The Villa of Mysteries

“Oh yes.” She swallowed half the cup of coffee and felt the caffeine and sugar buzz start to hit the back of her head.

“You want to be careful with that stuff,” he said. “It can give you nightmares.”

“I don’t need coffee for that. Do you?”

Peroni glanced at his watch. “Well?”

“We haven’t touched any of yesterday’s,” she said. “Well, hardly anyway. I spent most of last night trying to complete the autopsy on Eleanor Jamieson. I did try to come up and talk to you people about this. Around two thirty. If I recall correctly, you were all too busy.”

His mouth hung open, hungry for information. Quite deliberately she slowly finished the coffee then wiped out the dregs with her index finger and sucked it, making little squeaks of pleasure all the time.

“Please—” he begged.

“I got it wrong, twice over, big time. She wasn’t some virgin sacrifice. Or to be more accurate, she may have been a sacrifice but she wasn’t a virgin. I was wrong too that you couldn’t get any DNA out of a body that’s been sitting in all that acid peat for sixteen years. There’s one circumstance that allows this.” She looked at him. “You want to guess?”

“No!”

“If there’s a foetus. Even a tiny one. Eleanor Jamieson was pregnant. Six weeks or so I’d say. Probably just at the stage she was starting to notice, starting to wonder whether she dare tell the father.”

Peroni’s eyes were shining with hope and outright joy. “Jesus, you beautiful woman.”

“I said to cut the crap. The point is that she’s pregnant six weeks or so after she met Mickey Neri, who’s now been hanging around her look-alike, a sixteen-year-old kid who happens to have disappeared.”

It came so suddenly she wished she’d had the time and the strength to react. Gianni Peroni stepped forward, grabbed her face with both hands, then kissed her rapidly on the lips. She sat, transfixed. The ponytailed waiter was staring at the pair of them.

“Don’t ever do that again,” she whispered. Then added, “Not without asking first.”

“Give me more.”

“I don’t have any more,” she objected. “Not until the lab gets back on the DNA.” She smiled. “We’ve Mickey Neri on file already. He was accused of rape two years ago. Somehow the thing never got to court. It could be waiting on my desk right now.”

“Oh sweet Jesus.”

Gianni Peroni was beaming. “Don’t even think of kissing me again,” she warned. “Too early in the morning. Just go and find Nic, will you?”

“Yeah,” he agreed, nodding. “You bet.”

He stopped and stared out into the road. A tall dark figure was walking across the road, towards the Questura. It was Vergil Wallis, leather coat flapping around his shins, striding deliberately like a man with a mission.

“Two miracles in a minute,” Peroni murmured. “Maybe there is a God.”

NIC COSTA WOKE UP on a large, old double bed in an enclosed chamber that stank of damp. A single yellow bulb cast a pool of waxy light into the cold, dusty room. His head hurt. He ran his fingers gingerly over the faint, tender bump on the back of his scalp then sat upright, legs over the side of the bed, trying to think. His jacket lay crumpled on the floor. Costa picked it up. The mobile phone was still in the pocket. He stared at the screen in vain. He was deep inside the rock of the Palatine now. There was no chance of a signal. No sign of his gun either, or a soul anywhere nearby.

He stood up, paused for a moment to let the pain at the back of his head subside, then walked around the room. It looked like the kind of place Randolph Kirk would have used, professionally and for his private pleasure too. There were paintings on the walls, old, rough ones, never retouched over the centuries. He stared at the images that, just like at Ostia, ran around the place in a continuous frieze a good metre deep. It was the same theme that he’d seen in the underground chamber by the coast, an initiation ceremony. A young girl, more puzzled than frightened on this occasion, was being led through a crowd of revellers, only some of them human.

As he walked round the room, following the story, he realized this was different somehow. The rape looked more like seduction here. The girl seemed passive, willing even, with bright, knowing eyes and the hint of pleasure in her face. There was a graphic depiction of her coupling with the god, locked in his powerful arms, eyes closed, mouth just open, ecstatic, but this was no longer the final piece in the saga. It appeared midway through the frieze and was followed by some kind of frenzied orgy, in which the girl took part voluntarily, watching the fights and the lovemaking, the vicious wrestling bouts and the acts of bloody violence around her with a nonchalant sense of detachment. Then, in the last frame, she was the central figure once more. The girl stood in front of the god who was now tethered to a stake, his arms held both by ropes and the grip of two female acolytes, his body shrinking in fear. Now she held a knife which she plunged into his right eye. Blood soaked his dreadlocks. A silent scream rose from his throat. The girl was laughing like a maniac and Costa found himself thinking of Randolph Kirk, slaughtered in his grimy little office by a Maenad much like this one, greedy for vengeance over some unseen, unexplained crime. Had the “god” failed her, and Barbara too in some mysterious way? Was she now more important than him? Or was this simply the last part of an intrinsically inexplicable drama, the fury in which every participant, man and woman, human and mythical, visited the extremes of their imagination?

The simple answer—that the god, and by implication Kirk and his associates, were exploiters of young women—didn’t fit this story. There was, Costa realized, some form of reward on both parts, and some kind of revenge if, for whatever reason, the bargain wasn’t kept.

He forced himself to stop examining the pictures. They had a hypnotic, openly erotic quality that drew him in, made it hard to think of anything else. Costa scanned the corners, his eyes becoming more used to the shade. There was a door, dimly visible in the shadows beyond the bed. He walked towards it and touched the surface: old, tough wood. It was locked but as he rattled the handle he heard a sound from the other side: a surprised gasp, not far away. And female.

He thought of the night before and the bright blonde head disappearing into the maw of the cave, that repeated again and again in the photographs that covered the walls of the central chamber. Costa drew himself close to the crevice and tried to peer through. The wood wasn’t a perfect fit. There was light on the other side, the same dim, faint luminescence as in his own chamber.

“Suzi—” he whispered through the crack. Someone moved on the far side. He heard her breathing.

“Suzi—” he said again, more loudly. “My name is Nic Costa. I’m a police officer. Please look at the door. See if you can let me in. Let me help you.”

The person on the other side didn’t make a sound. He tried to put himself in her shoes: trapped, lost in this labyrinth, not knowing what to do, or who to trust.

“I talked to your mother,” he said in a normal, controlled voice. “She’s worried about you. This will all work out. Trust me. Please.”

He thought he heard a choked sob. Maybe she wasn’t alone. Maybe Mickey Neri was there, holding a knife to her throat, trying to work out what to do with the pair of them. Costa hadn’t thought about his own fate for a moment. Now that he did, something puzzled him. Why had Mickey let him live at all? If Neri just wanted him out of the way he’d surely be dead, or somewhere far from the heart of what was going on.

“Suzi—” he said for one last time.

There was a sound on the other side of the door: a bolt being drawn back.

Costa made a conscious effort to think like a cop again. He needed a weapon. He needed to know where they were, how the hell they could find a way out of this damp, stinking place.

The door didn’t move. He heard footsteps receding on the other side.

“It’s OK,” he said. He took hold of the handle, turned it and pushed gingerly. The old wood creaked open. On the other side was a room much like the one he’d woken in: small, almost circular, with paintings round the wall, a double bed with a single light bulb above it, and opposite, in the shadows, another door.

She stood against it with her back to him, hair shining under the wan light, shoulders hunched, crying he guessed, most likely terrified.

Nic Costa walked over and put his hands on her shoulders, unable to take his eyes off that bright, gleaming head of hair.

“Suzi—”

She turned suddenly and thrust her face into his chest, threw her arms around him, clenching his back hard with her hands.

He held the taut, slim body, his head beginning to spin, trying to work out why this felt wrong.

Her mouth worked its way to his neck. Warm, damp lips brushed his skin, a tongue flickered against day-old bristle.

Automatically, his hand went to her head, felt the soft hair, pushed her gently away.

“Suzi—” he said, then was quiet.

It was as if two people had merged into one. Or as if they had never been quite separate in the first place.

Tears starting to stain her cheeks, her face framed by this bright shock of too-young hair, Miranda Julius looked up at him, pleading, drawing him ever closer.

“I’m sorry, Nic,” she said. “I didn’t want you here. I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be,” he whispered, and found his hands roaming her shoulders, holding her tight to him, his lips close to her shining head, his eyes locked on the figures dancing over the walls.

BEYOND THE GLASS of Leo Falcone’s office the Questura buzzed furiously. For once the rival forces of the DIA and the carabinieri were making an effort to work in tandem, sharing information, scouring the streets for any sign of Emilio Neri. The old hood had gone to ground, and it was clear he had done it well. For all Falcone knew he could be out of the country already. The networks of informers used by all three organizations had come up with a few nuggets of information. They told him what he already suspected: the blast outside the house in the Via Giulia was Neri’s own work, a parting gift deliberately timed for the arrival of the police. There would be no return. From this point on Neri would hide out abroad, doubtless somewhere he believed the Italian extradition laws would never reach him.

Vergil Wallis sat opposite wearing his long leather overcoat, a brown travel bag on his lap, black face impassive as a rock, and said, “I’m glad you made time for me in the middle of all this.”

“You seemed to think it was important,” Falcone replied.

“It is.” Wallis opened the bag and took out a digital camera, turned on the screen, and passed it over the table.

“What the hell’s that?” Falcone asked.

“Got thrown over my wall at three this morning,” Wallis said. “With this.” He held up a mobile phone. “Started the dogs barking. I’m surprised those people you’ve got outside never saw who did it.”

Falcone screwed up his eyes at the picture on the little screen. “They’re not ours. That was the DIA’s job.”

He picked up the camera. Peroni came and stood behind him then swore softly under his breath. The picture was of Nic Costa unconscious, lying on a bed in an anonymous room.

“This is my fault,” Peroni groaned.

Falcone pressed a button. The next picture was of Miranda Julius, her hair dyed the same bright blonde they all now associated with her daughter, scowling at the lens, tied to a chair. Then a third. The lighting was slightly different this time. More harsh. It looked as if the picture had been taken in different circumstances. The face was that of a young girl, with the same blonde hair, looking vacantly into the camera. She too was tied to a chair, but somewhere else.

“That’s the missing girl?” Wallis asked.

“Suzi Julius,” Peroni confirmed. “We got the pictures her mother gave us. It’s her.”

The big black figure folded his coat around him as if it were a second skin. “There’s a message too. Play the last thing you find.”

They did. It was a little video of Mickey Neri staring straight into the lens, looking scared as hell, glancing around him as if someone else was giving the orders. Mickey gulped once then said, in a mock-tough voice, “Vergil, you bring what I want at ten. Use the phone. I’ll call you and tell you where to collect at seven. At nine I call and tell you where to deliver. You’ll know the way. Don’t come with anyone else. Don’t fuck with me. Do anything other than this and they’re dead.”

“For all we know they’re dead already,” Peroni murmured.

“Maybe,” Wallis agreed testily. “I can’t tell you one way or the other. This is none of my business. What am I supposed to be here? Some kind of messenger boy? What’s going on, huh? Can you tell me that?”

Falcone scanned through the pictures again. “Did you get the call at seven?”

“On the dot. Sent me round to some private banker out in Paroli. He was waiting. He’d had a call too. Got this packed. As soon as I saw it I knew I was passing it on to you guys.”

Wallis opened the bag. It was full of brand-new banknotes, big denominations, still with the ties around them. “Half a million euros there.”

“Whose?” Peroni demanded.

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

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

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

“You do remember Mickey?” Falcone asked.

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

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

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

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

“So why are you here?” Falcone wondered.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Fuck Mickey Neri,” Wallis interjected.

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

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

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

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

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

“Where is he?” Costa asked.

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

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

“To do what?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Where is she now?”

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

Her face darkened and he knew what she was thinking.

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

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

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

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

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

“A kind of temple, maybe?”

“To what?”

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

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

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

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

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

He thought he heard her whisper his name, then the tongue returned, probing, hard, insistent, finding the deepness in his throat. There was just the hint of something solid on the tip, something that made him swallow and, in the heat of the moment, scarcely notice the act.

Nic Costa closed his eyes, not thinking, letting her hands do their work, rising when he was bidden, feeling her straddle him, panting, demanding, feeling the heat rise between them, drowning out the doubts in his head.

In the fevered stream of his imagination painted figures watched from the walls, eyes bright, gaping mouths laughing, particles of dead, dry dust coming alive, waiting for the ancient siren song to rise in her throat, waiting for the ecstasy to bind them.

At some point afterwards he closed his eyes and slept. When he woke she was quietly singing a line from an old song, one his father possessed among that ancient pile of vinyl back in the farmhouse off the old Appian Way. He recognized it: Grace Slick fronting Jefferson Airplane, all those years ago. Miranda Julius was softly chanting the same refrain over and over again.

“One pill makes you bigger,” she sang in a low, breathy voice that ran through his head like a dream.

“HE’S OFFERING me what?”

Emilio Neri couldn’t believe his ears. Maybe he’d misjudged the kid all along. It was now almost eight thirty. He’d just finished breakfast in the cellar of the safe house on the Aventine Hill, after the best solitary night’s sleep that he could remember in years. Bruno Bucci made the choice. Neri had forgotten he even owned the place. The radio and TV stations were now blurting out his name as the chief culprit for the previous night’s bomb blast. One of the newspapers had even put up a reward for anyone who helped track him down. None of this worried him. Bucci was a good guy. He’d done his homework. He’d paid the right people, sealed the lips of those who might be tempted to go for the main chance. The Albanian mob reckoned they could spirit Neri out of the country late that afternoon. By midnight he’d be in North Africa. In a couple of days he’d find himself in Capetown, ready for a little holiday, in preparation for the trip across the southern Atlantic to his new home. Once he was beyond his native shores no one could touch him. A long line of money would grease his path all the way, from one understanding state to the next.

But now, as luck would have it, a little temptation had got in the way, and Emilio Neri knew the moment he heard it nothing would induce him to walk away from Mickey’s offer.

“Tell me again,” he said. “Just so I know I’m not dreaming.”

Bucci grimaced, unhappy with the idea from the outset. “If you forgive him, if you let him and Adele live, you can have Wallis on a plate. He just wants some money, that’s all. And some guarantees.”

“Guarantees?” Neri waddled around the room, shaking his head. “Tell you what. Get him back on the phone. Let me talk to the kid. I’ll give him guarantees. Why didn’t he call me direct anyway? I’m his father, aren’t I?”

Bucci shook his head. “He won’t speak with you, boss. He’s pissed off with you. Says you expected Toni Martelli to off him last night. Seems to think that was an insult or something.”

