in you,” Costa said. “Not directly. If it’s at all possible, Mr. Martelli, try to imagine yourself outside all this for a moment. I was asking about Barbara. We’ve only got three possibilities here. Either she did this of her own volition, just acting alone, for what reason none of us could begin to guess. Or she did it as a private favour. Or someone from one of the mobs kept her sweet over the years and used her to do jobs in her spare time. And paid her.”

Martelli sucked desperately on the cigarette and blew a cloud across the room. Costa waved away the smoke.

“You’re her father,” Costa continued. “You were a cop. Where’d you put your money?”

The cigarette burned brightly again.

“In fact,” Costa added, “talking of money, where are Barbara’s bank accounts? Where are yours for that matter?”

“They took them,” Martelli snapped. “Last night. They’re clean. Not a hint of anything bad. Do I look like an idiot?”

Costa stood up. “You don’t mind if we search the apartment again, Mr. Martelli? In case they missed something?”

The old man turned his miserable gaze on Peroni. “I’ve had enough of this shit. You’ve got no papers that give you the right to do this.”

Peroni shook his head. “We’re not going away empty-handed, Toni. There must be something. Something you remembered after they left last night. Otherwise we go out for the beer and pizza. I promise you.”

“Thanks,” Martelli said with a scowl. “Tell them this. She was a good daughter. She cared for me. She always knew her family came first. I wish I’d appreciated that more. I wish—”

His voice broke. His eyes filled with tears.

Toni Martelli was crying for himself, Costa thought. None of this was supposed to happen. The company he kept had saved him from prosecution before. He must have thought himself untouchable, and believed, by implication, this sense of immunity applied to his daughter too.

“It would be a terrible thing to live with,” Costa said quietly. “Knowing the events that led to your own child’s death came from you.”

“Get the fuck out of here,” Martelli croaked. “The pair of you. And don’t come back.”

Costa thought of arguing. But there was no point. The old man felt protected. As long as he could stay inside the big empty apartment in the Lateran he could continue to fool himself into believing the world would never intrude upon his private hell. None of this could last, and he knew that as well as they did. It was just one of the reasons why he was steeped in such terror.

They didn’t say anything as they left. The two men stumbled outside into the daylight. The morning was growing painfully bright under the strong sun. It hurt the eyes. It made the city harsh and two-dimensional.

“We need to work on this ”good cop, bad cop“ routine,” Peroni suggested as they walked to the car. “I got confused about my role in there.”

“Really? What role did you want?”

“Good cop,” Peroni insisted. “Maybe not with assholes like him. But temperamentally I’m much better at it. Whereas you… I think you could out-hardball Falcone if you wanted. Doesn’t that worry you a little, Nic?”

“Not often these days.”

Peroni shot him a puzzled glance. “I wish you wouldn’t do this to me. Make me think like a detective. It hurts. It’s not what I’m built for.”

“What are you thinking?”

He nodded back at the apartment block. “Martelli was on the take. That we know. So Barbara must have got into it too. Or maybe her job was some kind of reward for something Martelli had done. She just inherited the crooked mantle.”

Peroni stared at his partner, half offended. “What? Why are you looking at me like that?”

“You’re imagining things,” Costa said with a smile. “This is good. Maybe you could make detective.”

The older man laughed and pointed to the car. “Hey, what I make next is inspector. And you get to drive for me. This is just a temporary hiatus, a blip in the natural order. Some things never change.”

But they do, Costa thought. The world was different already. Cops were killing people in their spare time, and getting killed in return. Something was loose, and random too, but that didn’t make it any less powerful.

Costa got behind the wheel, waited for Peroni to strap himself in, then set off into the traffic struggling round the big, busy square, thinking about Miranda Julius and her missing daughter, trying to work out if there was a way in which they might be unwitting parts of the shadowy, broader picture which had taken Barbara Martelli down to Ostia on a murderous mission less than twenty-four hours before.

“At least we’ve found out something,” he said.

“We have?”

“Whoever it was on the motorbike that picked up Suzi Julius yesterday, it wasn’t Barbara Martelli. She was on duty. I’ll check her movements but there’s no way that could have been her in the Campo. She couldn’t have changed uniform, changed bike, without someone noticing.”

Peroni nodded. “That’s right. Jesus, I should have seen that myself.”

“You’re doing fine, Gianni. You just have to keep looking for the connections. Imagining what they might be.”

“I don’t want to imagine,” Peroni objected, scowling. “I wanna ask and get told. OK? And don’t say I ain’t a partner.” He started delving into Costa’s jacket pocket as the Fiat sped down the hill towards the Colosseum.

“This is over-familiar,” Costa declared.

Peroni took out the envelope of holiday snaps Miranda Julius had given them and waved them in Costa’s face. “I can look, can’t I? There’s nothing private going on between you two? Not yet anyways?”

“Hah, hah.”

Peroni snorted. “That’s good. Get all the impertinence out of your system now, Nic. You won’t be able to come out with all that stuff when I’m your boss. Firm but fair is my rule. I don’t take any crap though and—”

He went quiet. Costa drew to a halt at the red light, tucked in behind a tram, watching in despair the way the tourists ignored every traffic signal on the road, risking their lives dodging between the cars.

“What is it?” he asked.

