The Villa of Mysteries Read online

  “I do,” Falcone said, coming out of the daydream abruptly. Costa peered at him. There was something odd going on. Falcone wasn’t as cool, as self-composed as normal. He looked glum, which was unusual. It was rare that anyone was able to discern much sign of human emotion in him at all. Costa wondered who Falcone had been on holiday with. The dour inspector’s marriage had ended years ago. There were rumours of occasional attachments since then but that could just be station gossip. When Leo Falcone was in the Questura, nothing else seemed to exist except the force. When he was gone, he was out of it completely, never mixing with his colleagues, never wanting to be invited round for dinner. Maybe the inspector, who always seemed so calm, so in control when it came to other people’s lives, had no hold whatsoever on his own. Maybe he went on holiday by himself, sitting on some sunny beach somewhere reading a book like a hermit, turning browner and browner, meaner and meaner.

  “Hear me out,” Teresa pleaded. “It’ll all become clear, I promise. A couple of decades? Nice guess. But I have to tell you it’s out. By a touch under two thousand years.”

  Peroni snorted. “Someone’s been hitting the wacky baccy around here, Leo. Excuse me. Sir. How else can you come up with that kind of shit?”

  “Wait for it, wait for it,” she demanded, waving a finger at him. “I can’t be precise, not yet, but I hope to give you something pretty accurate very soon. This body’s been in peat all that time. From the moment you put a corpse in that kind of bog it starts getting preserved. Sort of a mixture between mummification and tanning, and completely unpredictable too. Plus, there’s no end of industrial effluent getting poured into the river out there and God knows what that does. I got parts of her almost as hard as wood, other areas soft, almost pliable. Haven’t even contemplated a conventional autopsy—for reasons that will shortly become obvious—so God knows what kind of state she’s in internally. But I have a date. Peat plays havoc with normal radiocarbon dating techniques. I won’t get technical on you. Let’s just say the acid in the water depletes just about anything we can use for a radiocarbon test. There are things we can try, like getting some cholesterol out of her, since that’s virtually immune to long-term soaking. But right now I’m working with some organic material from the dirt beneath her fingernails. And that’s somewhere between 50 AD and 230 AD.”

  They just stared at her.

  “Is that really possible?” Falcone asked eventually.

  She went over to the desk and picked up a large brown envelope next to the computer. “You bet. None of this is new. The archaeologists have a term for it. ‘Peat bodies.’ They’ve been there for centuries but no one noticed until companies started digging up the bogs for the gardening business. The area behind Fiumicino was never big enough to work commercially. Mind you, there’s been a lot of rain this winter. Maybe that took off some of the surface soil and made it easier to find.”

  She crossed the room and passed them a set of colour photographs. They were of corpses, brown corpses, some contorted, half shrunken, half mummified, a little more exaggerated than the one now on the slab but recognizably similar all the same.

  “See this one,” she said, pointing at the first picture. It was the head of a man, apparently turned to leather. The features were almost perfectly preserved. He had a calm, composed face. His eyes were closed as if in sleep. He wore some kind of rough leather cap, the stitching still visible on the crude seams. “Tollund, Denmark. Found in 1950. Don’t be fooled by the expression. He had a rope around his neck. Executed for some reason. Some good radiocarbon material there. Puts his death somewhere over two thousand years ago. And this—”

  The next picture was of a full corpse: a man, reclining on what looked like rock. He was more shrivelled this time, with his neck turned at an awkward angle and a head of matted red hair.

  “Grauballe, also in Denmark, not far away, though he’s even older, third century BC. This one had his throat cut ear to ear. They found traces of the ergot fungus—the magic mushroom—in his gut. It’s not easy to re-create what went on but there’s a common theme. These people die violently, maybe as part of some ritual. Drugs tend to be involved. Here—”

  She began scattering pictures over their laps, corpse after mummified corpse, many crouched in that tortured, agonized position any cop who’d visited a modern murder scene already knew too well. “Yde Girl, in Holland, stabbed and strangled. She was maybe sixteen. Lindow Man, England. Beaten, strangled then dumped in the bog. Daetgen Man, Germany. Beaten, stabbed and beheaded. Borremose Woman, found in Denmark, face caved in, probably by a hammer or a pickaxe. These were all people in primitive, pagan agrarian societies. Maybe they did something wrong. Maybe there was some kind of sacrificial rite. Peat bogs often had a kind of spiritual significance for these tribes. Perhaps these were offerings to the bog god or someone. I don’t know.”