“Yeah.” Neri laughed. “Maybe it was. But Martelli’s dead and he’s alive. So where’s the insult now? How much does he want?”

“A cut of the action,” Bucci said gloomily. “Ten per cent of everything going forward.”

Neri slapped Bucci cheerfully around the cheeks. “Hey, don’t look so miserable, Bruno. There’s plenty to go round. Be realistic. Nothing’s ever fixed in stone, now, is it?”

“Whatever you want, boss.” Bruno Bucci said that a lot, Neri thought. It could get annoying.

“Did you know anything about this?” he asked. “Mickey snatching this girl on the side? Be honest now. I’m not pissed off with you.”

Bucci threw back his big shoulders as if it were some kind of insult. “No. You’d have been the first to know. He’s always up to stuff. Stupid little bastard. Why fuck around with crap like that? What’s the point?”

“His dick’s the point. Some things never change.”

Bucci sighed and gave Neri a knowing look. “Stupid—”

“Don’t be ungrateful, Bruno. When the word gets around about this nonsense you come out looking good. No one wants a lunatic running things. You get the business. I get retired. And that black bastard Vergil Wallis gets dead, which is a good lesson for anyone who thinks they can fuck with this house in the future. Understand?”

“Sure.” He really didn’t look happy. “Look, boss. We made lots of good plans here. I can get you out of the country, no problem. If we start messing around like this, I don’t know—”

Neri smiled. “You can do it.”

“Why not let me or one of the boys handle Wallis? We can see to him.”

“Yeah.” Neri grinned. “Mickey and Adele too, huh? You think I’m stupid?”

Bucci was silent. Neri patted him on the shoulder. “Hey, I’d do the same thing myself. Hell, you will do it when I’m out of the way. Let’s not fool ourselves otherwise. But I got a score to settle with Vergil Wallis. Got some personal questions I’d like answered too. He whacked that little accountant of mine. He gave all them private papers to the DIA. It’s thanks to him I get to retire now. I wanna show him a little gratitude. Understand?”

“I understand. But is it worth the risk?”

“Yes,” Neri snapped. “It’s worth the risk. Besides, with you planning things, there is no risk. Am I right?”

Bucci looked at him oddly. There was something going on in his head Neri couldn’t see. “Am I right, Bruno?”

“I never asked you for anything, boss. Let me ask now. Just this one thing. Stick to what we’ve got. No distractions. Just go and enjoy being retired. I’ll look after things.”

Neri would have given up on him then, changed his mind completely. But he was too far down the road and Bucci, he guessed, understood that already. “I’m still running things right now,” Neri snarled. “You do the fuck what I say. A man’s gotta leave a few memories behind him. They got last night. Now they’re gonna get Wallis too. That’s my legacy, Bruno. Don’t fuck with it.”

Bucci grunted something incomprehensible.

“So when do we wrap this up?” Neri demanded. “Where?”

“He’s gonna call us back.”

Emilio Neri thought about his son. And about Adele. Maybe this was all her doing. Maybe this was her way of convincing Mickey she could set him up for life. What a pair they’d make. She’d be screwing the chauffeur before Christmas.

“You know there’s just one thing I don’t understand,” Neri said, more to himself than to Bruno Bucci. “How the hell has Mickey talked Wallis into walking out into the open like that? After all this time? Is he just getting dumb in his old age or what?”

“Maybe he’s thinking of retirement too,” Bucci suggested. “Maybe he wants to even things out.”

Emilio Neri grinned. “Oh, he’s retiring. That’s for sure.”

THEY CLUTCH EACH OTHER on the cold, damp bed. His too-bright eyes, the pupils now dilated, dart everywhere, to places he doesn’t want to see. She watches, face close to his, her breath on his skin, smiling, thinking.

He looks into her eyes and just at that moment, when she’s caught him completely, she says, in a new voice, a low voice that seems as if it should belong to someone else, “Every good deed needs a witness, Nic. Every crime has to meet with some punishment. Without that—”

He’s laughing, can’t help himself, can’t believe the words coming out of his mouth.

Call the cops, he says. That’s what we’re here for.

She slides her slim, taut body onto his chest. Firm fingers grip him, force his eyes to look into hers. Then she turns his head and he looks once more at the shapes on the walls, writhing, laughing, chattering in some unknown language. He closes his eyes. From somewhere deep inside, somewhere he can’t discern, comes a voice, rough and cruel, rumbling up from the guts through a crazy mask’s bulbous lips.

It says, Look, you fucker, look. You got to in the end.

No. He knows the word never leaves his throat.

Sounds from beyond the wooden door. People. Events. Real, perhaps. Or memories, shadows of the past seeping into the present.

I think, she says, there was a girl here once. Years ago, but not so distant we ought to forget. A young girl. Others too. But this girl was special.

Everyone’s special, he murmurs. How?

She was beautiful. Everyone’s beautiful. After a fashion.

The rough voice laughs from behind the hidden mask, a sound filled with scorn.

Hot breath enters his ear, a torrent of words that transform into pictures inside his head. He sees them now, forced into his imagination by what he hears and the pulsing elements roaring through his veins. They both have a stiff schoolgirl stance, backs to him, arms behind, fists clenched. Long blonde hair falls over slim shoulders onto sackcloth robes. A garland of flowers hangs around each too-young neck, a smaller one crowns each shining head. Carnations for love, lilies for death. Their smell fills the room, bright and harsh and cloying, with something else beneath it, a narcotic perfume worming its way into every hidden corner of every head.

One figure turns and he sees Barbara Martelli, now sixteen years younger than the woman he never really knew, long locks down to her waist, smiling face full of warmth, pleased to see someone.

Barbara opens her mouth. No sound emerges. She is a gift. He understands that just by looking at her, the way she stands, the way she beckons, and something in Barbara’s face seems to say she’s aware of this too.

Her slim arms, tanned, still a little chubby from her youth, reach out, seeking a man’s touch and the gift it will bring.

Barbara knows, he thinks. Barbara wants.

Miranda’s lips, damp and scorching, move against his ear.

She whispers, Look.

A second figure turns and he feels his heart become stone, feels the air disappear from his lungs.

Eleanor Jamieson stands in front of him, alive and smiling, and Miranda is right. She is more beautiful than any of them, not because of how she looks, but from the simple light that shines from her eyes, the naÏve, unworldly light of innocence begging to be dimmed because it burns too brightly for the rest. This is her undoing. Men will see this flame, perhaps women too, and want to suck on its power, steal the life from within it, jealous of its intensity. And she understands none of this. She simply smiles, and beckons.

She doesn’t know, fuckhead, the old voice croons. She doesn’t have a clue.

Eleanor Jamieson opens her perfect mouth and smiles.

Her teeth are the colour of mahogany. Her wide, unseeing eyes are pools of black, as deep and as dead as the foetid Tiber.

In her throat something glitters, silver and gold. A coin to pay the ferryman.

Behind her back something moves in the shadows.

VERGIL WALLIS SAID NOTHING for a good five minutes after he read the lab report. At his boss’s suggestion, Peroni went out for some coffee and to find out if there was any news. The men who had been combing had found nothing. Mickey Neri seemed remarkably well organized.

He came back, discreetly shook his head behind Wallis’s hunched figure at the desk, and placed a cup in front of the American. Wallis had the makings of tears in his eyes. He wiped them away with the back of his hand.

“Sorry,” he said eventually. “You’ve got a lot of surprises around here right now.”

“Too many,” Falcone replied. “You had no idea? You never knew she and Mickey were messing around together?”

This was the moment, Peroni realized. Vergil Wallis could stick to his guns, pretend he had pretty much told them the truth all along and just try to brazen the whole thing out. And if that happened then Nic Costa would be dead, along with the Julius woman and her kid. Everything hung on this old crook’s decision.

“No,” Wallis answered dolefully. “I still can’t believe it. You’d never have guessed it from seeing them together. Eleanor was smart. A little naÏve. Maybe that was why I indulged her from time to time. But she could have walked into any college she liked. The Neri kid was just an oaf. Worse than his father, if that’s possible.”

“Maybe that’s what she liked,” Peroni suggested, trying to be reasonable with this man because he understood how essential he was to them. “I have kids. You get to understand these things. A little anyhow. Sometimes they do the opposite of what you want just because it is the opposite of what you want. It doesn’t mean you can go blaming yourself for what happens next. That’s how people are made.”

Wallis nodded. “True.”

“So,” Peroni continued. “Now you know this, how about we stop pretending, huh? We know she didn’t go missing just off the cuff. And I got to say, Mr. Wallis, you must have realized that all along. So let’s cut the crap. We got a little time before your appointment. You tell us. What really happened that day?”

“Really?” There was some bitter amusement in Wallis’s face. Peroni didn’t like what he was seeing. This man just might help them, but he’d never relinquish control and never fully divulge anything he didn’t think necessary. “I’ve no idea. That is the truth. I swear to it. If I’d known—”

He didn’t finish the sentence.

“You’d have killed him?” Peroni suggested. “Just for screwing around?”

Wallis nodded. “The person I was then… I would have killed him.”

“And now?”

“Now I live in Rome and read my books,” Vergil Wallis said quietly.

He pulled the overcoat tighter around him. “A man can drown himself in a few illusions if he likes. Is there anything wrong in that?”

Falcone and Peroni exchanged glances. Then Falcone tried to get things back on track.

“Where did you think Eleanor was going that day?”

“To some kind of party. Neri knew what interested me. Knew what interested her too. They were the same things. When we went on vacation together it was just after Eleanor’s birthday. Neri said he wanted to give her a gift. A surprise. Something out of the past. I’d given her Kirk’s book as a birthday present. She loved the stupid thing, read it all in a couple of days. So I mentioned this to Neri and said, maybe—”

Wallis paused and sighed. “The next thing I know Neri’s fixed a meeting round at his house. Me and him and the Kirk guy, who’s all eyes at the idea he might get paid to throw the party of his dreams. If I’d thought about it maybe the alarm bells would have started ringing. I didn’t even know what a Dionysian ceremony was. Maybe that was why the Kirk guy kept looking at me, weird, all the time. I just didn’t… imagine.”

He hesitated over this last point. “Eleanor knew, of course. Neri’s kid must have set her up for the whole thing.”

“Where was this supposed to happen?” Peroni asked.

“I don’t know,” Wallis replied. “I never asked. I could have gone along if I’d wanted. I didn’t.”

“Why not?” Peroni wondered.

Wallis glowered at him. “Watching some young kids dance around in costume? That’s what I thought it was. I’d been in Rome long enough to recognize all the tourist shit they try to sell you. They say it’s culture. I thought it was just one more turn around the block. If Eleanor wanted it… fine. I’d better things to do with my time.”

Peroni shot Falcone a look that said unconvinced. “Did you drive her there?”

“No. She went off on that little bike of hers. Like I said.”

“You really have no idea where she might have gone?”

“None at all. And that’s the truth.”

They waited. Wallis wasn’t going to give this up to them easily.

Falcone pressed him. “It’s nine in the morning and she’s left for this fancy dress party. Is she wearing the clothes we found her in?”

“She had them in a bag. The Kirk guy sent them along with some other stuff.”

“Then what?” Falcone asked.

Wallis closed his eyes for a moment and Peroni felt his heart skip a beat because this could just be the point where the American thought “no further.” “Then nothing. For hours and hours. And I’m busy. I got people to talk to, calls to make. So I don’t think twice about it. Not until the evening and then I think… she never said when she’d be back. She went out there and she was so excited she didn’t even care about what time it all ended.”

“Then you call Emilio Neri, right?” Peroni could work this through for himself. It was what you did as a father. Not approach the kids direct, even if you could find them. That was wrong. That was uncool. You phoned their dads and said, look, man to man…

“Eventually, Neri calls me.” Wallis shook his head. “I never touched dope. Sold plenty. I never thought about it. It wasn’t anything that came near me. It never affected anyone I loved, not even back in the old days when I was just some black punk on the street. Dope just existed. It was a utility for us. Like water or electricity.”

“Pretty lucrative utility, Mr. Wallis,” Peroni observed. “Bought you that nice house on the hill.”

“Bought me part of that nice house. Not as much as you think.”

“Does that hurt? Now you realize the kid got burned by dope?”

For a moment Peroni thought Vergil Wallis might take one of those big black fists out of the pocket of his leather overcoat and smack him with it.

“But she wasn’t, was she?” Wallis replied calmly. “Someone cut her throat. Neri said it was dope. He acted like he was furious too. Said he came in on the thing and found the kids had been popping stuff on the side, and even the professor guy never knew it was that bad. He said—”

Vergil Wallis could have been a good actor, Peroni thought. Or maybe he did feel this cut up after all these years.

“There’d been an accident,” Wallis continued. “Eleanor had over-dosed on some bad crack one of the kids—not Mickey—had smuggled into the party. She’d gone into a coma. They’d called a doctor they knew. They’d tried everything. She was dead. Nothing they could do.”

“Then what?”

Wallis stared at his long black hands. He hunched up inside the coat looking as miserable as any man Gianni Peroni had ever seen. “For an hour or two I went crazy. Went round smashing things. Beating up on anyone I could find. Trying to find someone else to blame.”

“You blame yourself,” Peroni said instantly, and found, against his wishes, some feelings of sympathy rising inside himself. “That’s how it works.”

“That’s how it works.”

“But after,” Peroni continued, “when you stop feeling quite so mad, what do you do? Go to the cops? No. Because you’re a crook, Mr. Wallis. And crooks don’t go to the cops. We’d start asking where that dope came from. We’d start asking all kinds of stuff.”

Wallis nodded and didn’t say a word.

Peroni thought about this. “And those bosses of yours back home wouldn’t be none too pleased, I guess. All the same, I’d want to see the body. Didn’t you want to see the body?”

“Seen a lot of bodies in my time, mister,” Vergil Wallis murmured. “That’s one I didn’t want coming back to haunt me at nights. I just told Neri to get on with it. He’d offed the kid he said brought in the dope. Or so he claimed. I just went back into my shell. And I remembered.” The black eyes flashed at both of them. “I remember well.”

“Dope.” Peroni hated working drugs. Everything got so unpredictable. “Once you walk into that place it all gets so messy. Who’s to say that wasn’t what killed her, really? That it wasn’t little Mickey out of his head thinking he was the love god come to call? And getting all cut up or something when she says no, and by the by, Mickey, I’m carrying a little present for you?”

Wallis pushed his big fists deeper into the overcoat. “What is it you want of me? There’s nothing I can do to bring her back.”

Peroni bridled at that. “There are two women and a cop you could help bring back, Mr. Wallis.”

“Why me?”