Peroni had four photos fanned out in front of him. Just crowd scenes outside the Trevi Fountain.

“Did you see our late professor friend out at Ostia?”

“No. I was busy looking around the place.”

“In that case you should have watched the TV this morning. They showed a mug shot of him. We’ve got the same guy. Here.” He pointed at a bland, middle-aged man in the crowd, staring back at the camera, interested.

“And here.” It was another shot at the fountain, probably just a minute or so later. The crowd had changed, but Randolph Kirk was still there, still staring intently.

“And here. And here.”

“Four shots,” Costa said, and didn’t know whether to feel pleased or horrified.

“So was the creep stalking her?” Peroni wondered. “Was he a distant admirer or something, and never took it any further? Or is this just coincidence?”

Costa glanced in the mirror, hit the pedal and pulled out into the oncoming stream of traffic, generating a furious howl of horns.

“I don’t know about you,” he said, “but I’m right out of coincidences.”

“IT DOESN’T RHYME with ”vagina.“ Try again. I have a rule about this. Kindly indulge me.”

Teresa Lupo was struggling for words. She’d expected some boring university administrator, not this slender, middle-aged Scotswoman dressed in an elegant, black velvet dress, a string of pearls around her pale, flawless neck, and sitting bolt upright behind a gleaming teak desk. A large, imposing brass nameplate stood between them bearing the name Professor Regina Morrison, Director of Administration, followed by a string of academic letters. Teresa wasn’t sure she knew how to cope. What was more, she was starting to feel sick. Her head hurt. Her throat was going dry, her eyes itchy.

“Excuse me?”

The woman adjusted a photograph of a small terrier on the desk so that the dog stared directly into Teresa Lupo’s eyes with a fierce, unbending gaze. “Re-jeen-a Morrison. I’m not responsible for my own name. Sometimes I wonder if perhaps I ought to change it to something more usual. But then I think: why? Why bend to an ignorant world? Why not make it bend instead?”

“Re-jeen-a.”

“There,” the woman beamed. She had a very neat, mannish haircut, her too-black locks clipped close to her scalp. “That wasn’t so hard, was it? Now tell me. You’re a police officer?”

“Teresa Lupo. I’m from the police department.”

Regina Morrison leaned forward and put her hands together in the kind of gesture she must have used with recalcitrant students all the time. “So you’re not a police officer?”

There was, she thought, no point in trying to fox this woman. “Not exactly. I’m a pathologist. This is Italy, Professor Morrison. Things get complicated.”

“In the six months I’ve worked here I must say I’ve noticed. Still, I imagine I should be grateful anyone’s turned up at all. If this were Edinburgh I’d have no end of people trampling through my office asking all manner of stupid questions with half a dozen TV stations stumbling in their wake. It’s almost a day now since Randolph was killed. And all I have is you. Should I be grateful? Or offended?”

“Ask me that when the real cops turn up,” Teresa observed wryly. “My money’s on grateful.”

The slender shoulders moved just a little. That seemed to amuse her. “So why are you here and not them?”

“Because—” she shrugged. “The woman who killed your man was a cop and that changes things somewhat. The focus shifts, to her, not him. For now anyway. I got a look at the report this morning. It said Kirk was something of a loner. He lived by himself. No relatives in Italy. Not many friends. Cops are just like…” she tried to think of a good analogy, “… university administrators. They put their resources in the places where they think they’ll get the best return. The woman who killed Professor Kirk is someone they all knew. I guess they think they’ll get further, faster, by checking her first before driving round all day trying to track down any barflies Kirk drank with in his spare time.”

“Randolph Kirk drank alone, poor man,” Regina Morrison said with some firmness.

Then she opened a drawer and took out a half bottle of Glenmorangie malt and two small glasses.

“Cheers,” she said, pouring a couple of shots, picking one up and staring directly across the shining desk at her visitor.

“Sorry,” Teresa said. “I’m on duty. I didn’t mean anything by that. It was a figure of speech. If he was a friend of yours—”

“No,” the woman answered, with equal conviction, and downed the whisky in one go. “He wasn’t that either. Not at all. I’m just a mite put out to discover that he, and by implication the rest of us in the academic community… we’re all somehow less interesting than this murderous colleague of yours.”

Teresa took Kirk’s book out of her bag and waved it in the air. “Not to me you’re not. I was hoping he could clear up a few things that were bothering me. While I couldn’t claim to have made much personal contact with him during our brief meeting yesterday, I have read his book. And that I find very interesting indeed. That, Professor Morrison, is why I’m here.”

“It was you?” she asked, intrigued. “The woman who was with him when this happened?”

“Not with him. Locked in his office. He saved my life, I think. Not that he meant to.”

“Don’t undersell yourself,” Regina Morrison said with some admiration.

Unconsciously, Teresa stroked the plaster sticking to her scalp. “I’ll try to remember that.”

“But I don’t understand why you, of all people, are here. I’d have thought you had plenty of real work to occupy you.”

Regina Morrison had a way of coming to the point with a remarkable directness. It hit home too. When she thought about Monkboy being left to his own devices, Teresa Lupo felt far from comfortable.

“I need to tie up some loose ends. You’ve read Kirk’s book?”

