The Villa of Mysteries Read online

  Barbara Martelli downed the tiny coffee. She was thinking. She seemed briefly troubled, he thought, as if there was something she didn’t want to say. “I know what you mean.”

  “You do?”

  “About the choices.”

  Something crossed her face then, some shadow of doubt, of unhappiness, and it struck him that Barbara Martelli’s appearance wasn’t always an advantage. It could be a burden too. This was how people judged her, on her looks, not the person beneath, who was somehow oddly remote.

  “But, Nic. The best thing is just to accept that’s how it is and get on with the job. Not . . .” She looked at his coffee cup. It had been empty for a long time and they both knew it. “. . . not hide away in the corner somewhere. That’s not like you. At least, as much as I think I know you.”

  He was late already. If she hadn’t walked in, he’d still be there, hesitating. And a moment would come, he knew it, when he’d turn round, go back to the farmhouse, maybe open a bottle of good wine, then undo everything he’d achieved these past few months, rebuilding his health, resurrecting what was left of his dignity and self-respect. There was a kind of glory in crashing out that way. If you could only prolong that feeling forever, it would be enough, would see you through an entire lifetime. The trouble was it didn’t last. You always woke up. The real world poked its head around the door and said, “Look.” There was no escape and that was for the simplest of reasons: what he was running from lay inside.

  “Do I have to march you into that place or what?” she asked.

  “I could call in sick.”

  “No!” Her large, green eyes widened with anger.

  They were flirting with each other. Not seriously, he realized. This was Barbara’s way of getting him moving. She’d use it on anyone she felt needed it.

  “This,” she declared, “is what we do for a living. It’s our chosen vocation and there are no halfway houses. You’re either in. Or out. So which is it?”

  A wild thought ran around his head then popped out of his mouth without even letting him consider the consequences. “Do you think we’ll ever go out on a date, Barbara? Do you think that’s possible?”

  A gentle blush rose in her cheeks. Barbara Martelli got asked out a dozen times a day.

  “Ask me tomorrow,” she said. “On one condition.”

  He waited, still embarrassed by the sudden intimacy.

  She pointed a long, manicured finger in the direction of the station. “You ask me in there.”

  They did everything wrong in Italy. The cappuccinos had insufficient milk. The pasta didn’t taste right. The pizzas were too thin. And the booze. Lianne Dexter couldn’t work out what was wrong. Ordinarily the effects would be wearing off by now, two hours after lunch. But she felt just as drunk as when they left the osteria and it was starting to make her edgy. She and Bobby had finished the single bottle of Pellegrino mineral water from the rucksack he’d snatched from the car before it went up in flames. Now they had nothing to drink, nothing to eat and not a lot of money either. She didn’t even want to think about the walk back along the rutted lane towards the main road. How did you flag down an Italian and get him to take you to Avis for a refund on the crappy car they rented you? And what about the stuff Bobby had found? So far a coin, what looked like a very old, very big nail and something the size of a kid’s hand, semicircular, encrusted with crud, which Bobby assured her was definitely an ancient Roman neckband or the like and would come up great once he cleaned off the crap. Which was great except they weren’t supposed to be hunting for these things. The Italians would surely know. And maybe the “necklace” was just a brake lining anyway. Lianne’s father was a car mechanic. She knew about these things, a little anyway. It looked awfully like a brake lining to her.

  She licked her lips. Her mouth was dreadfully dry. A cheap wine migraine was pumping at her temples. It was now approaching three in the afternoon and the light was fading. They needed to be moving. She didn’t want to be stranded all night in this odd wilderness, with its queer smell and the planes from Fiumicino screaming overhead every two minutes or less.

  “Bobby,” she whined.

  He wasn’t satisfied with the haul. Tom Jorgensen still had the marble head and it looked better than any of these things.

  He tore off the headphones and barked, “What?”

  “Gonna get dark soon. We gotta go.”