“Mickey Neri says you know the way,” Falcone reminded him. “Do you?”

“I have no idea what the hell he’s talking about. All I can guess is what you can guess. He wants me there for my hide. I’d need a damn good reason to lay it on the line for people I don’t even know.”

Falcone glanced at the clock on the wall. It was two minutes to nine. “You might get to find out who really killed her. Isn’t that enough? Isn’t that the lure Mickey’s really dangling in your face? Also, you get me and half the cops in Rome behind you. We quit chasing bombers, quit chasing street thieves and dope dealers, pimps and murderers, and try to save your lying ass instead. The choice is yours, Mr. Wallis. But if I have to pick up any more dead bodies at the end of this, your cosy sweetheart deal with the DIA goes out the window. I don’t see you sitting comfortably in that house of yours on the hill for much longer now. Do you?”

Wallis grimaced. “Is that a deal you’re offering me? Play ball and you stay off my back?”

Peroni was quietly whistling through his teeth, looking livid.

“If that’s the way you care to see it,” Falcone replied.

“And you think you’re good enough to keep me alive? All the dead bodies I’ve seen on the news this past couple of days don’t give me much in the way of optimism.”

Falcone shrugged. “Take it or leave it. Either way we’re pulling away all those people from your gate. The DIA don’t do security. Who do you think’s going to guard your back then? Your golf buddies have got to go home sometime. Neri’s people aren’t going away. And they want blood over that accountant, I imagine. Thanks for the gift, by the way.”

Vergil Wallis leaned over the desk and pointed a long black finger in Falcone’s direction. “Listen to me, man. I didn’t touch Neri’s accountant. I’m retired. OK?”

Then he fell back into his chair and closed his eyes, waiting.

Bang on the minute—Mickey Neri was punctual—the phone rang. The two men watched Vergil Wallis. He waited, just long enough to make them nervous, then picked up the handset.

Wallis hit the button and barked, “Speak.”

He listened. It didn’t last long.

“Well?” Falcone demanded.

Wallis reached inside his coat and pulled out a piece, a silver pistol, nice and shiny, of a kind neither cop recognized. “You’re not thinking of taking this off me now?”

“My,” Peroni observed. “The things retired people carry around with them these days. Does that get covered by the state pension or what?”

Wallis opened the bag and dropped the gun inside. “Front steps of San Giovanni. Twenty-five minutes. I want Mr. Sweet Talk here to drive. I hear he played boss class once. Don’t want any amateurs stepping on my toes.”

MICKEY NERI SNIFFED in the dead air of the caverns and wished he had the courage to walk outside, out into good daylight, away from the mess he was in. That wasn’t possible. Adele had made him place the calls. She said they had no choice. They needed money. They needed his father to give them the chance to start again, free of his anger. So they just sat in one of the chambers in this stinking, dark maze, trying not to bitch at one another. Mickey just couldn’t work out the geography of the place. Adele walked around as if she knew every last corner, every last twist and turn. It pissed him off. He thought he was going to end up in charge. He was grateful for what she’d done at Toni Martelli’s. But he’d have killed the old bastard without her help… in the end.

If it worked out now they’d get some money, some kind of reconciliation, and they would earn the old man’s thanks. Mickey knew his father well. Gratitude was one thing that did count with the old man. Emilio had his faults but he had a thing about fairness, a thing that was almost a virtue. If he and Adele could deliver Vergil Wallis’s head on a plate, then it was possible—just—that everything else could be forgiven. Or if not forgiven, forgotten. These were, as Adele was swift to point out, changed times. Emilio Neri couldn’t go back to being a resident Rome hood, not after felling a bunch of cops with a bomb. His power was failing him. But the cops couldn’t touch Mickey with any of this. He could stick around, live off the cream of the estate. With or without Adele in tow—he hadn’t decided on that one yet.

It all hinged on Vergil Wallis showing up. Without him, Mickey thought, they were both dead. And that thought didn’t leave him any the happier. If he were the big black crook up on the hill, trying to look respectable for all the world, the last thing he’d do would be to run an errand to his worst enemy. It made no sense.

“What if Wallis don’t turn up?” he asked.

“He will.”

“Why are you so sure?”

“You don’t understand anything, do you?” she snapped. “These are serious men. Maybe they do end up trying to kill each other. Maybe that would be good for us. But men like this talk, even in the middle of a war. They have to understand how everything lies, if there’s some middle ground between them. Wallis wants this settled just as much as Emilio. And also—” She gave him that frank look, the one that went right through him. “I imagine he wants to know what happened back then. Don’t you?”

“Why ask me?” he demanded. “Never even knew the stuck-up little kid. Never even touched her.”

“No?” She didn’t sound convinced.

“No. Anyway, that was years ago. It’s time people started thinking about now, not what happened way back.”

She laughed, shook her sleek, perfect hair and gave him the same kind of look his father wore so often. One that said: don’t be so dumb. “That’s what happens when you get older, Mickey. You don’t have so much future ahead of you. It’s the past that gets more real.”

“What do you know? You’ve only got a year or two on me.”

“Guess I grew up more,” she said, watching him reach for his cigarettes. “Don’t light that.”

“Why not?”

“Because if all this goes bad someone’s going to be shooting in the dark. Think, for once in your life. It’s easier to aim at a smell.”

He swore and threw the pack onto the floor. “And if it goes well? What then?”

She moved close to him, smiling, and placed a slender hand against his chest, toying with the buttons on his shirt, a gesture he knew was mocking him somehow. “Then we get to inherit everything. You and me. We can make a couple. Can’t we?”

“Yeah.” He could hear the uncertainty in his own voice. He was trying to stay on top of things. It wasn’t easy. “What’s the cop doing here now, Adele? And that woman too? What do we do with them?”

She shrugged, playing with his collar. “You don’t have anything to worry about except your old man. Leave the rest of them to me.”

“What? This guy’s a cop. If they think I whacked him they’ll never leave me alone. I want this shit over when we get out of here. I want to be free of all this crap.”

“Mickey,” she said firmly. “When I say this isn’t your problem, I mean it.”

He tried to laugh but it didn’t ring true. “So you’re the boss? You’re going to take on Emilio and that Bucci animal all on your own? There’s just the two of us. How’s that gonna happen?”

She just smiled and it wasn’t a smile he recognized. He wasn’t sure he really knew this woman anymore.

“You don’t need to worry about Bruno. I screwed him before I screwed you.”

Mickey Neri suddenly felt dead stupid. “Really?” He didn’t know what to think, except that it offended him. “That’s nice.”

The cold eyes blinked then stared into him. “Yes. Nice. I did it just the once. That was all it needed. Thanks to that I got a little warning about what was going on in Emilio’s sick head when he found out about us last night. Thanks to that I knew enough to get out of the damn house before he blew it to pieces, and to save your pathetic ass. It means we stay alive and Bruno gets to prosper too. That’s called diplomacy, Mickey. It’s a skill you have to learn. Bruno knows he doesn’t have what it takes to run a family. There’d be a war within months and he’d lose. He’s a number two. He’s smart enough to realize that.”

“That’s good,” he said. “So long as it stays that way he’s got nothing to worry about.”

“No.” She was mocking him and he couldn’t do a damn thing about it. Not yet anyway.

Some time the previous day Adele had put some blonde stuff on her hair, mixing it over the red. It was more noticeable under the yellow light of the caves. It made her look different. More classy somehow. And younger.

“You coloured your hair,” he said, and reached to stroke it, thinking that maybe there was time to fit something in. Maybe this damp, stinking place in the earth was just the place for it. She could go down on him maybe. They could even stay in this little room and fuck. “I like it.”

She snatched his hand away. “I didn’t colour it, you moron. This is what it’s meant to be like. And don’t touch me, Mickey. Not without my say-so.”

He tried to think back over the years. She was right. She did used to be blonde. It just didn’t last too long for some reason. “Why not?”

The green eyes were so hard now, full of something not far from hate. “You need to learn what ”no“ means. You might as well start now.”

She hesitated. She looked a little nervous just then and he couldn’t work out whether this was good or bad.

“Do you remember what I told you?” she asked. “Can I rely on you, Mickey?”

“Yeah. Just don’t fuck around with me afterwards.”

Her skinny hand came up and touched his cheek. “No,” she said, smiling.

“Adele?” She was walking out of the room, without another word. “Adele?”

She stopped in the shadow of the open door and blew him a kiss.

“You’ve got to cope with this on your own now, Mickey,” she said. “I’ve got other things to do.”

TERESA LUPO WENT BACK to her office with Gianni Peroni’s words ringing happily in her head. A little praise went a long way. Her thoughts were beginning to clear a little too. The vicious flu virus in her head was in retreat from a bombardment of aspirin, and with its abatement came some clarity. She’d found the change of clothing she kept in the office, showered, and now felt fresh and clean. Her hair was combed and back in the businesslike crop. If she peered in the mirror—which she didn’t plan to do—she guessed her eyes wouldn’t even be that bloodshot anymore. The mood was a touch infectious. Monkboy had recovered some of his composure too when the report from the lab came through. It had confirmed what Teresa, in her heart, already knew. The paternity of the tiny preserved foetus she’d recovered from Eleanor Jamieson’s corpse may have been more about morale than closure. No one had any idea where the Neris had fled overnight. But morale mattered. Maybe everyone was still walking in the dark but at least they had a spring in their step.

One thing continued to bug her. She would have saved everyone so much grief if only she’d carried out a conventional autopsy when the body from the bog arrived. They’d have known it was not this for a while now… This was a lapse in judgement and it bothered her. If she could fail once, she could fail again. How many other oversights lay around her now in this overcrowded haven for the dead? Gianni Peroni’s point, brought home with that sudden, unexpected kiss, was a good one. In times like these it was all about priorities, looking closely under a handful of promising stones, not trying to steal a quick glance at everything. She hadn’t focused enough. Most of all, she hadn’t focused on Professor Randolph Kirk, which was odd given that he represented the sole customer in her career who had fallen into her care, so to speak, within earshot. Everything was about connections. It had been all along. If she could just find the right one it would all fall into place.

Silvio Di Capua wandered in from the corridor. He looked into her smiling face with a frightened devotion that threatened to bring the black clouds of depression straight back.

“Silvio, my man,” she said, her voice still husky from the cold. “Tell me about the good professor. What news of him?”

“News?” he replied, bemused. “He got shot. What news do you want?”

“Oh, how he feels about the whole thing. Who he wants to call.”

He did call someone. The memory, which was less than two days old, now seemed shockingly distant. Randolph Kirk called someone and all hell started to break loose straight afterwards. The conventional thinking around this place, she reminded herself, was that Eleanor Jamieson was the Pandora du jour. It was her ossified corpse that summoned the four riders from wherever else in the world they’d been, whipping up a little apocalypse for tea.

“Up to a point,” she said to herself.

Monkboy looked a little scared again. “What?”

“It was Randolph Kirk.” She recalled that disgusting habit he had with his nose. “Booger Bill. He started this crap off. With a little help from me, of course. Bog girl had been out of the ground for two weeks up till then, and nothing whatsoever had happened.”

Silvio Di Capua blinked then performed a polished impersonation of a terrified rabbit. “Lots of work to do, Teresa. Nice routine stuff. You’ve already given the boys next door a present to get along with. From what I hear there’s plenty more to occupy them besides.”

Her ears pricked up at the scent of gossip. “Plenty more what?”

He didn’t say a word.

She picked up a pair of scissors and snapped them open and shut a couple of times. “Speak, Silvio, before I am filled with the urge to snip a testicular sac or two.”

He gulped. “I heard one of the guys talking down the way. He says this mobster’s son’s straight in the frame now, even without the paternity stuff. Seems he’s trying to get himself a little holiday money by holding them to ransom.”

“Them?” She didn’t understand. “He’s only got Suzi Julius.”

He swallowed hard. “Not anymore. Seems he’s got the mother too.” He hesitated and dropped his voice to a whisper. “And a cop.”

Something black turned in her head. She advanced on Di Capua still holding the scissors. “What cop?” she demanded.

“That guy you like,” he said feebly. “Costa. God knows how. Or where. But they’ve got a picture of him and the mother tied up somewhere.”

“Nic?” she screeched. “Oh shit. What are we doing—?” She was looking round the morgue, mentally counting all their options. “Let’s think this through.”

Silvio Di Capua drew himself up to his full height, which was still a good measure below hers, and yelled, “No! Don’t you get it? I don’t want to fucking think this through! It’s not why we’re here!”

She’d never made him this mad before. Perhaps that was a failing on her part. This newly assertive Silvio Di Capua seemed a little more human somehow.

“And for God’s sake, Teresa, stop saying ”we.“ ” He calmed down a little now. “They are cops. We are pathologists. Different jobs. Different buildings. Why don’t you get that?”

“Because Nic Costa’s my friend.”

“Good for you. He’s their friend too, isn’t he? Don’t they get the chance to be heroes sometimes? While we settle down to a nice routine of cut and stitch and let things run their natural course?”

“Natural course?” Her voice was a touch too loud. She was aware of this but it didn’t help somehow. “Have you been following the events of the last couple of days, Silvio? What the fuck is natural about any of this? Also—”

“No, no, no…” His head was down, bald scalp shining under the harsh morgue lights, long hair, even more lank than normal, unwashed for days, revolving around his podgy little shoulders.

Monkboy’s miserable face rose to greet hers. “Promise me, Teresa. Promise me you won’t go anywhere this time. Promise me you won’t set foot outside this place. Falcone’s handling this kidnapping crap himself. It involves ransoms and money and surveillance and all those things we know nothing about. Let’s stick to what we do for a living, huh? Just for a change. You shouldn’t be involved in these things. If you’d been here more we wouldn’t be in this shit in the first place.”

“You sound like one of them,” she said.

His flabby cheeks sagged as if they’d been slapped. “Maybe. But it’s true.”

“I know that. It’s just—” How did she explain this? There was something irredeemably personal about what had happened two days before. It wasn’t just her own near-death. The memory of Randolph Kirk, Booger Bill, nagged at her. He’d died in her presence, his rustling shade had somehow whistled past her, too busy to say goodbye.

After he called someone.

Booger Bill. Mister No-Friends, whose personal habits surely precluded closeness of any kind, except when wearing a mask and dealing with doped-up juveniles.

She looked at Monkboy. “Didn’t you find anything useful in Kirk’s pockets? An address book or something? A note with some numbers on it?”

“No,” he said sulkily. “And before you ask—yes, I looked.”

