The Villa of Mysteries Read online

  Peroni lit a cigarette and blew the smoke out the window. “You asked Barbara Martelli out yet?”

  Where did that one come from? Costa wondered. “Haven’t found the right occasion.”

  Peroni stared at him with a face that said: are you kidding me?

  “I’m not ready. OK?”

  “At least that’s honest. How long’s it been since you went with a woman? You don’t mind my asking. We have these conversations in vice all the time.”

  “I guess in vice you measure it in hours,” Costa answered without thinking and immediately wished he could bite back his words. Peroni’s face fell. He looked hurt.

  “I’m sorry, Gianni. I didn’t mean that. It just slipped out.”

  “At least we’re on first-name terms now. I guess that means we can say what we want to each other.”

  “I didn’t—”

  “It’s OK,” Peroni interrupted. “Don’t apologize. You have every right to tell me when I’m acting like a jerk.”

  Peroni was more complicated than he liked to appear. That much Costa had come to understand. Some part of him wanted to talk about what had happened too, even if he felt he ought to make a play of avoiding the subject.

  “Why did you do it, Gianni? I mean, you got a family. Then you go with a hooker.”

  “Oh come on! It happens every day. You think it’s just single men get horny from time to time.”

  “No. I just wouldn’t have thought it of you.”

  Peroni let out a deep sigh. “Remember what I told you once? Everyone’s got that dark spot.”

  “Not everyone lets it out.”

  The big, ugly head shook slowly. “Wrong. One way or another they do. Whether they know it or not. Why did I do it? Won’t a simple answer do? The girl was damn beautiful. Slim and young and blonde. And young. Or did I mention that? Maybe she made me feel alive again. When you’ve been married twenty years you forget what that’s like. Yeah, before you say it, so does your wife. Blame me twice over.”

  Costa said nothing, worried he might cross the line and destroy the delicate bonds the two of them had managed to build over the last few weeks.

  Peroni’s damaged face wrinkled some more in puzzlement at his silence. “Oh. I get it. You’re thinking, ‘Who does this hideous bastard think he is? Casanova?’ ”

  “You don’t look like the great Latin Lover. That’s all. If you don’t mind me saying so.”

  “Really?”

  “Really.” Costa knew what was going on here. He wondered if he dared ask.

  “Are you calling me ugly? That happens from time to time, Nic. I have to tell you I don’t like it.”

  “No . . .” Costa stuttered. He took a good look at that battered face. “I was just wondering.”

  “What?”

  “What the hell happened?”

  Gianni Peroni burst out laughing. “You kill me. You really do. In all the time I’ve worked here you are the first person who’s come out and asked that question direct. Can you believe that?”

  “Yes,” Costa said hesitantly. “I mean, it’s a personal question. And most people wouldn’t like the idea that you could take it the wrong way.”

  He waved a huge friendly hand in Costa’s face. “What the hell do you mean a personal question? You guys have to look at this ugly mug every day you come to work. I got to live with it. This . . .” he pointed a fat index finger at his face, “. . . is just a fact of life.”

  Costa felt he’d made progress of a kind anyway. “So . . .”

  Peroni chuckled again and shook his head. “Unbelievable. Just between the two of us, OK? This goes no further? No one knows this. Most of the guys out there think I look like this through getting into a fight with a hood or something. They wonder what the other guy looks like too. I’m happy with things that way.”

  Costa nodded his agreement.

  “A cop did this to me,” Peroni said. “I was twelve years old. He was the village cop. I was the village bastard. I mean that literally. My mamma worked for the couple who owned the lone bar in town and got knocked up after the fair sometime. She always was a little naÏve. So I spend twelve years being the village bastard, getting the village bastard treatment all those years. Spat on. Beaten up. Laughed at in school. Then one day the moronic kid in the same class who was my principal tormentor went just a touch too far. Said something about my mamma. And I kicked the living shit out of him. First time I ever did that. You want the truth? It’s the only time I ever did that. Don’t need to now. I just look at people and go, Boo . . .”

  Costa thought about it. “I can believe that.”

  “Good. The stupid thing was, I forgot the moron I was beating up was the village cop’s kid. So Daddy comes along, and Daddy’s been drinking. One thing leads to another. He gets done with the strap and he’s still not happy. So he goes and gets these metal things he carries, just for protection you understand, and he puts them on his fists.”