“Oh yes,” she answered. “I’m an administrator now but I’m a classicist at heart. One day I’m going back to teaching. Sooner rather than later if I lose another member of staff this suddenly. I got parachuted in here from Edinburgh last autumn so don’t expect me to provide too many searing insights into Randolph Kirk’s persona. But I read his book and admired it greatly. When I took the job I hoped he had another one on the cards and perhaps I’d get an early look-in. That was one reason I came.” She thought carefully about what to say next. “Little did I know.”

“Know what?” Teresa asked impatiently.

“To be honest with you I thought I’d be telling all this to a real police officer.”

She couldn’t wait that long, though. Regina Morrison was itching to get on with her tale.

“I’ll pass it on. Promise.”

“I’m sure you will,” the woman chuckled. “The truth is I was about to fire him. It’s just one nasty job after another here at the moment. They brought me in from outside for a reason. No one local, and certainly no one Italian, was going to face up to the… difficulties that needed cleaning up. I may as well tell you. It’s going to come out anyway one day. Maladministration. Fraud. Some exceedingly dubious academic projects. And Randolph Kirk. A wonderful scholar, one of the best of his generation at Cambridge apparently. But a lonely little man with a lonely little man’s habits. He couldn’t keep his hands to himself. Most academics move on once in a while. That’s the way to get more money. Not Randolph. He stayed here for a reason, my dear. He had to. If he’d pulled some of his tricks anywhere else he’d be out of work for life, sued for every penny he owned, and possibly in jail too.”

For a moment, Teresa felt like a cop, standing on the brink of some important discovery. It was a wonderful sensation. “Tricks?”

“He molested young women. The younger the better. I don’t know the full extent of what went on. Back home we’re like the Americans. Girls scream sexual assault if someone says they’re wearing a nice dress. Why Sigmund Freud settled in Vienna is beyond me. We’re ten times more anal in Edinburgh. Here it’s the opposite. Everyone keeps their mouths shut. Maybe they think it goes with the course. All the same, I had enough evidence to terminate him within six weeks of falling into this chair, and had your gun-wielding colleague not intervened I would have done it very soon. Trust me.”

Teresa tapped the book. “Was it connected with what he wrote?”

Regina Morrison smiled back at her across the desk. “You and I think along the same lines. Remarkable. I read that a couple of years ago. Then when I turned up here and started hearing some stories about the real Randolph I read it again. You needed to meet the man to understand this. He wasn’t just writing history. He was laying out the grounds for some kind of personal philosophy of his, one he thought he was copying from those rituals. You know what I think? He played it out. He persuaded some of those gullible girls. He convinced them what they were doing was worth a try somehow. I can’t believe they were fooled by all his mumbo-jumbo, mind, but you know what girls are. Perhaps there was something in it for them. Whatever. My guess is he put on one of those masks he was always writing about, pretended he was the great god himself and had his fun. It didn’t fool anyone else, of course. The kids knew why they were doing it. To get the right grades or something. If old Randolph invited along a few visitors—and I suspect he did because he was a man who desperately needed to be told how clever he was every living second of the day—I don’t imagine they bought into his fancy myths either. They were just having a little fun for free. I’m guessing there, which is something no academic should do, but I feel it’s right anyway. I talked to a couple of ex-students. They’re just too scared to tell, to be honest. I wonder why.”

Teresa’s pulse was racing. There had to be evidence here. There had to be something Regina Morrison could give her.

“Do you have names? Places?”

The woman on the other side of the desk eyed her suspiciously. “You could get me into big trouble. You think I haven’t put enough noses out of joint around here already? They brought me in to sort things out. That kind of work never makes you popular. Once I’m finished firing then they fire me. That’s the way it goes. But I don’t want to give them any early excuses.”

“Regina,” she said, taking care to pronounce the name perfectly, “this isn’t an academic exercise. It’s not about finding out why Randolph Kirk died. Not directly. There’s a girl who’s gone missing. Right now. Maybe she’s been abducted. Maybe she went willingly, not knowing what she was in for. But I’m sure it’s something to do with all this. There was evidence in her apartment. A thyrsus. Some other items. That’s why I went to see him in the first place.”

Teresa Lupo looked at her watch. She needed to get back to the morgue. There were so many questions to ask this unusual, intelligent stranger, and so little time.

“But if Randolph’s dead—” Regina Morrison wondered. “Surely she’s safe. You don’t think he went around abducting these girls. He couldn’t do that. Not—”

Regina Morrison hesitated.

“Not what?”

“Not on his own.” The Scotswoman’s composure was broken for a second or two. Teresa could see she genuinely was worried. “Look,” she said, toying with the photo of the dog in front of her. “I’ve been sitting here all morning waiting for you people to turn up. Where have you been? Who are you to start shouting ”urgent“ now? When I heard what had happened to Randolph last night I came in here late and took a little look around his office. A raid you might say. I thought I’d get in there before you people did. I didn’t understand your timekeeping habits then, you understand.”

“You broke into his office?” Teresa gasped, a little in awe.

Regina Morrison tapped her nameplate. “That’s what titles are for. I came up with something too, locked away in a drawer with some teeny little padlock on it. Randolph hadn’t a clue, you know. The man was utterly unworldly. You don’t seem the squeamish sort, Teresa. Am I right?”

“I’m a pathologist.”

“Sorry. I meant ”prudish.“ ”

“Me?”