She bunched up her sizeable arms, folded them on her chest and began to walk. “Everyone’s got to write things down from time to time,” she said, moving briskly across the morgue, towards the storage drawers, Monkboy in her wake, whining every inch of the way.

Teresa Lupo found the one with Kirk’s name on it and pulled the handle, listening to the familiar sliding noise, steeling her nose for the inevitable rush of chemical odour that always followed.

“What are you doing?” Monkboy moaned. “We’ve finished with him. We got a whole load of others standing in line.”

“Well, tell them they can wait.”

Randolph Kirk looked pretty much like any other dead person post-autopsy. Stiff, pale and somewhat messed around. Monkboy never was any good with a needle and thread.

She took a long, professional look at the cadaver in front of them, and picked up each dead wrist in turn. “Has he been washed?”

“Sure!” Monkboy answered. “And I gave him a manicure and dental floss too. What do you think?”

“Just wondered.”

“Wondered what?”

She was starting to get annoyed with him now and didn’t mind if it showed. “Wondered, as it happened, whether he’d got around to scribbling something on his hands or his wrists. Something like a phone number. Disorganized people do that kind of thing. Or am I not supposed to know that? Doesn’t it fit the fucking job description?”

“Yes,” he answered mutely. “Sorry.”

She went back to the desk, retrieved her notes from the previous day and called Regina Morrison, heard the surprise at the end of the line.

“You have the time to call me?” said the dry Edinburgh voice. “I’m amazed. Things can’t be as busy as the newspapers say.”

“Oh, but they are,” she snapped. “Busier, actually. Now can you tell me please, Regina? Did Randolph Kirk keep some kind of personal address book at the college? Did you pick that up on your rounds?”

There was a pause on the end of the line. Teresa had remembered enough to pronounce the woman’s name correctly. That wasn’t enough, though. She wanted some deference, and right then there just wasn’t the time. “No. So this isn’t a social call?”

“What about a pocket diary? Did you see him use something like that? One of those electronic organizers perhaps?”

A long sigh made its way out of the earpiece. “Clearly you didn’t spend enough time in Randolph’s company to gain a true picture of the man. That was the most messed-up technologically challenged disaster of a human being I ever met. I wouldn’t trust him in the company of a toaster.”

“Damn. So you’re saying he just kept it all in his head?”

“All what? He didn’t know anyone.”

But he did. He had to. He made a call and then the crap hit the fan. Except it couldn’t be like that. The crap had to be on its way already. All she’d done was accelerate it a touch, speed up the machine a little. Nevertheless, he made a call.

She slammed down the phone, aware that Regina Morrison was, to her astonishment, uttering noises that sounded very like an offer of dinner.

“What is wrong with these people?” she wondered out loud.

She walked back over and stared at the corpse of Randolph Kirk, wishing she could wake him up for one minute and ask a few simple questions.

Her head was back in Kirk’s office now, watching him work at his nose with that disgusting piece of cloth.

“Booger Bill, Booger Bill,” she whispered to herself, aware that Monkboy looked ready to call in the men from the funny farm at any moment. “Never in my life have I seen a handkerchief in that condition, not even in the middle of a flu epidemic. ”Not even—“

Monkboy watched her, petrified. “You’re not leaving this room,” he warned. “I will lock that door, I will swaddle you in bandages, I swear—”

“Oh my God,” she gasped, then foxed him altogether. She was smiling beatifically.

“Please—” he whined.

“His clothes, Silvio. I want them. Now.”

THEY ARE DRESSED, moving, through the door, out into the cold and the caves, his legs as heavy as lead, detached from his control. She has to help him round this baffling labyrinth of tunnels, stumbling in and out of the yellow pools of light cast by the random bulbs that hang from the ceiling.

Stay in the shadows, he says. Until I tell you.

They enter another room and she holds him, keeping them both close to the wall, in the darkness. It’s a large chamber, one he remembers, well lit in the centre. He notices now that there is a table at its centre, dusty, with rickety chairs, maybe as many as twelve. An ancient wand—his head searches for the name Teresa Lupo gave it, thyrsus—lies at one end, in front of a chair that is high-backed and grander than the rest. A theatrical mask, with the familiar gaping mouth and dreadlocks, sits next to it, black-eyed, a dead totem, waiting to be reanimated.

The walls are what he recollects best from the night before. Picture upon picture, blonde on blonde, the same shining colour as Miranda’s hair now. Suzi Julius and Eleanor Jamieson, young and innocent, laughing for the camera, thinking they’d live forever. They haunt the room like ghostly, incandescent twins, their glittering eyes following everything.

Miranda Julius darts into the light and picks up the thyrsus, waves it in the air. Specks of dust dance in the yellow light. The smell of ancient fennel, faintly sweet, reaches his nostrils.

She replaces the wand, returns and looks at him. There are voices, distant ones. This curling, twisting tangle of caverns could encompass scores of chambers. He tries to think for both of them.

Her hand is on his arm. Her eyes are bright orbs alight in his face.

There is a dark alcove set back from the table. He pulls her further into the shadows and the effort makes his head hurt, his breath comes in snatched pants.

He takes her face in his hands. His head’s starting to clear now. He can hear his own voice and it’s real.

“Miranda. The best thing we can do is find a way out of here. Find some help and come back for Suzi.”

There’s such fear in her face. She embraces him, her hands reach behind his back for something unseen, her head moves to the back of his neck, lips bite hard on the skin there. She’s moving, pressing herself now to his lips. She lunges forward, kisses him, thrusts herself into his mouth, probing, probing, feeling the softness. And this time he is certain. A tiny object rides the tip of her long, strong tongue until it reaches the back of his throat. He gags, begins to fall, and a voice somewhere in his head sings, one pill makes you bigger.

He opens his eyes and sees her lips moving to the words as she holds him, blocking his mouth with his fingers until he swallows.

SILVIO DI CAPUA LOOKED at the object on the table, shivered then let out a long, pained groan. It was Randolph Kirk’s handkerchief, a piece of once-white pristine fabric now crumpled into a compact ball held tightly together by a random collection of solidified green and grey gloops.

“Don’t turn squeamish on me, Silvio,” she said. “Scalpel?”

“Oh come on,” he complained. “You want me to find you a surgical mask too?”

Teresa Lupo gave him the extra cold look, the one she saved for special occasions. “Wouldn’t be a bad idea, would it?”

He grumbled and passed her the instrument. “This is insane. This is the most insane thing I have seen in these recent insane times.”

“Booger Bill wrote those numbers down somewhere,” she insisted. “It wasn’t on the back of his hand. It wasn’t on the cuffs of his shirt. And there was more stuff on this damn hankie than mere snotballs. It was only my natural reticence that stopped me remembering this before.”

She could swear he stamped his little feet on the tiles at that. “Teresa! There’s something creepy about this need of yours to please. Even if you’re right we shouldn’t be doing this. We should be handing it over to forensic.”

“This is human snot, Silvio. Our territory.”

“Excuse my pointing this out but we are not looking for snot. Snot we have by the bucket. We are looking for some phone number this weird, dead bastard has thoughtfully written down, hopefully in indelible ink, in between the snot. Which, all things taken into consideration, is both a very strange thing to do and indubitably a job for forensic.”

She found a point of entry and began to ease the fabric, holding down one end with the gloved fingers of her left hand. “If you’d met Professor Randolph Kirk in the flesh you wouldn’t be saying that. You’d think it the most normal thing in the world, as normal as—”

An entire corner of the fabric fell over under the pressure of the blunt side of the blade.

“I did surgery once, Silvio,” she said proudly.

“On a hankie?”

“Adaptability, my man. We live in modern times. Adaptability is everything. Behold…”

There were numbers there. Six of them, written in a tiny, cramped hand, mostly so old the ink was blurring into the fabric. One she recognized straightaway. It was Regina Morrison’s. This really was his address book. She hated to think what the rest were. A dry cleaners? Did Randolph Kirk even grace such an establishment?

But one was more promising. The ink was fresh, the strokes of his spidery hand unblemished. This number had never gone through the wash like the others. Maybe, she thought, written just a day or two before he died.

“Gimme that report,” she ordered.

He clutched the thing to his chest. “This is not right. Not right at all. We should just pass this information on to the people who need it and let them decide what it’s worth. It isn’t our job—”

The ferocity of her gaze stopped him dead.

“Silvio, if you tell me one more time what my job is I will, I swear, fire you and fire you good. In case you hadn’t noticed, those lovely policemen out there are busy chasing all the big things they like to think of as their prey. People who plant bombs. People who kill and kidnap other people. Were I to walk into their midst bearing a hankie, albeit one of more than minor interest, I would be inviting their ridicule. Who knows? They might even invent a name for me. What do you think? Crazy Teresa? How does that sound, huh?”

He swallowed noisily and said nothing.

“Gimme.”

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

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

“Probably his aromatherapist.”

“Shut up!”

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

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

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

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

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

“Teresa?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You know what’s up there?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Really.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wallis put a large, firm hand on his arm. “Peroni,” he said. “I got your number, man. I know what happened a couple of months ago.”

“You do?”

Peroni thought about that and wished he’d had more time to go through the details back in the Questura. Nic had gone missing sometime before midnight. Vergil Wallis had picked up half a million euros less than eight hours later. What kind of “private banker” did Miranda Julius use? Who on earth had that kind of money lying around ready to be bundled up in a bag at a moment’s notice?

“I heard you got busted down from on high,” Wallis said. “Why’d you think I picked you for this job? It says two things to me. You’re a man who’s open to ideas. Plus you could use the cash.”

Peroni noted the growing gap in the traffic ahead and wondered how quickly he could make a U-turn. “You disappoint me, Vergil. You are a very, very bad judge of character. Best we turn around right now and go through this whole thing again with Inspector Falcone, only in a little more detail and leaving out the lying parts.”

There was enough room, if only the idiot in front would pull forward enough to let him make the turn.

“An honest cop,” Wallis said, nodding his imposing black head. “Who’d have thought it? I admire that, though. And it’s because I do I’m not gonna hit you as hard as I might otherwise.”

Peroni wasn’t sure he heard that last one right. He took his foot off the pedal, screwed up his face and said, “What?”

When he opened his eyes a big black fist was coming towards him, fast, so fast he could do nothing but watch and wait as it crashed straight into his right eye.

It got a little fuzzy after that. Huge hands moved around him. The belt got unbuckled. Vergil Wallis’s collar mike got torn off and thrown onto the floor. A big foot came across and kicked open the driver’s door. Then a pair of arms came beneath his body and hurled him out of the car.

He fell on the filthy road with a crack, took one breath of the stinking air and started to cough.

The unmarked police car was doing a U-turn into the tunnel, now facing a clear run back into the city, headed anywhere but San Giovanni. And—Gianni Peroni would remember this for a long time, he told himself—he’d be damned if the grinning black figure behind the wheel wasn’t waving goodbye.

SHE WHISPERS and, through the chemical fire that rages in his head, he sees.

The thyrsus sits in the same place, now green and vivid, coloured ribbons round its shaft, beneath the bulbous priapic head. The lights are brighter. Men, middle-aged, stiff in their movements, conspiratorial in their shared glances, move beneath them. There are glasses in their hands, brimming with purple wine. A couple smoke, long, hand-made roll-ups that send blue-grey smoke rolling up to the rocky ceiling. They talk among one another: Emilio Neri, the little accountant Vercillo, Randolph Kirk and Toni Martelli, others who are just faces half hidden in the shadows.

Mickey lurks behind them, miserable, uncomfortable, unsure of where he belongs.

They talk and talk and now Nic Costa understands why. These men, powerful men, influential men, are nervous. This is something new for them. An experiment, a break with convention. They look at Randolph Kirk and their eyes say everything: make this work or else.

Randolph Kirk knows this. He’s more nervous than the rest, almost twitching with anticipation. He speaks but his words are inaudible. He claps his hands and, though they make no sound, the men stop talking and look. A line of young figures gathers at the door. Girls in sackcloth shifts, flowers in their hair, young, young. Some giggle. Some smoke. Their eyes are bright yet hazy. They are, like Randolph Kirk, afraid.

The mood pivots on a breath, a gesture, anything that might break the spell.

One of the initiates, Barbara, young yet knowing, walks forward, expectant, animated. Her hand falls on the mask. Her fingers stroke its ugly features, caress the vile, bulbous nose.

Watch, the chemical screams, a god inside him, so strong it is impossible to fight.

The golden girl lifts the dead, ugly face, looks at each of them in turn and smiles.

THEY LEFT THE HOUSE on the Aventine Hill just after nine. Bruno Bucci drove. Neri huddled down in the rear with one man on either side. Then the Mercedes snaked down the back roads, taking the narrowest it could find, before it emerged in Cerchi, just where the call had dictated.

Not that Emilio Neri needed directions. He’d never forget this place. Too many memories lay behind the scarred earth.

The car pulled onto the pavement. They got out and stood in the shadow of the escarpment that ran into the Tarpeian Rock. The sun was coming up on another fine spring day. If there’d been a little less traffic Neri could have taken a deep breath and believed he would miss Rome.

Bucci looked at him, nodded at the black hole of the cave, behind the broken gate its ancient city archaeology department notice saying “Keep Out.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Neri said and ducked into the darkness. “I’ll handle this on my own. Just make sure he’s carrying nothing when he shows, huh?”

“What about Mickey?” Bucci said.

“Mickey?” Neri laughed. “What about him? He’s just a stupid kid. I can handle my own son.”

Neri thought about Bucci again and briefly wondered about his own judgement. “You think I’m being dumb, don’t you?”

Bucci didn’t say a thing.

“OK. Don’t answer. I got to say, Bruno. I’m being more than fair to you here.”

“Sure. I’d still like to come in with you.”

Was this sentiment? Or just some self-serving show of concern? Neri couldn’t decide. Maybe Bucci was right. He could handle Mickey, no problem. But if his son had others in tow…

“You heard of anyone going over to Mickey?” he asked.

Bucci laughed out straight. “Are you kidding? Who’d be fool enough for that?”

Neri nodded at the shadowy mouth of the cave. “So it’s just him in there. And maybe Adele. Do you honestly believe I cannot cope with my own son and a two-timing wife I can slap down with one hand?”

Bucci shuffled on his big feet, uncomfortable.

Neri took that as a yes. “Just make sure Wallis goes in on his own and he’s not carrying anything,” he said. “I don’t share out this pleasure with anyone. Besides. I’ve been thinking. There’s some questions I want to ask, and they’re all family. I don’t want anyone else listening.”

“Think of me as back-up.”

Neri tapped him on the chest with a single finger, quite hard. “I was putting men down before you were born, Bruno. Don’t get presumptuous. You got the rope and the tape like I asked?”