  He looked around at the grey sky and sniffed. “Five more minutes.” Then he popped the headphones back on and wandered over towards the water’s edge. It was bog here. Lianne knew that instinctively. It had that odd, acid smell she associated with the cranberry farms in Maine, one of the places they’d trashed on an earlier vacation.

  “Peat,” she said, suddenly remembering. Bobby mouthed “what the fuck now?” at her with the headphones still clamped to his skull. A 747 careered over them so low she felt the earth shake. She had to put her hands over her ears just to try to keep out the bellowing of the plane’s engines.

  “Nothing,” she whispered to herself in the plane’s wake, wishing she was somewhere else. Back home even. The cranberry farms had been nice. Interesting. Run by people who spoke the same language she did and never made her feel out of place. Rome wasn’t like that. She felt all the faces in the street were looking at her constantly, waiting for her to say the wrong thing, turn the wrong corner. It was all so foreign.

  Then there was a new noise, an unexpected one. It was Bobby, whistling. He tore off the headphones and pointed to a patch of damp earth, covered in feeble grass, a few feet in front of him.

  “One more thing, sweetheart. Then we’re gone. Gimme the spade.”

  She did as he asked. Bobby Dexter placed the shovel on the ground then jumped on it with both feet. The thing went straight in like a knife through hot butter. Bobby tumbled off the spade and hit the dirt once more.

  “Peat,” she said again, watching Bobby writhe on the ground, cursing. “It’s soft, Bobby. You don’t need to try so hard. Look—”

  She picked up the trowel they’d brought and squatted down on the ground, next to where his spade had bitten the earth. Lianne had watched an archaeology programme on the Discovery Channel once. She knew how people did these things, though why they bothered, for six, maybe eight hours a day, was quite beyond her.

  “You just do it gently,” she said and poked the end of the trowel into the soft earth. The acid reek came up and hit her in the face. It made her think of cranberries: all that sharp red juice mixed up with vodka. “Look—”

  She scraped the surface, trying not to breathe in the smell. And then the trowel stopped dead on something solid. Lianne Dexter gulped involuntarily and wondered whether her throat might seize up. She ran the trowel tentatively through the earth. It encountered the same solid object as far as she could push it.

  Bobby lurched over the ground and took the trowel off her. He began working at the soil, a little too roughly, she thought.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  An object was emerging. It was the colour of the peat, a dark, woody brown, and hard to the touch. Bobby scraped some more, then the two of them took a deep breath and sat back. What lay before them, emerging gradually from the earth, appeared to be the carved representation of a human arm. A feminine one, probably, with the folds of a simple shift visible through the dirt, reproduced with an uncanny accuracy.

  “It looks real,” Lianne said eventually.

  “Hello!” Bobby bellowed sarcastically. “Earth to Planet Lianne. It’s a statue. It’s supposed to look real.”

  “Statues aren’t that colour.”

  “Lianne—” He was getting exasperated again. His eyes had an angry roll to them. “This thing’s been sitting in the shit for a couple of thousand years or so. What colour do you expect it to come up? Shiny white or something? You think they shrink-wrapped it before putting it there?”

  She didn’t answer. He had a point.

  Bobby scraped some more. A hand emerged at the end of t
he arm: slender fingers clenched tightly shut around the shaft of something big. The two of them stood back for a moment and stared at the object in the mud. To Lianne the figure now looked very feminine and curiously familiar. Then her head lurched into gear and she realized what the connection was. This odd, dead thing in the ground resembled a cut-down version of the Statue of Liberty, trying to raise a big, stone torch, struggling to get it upright in the mud.

  “It’s not metal, Bobby,” she said with a degree of boldness that worried her a little. “How come your machine picked it up? You thought of that?”

  He glowered at her. “You amaze me sometimes. I’m sitting here maybe discovering Tutankhamen’s fucking tomb or something and all you can do is pick, pick, pick. Get off my back for a moment, will ya? I’m trying to think.”