Regina Morrison opened a drawer and passed over a manila folder. On the cover, written in a sloping, intelligent hand, was scrawled a single word: “Maenads.” And a picture was glued there too, a print of a familiar ancient theatre mask, howling through an exaggerated mouth. Then she leaned across the desk and said, in a conspiratorial whisper, “You know who they were, don’t you? The Maenads?”

“Remind me,” Teresa hissed, snatching through the pages of typed text and photographs, breathless, head reeling.

“The followers of the god. Call him Dionysus. Call him Bacchus. Either works. The Maenads were his women. He—or by implication—his followers—made them initiates through these mysteries of theirs.”

Teresa’s fingers were racing through the documents. “What happened exactly? At these mysteries?”

“Not even Randolph claimed to know that. Not exactly. From what we discussed I think he had a better idea than he put in that book, though. It was a ritual, Teresa. It’s important you remember that.”

She paused over a page of incomprehensible text. “Why?”

“Because rituals are formal. They have a structure. Nothing happens by accident. These girls weren’t snatched from the street. Some of them volunteered. Some of them were gifts from their family.”

“What?” It seemed incomprehensible to her. “Why would any mother or father do that?”

“Because they thought it was right. Why not? Plenty of girls get given to the church today to become nuns. Is it that different?”

She thought of the book. “Nuns don’t get raped.”

“They’re both offerings to their chosen god. The difference lies in the detail. Take out some of the weirder parts—the parts Randolph liked—it’s not that different. Gifts or volunteers, they submitted to the ceremony. They became brides of the god. It’s just that the Dionysians consummated that marriage, physically, in the shape of some hanger-on like Randolph, I imagine.”

“And afterwards?”

“Afterwards they belonged to him. And the men who followed him. They worshipped him. Or them. Once a year he returned to meet his new brides and renew his gift for those who’d gone before. He gave them all that they wanted: ecstasy, frenzy. If Randolph was right, the nasty parts, the violence and the unbridled sexual encounters, occurred after the marriage, not during it. They enjoyed what we would call an orgy. Pure, mindless, dangerous, liberating. Then they went back to their homes and were good mothers for another year. Have you read The Bacchae, or is Euripides not to your taste?”

“Not recently.”

Regina Morrison reached into the bookshelf behind her and took out a slim, blue leather-backed volume. “Borrow it if you like. You can interpret the story in a number of ways. The liberal tradition says it’s an analogy for the dual nature of humanity, the need to give our wild side an outlet now and then because if we don’t it will surface anyway, when we least want it. The natural order breaks down. People get torn limb from limb by crazy women thirsty for blood just because someone broke the rules, unwittingly even.”

She leaned forward over the desk. “Do you want to know what I think?”

Teresa Lupo wasn’t sure she did but, all the same, found herself asking, “What?”

“It’s just about men and power and sex. How they can have it whenever they want, regardless of how a woman feels. And how we’re supposed to be grateful however much we hate it because, well, let’s face things, the god lives with them, not us, and the only way we get a taste is if we let them put a little bit of him inside us. Are you getting my drift?”

“Oh, I am, I am,” Teresa agreed.

“One doesn’t wish to appear the puritan, Teresa. As a Scotswoman I am all too aware of that. There’s nothing wrong with—what was it that American woman called it?—the ”zipless fuck.“ Everyone likes some mindless carnality from time to time. Half an hour of pleasure and nothing to think of afterwards. You must have done the same?”

Teresa Lupo looked at the staid, elegant woman opposite her and after a while could still only think of one thing to say. “Yes.”

“But a quick fuck in the dark’s not the same, is it? Old Randolph planned all this. It’s all just so damnably male.”

“Agreed. We must have dated the same men over the years, Regina, believe me.”

“I don’t date men anymore,” Regina Morrison said very sweetly. “Where’s the hunt? Where’s the challenge? When you know they’re panting for it anyway, with whomever or whatever they can find, what’s the point? Here. Let me give you my card. My mobile’s on there.”

“Right,” she replied, cursing her own stupidity, taking the item from the woman’s slim hand in any case.

“It’s a question of timing,” Regina Morrison said. “Everything is.”

Teresa looked again at the file. There were pages and pages. And photographs. Lots of photographs.

“What is?” she asked idly.

“Finding this girl is your idea, isn’t it? That’s why you’re here on your own. The police don’t think there’s any connection.”

Teresa stared at her. The woman had been two steps ahead all along. It was disquieting. “They’re not sure.”

“You’d best hope they’re right and you’re wrong, my dear. Think about the dates.”

“The dates?”

“You read the book. Tomorrow is Liberalia. The day for making new Maenads. And the day the old ones come out to play.”

“Yes. I know that.” She thought of Nic Costa. “We know that.”

Regina Morrison smiled at her, bemused. “You seem somewhat… distracted.”

Teresa Lupo took out one photo from the folder and placed it on the desk. Then she stifled a sneeze with a lone finger.

It was an old picture, shot secretly like the rest, in poor interior light using a cheap camera. Home-developed probably, which explained the thin, washed-out colours. That and its age. She could just about make out the images on the walls in the background. They were almost the same as the dancing fauns and leering satyrs in Kirk’s book, from the place that seemed to double as his strange, private playground at Ostia. But not quite. This was somewhere different. The paintings looked even older, and more sinister somehow. The place looked larger too. Perhaps he’d found the Villa of Mysteries and kept it for this one particular purpose.