Bucci nodded and handed them over.

Emilio Neri patted his jacket, felt the butt of the gun there. Then he walked into the darkness, surprised how cold it was, surprised too by how little illumination the bulbs gave.

His memory must have been playing tricks. In the old days everything seemed much brighter.

LEO FALCONE WATCHED Peroni dabbing his head next to him in the back seat.

“That’s one big black eye on the way,” he said. “Do you have any idea where Wallis might have gone? Did he say anything?”

“Yeah. First he asked if Neri and his kid were safely in the net anyway, even without this. Then he tried to bribe me to look the other way so he could get a spare thirty minutes with the fat man. I was explaining the problems this posed for my fragile sense of public duty when he whacked me in the face. Said he wasn’t hitting me so hard because he admired me. I’m glad I wasn’t on the hate list. If he punched like that when he’s a fan—”

The radio barked at them. Wallis had dumped the police car in a side road near the Trevi Fountain and disappeared into the tourist masses. Falcone swore and then issued the standard call. Tall black men in flapping leather overcoats weren’t that common in Rome. Someone ought to see him.

“Maybe he’ll take a cab,” Peroni suggested. “That guy is as cool as they come. You know what I think? He intended to make that drop all along. And on his own. He just came to us to make sure we got that camera with Mickey on it. Make sure the Neris wind up in the shit whatever.”

Falcone picked up the mike and ordered every man he had to cruise around Cerchi; he told his own driver to get there too. It was the last place Costa had been seen. If they got lucky…

It was hard thinking straight. Then his phone went and it got even harder.

“Not now,” he said instantly.

“Yes now,” she yelled at him, and Falcone wondered for a moment why he and Teresa Lupo so seldom had a conversation at normal volume. “Listen to me. I’ve just been through Kirk’s belongings again. I’ve found some phone numbers. One in particular. The most recent. Maybe the one he called before he died.”

“Maybe?” Falcone roared. “What the hell use to me is ”maybe“?”

“He called Miranda Julius,” she said simply. “At least that’s the number on his snotty little handkerchief, as bright and clear as day. She gave me the number when we were in that apartment of hers. Doesn’t that sound more than a little interesting? Sometime before he died, Randolph Kirk called the mother of the kid we’re supposed to think he snatched in the first place.”

Falcone shook his head, trying to clear some space for thought then ordered the car to pull to the side of the road. “What?”

“Her mobile number was there on Kirk’s person. There is no mistake about this. And given how disorganized that particular man was I can only think it was there for a very recent reason. You tell me.”

Leo Falcone leaned back into the soft seats of the Alfa Saloon and stared out the window, out at the tourist crowds mingling near the mouth of the tunnel, making their way at a snail’s pace to the little square and its over-blown fountain. Miranda Julius had given them a picture of Randolph Kirk near the Trevi, staring myopically at her daughter. Or so it appeared.

“Meet me at her apartment,” he said, making a particular effort to keep the volume down. “I’ll send a car.”

“Hey,” said the surprised voice on the other end of the line. “I’m just a pathologist. I don’t want to tread—”

“Be there,” he yelled and cut the call.

MICKEY NERI STOOD with Adele in the shadows, watching his father walk into the big, brightly lit chamber. The old man was grinning at the pictures on the walls, happy as could be, as if they brought back good memories, which was, Mickey knew, ridiculous. Something else must have been making the old man feel this way.

The shadows in this stupid place had such substance. They were places you could hide and feel you didn’t really exist as you watched what went on in the light. Mickey Neri knew he would be happy to stay in shadows like this, all the way to one of the several exits she’d talked about and out into the bright new day. Then Adele gave him a short, damp kiss on the cheek, whispered “Ciao” and propelled him out into the yellow light.

Neri opened his arms in a welcoming, paternal gesture. “Son, son—”

Mickey didn’t move. Neri took two steps towards him. “Mickey… Why the long face? Are we going to argue about this forever?”

He stood his ground, fearing the presence of the old man.

“I gave you a test, Mickey. What do you do? Not just kill that talkative bastard Martelli but come up with a present for me too? So you’ve been screwing Adele. What the fuck? If it’s gonna happen best it’s kept in the family. I don’t care. Screwing around’s such a little thing for a man of my age.”

He looked around the chamber. “Jesus, we had some times in here. Where is Adele exactly?”

“Dunno,” Mickey mumbled. “She said she’d leave us two alone. Catch up with you later.”

The old man gave him a cold smile. “Yeah. I guess that will happen sometime. Except I won’t be in Italy much longer so maybe she knows I won’t be fixing social appointments for a while. It’s always the same with that woman. Adele’s in it for herself. Forget that and things just might get dangerous.”

Mickey wanted to kick and scream and yell at the fat, grinning figure in front of him. Neri was behaving as if what happened the previous night was just one of those things. “Fuck her! You nearly got me killed! Like you wanted it or something.”

Neri took one more step towards him, opened his arms wider, embraced his son, overwhelmed him with his strong, commanding presence. Mickey couldn’t remember when they’d last touched like this but he knew that had been a bad time too.

“Don’t make so much noise,” the old man whispered. “You could wake the dead screaming like that.”

“You—”

The big arms enfolded him, buried him in Neri’s bulk. “I’ve been a lousy father. I know. You’ve every reason to feel mad at me.”

“Yeah—”

“Quiet,” Neri said. “I’m talking. I brought you up bad, Mickey. I left you with that bitch of a mother for too long. When you weren’t with her I didn’t spend the time with you I should.”

“Yeah, right—”

“Shhhhh.” Neri put a fat forefinger to his son’s lips. “Listen.”

Mickey pouted and the kid could have been ten years old again. Emilio Neri wanted to laugh out loud.

“There are so many things I never taught you. When it’s time for a little honesty for one. People like us need to know that. Sometimes it’s the most important thing of all.”

He looked at the photos on the walls, holding on tight to Mickey, turning his head to see. “She was a good-looking girl, his stepdaughter. Anything you want to tell your old man about her now, huh? And this other one too. All these games on the side. Jesus—”

Mickey’s head shook from side to side. “No. I got nothing to tell you.”

“You think that’s what Vergil Wallis is coming all this way to hear? He’s not falling for this ransom shit, Mickey. He don’t give a damn who you’ve been messing with now or what you wind up doing with them. He’s coming to find out why we lied to him all those years ago. He’s looking for answers. When I think about it I got to be honest with myself. Maybe he deserves some.”

His rank, old man’s mouth came close to Mickey Neri’s face. “You gonna tell him, son?”

“I didn’t do nothing!”

“Mickey, Mickey.” Neri was smiling all the while, loving this. “You were banging her in Sicily. I may have been a lousy father but I knew that. You banged her so well she was carrying some little bastard for you by the time we came back here. You told me so yourself once I beat it out of you. Remember?”

Mickey didn’t look his father in the eye. He thought this was all dead and would stay that way.

Neri kept staring at her photo. “That kid. Lovely as an angel but she was so damn stupid. Stupid as you in a different way. I mean, I know why you wouldn’t bother with a rubber. I wonder if you use them now with those African whores of yours. But her… I guess she just didn’t know any better. Tell me now. In Sicily. It was the first time for her, wasn’t it?”

“Yeah,” Mickey mumbled.

“So it makes sense. When she told you there was something on the way that made you real worried, I guess. I mean, Vergil… he’s not a man to cross now.”

“I told you years ago. I didn’t k… k… k…”

It was just like when he was a kid. Even down to the stammer. “You didn’t k… k… k… ?”

“K… kill her.”

The old man withdrew his arms and looked sternly at his son. “Maybe not. But you know something? After all these years I’m not even sure it matters.”

Emilio Neri put his hand gently to the back of his son’s head and stroked his soft hair, wishing it wasn’t that stupid blonde colour. There were tears in Mickey’s eyes.

“Don’t cry, son,” Neri said, then brought his head down hard on the table, slamming it onto the old wood, ignoring his screams.

He pulled out the tape and wound it first round his mouth then his eyes. He bound Mickey’s wrists, kicked his feet from under him so he landed roughly in the nearest chair and tied him tightly to the back, circling the rope around his chest.

“Plenty of time for crying later.”

Emilio Neri looked at his handiwork.

“Hear that, Adele?” he roared into the darkness. “Just so much time for that later. You listening?”

TWO TIMES MERGE NOW, and in each he’s leading the way, looking, staying close to the walls, in the shadows, Miranda behind, whispering, whispering. Nothing stands between her words and the images in his head. There is a light in one of the side chambers. They steal to the door, peer inside. Something flashes at the back of his imagination. The pictures he saw in Leo Falcone’s office rise again in his muddled head, real this time, rolling past his eyes. A fat, white naked shape rolls around on the bed lunging at something only dimly seen beneath him. The air reeks of dope. A spent needle sits by the table. On the floor lies the girl’s sackcloth shift and the garlands of flowers, discarded like an old skin, shed for her becoming. The man grunts like a pig. The girl beneath him squeals: pain, he thinks, revulsion. Is this the first time? In a dank underground chamber reeking of stagnant water and mould? In the sweating arms of a middle-aged man who comes bearing flowers and oblivion in a syringe?

Can you see who she is? Miranda asks.

No, he says, not looking.

You have to know, Nic.

He walks on, knowing she’s behind, talking, talking, and here is another chamber, deeper into the pulsing vein of rock, the light a little brighter inside. More cries of pain, a young girl’s voice, sobbing.

Look, she says.

Costa leans against the dusty wall. His breath comes in snatches. His body feels like a lumpen machine beyond his control. He’s stiffening, ashamed of the fact. She sees this, touches him there.

We’re only beasts sometimes.

No, he answers. Only if we allow it.

Then the old voice sounds, deeper, impossible to ignore, chanting, Look, you fucker, look and learn.

The shape in the shadows is pumping from behind at a girl who straddles the back of a big armchair, face upturned towards them. His arms hold her legs and the memory of a childhood game—wheelbarrow, wheelbarrow, an act so innocent the memory hurts—races into his head.

There are tears in Eleanor Jamieson’s eyes. The girl looks at them from across the years, pleading. Two voices burn in Nic Costa’s head, one young and innocent, one old and knowledgeable.

The man cranks up his grinding a gear, forcing himself into her with a brutal, punishing force. She screams from the agony. She begs for his intervention.

This is just a dream, kid, no one gets to change the past, grunts the old voice.

Then he hears her screaming… I’ll tell I’ll tell I’ll tell.

Nothing changes, not even a break in the rhythm of the panting man behind.

The figure forces himself harder into her. The chair leaps forward propelled by his momentum. A face emerges into the light, distorted, ugly. It wears the mask, grunting, grunting.

He tries not to watch but the mask is staring at him, something alive behind those dead black eyes, the old voice rising, laughing, Look, you fucker, look.

And in the corner, in the darkness, something else. Another pair of bright young eyes, hidden, terrified.

ADELE NERI WALKED out into Cerchi the way she had come, through the main entrance, straight to where Neri had left his men. She blinked at the sunlight then brushed down the cobwebs and crap from her black cashmere coat. Bruno Bucci and his men were standing in the shadows next to a “Keep Out” sign that lay half askew behind some barbed wire marking the site.

She smiled and walked over to him. Bucci nodded.

“Mrs. Neri,” he said carefully. The other men watched him like a hawk. “Is your husband OK in there? I’m a little concerned, if you want to know the truth.”

She put a slim hand on his arm. “Of course he’s OK, Bruno. You know him.” She stared at the men, not letting go until they dropped their eyes to the ground. “You all know him.”

Bucci was trying to make some private contact with his eyes. She didn’t play ball. She just lit a cigarette and stared down the big, busy road, watching the traffic.

“He told you what to do, didn’t he?” she asked without looking at him. “Mickey couldn’t hurt his old man.”

A taxi drew up a little way along from them. They watched a tall, dark figure get out. He was carrying a leather bag.

“It’s not Mickey I’m worried about,” Bucci grumbled.

They watched Vergil Wallis walk slowly towards them, swinging the bag, whistling some old tune, face expressionless, eyes never leaving the mouth of the cave. He came to stand between them, raised his arms high up in the air and said to Bucci, “Well—?”

A couple of strong hands undid the leather overcoat and went up and down Wallis’s chest, then down to his belt, down his trousers. Bucci swore, put a hand around the man’s left ankle and came up with a gleaming silver hunting knife. He held the blade up in front of Wallis’s face.

“Forget something?” Bucci asked.

“Guess so,” Wallis replied nonchalantly. “It’s these early mornings. I’m getting too old for them.”

Bucci looked at the knife then passed it to one of his minions. “This has gone far enough, Mr. Wallis. Why don’t you just walk away? We can pass on the money. We can pass on any messages too. You can count on me to get what you’re buying. This… disagreement needs to stop now.”

Wallis laughed in his face. “Wow. I knew Neri was losing it. But so soon? Are you making the decisions already, Bruno?”

The big Italian hood fought to control his temper. “I’m just trying to draw a line under all this shit.”

Wallis patted him hard on the shoulder. “Don’t bother. You’re still new to all this, man.” He nodded towards the rock. “You don’t want to step out of line now, not with him still around. Mr. Neri wants to see me. I want to see him. That’s all there is to it.”

Bucci shook his head and reached for the leather bag.

Adele got there first and said, “I can do this.”

She lifted it up to her chest, ran open the big bronze zip and rummaged thoroughly through the contents with her right hand. It took a good minute or more. Then she smiled at Vergil Wallis.

“You got a lot of money there,” she said. “I hope you think it’s worth it.”

“I hope so too,” he murmured and caught the bag as she flung it at him.

Vergil Wallis walked into the darkness. They listened to him whistling and then the sound died altogether.

Adele leaned close to Bruno Bucci, looked up into his big, impassive face and ran a finger down his arm.

“Bruno?” she asked. “Do you boys really want to hang around here all day?”

BY THE TIME Teresa Lupo arrived, the door to Miranda Julius’s apartment was down, torn from its hinges by the entry team. Men were swarming everywhere, opening drawers, scattering their contents on the floor, looking for anything.

She walked straight into Suzi’s room. They hadn’t reached there yet. She was glad. It gave her time to think.

There was a sound from the corridor, a gentle cough. She turned to face it and Falcone stood in the doorway looking as grateful as he could manage.

“Thanks for coming,” he said.

“Why am I here?”

Falcone stroked his angular silver beard and looked as if he were asking himself the same question. “For luck I guess. Maybe I’m getting superstitious in my old age. We could use some luck.”

“No sign of Nic or Wallis? I heard when I was leaving.”