  He scraped down the other side, where the other arm might be. Sure enough it was there, only a few inches beneath the surface of the peat. Maybe the recent rain had washed away some of the crap that had been covering it. Bobby ran the trowel gently across the space in between the arms. The figure’s chest emerged. She was wearing what looked like a classical gown, with a v-neck that went low enough to disclose the rising curve of her slight and very lifelike breasts. The surface of the statue, when Bobby pushed away as much dirt as possible, was quite curious. It was the colour of old leather and a little shiny. For one brief moment, as he pushed and prodded with the trowel, Lianne thought it gave a little in places, but that must have been the booze.

  Bobby shuffled on his knees then pushed aside no more than four inches of soil a couple of feet below the areas he’d already exposed. He’d guessed well. There were the outlines of two ankles, some way apart, perfect, naked this time, no sign of a carved dress or anything.

  “It’s life-size, Bobby,” Lianne said.

  “I know!”

  “So what are you going to do?”

  “Jesus. If only I could see that fat fucker Jorgensen’s face right now. You bring the camera?”

  She shook her head. “Forgot it.”

  “Typical. Thanks a million.”

  “Bobby!”

  He looked at his wife. Lianne knew she was close to becoming downright argumentative just then. She didn’t care. Something bad was happening here and maybe it was time to take a stand.

  “What am I going to do?” he asked. “What the fuck I like, Lianne. Whatever the fuck I like.”

  “It’s too big. You can’t pack that as excess baggage. Also it’s the colour of shit. And it smells. Can’t you smell it?”

  “It’s been in a bog for a million fucking years. You want it to come out smelling of roses?”

  She pulled back from the thing and crossed her arms across her chest, mutinous. “I don’t want it smelling like that. And quit swearing at me all the time. It’s not nice.”

  He cursed under his breath and went back up to the top end, where the head ought to be. Cautiously this time he brushed away at the soil there. She was hoping the head had gone. She was hoping all Bobby would find was the torso and a couple of legs sticking out of the bottom. And wouldn’t Tom Jorgensen see the funny side of that?

  But there was a head. A beautiful one maybe once someone washed off all the crap. As Bobby Dexter scraped away, whistling again, his wife was beginning to put the pieces together, beginning to understand what they’d found. It was a life-size Roman statue, maybe a couple of thousand years old. Stained like shit from all this time in the peat, maybe, but perfect apart from that. She understood what Bobby would be thinking too. Who knew what they could do in a lab these days? Maybe get it right back to nice, white marble, like it had been when Julius Caesar or some other dead Italian first ordered it.

  And there was the problem. It was just too big. The two of them couldn’t even try and get it out of the ground. Five feet or so of stone was bound to weigh a ton. Even if they got someone in to help, there was no way they could ever bring the thing back to the USA.

  “Let’s just go, Bobby,” Lianne pleaded. “We can call someone and tell them about it. Maybe they’d give us a reward. Maybe we’d be in the paper. You could stick that under Tom Jorgensen’s nose and see how it felt.”

  “Fucking reward,” he spat back at her. “This is Italy, Lianne. They’d steal the thing for themselves and probably lock us up for messing around down here.”

  “Then what are you going to do?”

  She was defying him now and they both knew it. This was some kind of turning point in their marriage, one at which either life could go in one of two directions: to freedom or to servitude.

  He got up and went for the spade, picked it up, felt the weight of the thing in his hands then stared avidly at the queer brown form half buried in the peat.

  Lianne looked at him, a cold tangle of dread beginning to form in her stomach.

  “Bobby?” she asked, half pleading. “Bobby?”

  Nic Costa drove the unmarked police Fiat east along the city side of the main riverside drag. Gianni Peroni, the partner assigned to him that morning, was in the passenger seat filling his face with a panino leaking roast pork at the edges. He was a big, muscular man approaching fifty, with an unforgettable face. Somewhere along the line—and Costa just knew he was going to have to ask before long—Peroni’s features had walked into a wall or something. His nose was crushed worse than any Costa had seen on a rugby player. His forehead sank low over a couple of bright, smart piggy eyes. A vicious scar ran diagonally across his right cheek. Just to complete the picture Peroni cut his grey hair as short as possible, a crew crop, like a US marine. In a neat dark suit and a crisp white shirt and tie, he looked like a thug dressed up for a wedding. It was station lore that the man had never once raised a fist to a customer in his career. He didn’t need to, Costa thought. People took one look at him, gulped and came clean. It was one reason why Peroni was known far and wide as one of the most popular and respected inspectors in the force, the last man Nic Costa expected to be sharing his car with as an equal.