Barbara Martelli was in the centre of the shot. She wore a plain white tee-shirt and jeans. She looked so young, just a teenage kid, so sweet it almost hurt. Teresa Lupo’s head hurt trying to reconcile these conflicting images into some sane, comprehensible whole: innocence on the verge of being spoiled, of entering the long path that would transform this lovely kid into a murderous black-helmeted insect. Was the beast in her already, a cocoon of hate and death just waiting, growing over the years?

She didn’t want to look too closely at the figure next to Barbara. It was Eleanor Jamieson. That much was quite clear. But seeing the girl like this—alive, full of spark and expectation—was almost more than Teresa Lupo’s pained, congested head could bear. She’d come to think of her as a mummified corpse on a shining silver table. This image made her something else, a real, looming presence haunting Teresa’s head, and emphasized, almost to breaking point, the enormity of her death. This was all before. The god hadn’t visited them yet. Maybe they never even knew he was on the way.

And one more thing, one crazy, nagging idea that couldn’t be dismissed. Teresa was unable to forget the pictures of Suzi Julius she’d seen. She and Eleanor were so alike they could almost have been sisters, smiling teenage siblings from the same template of classic blonde beauty. The thyrsus, the tattoo, the seeds… all these coincidences paled next to the physical resemblance they bore to one another, and it was this, she knew, that had triggered Suzi’s disappearance, this alone that made her reach the bottom of some long, dark narrow street and get called into the shadows. Someone who knew what had happened sixteen years ago found his memory jogged when he saw this lovely young stranger walking down the street. The wheel turned. The ritual was in motion.

“Teresa?” Regina Morrison looked worried. “Are you OK?”

“I’m fine,” she said softly, then coughed and felt the mucus move painfully inside her temples. “I need to take these documents.”

Regina Morrison nodded. “Of course. Sure you’re all right? You look as if you could use that drink.”

“No. I’m fine.”

She was lying. Her eyes had started itching again, stinging cruelly.

She looked into Eleanor’s face. It had never happened like this before. They were always dead, truly dead, long dead, dead and gone forever, when they fell beneath her knife. A switch had been turned: life went from on to off, with nothing in between and nothing after.

She remembered cowering in Randolph Kirk’s scruffy little office, remembered what happened when she heard the shots, how something appeared to pass through her with a sudden resigned rush, like the last gasp of a departing persona.

When she stared at Eleanor Jamieson she felt the same sensation, the same lack of certainty about herself and what she did for a living. Just to pay the bills, to feed the prurient maw of the state. And now Suzi Julius was out there, walking in these same shadows, towards the same destination, with no one in the Questura paying sufficient attention because Teresa Lupo, Crazy Teresa, had taken matters into her own hands, pretended she was something she wasn’t and made it all worse.

“Teresa,” Regina Morrison said. “Here’s a tissue. Take it.”

“Thanks,” she said, and put down the page, her hand trembling, her vision awash with tears, gulping at the whisky, gulping at another too when Regina Morrison briskly refilled the glass.

FALCONE CAST an interested eye at the bunch of men lurking on the first floor of Neri’s house. Then the fat old hood hurriedly ushered him and Rachele D’Amato upstairs.

“I didn’t realize you had guests,” Falcone said. “And you answer the door yourself these days. Servants getting too expensive?”

“I don’t need any damn servants,” Neri retorted. “Don’t give me any shit, Falcone. I could’ve turned you back at the door. You got no papers that give you the right to walk into a man’s home like this. And her—”

Neri looked right through D’Amato. “So you two are on speaking terms these days? I heard that ended when the sheets started to get cold.”

“This is business,” she said briskly, then followed Neri into a large living room furnished expensively with a minimum of taste: modern leather sofas and armchairs, reproduction paintings on the plain cream walls, and a big glass table at the centre.

Two people sat on the couch: a slim attractive woman in her thirties, with fiery reddish gold hair and striking, angry features, and a slightly younger man, slim, nervous, with dark, shifty eyes and a bad bleach job.

“I don’t have a lawyer on the premises,” Neri said. “So you can talk in front of my family. That way if you invent stuff I’ve got witnesses.”

Falcone nodded.

“You didn’t introduce us,” the woman said. “I’m Adele. His wife.”

“Current wife,” Neri added.

“True,” she agreed. “This is Mickey. My stepson. Say hello to the nice policeman, Mickey. And stop twitching like that. It pisses me off. Quit gawping at the lady too.”

Mickey ceased fiddling with his fingers and muttered, “Pleasure.”

Neri fell into a large, fat armchair next to them and waved Falcone and D’Amato to the table. “I’d offer you coffee but fuck it. Why are you here? What am I supposed to have done now?”

“Nothing,” Falcone said. “Just a social visit.”

Neri’s big chest heaved with a dry laugh.

“When we decide you’ve done something, Emilio, it won’t be just the two of us who turn up,” Rachele D’Amato said, amused by the way Mickey was still staring at her. “We’ll have lots and lots of people. And the TV crews, the newspapers too. I just know they’re going to hear of it.”

“Not gonna happen,” Neri muttered. “Never. There’s no reason for it.”