  Falcone put down the photos. He seemed remarkably uninterested in them. “I don’t care what happened in Denmark a couple of millennia ago. What happened here? How, specifically, did she die?”

  She didn’t like that. Teresa Lupo had been expecting a little more credit for what she’d found out, Costa thought. She deserved it too.

  “Listen,” she answered sharply. “We have limited resources. Like Nic said, when do we have a body and when do we have a specimen? I can make that judgement for myself, thanks. This is a very old corpse. I’m a criminal pathologist, not a historian. There are people who can perform a full autopsy on this girl and the rest. It’s not a job for us.”

  “How did she die?” Falcone repeated.

  She looked at the frozen, leathery face. Teresa Lupo always felt some sympathy for her customers. Even when they’d expired a couple of thousand years ago.

  “Like the rest. Badly. Is that what you wanted to know?”

  “Usually, it’s the first thing we need to know,” Falcone said.

  “Usually,” she agreed. Then she gestured at the cadaver on the shining table. “Does this look usual to you?”

  There were times when Emilio Neri thought himself a fool for hanging on to the house in the Via Giulia. He’d taken on the property thirty years before, in return for an unpaid debt from some dumb banker who’d got in over his head gambling. Neri, then a rising capo in the Rome mobs, reluctantly became the owner. He’d rather have driven the yo-yo into the countryside somewhere and put his eyes out before dropping him in a ditch. But this all happened at a time when his actions were circumscribed by others. It would be a further ten years before Neri became don in his own right, giving him the sway to order executions directly, and taking a cut of every transaction running through the family’s books. By then the banker was back in business and never made the mistake of getting into his debt again, much to Neri’s disappointment.

  In the 1970s the Via Giulia was still pretty much a local area for everyday Romans, not the chic street for rich foreigners and antique dealers it was to become. Created in the sixteenth century by Bramante for Pope Julius II, it ran parallel to the river, set some way below the level of the busy waterside road, and was originally intended to be a grand entrance to the Vatican, by the bridge to the Castel Sant’Angelo. The market of the Campo dei Fiori was no more than a two-minute walk away. Trastevere was maybe a minute more, crossing over the medieval footbridge of the Ponte Sisto. On a fine summer evening Neri used to make that walk regularly, pausing in the middle of the bridge to look along the river towards the vast, sunlit dome of St. Peter’s. He was never much interested in views but this one pleased him somehow. Perhaps that was why he held on to the house, although by now he could afford just about any property in Rome, and was beginning to acquire a portfolio that would include homes in New York, Tuscany, Colombia and two country estates in his native Sicily.

  The walk to Trastevere took him out of himself for a while. The restaurants were good too, which was something Neri could never resist. Until he was fifty he’d been relatively fit, a big, powerful, muscular man who could impose his will by force and brute
physical violence if need be. Then the food and the wine took hold. Now he was sixty-five and carrying way too much weight. He looked at himself in the mirror sometimes and wondered whether there was anything to be done. Then he remembered who he was and knew it didn’t matter. He had all the money a man could want. He had a beautiful young wife who did anything he pleased, and was smart enough to look the other way if he felt like the occasional distraction. Maybe he was fat. Maybe he wheezed now and again, and had halitosis so bad he popped mints into his large, grey-lipped mouth the way some of his underlings sucked on cigarettes. Who cared? He was Emilio Neri, a don to be feared in Rome and beyond. He had influence. He had hard cash pouring into his offshore accounts, from prostitution, drug trafficking, money laundering, arms and any number of semilegitimate investments. He didn’t care what he looked like, what he smelt like. That was their problem.