  “I don’t know how they dare call this porchetta?” Peroni grumbled. “Where I come from . . . it’s this little town near Siena. All farmers and stuff, too ordinary to get the tourists. Now there they do porchetta, every damn weekend. My uncle Freddo was a farmer. He showed me how. You’d kill the pig, you’d bone it. You’d take out the liver and soak it in grappa and stuff. Then you’d stay up all night roasting the thing. Freddo used to say that was the only night of the week he slept with a pig that didn’t snore.”

  Peroni watched him, waiting for a reaction. “OK. Maybe you had to meet his missus to understand that one. Anyway that was porchetta. All hot and fresh and lots of crackling too. This shit’s been sitting in the fridge for days. Want some?”

  Costa eyed the pale dry meat. “Not while I’m driving, thanks. Anyway, I don’t eat meat.”

  Peroni shrugged then wound down the window and ejected the greasy paper out into the rising temperature of a Roman spring morning. “Oh yeah, I forgot. Your loss.”

  Costa took his eyes off the busy riverside road for a second and looked at Peroni. “That’s littering. You don’t do it from my car.”

  “You mean, ‘That’s littering, sir.’ ”

  “No,” Costa insisted. “I mean what I said. You’re just another cop. You heard Falcone.”

  Peroni’s oddly stiff face suddenly became animated. “Equal rank, equal rank. How can Leo do this to me? Jesus, the stuff he’s got away with and no one busts his ass. Leo and I are meant to be buddies, for God’s sake. What does friendship mean in this world?”

  Costa had made up his mind the moment he knew Peroni was his new partner. He wasn’t taking any crap. He wasn’t behaving like a subordinate. Maybe that was why Falcone fixed this in the first place. It was a lesson, perhaps a kind of punishment, for both of them.

  Gianni Peroni’s crime was now well known throughout the Questura, told and retold with a certain awe, a fable about how even the brightest and the best could fall from grace, and for such small temptations
too. For years he’d worked his way up through the vice squad, with never a taint of corruption to his name. As inspector he’d busted three of the biggest hooker rings in the city and managed to stem the infiltration of the prostitute trade by the vicious Albanian crooks who’d started to muscle in on territories elsewhere. He never went out of his way to make friends. He never hid the fact that, at heart, he remained a working-class farm boy from Tuscany who didn’t feel comfortable mixing with the upper strata of the force. All the same, Peroni’s name had been marked out for big things. If he didn’t look so weird and scary maybe they’d have happened by now too. Then he blew everything, one night some weeks before, an occasion that rapidly made its way into the hands of a gleeful press.

  It was meant to be a sting operation organized by the Direzione Investigativa Anti-Mafia, the civilian force outside police control specifically aimed at halting mob activity. The DIA had set up a fake brothel in Testaccio, manned by real hookers brought in from Bologna. In three weeks it had run up enough clientele to attract the attention of the big-time pimps who would, the DIA knew, soon be round asking for either a cut or the heads of the men creaming off the profits.

  Three heavies did turn up one Thursday night. When the DIA pounced they took in the brothel’s customers, just out of interest, and went through their wallets before handing them on to the police as a free gift. Gianni Peroni had the misfortune to be in the room of a blonde Czech girl when they walked through the door. No amount of talking on his part was able to extricate him from the mess. Word got back to the Questura. Peroni was first suspended then sent crashing back to earth as a lowly plainclothes detective. And he was supposed to feel lucky. Had it been anyone else, an entire career would have disappeared down the drain.