She nodded at his son. “Do we take him in too? Is he part of the family firm now?”

“You tell me. You DIA scum never give up spying on me. What do you think?”

She smiled at Mickey. He blushed a little and stared at his feet.

“I think he doesn’t look like you. Maybe he doesn’t act like you. I don’t know.”

“No,” Neri agreed. “You don’t know. Tell you what. If you want someone to keep your statistics up you can take him now. Take her too if you feel like it, so long as…” He took a good look at them when he said this. “… they get to share the same cell. She’s got more brains than him though. You might find it harder fitting her up.”

Falcone smiled. “Happy families. Don’t you love to see them?”

“My patience is wearing thin. Get to the point.”

“The point,” Falcone said immediately, “is that I want to know what you were doing sixteen years ago. I want you to tell me about Vergil Wallis and what happened to his stepdaughter.”

Neri’s bleak, reptilian eyes narrowed. “You’re kidding me. You want me to try to remember all that way back? Who’re you talking about?”

“Vergil Wallis,” D’Amato repeated. “He was your contact with the West Coast mob. Don’t try to deny it. There are intelligence photos of you two together. We know you had dealings.”

“I’m a sociable man,” Neri protested. “I meet a lot of people. You expect me to remember every one?”

“You remember this one,” Falcone said. “He nearly got you on the wrong side of the Sicilians. You screwed him over some deal. Is there still bad feeling between you? Have you spoken recently?”

“What?” Neri’s feigned outrage was unconvincing. He meant it that way. “Look, if you want to throw these kinds of questions at me it’s best we do it some other time, in the company of a lawyer. Not now.”

D’Amato ran her fingers through her perfect brown hair, just for Mickey’s benefit. “You don’t need a lawyer, Emilio. No one’s accusing you of anything. We just want to know what you can recall. You did meet this man. We all know that. That’s not why we’re here. His stepdaughter was murdered. Sixteen years ago. The body turned up recently.”

“You think I don’t read the papers? You think I don’t hear things?”

“So?” Falcone persisted.

Neri nodded at Mickey. “You remember some black guy way back then? Rings a bell for me. Not much more.”

“Sure,” Mickey agreed, looking more nervous than ever. “He and some kid were with us on vacation for a while. They were both history freaks or something. Couldn’t stop talking about all that crap. Museums and stuff. Turned me off.”

“And you remember his stepdaughter?” D’Amato asked.

“A little,” Mickey conceded. “I thought she was his, if you get my meaning. A black guy with a skinny blonde thing around him. What would you think?”

Falcone considered this. “Are you saying there was some relationship between Wallis and the girl?”

“No,” he replied defensively, looking at his father for guidance. “I dunno.”

“He was some jumped-up piece of work,” Neri added. “Who the fuck knew what was going on? I’ll say this, though. Met a few like him in my time. They come here, think they can do business, never have to pay nothing in the way of an entrance fee just because of who they are. Yeah, and one more thing. You ever seen a black guy with a blonde in tow he wasn’t fucking?”

D’Amato shook her head, unhappy with this idea. “She was his stepdaughter.”

“Oh right,” Neri sneered. “That makes a difference. Tell me. If you found some rich Italian guy shacked up with a teenager, smiling at her all the time like he owned her, you’d say that about him, huh? You don’t think maybe there are some double standards here? Men like that can’t keep their hands still. Can you imagine what it’d be like to get a couple at the same time? Mother and daughter? You go ask him about that. Not me.”

He had a point. Falcone understood that. Maybe Wallis was just a great actor. Maybe this show of grief was just that, a show.

“What about you, Mickey?” D’Amato asked suddenly.

“What about me?” he stuttered.

“Did you like the look of her? Was she your type?”

He glanced nervously, first at Adele, then at his father. “Nah. Too skinny. Too stuck up. She talked all the history shit he did. What’s someone like that gonna do with someone like me?”

Rachele D’Amato smiled. “So you remember her well?”

“Not much,” he murmured.

Neri waved his big arm. “Fuck this. Why are we talking about some kid who went missing ages ago? What’s this got to do with us?”

They said nothing.

“Right,” Neri continued. “Now that’s out of the way maybe you can go. This place is starting to smell bad. I want some fresh air in here.”

Rachele D’Amato smiled at Mickey. “What about Barbara Martelli, Mickey? Was she your kind of woman? Not skinny at all. Got a good job as a cop too.”

His eyes went round and round, flitting between his stepmother and Neri. “Who? Who? Dunno what the hell you’re talking about. Who?”

“The woman who was in the papers, dummy,” Neri snarled. “The cop who got killed yesterday. They say she offed someone. That right? What is it with the police force today? How’s a man supposed to trust anyone?”

“I ask the questions,” Falcone said. “Where were you yesterday, Mickey? Give me your movements, morning to night.”

“He was here with me all day,” Adele Neri insisted. “All day. And in the evening too.”

“We were all here together,” Neri added. “Apart from a little lunch outing I had with one of my employees. He can vouch for me. We can vouch for one another. You got any reason to think otherwise?”

Rachele D’Amato took two photographs out of her briefcase: Barbara Martelli in uniform and one of her old man, back in the days when he was on the force. “Her father was a cop. He was on your payroll.”