He shook his head. “What made you come to this room first? Do you think there’s something we should be looking for?”

“No. Nic and I did look, didn’t we? It’s just—” The conviction had grown in the speeding police car on the way. “I should have said something when we were here before. This room doesn’t feel lived in. Not at all. People leave their mark. If you go into the mother’s room you can still feel her presence. There’s mess. Chaos. This—”

She took another look to make sure. “This is for our benefit. Do we really know for sure that Suzi Julius exists?”

Falcone’s eyes didn’t leave her. “We’ve got video of someone getting on that bike. We’ve got the photos the mother gave us.”

“I know. But apart from that?”

“No.” Falcone sat down on a small cheap chair and looked around the bedroom. “Maybe that was all for our benefit too. Let’s face it. If you wanted to stage something for the police there’s no better place than the Campo. We’re always around. She’d know she wouldn’t have to scream for long. You don’t need to be a genius to see there’s CCTV there either. It’s hanging from the lamp posts.”

Teresa could see he was right. “But why?”

Falcone walked silently back into the big living room. She followed, becoming aware of the roar of traffic from outside.

“Look,” he said, and pointed to a pile of old maps. They were detailed drawings of archaeological digs, all over the city out into the suburbs and beyond. She sifted through the top of the pile. There wasn’t one she’d heard of. “The Julius woman was interested in these places too,” he said. “How many reasons can there be for that?”

Peroni was bent double over the woman’s notebook computer, thrashing at the keyboard. Teresa crouched next to him, unthinkingly put her hand on his shoulder and watched, in amazement, as he hammered the keys, working through the machine.

“How the hell do you know about computers?” she asked.

He stopped for a moment and stared at her, bemused. His right eye was a puffy red mass, almost closed. He looked awful. “I got kids, Teresa. Who else is supposed to fix their problems?”

It had never occurred to her how family shaped a man in such small, unpredictable ways. All her preconceptions about Peroni seemed false.

“Gianni,” she said softly. “What the hell happened to you? Have you seen a doctor about that?”

He laughed. “It’s a punch in the face, for Christ’s sake. Ask me something important. Ask me about her reasons.”

“Which are?” she asked and wondered whether she really wanted to know.

“Good ones,” Peroni replied and pulled up some photos on the computer.

Teresa Lupo watched as he flicked through shot after shot and wished she’d stayed where she belonged, safe in the morgue.

Peroni pointed to one of a contemporary Randolph Kirk standing at the dig in Ostia, clearly unaware someone was furtively taking his picture. The expression on his face was one of puzzlement and perhaps a little fear. “We’ve still no idea who she is really. According to the British the only woman of that name with a current passport is sixty-seven years old. Also we found these—”

There was a pile of passports on the table. “Another British one. American. Canadian. New Zealand. She looks different on every one. Different hair colour. Different style. If you’d given me this back when I was on narcotics and asked me her true profession, I’d have said she was a mule. But we just don’t know. She’s into photography though. This…” he picked up the picture of Kirk, “… was the inspiration for the photo she gave us to establish a link between Kirk and Suzi. It never existed. She just took his head from that picture and pasted it into the background of one she had of Suzi at the fountain. Kirk was never there. Kirk never threatened anyone.”

“Perhaps,” Falcone said, “it was the other way round. She was blackmailing Kirk.”

Teresa tried hard to think about Miranda Julius. If it was an act, it was a very good one.

Peroni pulled out an envelope, extracted two prints and she believed there was a glimmer of light in the darkness. These were, it seemed, from the series she had been handed by Regina Morrison. They had the same seamy quality, the same backdrop. The time was sixteen years earlier. In one the young Miranda Julius—or whatever she was really called—stood next to Emilio Neri, a big, innocent smile on her face, a glass of something in her hand. Flowers in her younger, brighter blonde hair, the petals falling down onto that stupid ceremonial shift. Teresa Lupo wanted to pick the thing up and tear it into shreds, unwind the years.

He took out the second print and placed it over the first. Miranda was naked now, pale body lolling back drunkenly on what looked like a cheap, fake Roman couch. Her legs were wound round the large, cloaked body of a man who was pumping away for all he was worth and not getting very far either. It was Beniamino Vercillo, already looking old and past it. Teresa stared into the blank eyes of that young face and tried to imagine what it would be like to be in that room. Maybe they thought Miranda was so out of it she didn’t understand what was happening. That if they poured enough booze and dope down these dumb kids they’d forget half of what went on and think the rest was as much their fault as anyone’s. You could work that trick on someone like Barbara Martelli, particularly if you threw in a nice job in the police as a reward. It wasn’t like that for Miranda. There was physical pain there. There was resentment, hatred too at having this animal steal her innocence on some cheap couch in a stinking damp cave.

“There are more,” Peroni said, reaching for the prints.

Falcone abruptly put his hand on the envelope. “Not now.” He looked at her a little slyly. “So what do you think?”

It didn’t require a genius. She smoothed back her dark hair, wondering how bad she looked just then. The work clothes were back on. Her mind was in order. But she still felt out of sorts. “Miranda, or whoever she was, came back for vengeance. But why wait so long?”

“Because this wasn’t just about getting raped by these creeps,” Peroni said. “One of those girls died and Neri told everyone it was a drug overdose. He told Wallis that too. From what we’ve seen it must have been a pretty plausible story. Until we fished that body out of the bog.”

There was some logic there, she thought. Just not enough. “So why doesn’t she just kill the bastard? Why go to this trouble?”

Peroni took out a handkerchief and dabbed his damaged eye, which was surely leaking something and must have hurt like hell. “Which bastard would that be?” he wondered. “Mickey? Maybe. Maybe she’s not sure. Maybe she knew all along and was just too scared to say. Until she realizes she can finally prove it and, bingo, it’s the first plane to Rome. So one day Barbara picks up the phone and it’s Miranda saying, ”Hi, guess who’s in town and you’ll never guess what I heard. Our old initiation girlfriend from the fuck club didn’t OD. Some bastard cut her throat and got away with it.“ Can you imagine Barbara, even the somewhat crooked Barbara we now know existed, enjoying that?”

Teresa Lupo continued to be amazed by the respect they gave their murderous former colleague. She bent down, removed the handkerchief from him, dabbed gently at the wound. Peroni was right. Nothing was cut. It was just swelling, and some weeping from the bruised eye. She touched the corner of his cheek lightly to remove some of the liquid.

“This would explain why the lovely Barbara wanted to put a bullet in my head too, presumably. You can dab away anything wet here, Gianni, but if you touch anyplace else I’m confiscating the hankie and sending you to hospital. Understood?”

Peroni wriggled in his tight grey suit, took back the hankie and touched it gingerly on the precise spot. “Thanks. Be honest with yourself, Teresa. In her shoes, in those circumstances, what did you expect her to do? Explain? These were women with a mission. God help anyone who got in their way.”

Falcone bent down and peered into Peroni’s damaged face. “Miranda did kill someone. Beniamino Vercillo. We’ve got the mask. It was dumped in a bin nearby. It’s got blonde hairs on it. I’d put money on them being hers. She had the personal motive. We’ve got the proof here. But she also wanted to expose those papers and bring Neri down for good. It wasn’t enough, all this stuff about the missing girl. We’d got distracted then by Barbara killing Kirk.”

“And me… nearly,” she interjected.

“And you,” he agreed. “All the same, she had to keep the pressure up. She identified that hair-band from Ostia which could have belonged to anyone. She identified Mickey when I doubt he’s even been near whoever ”Suzi“ really is. The rest, I don’t know. Maybe it would be hard for her to get to Neri and Mickey. Maybe… He’ll be OK, won’t he?”

Falcone was grasping for ideas in the dark and struggling to find them.

“He’ll be fine if he can stop poking it,” she replied. Teresa recalled what Regina Morrison had said about the ritual and the roles each participant would play. “She’s what they made her, Neri and the rest. A Maenad. A woman who’s all sweetness and light, a warm bed and anything else you want when times are good. And the banshee from hell when she feels she, or one of the sisterhood, has been wronged. Think of it from Miranda’s point of view.” She pointed at the picture, with the figure in the mask humping and grunting away. “Who would you want to kill? Just this sad bastard?”

“The whole damn lot of them,” Peroni said softly. “As nastily as possible. I’d want to watch them tear each other apart and dance on their graves afterwards.”

They looked at each other, lost for words. Then a woman officer walked through, smiled briefly at Teresa Lupo, and said, “We’ve picked up Neri’s lieutenant and a couple of sidekicks. In Cerchi. They’re not talking.”

Peroni raised a crooked, bloodied eyebrow. “Is that so?”

EMILIO NERI SAT at the head of the old table, smoking a Cohiba, ignoring his son, toying with the black gun he’d owned for years, used so many times it was like another limb. Thick grey cigar fumes curled their way up into the darkness, swirling on some unseen current. He watched Vergil Wallis walk in. The American was carrying a leather bag on one outstretched arm and had the other high up in the air.

Neri looked him up and down and said, “You met the guys outside?”

“Yeah. What’s his name? Bucci?”

Neri hated this man. He had no business knowing the names of his lieutenants. “He’s a good guy. I trust him. All the same—”

He waved the gun at Wallis. “Put the bag on the table. Take the coat off. Throw it on the floor. Then stand upright, keep your arms out. Fuck around and I just shoot you now.”

Wallis carefully eased the coat off, let it fall, then held his breath as Neri got up and walked round him, patting in all the right places, making sure.

“You can sit,” the old man said finally, indicating a seat at the table with the gun. Then he went back to the other side and resumed his place next to Mickey. “Show me the cash. Don’t reach inside or anything. Just turn it upside down and let me see.”

Wallis took the bottom of the bag and upsided the thing. Banknotes, big denominations, tucked into wads straight from the till, fell onto the table.

Neri gave it a derisory stare. “So this dumb shit of a son of mine’s willing to cause all this anguish for this. What an idiot. I’d have given him more as spending money if he’d asked.”

“Perhaps,” Wallis wondered, “that was the point. He got tired of asking. He wanted a little independence.”

Neri laughed and cast a brief glance at Mickey. “That worked, huh?” Then he looked at the pictures plastering the room. “What is it you think this is buying you, Vergil? That kid Mickey has stashed somewhere? Don’t ask me about it. I don’t know no details and I don’t want to. He was just playing freelance there. That kind of thing’s beneath me, but I guess you know that.”

Wallis frowned. “I got asked to come. I came.”

“You want justice or something?”

“Or something.”

“OK.”

Neri reached into his pocket, took out a knife, flicked open the blade and placed it on the table. He motioned to Mickey with the gun. “I’m a fair man. I’m going to let you take him. I got to be honest with you, I nearly did the same myself sixteen years ago. I mean, you got a nice party going, you’re thinking everyone’s having a good time. Then what happens? Your dumb kid comes in all doped up to the eyeballs, hysterical and weeping, saying look, look, look. Here’s my girlfriend, dead as they come, throat cut from ear to ear. And I watch him twitching away like that and I think, let’s make it two. Because this worthless piece of shit surely deserves it after what he’s done. I don’t know about you but I was never into beating up women. I’d kill them if it was necessary. But not out of anger or some weird doped-up pleasure. Also…” Neri took a last puff of the cigar then threw it on the floor, “… it spoiled a damn good evening. Had to cover up stuff to make sure you wouldn’t hear of it for one thing. Not that I remember the details, to be honest with you. Got to admit I was a little out of things myself.”

He looked for some sign of emotion on Wallis’s face. The American sat impassive, with his hands palm down on the table.

“We were all out of it,” Neri continued. “It was a lapse of concentration. Dangerous. But, hell, it was a good party anyway. From what I recall I banged three different girls. Adele being the best, which is why we ended up getting hitched in the end. But three! All in one night. Something else.”

He leaned forward, grinning. “What about you, Vergil? Tell me. Man to man. How many you’d bang, huh?”

SHE HOLDS HIS HEAD. Her tongue, chattering, chattering, soaks his cheek in desperate saliva.

What do you see? she says.

Costa’s peering down the blackness, half visible as a corridor in front of him, trying to fight the confusion in his mind, trying to think of some way out.

You know what I see, he says.

Miranda takes his head in her hands, forces him to look into her bright eyes. No, Nic. Not what you know already. When you look into the corner. What do you see?

In his imagination, formed by her suggestions, he sees her for sure now. A huddled shape, wretched with fear and shame, hiding in the darkness, thinking itself safe.

What’s she thinking? Miranda asks.

Tell me.

Her voice starts to break. She sees, she knows, she never has the guts to tell.

In the waking dream the figure sobs, bites her hand, trying to stifle the noise.

Who is she, Nic? Who?

“YOU DON’T WANT TO SAY. Well, I guess it could be boasting.”

Wallis leaned back in his chair looking bored, saying nothing.

“Maybe you don’t remember, huh? It’s a long time ago. Which was what puzzled me, you see. When all this shit started happening. When we got to know that body was this stepdaughter of yours. I mean, a stepdaughter. Not like she’s your own flesh and blood, is it? You don’t have any of your own flesh and blood, do you? Problems down there or something?”

Wallis nodded at Mickey. “You think I’m jealous?”

Neri laughed and took the point. “Over this piece of shit? Nah. Who would be? But I know Mickey. He’s just a weak, stupid kid, same as he was then. And all this crap got me wondering. Got me trying to remember, which is hard after all this time. And you know one thing I remember?”

Wallis peered at his nails.

“Vergil, Vergil. This is important. This is the fate of your stepdaughter I’m talking about.”

“What do you remember, Emilio?” Wallis snapped.

“Two things now I come to think about it. Once Mickey started blubbing on about how he’d got the stupid kid pregnant I didn’t even ask why he’d cut her throat. And one other. She just didn’t get the game we were supposed to be playing. You said she’d get turned on by that jerk from the university. That we’d all be having fun. And we did, all except her. She didn’t want to fuck with anyone but Mickey. I asked, all nice and polite. Toni Martelli did too. And it was all just those flashing eyelashes, and lemme get you another drink, and then what do you know, she’s off with Mickey again. Maybe it wasn’t her kind of party. Maybe she was like that because—I got to be blunt here—it wasn’t the first time for her, like it was for the rest. And that, if you recall, was one of the rules that university guy you found for us laid down. He said bad things would happen otherwise. Maybe he was right. Where did you find him by the way? The cops seem to think he was something to do with me. As if—”

Wallis turned his head, listening, trying to work out if there was anyone else present in the pitch-black corridors. “I move in wider circles, Emilio.”