  In all this pampered life there was just one minor sore and, to Neri’s occasional annoyance, it lived downstairs, one floor above the six servants he employed needlessly, just to fill up the space and dust things before they ever got dusty. While he and Adele occupied the top two stories of the house—and had sole use of the vast terrace, with its palm trees and fountains—his only son, Mickey, had, after three fraught years pissing off Neri’s friends in the States, come home to stay. It was a temporary arrangement. Neri wanted to keep an eye on the boy just to make sure he didn’t start messing up with dope again. Once he’d found some kind of even keel, Neri would cut him loose. Maybe find him an apartment somewhere else in the city, or move him on to Sicily where there were relatives who could keep him in check. Neri did this partly out of self-interest—Mickey had grown up inside the organization. He could cause some harm if he started blabbing to the wrong people. But there was a degree of paternal loyalty there too. Mickey was an asshole. Maybe he inherited this from his mother, an over-tanned American bit-part actress Neri had met through a crooked producer he knew when he was pumping hot money into a Fellini movie . . . The marriage had lasted five years, after which Neri knew he either had to divorce the bitch or kill her. She now basked in the permasun of Florida and doubtless bore a close physical resemblance to an iguana, a creature, Neri thought, which could probably out-think her in its sleep.

  Mickey never wanted to be near mamma. Mickey wanted to hang around his old man. He thought he was a don in the making and never missed an opportunity to throw his weight around. He had problems with women too, just couldn’t leave them alone, whether they were married or not. His one saving grace was that he worshipped his father. Everyone else, Adele included, did Neri’s bidding out of fear. Mickey went along with everything his old man decreed for a simpler reason. Most kids idolized their fathers until they were seven or eight, and then started to see them for what they were. The scales had never fallen from Mickey’s eyes. There was some undying adulation stuck fast in his genes and Emilio Neri found it strangely touching. It led him to do crazy things, such as letting the kid wander around the house whenever he felt like it, even though he and Adele, who, at thirty-three, was just one year older, loathed the sight of one another. It led him to overlook the problems that came when Mickey got a little too close to the drugs and the booze, problems that were, on occasion, expensive to fix.

  Sometimes Emilio wondered who was indulging whom. Since Mickey moved in, he’d begun to wonder that a lot.

  It was now mid-morning and the two of them had been bitching at each other, on and off, since breakfast. Adele half reclined on the sofa, still in her mauve silk pyjamas, face in a fashion house catalogue. Emilio thought she looked gorgeous but he knew it was a matter of taste. She was sipping a spremuta of blood-red orange juice which was almost the colour of her expensively cut hair. She sent out one of the servants to buy these things by the kilo from the market then watched as Nadia, the sullen cook she’d picked herself, squeezed them in the kitchen. Adele almost lived off the stuff. It drove Mickey crazy. Maybe it was why she was so skinny, he said. He bugged his old man about that constantly. Why marry some redhead with the figure of a pencil when you could have just about any woman in Rome?

  “I still can have just about any woman in Rome,” Emilio told him.

  “Yeah. But why?”

  “Because I don’t want the same picture over the fireplace everyone else has. Leave it at that.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  Emilio had thrown a big arm around the kid. Mickey inherited the physique of his mother. He was lean, muscular, good-looking too. It was a shame he always chose clothes too young for him, though. And that he’d dyed his shoulder-length hair an overpowering, unnatural blonde colour. “You don’t have to. Just don’t snap at each other all the time. Not when I’m around anyway.”

  “Sorry,” he’d replied, instantly deferential.

  The old man never said as much but sometimes he didn’t get it either. Adele was unlike any woman he’d ever slept with: cool, adventurous, always willing, whatever he wanted. Young as she was, she actually taught him a few new tricks. Maybe that clinched it. He knew for sure it wasn’t her personality, which he didn’t really understand beyond her basic need for money and security. She was an expensive pet, if he were honest with himself, a living ornament to add some beauty to his life.

  “So,” Neri declared, looking in turn at the two of them. “What does my family plan to do today?”