“Me?” Neri whined. “Pay cops? Don’t you think I pay enough already what with the taxes round here?”

“When did you last talk to Martelli?” Falcone asked. “When did you last speak to his daughter?”

“Don’t recall ever making their acquaintance. And I’m speaking for us all now. Understand? If you’ve got something that says otherwise you go show it to a lawyer. Except you don’t have anything. Otherwise we wouldn’t be talking like this now, would we?”

She put the photos back in her bag. “Those men downstairs,” she said.

“We were thinking of having a card game later. They’re good guys.”

“Make it last,” Falcone ordered. “Make it last a long time. I don’t want to see them on the streets. You got that?”

The big old hood was shaking his head. “So Romans don’t get to walk their own town now? Is that what you’re saying? Jesus. Here I am taking this shit. Here I am listening to your dumb threats and all this crap about things you don’t know. And that American bastard’s just walking round doing what he likes. No one’s asking him whether he was screwing that girl. No one’s asking him if he’s been paying off dumb cops to get what he wants.” He waved a fat hand at them. “You tell me. Why’s that? Are you people just plain stupid or what?”

Falcone stood up. Rachele D’Amato followed suit.

“Nice seeing you again,” Neri barked. “Don’t feel the need to rush back.”

“Do you know what tomorrow is?” Falcone asked.

“Saturday. Do I get a prize?”

“Liberalia.”

Neri screwed up his slack face in an expression of distaste. “What? This some new European holiday they’re pressing on us now? Don’t mean a thing to me.”

“It does,” Falcone said. “It means that if you know what’s good for you, you stay right here. You don’t get in my way.”

“Wow,” Neri sneered. “This is what cops do now. Make a few empty threats.”

“It’s good advice. I remember you. Years ago, when I was just a detective. I watched you, I know you.”

“Yeah? You think so?”

“And the thing is, you’ve changed. You’re older. You look weaker somehow. Let me tell you something. You’re not the man you were.”

“Bullshit!” Neri yelled, getting onto his feet, waving his big arms in the air. “Get the fuck out of here before I throw you down the stairs, cop or no cop.”

Falcone wasn’t listening. He had his phone to his ear and was engrossed in the call. There was something in his face that made them all go quiet and wait for what came next.

“I’ll be straight there,” Falcone murmured.

“Leo?” D’Amato asked. “Is something wrong?”

He looked at Emilio Neri. “Maybe. Does the name Beniamino Vercillo mean anything to you?”

“All these stupid questions—” the old man grumbled.

“Well?”

“Not a damn thing. Why d’you ask?”

“Nothing,” Falcone replied with a shrug. “He’s a stranger. Why worry? Watch the news. Pay some bent cop to tell you first. Who cares? I’ll let myself out.”

“Mickey!”

Neri pointed at the two of them. Mickey led Falcone and Rachele D’Amato downstairs, going first so that he got a chance to turn round now and again and get a good look at her long, lithe legs moving out from underneath the short skirt.

The visitors were sitting around a table in the big room on the first floor, reading papers, smoking, playing cards.

“I recognize a few familiar faces,” Falcone said. “Is this the kind of company you keep, Mickey?”

“Don’t know what you mean.” Mickey Neri continued on to the big front door, with its security cameras and multiple electronic locks.

Rachele D’Amato ducked out of the way of the lens and smiled at him. “You should be smart, Mickey. It’s important to be smart in a situation like this.”

“A situation like what?”

“Change,” she said and handed him her card. “Can’t you just feel it in the air? That’s my private number. Call if you want to talk. I could keep you out of jail. If things turn bad, I could even keep you alive.”

He glanced upstairs to make sure no one was listening.

“G-g-get out of here,” Mickey Neri mumbled.

THE SCENE-OF-CRIME MEN pulled on their white bunny suits then clambered down the iron staircase into the basement office off the Via dei Serpenti. Falcone watched them, mentally trying to work out the manpower disposition inside the Questura. With the officers already inside that brought the total contingent on the murder scene to six. It wasn’t enough. The Questura was getting desperately stretched. He’d already got people trying to persuade the sick to rise from their beds. Even with the few who complied, he was still struggling to keep every thread of the investigation—Randolph Kirk, Barbara Martelli, Eleanor Jamieson and, just possibly, the Julius girl—fully staffed. It was the spring holiday season. A quiet time of the year, or so everyone supposed. The gaps were already starting to appear. He wished he had more people to despatch to watch Neri and Wallis, make sure they didn’t develop any stupid ideas. He wished, too, he had time to think about Suzi Julius. Falcone shared some of Costa’s fears, though he was reluctant to act in the present circumstances until some hard facts emerged to link her directly to the Jamieson case. There was still no evidence to suggest this was anything other than a wayward teenager out for some fun. He couldn’t afford to waste the men he had on hypothetical crimes when there were real ones demanding his attention.

Rachele D’Amato’s black Alfa pulled up on the pavement and he watched her get out, watched the way she angled her slender legs carefully so that the tight red skirt she was wearing didn’t ride up too much. For a brief moment Falcone let other thoughts dominate his mind. She was thirty minutes behind him. She’d had to call in at the DIA office on the way. He really had no idea what was going on there behind closed doors.

“She doesn’t need to be here,” he reminded himself, then managed to work up a smile. “Not at all.”