“Oh yeah. You’re educated. I forgot. Anyway, what does it matter? I promised you could have Mickey. I don’t break promises. You can do what you like. But the knife only.”

He slid the blade across the table. Wallis’s hand closed on it in an expert, practised grip. Mickey Neri, blind to the game, hung his head and sobbed behind the gag. “You can do him like he did the girl, Vergil, only—”

Neri hesitated. “Let’s give the kid a chance to talk first. Only fair—”

Watching the seated man opposite very carefully, he got up and tore the tape from Mickey Neri’s eyes in one rough sweep then did the same for his mouth. Mickey screamed from the pain, looked across the table at Vergil Wallis holding the knife and the noise died in his mouth.

“Jesus—” he whispered. “Dad, don’t do this to me.”

“Man’s got a right to know what happened to his girl,” Neri said severely. “Best get it off your chest, son. Best do that now before it’s too late.”

SHE’S YOU, he says in a still, dead voice.

Who?

You.

Miranda takes his pained head, stares at him with two eyes from the present, kisses him, crying, shaking from the release.

He looks at the young Miranda Julius cowering in his imagination. Time has worked such changes on her face, removed so much. No lines. No cares. No jaded acceptance of an imperfect world.

You’re beautiful, he says.

A thin, unconvincing laugh now, local, in his own piece of staggering space. Hers.

Only on the outside, Nic. The outside tells you nothing. The outside lies. The only truth lies in your imagination. Forgo that and there’s nothing but the dark.

Shouts echo through the caverns. Ripples of fear and anxiety—real, not imagined—disturb the wakeful dream inside his head.

He tries to walk and stumbles. The chemical fire is raging unchecked through his head. She holds him. He trembles. He sweats.

There’s more, she says.

“I JUST SCREWED HER,” Mickey bleated. “That’s all. She begged for it. All the time. I got bored, if you want to know. I wanted to mess around with the others like we were supposed to. She wouldn’t let me. It was just ”Mickey, Mickey, Mickey.“ I said that wasn’t the point. She was supposed to mix it. She didn’t want to know. She—”

His nervous eyes flickered between the two men.

“She said you was just a bunch of dirty old bastards. She wasn’t putting it out for any of you. She just went on about love and stuff. Like the whole world was something special. Even her being knocked up was special, but I just wanted her down the clinic, get the thing out. Love? All I did was bang her.”

Wallis watched him, toying with the knife, saying nothing.

“See,” Neri suggested. “Like I said. The girl just didn’t want to play the game. Her choice, I guess. But why come along in the first place?”

Mickey nodded at Wallis. “ ”Cos he made her. It wasn’t some birthday present. He thought it’d be good for business. That’s what she said.“

Neri cocked his head to one side, thinking about this. “I find that hard to believe, Mickey. Vergil here is an educated man. He came up with the idea for that party after all. He fixed all that stuff with the robes and the flowers. I just brung the dope and some guys who might be grateful for a chance at some young ass. The girl must have guessed what was coming.”

“None of them guessed,” Mickey yelled. “You were so far out of it you didn’t even get that, did you? Him and that professor guy of his just filled them up with so much stuff then put them in a room full of old guys with hard-ons and bolted the doors. They didn’t get any choices. They did what you wanted. Then when it turned bad you thought you could shut them all up with a few promises and that was it.”

Neri stared at Wallis. “Is that right, Vergil? My memory’s not so great after all these years.”

The American shot Mickey a hateful glance. “That fool was shot full of so much dope—”

Neri nodded. “I agree there, Mickey. You’re just trying to avoid the truth. You knocked up this poor girl when you first met her in Sicily. You fucked her rigid that night we came here. Then what? She told you she was coming to me and Vergil to announce a little shotgun wedding? Or did the dope and the festivities just go a little too far and you woke up one moment with a knife in your hand, and her stone dead?”

“No!”

Neri grimaced. “This is going nowhere. We don’t have time to piss around forever. Maybe I should just let Vergil do his thing now.”

Mickey Neri turned on his father, pleading. “Will you listen, for chrissake? I went outside for a smoke. It was driving me crazy in here. All these old guys screwing everywhere, taking junk like they were twenty years younger. And this place. It’s like being dead. In the grave. I was out there maybe an hour. I thought I’d go home but I knew you’d be mad with me. Then I came back, into that room you gave us, and she was there. Like you saw. It wasn’t me.”

Neri’s mouth hardened into a tight bloodless line. He looked at his watch and said nothing.

“But it’s always the same,” Mickey snapped. “There’s shit around and who do you turn to? Me. You never once asked what happened. You just looked at her, looked at me, then shook your head like you always do. You know how many times I’ve seen that over the years?”

“The girl was dead, Mickey,” Neri said quietly. “You were the only one who was with her. I was supposed to be doing business with her stepfather who was just a couple of rooms away, out of his head, playing god or something, fucking everything that moved. If I’d hesitated then, if I’d let him know what had really been going on—you screwing the girl, getting her in the family way like that—you’d have been dead anyway. Did you ever stop to think of that?”

Mickey was quiet for a moment, a tiny light of clarity sparking in his head.

“No,” he mumbled.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Yeah,” Wallis said. “It ends here.”

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

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

“It does?”

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

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

Wallis’s black eyes burned across at him.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Don’t fail me, Nic, she says. Remember what you are. Don’t make me the silent witness twice.

Her hand grips his and passes something over. Its shape slips beneath his fingers, cold metal, the old, familiar dumb machine.

THE POWERFUL BLACK ARM ROSE… rises.

A figure strides out of the darkness. Vergil Wallis watches and pauses, surprised. A name slips from his lips, hangs in the air between them. He lowers his gaze, nods at the table.

You got your money, the American says, staring at her too-blonde hair, eyes glittering covetously, remembering. You know the deal. Get gone.

Her face is more radiant than anything in the room, shining with a living brightness leeched from the vibrant photos pasted everywhere. She shivers, she shakes, rooted to the spot, afraid but not afraid.

Wallis waves the blade at her. Take it.

No movement. Fear and resolution.

I know, she says.

He halts, confused. Her golden head shakes. There are tears in her eyes as, stuttering, she says…

I saw, I know, I never had the guts to tell.

He looks at the dead mask on the table and laughs, wondering whether to try it on again for size.

So what’s one more? he wonders, then laughs, staring avidly at the shining hair. Afterwards…

The blade rises, then falls. A red line starts on the white, shining skin.

You got a talent for watching, girl…—he tries to say into the dark air, but finds himself struggling for the words. Wallis looks beyond her, into the shadows, where fire and thunder are shredding the darkness.

He stares at this black shape there and tries to roar, to find the god inside him. Blood rises in his throat. He falls and, in the smoke and powder stink, Nic Costa finds his consciousness fading too. His head spins, his legs become feeble.

On the ground, sight fading. One last memory.

She bends over the fallen man, opening his bloody lips, still mouthing, still trying to say some single word. A coin glitters briefly between her fingers then is gone.

ANOTHER ROOM. Smaller. A pool of grubby light pierces the darkness. Her older voice now talks to him and it is calm, unmoved.

Sweet Nic, sweet Nic. You save yourself. You save me.

No, he says, and hears his own voice rumbling around the inside of this curling, twisting intestine cut into the rock.

He sits on a chair. She crouches above him, holding his cheeks. Her face fills his vision, becomes all there is to the world.

You have to feed the savage sometimes. It’s the only way to keep him in his cage.

Fighting to control his hands, his fingers reach her shoulder, push the fabric of her tee-shirt down.

And hears the old voice, laughing, you should have looked earlier, kid, call yourself a cop.

Deep in the flesh, dark blue and old, the dreadlocked face grins at him, victorious. His mouth closes on the stained skin, swallows its guttural voice. His teeth bite into her, chewing, licking, sucking the vile blue poison from her pores, takes it into himself, feeling the rush.

Voices down the corridor, voices in his head. He snatches a breath and knows: this is only the beginning. The dope is moving higher up the ladder, seizing more territory inside his limitless imagination.

Then, like a lifeline from sanity, a familiar voice rings through the guts of the labyrinth, echoing, distant.

Nic! Nic!

A sound from the old world. The real world.

One pill makes you small, Miranda Julius sings.

Nic!

She bends down to kiss him, tongue darting briefly into the corner of his mouth.

“Don’t look for me,” she whispers, then vanishes into the shadows, leaving just the aftertouch of her skin, her presence, glowing in his head.

The light dies. It is dark and cold. He shivers alone.

Aprile

IT WAS LATE AFTERNOON ON THE FIRST DAY OF APRIL. They sat in the old courtyard garden of the hospital of San Giovanni enjoying the last of the sun. Peroni bolted down the remains of a panino, balled up the bag and despatched it into a nearby rose bed.

“Nice to have you back, Nic,” he said. “I never had a partner with acid flashbacks before. What’s it like?”

Costa gave him a wry look. “I’ll let you know when it happens.”

“Not yet, huh? Did they ever find out what shit that woman pumped into you?”

His partner’s eye had mended but still had a rosy bloom above the eyelid. Given the state of the rest of Peroni’s face, it didn’t look particularly out of place. Peroni was unchanged by events. Nic Costa had stared at himself in the mirror that morning and wondered if anyone would say the same about him. He looked older, more marked by the world. He’d even found a couple of grey hairs above one ear. This went with the odd new territory he seemed to have carved out for himself within the Questura. He wasn’t a hero, quite. But when he’d walked down the corridors that afternoon, for the first time since the incident, he realized he was now the kind of man who turned heads.

“If they did,” he said, “they haven’t told me.”

“Drop off a bottle of pee with Teresa,” Peroni declared. “She’ll know. I’m serious. That woman’s a genius.”

Costa thought of the role the pathologist had played in the Julius case. Maybe she was too. “So you never found out who Miranda really was?”

Peroni shook his head. “We got the ”daughter“ though. Not that it did us much good. She was a teenage model from Prague. Wanted to break into acting. Seems she was picked out of a portfolio for her looks, paid to come here and ”audition.“ Which meant getting her hair dyed a touch more blonde and her picture taken in a few places. You can guess by who. Oh, and doing that stunt on the motorbike for the benefit of the cameras and any cops who happened to be lurking in the Campo at the time.”

Costa thought about this. “She didn’t know anything about Miranda? She was just picked at random because of how she looked?”

“Sure. Miranda claimed to be a big talent scout from America. How many questions do you think would-be actresses ask in those situations? She got her plane ticket. She got put up in a nice hotel. Then, after performing the ”action audition“ with the bike, she took a taxi for Fiumicino and flew home. You got to admit it, Miranda did a great job. While we were thinking her daughter was lying drugged in a cave somewhere, making out with Mr. Beastie and about to get killed, she was actually back at school strutting around in front of her classmates boasting about her new career in Hollywood. She can’t give us a clue who Miranda really is. And you want to know something? I doubt we’re ever going to find out.”

Costa wondered how he really felt about that. “Falcone’s letting it drop?”

Peroni hesitated, choosing his words carefully. “I wouldn’t put it quite so crudely. You got to remember, Nic. People like him answer to lots of different bosses. Some of them hold the purse strings and ask about the money. Is it really worth it? Ask yourself. Is it?”

“Six people dead. I would have thought so.”

Peroni took a deep breath. “That’s seven actually if you include Eleanor Jamieson. Not counting those poor bastards outside Neri’s.”

Costa shook his head. The death toll there had risen to five in the end, some DIA, some cops. It could so easily have been higher. “We can’t just let this drop.”

His partner sighed. “Nic. Let’s have this conversation once and then leave it to one side forever. Most of this is wrapped up already. We got hard evidence that Mickey Neri accounted for that bastard Toni Martelli, for which he will stand trial once we can get him out of the hospital and into a jacket with sleeves. Barbara Martelli, meanwhile, popped Randolph Kirk to stop him talking to us before disappearing down a hole outside Fiumicino. Thanks to you we know most of the rest too. Wallis killed his own stepdaughter and got to Emilio Neri too, before you had the chance to stop him. This…” Peroni patted his knee to emphasize the point, “… is all good news for the statistics, and the people who live above Leo survive on statistics. Do you think it possible Crazy Teresa has the hots for me by the way? I’ve been getting some funny looks from that woman lately.”

“No,” Costa objected. “What about—?”

“Mr. Vercillo? Miranda Julius, or whoever she is, did him. There’s forensic on that costume we found, and we got some bloodstains on a shirt in the apartment too. So you see the dilemma? Do we really waste public money—big public money in all probability—chasing all over the world for a woman who, let’s be honest here, probably did the Italian public at large some very big favours?”

Costa scowled and said nothing.

Peroni sniffed a young rose on the bush next to them, just coming into bloom. “Summer’s on the way, Nic. Let’s put all this behind us.”

“I’m trying,” he murmured.

Peroni’s hand went to Nic’s shoulder and that big ugly face now stared up at his. “OK. I know. I checked the records. It’s the first time you shot a man. And it bugs you. I don’t blame you. I never shot anyone in my life.”

Costa looked Peroni straight in the eye. “Did you ever want to?”

A touch of colour rose in Peroni’s face. “Nic. Stop feeling sorry for yourself. As luck would have it I am going to be by your side somewhat longer than I expected. And I do not intend to sit back and watch you choke trying to swallow this. Do you think either of them, Neri or Wallis, was going to let you walk out of there? You’re damn lucky the woman did. Still not sure I get that. What I do know is she filled you up with dope before this happened. If you’re looking for someone to blame, blame her.”

Costa carefully removed his partner’s arm from his shoulder. “Don’t worry. What bothers me is I’m not that bothered. It wasn’t the dope, either. Not all of it anyway. I wanted that man dead. He was a monster.”

Gianni Peroni looked at him and Costa was unsure of his expression. It just may have been shock.

“I’m sorry to hear that, Nic,” he said eventually. “In a way. A part of me wants to say, ”Welcome to the real world, Mr. Costa. Where most of us go round having some such thoughts on a daily basis.“ A part of me hopes you don’t catch the same bug everyone else gets. Let’s not make a habit of it, huh? It’s such an easy way out. Is that a deal?”

“Yeah,” Costa replied, feeling a little embarrassed.

“Good.” His partner was grinning now. It made him look younger and a little scary.

“What do you mean you’re sticking around with me?” Costa asked. “I thought you were going back to pushing a desk in vice.”

Peroni took another look at the single rosebud struggling into bloom on the bush next to them then snipped off the stem with his forefinger and thumb and placed the flower in his jacket pocket. “You wouldn’t believe it. That Bucci bastard, the hood I knocked around good in Cerchi, laid in a complaint about me. Amazing. He may even sue too. Police brutality. First time I ever truly hit a man on the job, and he’s a murdering goon. What with all the hooker stuff that went down before, they wanted to kick me out altogether. But old Leo waded in and started screaming at everyone high and low. At least so I gather. He’s not even said so much as a word either way to me.”