  “Are we going out?” she asked. “We could have lunch somewhere.”

  “Why bother?” Mickey said, smirking. “I could send someone down the Campo. Buy you a couple of lettuce leaves. They’d last all week.”

  “Hey!” the old man bellowed. “Cut it out! And quit sending servants out to buy stuff you can get yourself. I don’t pay them to get you cigarettes.”

  Mickey went back to the sports car magazine he was reading and said nothing. Neri knew what the kid was thinking: so what do you pay them for? Neri never liked the idea of servants in the house. Adele said their position demanded it. He was the boss. He was supposed to own people. It grated somehow. Emilio Neri grew up in a traditional Roman working-class family, fighting his way out of the Testaccio slums. He still felt embarrassed by these minions downstairs. A couple were made men, there for security. He had no problem with that. But a house was for family, not strangers.

  “I got work to do,” Emilio said. “People to see. I won’t be back until this afternoon.”

  “Then I’ll go shopping,” she answered, with just a hint of hurt disappointment in her voice.

  Mickey was shaking his blonde head in disbelief. Adele did a lot of shopping.

  “You!”

  “Yeah.” Mickey closed the magazine.

  “Go see that louse Cozzi. Squeeze his grapes and ask for some accounts. The creep’s screwing us somehow. I just know it. We should be taking more in one week than he hands over in a month.”

  “What do you want me to do if I see something?”

  “ ‘If you see something’?” Neri walked over and ruffled Mickey’s wayward hair. “Don’t play the tough guy. Leave those decisions to me.”

  “But—”

  “You heard.”

  Neri looked at the pair of them. Adele was acting as if the kid didn’t even exist. “I wish you two could work up the energy to be civilized to each other once in a while. It would make my life a whole lot easier.” He watched. They didn’t even exchange glances.

  “Families,” Neri grunted, then phoned downstairs, telling them to get the Mercedes ready. He keyed in the security code that unlocked the big metal door. It felt like a prison sometimes, hiding behind the bodyguards, riding around in a car that had been discreetly filled with bullet-proof panelling. But that was the way of the world these days.

  “Bye,” Emilio Neri grunted, and was gone, without even looking back.

  Mickey waited awhile, pretending to read the magazine. Finally he put it down and looked across at her. She’d finished the orange juice. She was lying back on the sofa in her perfect silk pyjamas, eyes closed, glossy
red hair splayed out on the white leather. Pretending she was asleep. She wasn’t really. They both knew that.

  “Maybe he’s right,” he said.

  She opened her eyes and turned her head lazily, just enough to meet his gaze. She had very bright eyes, vivid green, never still. Not smart eyes, he thought. Just sufficiently expressionless to hide the odd lie.

  “About what?”

  “About us getting along a little better.”

  She became alert, alarmed perhaps. She looked at the door. There was a hard cast in her face: fear.

  Mickey got up, stretched his arms and yawned. He was wearing a thin tee-shirt and tight designer jeans. She watched him, worried. They heard the sound of the big main door to the street slamming shut three floors below, and then, directly after, the growl of the departing Mercedes.

  Adele Neri got up from the sofa, went to the door and threw the bolt, walked across to her stepson, put a hand on his fly and ran the zip down, clutching at what was inside.

  “You need to shop for new pyjamas,” Mickey said.

  “What?”

  He took hold of the neckline of her top and tugged hard with both hands, tearing at the silk. The fabric ripped wide open. Her meagre white breasts came under his fingers. He bent down, sucking at them briefly, then jerked down the pants, helping her shrug out of the things, running his palms everywhere, letting his tongue work briefly into her small, tight navel, then slide lower into the thatch of brown hair.

  Mickey got up, cupped his hands around her thin, tight buttocks, gripped her thighs, lifting her into the air, pushing backwards until her shoulders were up against the door. The green eyes looked into his. Maybe there was an expression there. Need. Maybe not.

  “Never much wanted to bang a skinny chick until you came along,” he mumbled. “Now I don’t want to bang nothing else.”