She walked up, eyeing him. “Leo?”

“I don’t recall issuing an invitation, Rachele. This isn’t an open house. You don’t get to walk into every investigation we have.”

She nodded at the door. A couple of the bunny suits were coming out again, taking off their helmets to light cigarettes. The path was clear for the rest of them to go in. “Don’t I get to take a look? You really believed Neri then? You think this guy was a complete stranger?”

“According to what we know Beniamino Vercillo was an accountant. We don’t have a thing on him. He was just a little man. Lived in Paroli on his own. The safe’s open. It’s probably robbery or something.”

She eyed the men by the iron staircase, not believing a word. Falcone resented the idea that she always seemed one step ahead of him. “Is that so? I listened on the radio. I gather you have a witness.”

“You shouldn’t go near our radios,” he said. “That’s not part of the deal.”

“I’m saving time. For all of us. What happened?”

He sighed. “A girl in the optician’s saw a character in a kind of costume going in. Something theatrical. With a mask. There’s a street theatre troupe performing down at the Colosseum so she didn’t think too much of it. We checked. They’re performing Euripides. The Bacchae. One of their costumes is missing. I’ve got men interviewing every last one of them. The trouble is they were rehearsing at the time. Either they’re all liars or it’s someone else who stole the costume. No one saw a soul coming out. It’s—”

Everything was going wrong, heading off in different directions. It denied him the time to think, the opportunity to focus on what mattered. “It’s the last damn thing I need right now.”

D’Amato didn’t look impressed.

“Are you going to tell me or do I have to guess?” Falcone sighed. “We really aren’t working together on this one, are we? Am I the problem? Do you want to liaise with someone else instead?”

Her hand went to his arm. Slim, delicate fingers. He recalled their touch. “I’m sorry, Leo. It’s not you. It’s me. You’re right. This is all… out of sync somehow. The DIA’s no different from you, really. We expect things to happen the way they always did. None of this fits a template.”

“You can say that again. So Vercillo wasn’t some boring little accountant?”

She laughed and it reminded him of how she once was: young, carefree. And how much that used to affect him. “You didn’t really think that, did you, Leo?”

“No.” He’d put on a bunny suit himself for a while and been inside. He’d seen what was there. He couldn’t get the idea of that damned mask out of his head. “I just don’t like jumping to conclusions.”

“We could never pin anything on him,” she went on. “Vercillo was smart. He needed to be. He kept books for Neri. Of that I’m pretty sure. Not that you’ll ever find a sheet of paper to prove it.”

A piece of the puzzle fell into place in his head. Falcone thought of the scene inside the dead man’s office and knew she was wrong for a change, though he kept the news to himself.

“Why would someone murder Neri’s accountant? Has he been taking from the boss?”

She’d considered that already. “It’s hard to imagine. He’d know what the result would be if he got found out. I don’t think Neri would send round a man in a mask either. Vercillo would just be there one moment and gone for good the next.”

“Then what?” he wondered.

“We had some intelligence,” she said eventually. “Early yesterday evening four, maybe five suspicious Americans flew in to Fiumicino. Separate airlines, separate classes for a couple. As if they didn’t know each other. It could be Wallis beefing up his army.”

Falcone stroked his pointed beard. He hated the way she seemed to know so much about the mob, how she seemed to understand their movements instinctively. The DIA were supposed to do that. All the same it left him feeling cheated. “What army? You said he was retired.”

“He is but that doesn’t mean he’s stupid. You saw the security on that place of his. Vergil Wallis doesn’t let his guard slip, any more than Neri does. Men like that have to be careful, retired or not.”

Falcone wondered: could this be Wallis’s first act of vengeance? Then there was a bustle down the street. It was Monkboy and the rest of the path team—except Teresa Lupo—arriving, unusually late.

“What took you?” Falcone barked at them. Silvio Di Capua just put his head down and stumbled onto the staircase. He looked scared.

“You’re saying these men have been summoned?” Falcone asked her.

“Maybe.”

He thought back to the cool way Wallis had greeted them. “It could make sense I guess. If he thinks there’s a war on the way. He didn’t look like a man getting ready for war to me.”

She gave him a sideways glance, as if she thought he was being naÏve. “You should never take these people at face value, Leo. Not even Neri. That was a performance this morning too, though not one I understand. Perhaps Vergil Wallis just feels he has no choice but to get some muscle around him.”

Falcone grimaced and started walking for the door. She raced to keep up with him.

The bunny suits had their helmets off. They were busy, dusting, poking, peering into corners, putting things into envelopes. Falcone glowered at Monkboy trembling over the corpse. Beniamino Vercillo was pinned to his old leather chair by a curving sword through the chest. His body had fallen forward a fraction. It was plain to see that the blade had been thrust up through the ribcage, exiting to the right of the spine and impaling itself into the back of the chair.

Vercillo was a thin man. Falcone wondered how much force such a blow would take. Crazy Teresa would know. She always did know this kind of thing. But she wasn’t there and Monkboy looked out of his depth, surrounded by a bunch of junior morgue assistants waiting to be told what to do.

“Where is she?” Falcone demanded.

“Who?”

“Who the hell do you think? Your boss.”

“Had to go out,” Silvio Di Capua stuttered. “She’ll be here soon.”