Costa tried to decode the expression on Peroni’s face. “Is that good or bad? You staying with me?”

“It’s good for me,” Peroni yelled. “I got a job still, and a partner I can live with. How about you?”

Costa shrugged. “I may need to think about it for a while.”

“Jesus,” Peroni gasped. “Will you analyse every last fucking event on the face of this planet until it rolls over and dies? It is how it is. Nothing I can do will change things. So why sweat over it?”

Costa chuckled.

“Your sense of humour could do with some improving,” Peroni moaned. “Country boys like me don’t get these finer points.”

“I’m sorry, Gianni. Really I am. What about your wife? How are things going there?”

Peroni looked shifty. “We met at the weekend. I had to go to a funeral back home. She wanted a reconciliation but… You know the one thing I have learned from you people? To recognize that dead means dead. And that marriage is dead. I’ll see the kids don’t get damaged though, as much as I can.”

His battered face was unreadable. “A funeral?”

“Yeah. That old cop. The Tuscan amateur plastic surgeon.”

Peroni pointed to his scars. Costa was surprised to discover he was now very used to them. This was Gianni Peroni. “The nice guy who did this to me.”

“You went all the way home for that?” Costa asked, astonished.

Peroni laughed and shook his head. “Christ, Nic. What a pair of lousy detectives we make. You can’t see it any better than I could, not that you had as much time, of course. He was my old man. He begat me. Half my genes are his. He… oh shit, even now I find it hard to use the f-word. He was my father. There. I think my mamma must have thought keeping him sweet was part of the terms and conditions of working behind that bar. Who knows?”

Costa looked at his partner. When he was getting to know Gianni Peroni he’d always thought of him as a rock, impervious to the mundane tragedies of the world. It was, he now realized, such a superficial view.

“When did you find out?” he asked, knowing the answer already.

“Just after Christmas. When they worked out his liver was finally throwing up its hands and surrendering. He wanted to see me one last time. So I went and guess what? It was all about him really, not me. He wanted to explain that when he was remaking my face it was nothing personal. It was just himself he was beating up all along because of how guilty he felt about having fathered a bastard at all. So we shed a few tears together, me being the utter fool I am, and yes, maybe twenty-four hours later I break the habit of a lifetime and fall into bed with a Czech hooker because, well, why not, why the fuck not?”

Peroni put a big hand over his crooked mouth, thinking. “You’re wrong about Teresa, by the way. I just know it.”

“But—” Costa wanted to ask so many questions.

“Ssshhh,” Peroni interrupted, watching a tall figure stride down the arcade opposite. Then he glanced at Costa. “What I just said is between the two of us, Nic. No one outside my family knows that little secret. No one else will. You share a little of my private burden. I’ll share a little of yours if you want me to, before I go back to my true vocation in life and you become my driver. At which point I doubt I’ll talk to you at all, the class war being what it is.”

Costa laughed. “I can’t wait for that day.”

“Good. What’s more, now we’re back on duty, we both get to share a whole load of old Leo’s burden. And that is one big load to bear.”

Falcone was beckoning for them to join him. He looked spruced up and dressed in his Sunday best. In his hands was a fine bouquet of roses and carnations.

“Hospital visits,” Peroni said, getting to his feet and patting the tiny rose in his jacket pocket. “Don’t you love ”em?“

RACHELE D’AMATO SAT upright in her bed in a private room. She wore a white silk shirt, torn up to the right elbow to make room for the cast on her arm, with sheets up to her waist. The fading remains of a livid bruise stained her forehead close to the scalp. Leo Falcone, watched by Costa and Peroni from the door, kissed her gently on the left cheek, presented a small golden box of chocolates then removed some old flowers from the vase by her bed and replaced them with his own.

“Here.” He passed the dead lilies and gladioli to Peroni who grimaced at the things then dumped them in a wastebasket in the corner of the room.

“Flowers,” she said, smiling. “Chocolates. Oh, Leo. How… quaint.”

The three men looked at her and understood the position. Nothing had really changed. She wielded the same control over her emotions. Even a bomb couldn’t change Rachele D’Amato.

“You’re welcome,” Falcone mumbled.

“Sit, if you like. I thought—” She looked at Costa and Peroni. “I thought you might have come before. I rather expected you on your own when you did find the time.”

Falcone stayed on his feet. “I’m sorry. They say you’re doing well. A couple of days more—”

She played with the flowers, improving the arrangement. “Can’t wait. I’m bored to death. I want to get back to work.” She hesitated. “I keep hearing all these stories. So tell me. Will you find this woman?”

“We will.” He nodded.

The firmness of his answer surprised her. “Really? I heard people were starting to consider it was a waste of time. She’s out of the country. You don’t know where to start. You don’t even know her real name.”

“Don’t believe everything you hear.”

She stared at the chair next to the bed until he sat down in it. Then he opened the leather document case he’d brought with him. “When you go back to work you’ll have to deal with this one.”

Falcone threw a photo of the young Adele Neri onto the sheets. She picked up the colour print and looked at it.

“Where did you get this?”

Falcone had lost some of his winter holiday tan. He looked tired and troubled. “The Julius woman was careless. She must have scanned Kirk’s photos into the computer to mess with them or maybe just for safekeeping. She thought she’d wiped the ones she didn’t want to fool with. She hadn’t. Our computer people managed to recover a few. Quite a lot actually. Adele Neri was on several.”

“Oh.” She stared at the photo then gave it back to him. “Are you telling me Neri’s mob is now in the hands of his widow? These are changed times. I know that happens in the South. But in Rome—? It seems wrong somehow.”

“It seems wrong,” he agreed.

“And you think she was involved in what happened? With this in mind?”

“Partly with this in mind. I’m certain of it.”

“Can you prove anything?”

He said nothing, watching her open the chocolates, put one in her mouth, smile faintly with pleasure then close the lid.

“Life will be interesting when I get out of this bed,” she said, still chewing.

“Quite,” he replied, then very suddenly, too quickly for her to protest, began to extend the tear in the silk shirt, ripping it up her arm with both hands until he reached the shoulder.

“Leo!”

The three men stared at the pale patch there, round, like the mark of a coin. Or a badge. Skin that was unlike the rest of her, bleached, changed.

“I remembered that,” Falcone said.

“I imagine,” she replied, “you remember most of me. Oh, Leo. You’re not that kind, are you? Lying in bed at night, on your own, just thinking of me? Trying to picture what I looked like when I was there under the sheets with you? Really. Aren’t you a little old for that kind of thing?”

Falcone couldn’t take his eyes off the white patch of skin. “It never quite works, does it? I imagine they promise no one will ever notice. The tattoo will just go and you get old skin in its place.” He touched her on the shoulder. “What you really get is new skin that never ages. Not quite right.”

“It’s a birthmark,” she said very patiently. “I told you, surely.”

Falcone wasn’t listening. “Neri worked so hard to clean this up, to keep you all sweet and silent. He married one of you. Barbara he put in the police. He put you through law college, then into the DIA. And another ran away for some reason. She knew all along Eleanor never died from drugs. She just didn’t dare say so. Then, when a body turns up, she decides to put matters right. She comes back to make sure you all know the price of what you’d won.”

Rachele D’Amato was into her second chocolate by now. “These really are delicious, you know. You don’t mind my not sharing them. I am still an invalid. Just. And frankly I always feel good chocolate is wasted on men.”

“So she tells Vergil Wallis, who goes along with everything,” he continued. “Perhaps he bankrolls things. This fake abduction. He leans on Randolph Kirk to cooperate. Never understanding that you know already who killed Eleanor. And it’s not just him you want. It’s all of them, him included. Him especially.”

She closed the box. “No more. I’ve put on enough weight in this place already. I must say, Leo. You are entertaining today. Is this how the police intend to pursue investigations in the future? Just guess your way through everything until you find an answer that fits?”

Falcone took no notice. “Someone had to tell her about Vercillo. Kirk wouldn’t know him as anything other than a face at the party. There’s no reason to think Wallis could have provided his address. But the DIA—”

“No reason?” She laughed. “Have you actually run these fantasies past a lawyer? Is this what constitutes evidence in the police force these days?”

He shook his head. “And someone had to drive that bike with the bogus Suzi Julius on the back. You have a licence.”

Rachele D’Amato stared coolly at the three of them. “I have a licence? My. That’s incriminating.”

“It bothered me afterwards. I talked to you that day. You were in a hurry to leave for an appointment. I told you, I checked. There’s nothing on your DIA diary to account for that.”

“I told you. I met a man. I’m sorry if that hurts your tender ego.”

“Does he have a name?” Falcone asked.

“He’s married. I’m not dragging him into this for your sick curiosity.” She nodded at Costa and Peroni. “Is that why they’re here? Is this a formal interview?”

“Just came along to wish you well, ma’am,” Peroni said with a little bow. “So pleased to see you’re recovering your customary composure so quickly.”

“Jesus,” she murmured. “That man gets uglier by the day, Leo. Did you have to pick him?”

“And your charm too,” Peroni said with a smile. “Glad that’s returning.”

“There was no man,” Falcone said. “There never has been. Not even me. What was I for, Rachele? Promotion? Or did you just feed back information to Neri even then?”

“This is ridiculous,” she hissed.

“That’s what they did to you,” he continued. “All of you. Barbara. Miranda Julius. They took away any chance you had of a normal relationship. Perhaps that’s what you hated most, even more than the thought that they’d tricked you over Eleanor.”

He threw another photo on the bed. She looked at it. “And what’s this supposed to be?”

“You. Dressed up and ready just like all the others. You were there. Which one was it? Do you remember? Toni Martelli? Wallis? Or did they take turns?”

She flung the picture at him. “Take this away. Go find something better to do, Leo.”

“It’s you,” he insisted. “They even got you to dye your hair blonde back then. Whose idea was that?”

She was laughing at all of them. “What are you talking about? Look at this girl! It could be anyone!”

“It’s you.”

Rachele D’Amato sighed and leaned back into the pillow. “Do you think you could convince a court of that? And even if you could, does it matter? It’s just a picture.”

“What about those people outside Neri’s house?” Costa asked. “Don’t their relatives deserve some answers?”

“I was one of them,” she snapped. “In case you forgot. Neri placed that bomb. Neri’s dead. How many answers do you need?”

Peroni sniffed and looked at her. “What about Barbara Martelli? No feeling there?”

She picked at another chocolate then said, “I never knew the woman.”

“Rachele,” Falcone said, and heard the note of pleading that had crept into his voice. “You can’t just bury this.”

“It’s buried already, Leo. You just don’t see it. Ask yourself a question. Are we living in a better world now? Or a worse one?”

“That’s not for the likes of us to decide.”

“No!” she yelled. “Don’t take that line with me. You make those decisions just as much as anyone. If you think you have one piece of hard evidence against me then use it. If not I suggest you keep your mouth shut and try catching a few criminals instead of boxing shadows. Now get out of here. And take these with you!”

She picked up the vase of flowers and launched them against the wall next to Peroni and Costa where they shattered noisily, dispensing water, petals and fragments of pottery everywhere.

IT WAS DARK by the time they got outside. Falcone clutched his leather case to his chest, looking lost. Costa shuffled on his feet, hunched up inside his jacket, silent, thinking.

“I know—” Peroni said hopefully. “Let’s get a drink. Something to eat. There’s a place near here—”

“Is the wine good?” Falcone asked. “I don’t drink any old shit.”

“Me neither,” Costa grumbled. “And I don’t just want salad.”

“Boys, boys,” Peroni sighed. “Stick with your old uncle Gianni. He’ll see you right.”

Ten minutes later they were in a tiny bar behind the Colosseum. Falcone sniffed approvingly at an expensive glass of Brunello and some prosciutto crudo. Nic Costa was testing a Tuscan chardonnay and some porcini on crostini. Gianni Peroni had one beer under his belt already, along with some translucent slices of expensive pork lardo on a slab of country bread.

“I can give everything I’ve got to the DIA,” Falcone said to no one in particular. “Let’s see what that does for her career.”

“You can, Leo,” Peroni said. “And by the way, thanks for putting in a word for me.”

The tall inspector rolled back on his seat as if affected by some slight. “I just did my job. They asked my opinion. I gave it to them.”

Peroni ordered another beer and said, “For which I’m grateful. Let me offer a thought in return. Do you really think the DIA will appreciate if it we keep this thing on life support? I mean, either they know already, in which case it’s their problem. Or they don’t and frankly I’m not sure they’ll be pleased to have it laid on their plate. I mean, she’s good at her job, isn’t she? She didn’t kill anyone. She didn’t do anything except ride a motorbike and hand out some information, not that we can prove any of that. Also, maybe they’re aware of some of the people who had their photos taken in that place. Maybe some of them are those very people.” He paused. “Have you thought of that?”

Falcone glowered back at him. “Are you ever going back to vice?”

Another beer landed on the table. Peroni took a deep swig. “Who knows? Who the hell knows anything these days? How’s your drink? How’s the food?”

Falcone sniffed at the wine. “The Brunello is as good as one might expect for the price. I don’t mean that as a criticism. The ham is… fine.” He took another sip then nodded with a measure of approval before grumbling, “And we still don’t know that damned woman’s name.”

Gianni Peroni sighed and stared at his beer glass.

“A good white,” Costa said, holding his glass up to the light. “Well-balanced. A little under-chilled.”

It was the colour of old straw under the yellowing candle bulbs of the bar. He took a gulp, larger than normal, and paused over the sudden and unexpected kick of the alcohol.

One pill makes you bigger, she sang, and he wondered, once more, why she’d dyed her hair that night.

He recalls a face now, frightened, furious and dying, under the same light, something glittering in its throat, choking as it tries to speak the same word, over and over again into the echoing darkness.

“We do know her name,” Nic Costa says, mind half recoiling from the memory, half flying towards it like a moth dancing for the candle.

“She told us time and time again.”

And no one else was fool enough to listen, says an old, cruel voice, still locked somewhere at the back of his imagination.

“Her name is Suzi.”

About the Author

DAVID HEWSON is a weekly columnist for the Sunday Times. The Villa of Mysteries is the second novel in a crime series which began with A Season for the Dead, set in Rome and featuring Detective Nic Costa. He is also the author of Lucifer’s Shadow. A former staff writer on The Times, he lives in Kent, where he is at work on the third Nic Costa crime novel, The Sacred Cut.