  Peroni watched the cars go by out of the window. “I woke up in hospital two days later, face like a pumpkin, Mamma by my side. I couldn’t see a thing. The first thing she says is, don’t even think of telling anyone. He’s the village cop. Second thing she says is, don’t look in the mirror for a while.”

  Costa sighed. “You could have told someone.”

  Peroni gave him a frank look. “You’re a city kid, aren’t you?”

  “I guess so.”

  “It shows. Anyway, a couple of weeks later I come out of hospital and I notice things are different. People look at me and suddenly their eyes are on their shoes. A couple cross the road when they see me walking down the street. You know the worst thing of all? I was helping my uncle Freddo sell those pigs at weekends then. I went back to it. What else could you do? After a while he comes to me, tears in his eyes, and fires me. No one buys food from someone with a face like this. That was the worst thing of all at the time. I didn’t want to do anything else when I grew up except raise those pigs and sell them every weekend. Those guys . . . they all look so happy. But—”

  He folded his arms, leaned back in the passenger seat, and glanced at Costa to make sure this point went in. “That was not to be. I became a cop instead. What else do you do? Partly to spite that old bastard who beat me up. But mainly, if you want to know, to even things up a little. I’ve never laid a finger on anyone in this job. Never would, not unless there was a very good reason and in more than twenty years I never found one. It’s a question of balance.”

  Costa didn’t know how to respond. “I’m sorry, Gianni.”

  “Why? I got over it years ago. You, on the other hand, have spent the last six months going loopy inside a bottle of booze. I’m sorry for you, kid.”

  Maybe he deserved that. “Fine. We’re even now.”

  Peroni was peering at him with those sharp, all-seeing eyes. “I will say this once, Nic. I am starting to like you. A part of me says that I will miss this time we’re spending together. Not that I wish to prolong it, you understand. But let me offer some sincere advice. Stop trying to fool yourself you’re something special. You’re not. There are millions of people out there trying to cope with fucked-up lives. We’re just two in the crowd. And after that little lecture . . .” he said, stretching up in his seat as Costa parked the car in a tiny space off the road by the ghetto, “. . . let me make a request.”

  Peroni looked into his face hopefully. “Cover for me. I got something important to do. I’ll meet you back here at two.”

  Costa didn’t know what to say. Bunking off for a couple of hours wasn’t unknown. He just didn’t think Peroni was the kind of cop to do it.

  “Anything I should know about?” he asked.

  “Just personal. It’s my daughter’s birthday tomorrow. I wanted to send her something that might make her think her father is not quite the jerk she’s come to believe. You can cope with the Campo on your own. Just don’t pick on any big bastards, OK?”

  Leo Falcone was reading the file on his desk, trying to focus
on the case. He didn’t want to rush anything. Going public too quickly only alerted those he would wish to interview, though given how leaky the Questura had proved of late they probably knew by now anyway. The pause would also give him time to turn his mind back towards work after a solitary two weeks spent at a luxury beachside hotel in Sri Lanka. He had met no one of interest, and had scarcely sought the company of others. It was an unsatisfactory, tedious respite from routine that left him mildly disturbed. He was glad to be back at his desk and with a challenging case to tackle.

  Even so, a rare note of self-doubt lurked at the back of his mind. Falcone had, to his surprise, been aware of his own loneliness during the long, drab holiday. It was now five years since his divorce. There had been women in that time, attractive, interesting women. Yet none had stimulated him sufficiently to take the relationship beyond the routine round of meals, the cinema, and the physical necessity of the bedroom. He’d come to realize the previous night—when, completely out of character, he’d consumed an entire bottle of a wonderful, deeply perfumed and expensive Brunello—that there had been only two real lovers in his life: his English wife Mary, who was now back in London, pursuing a legal career; and the woman who was the reason Mary left, Rachele D’Amato.

  Here, in the light of day, obscured only slightly by the remains of a hangover, lay a curious coincidence. In Sri Lanka he had thought consciously about these two women for the first time in several years. When he returned to Italy, it was to find them ready to re-enter his life. Mary had written to invite him to her marriage, to another rich English lawyer, at a country house in Kent. He would find an excuse and decline. She would, he thought, expect this. The invitation came out of politeness, nothing more. His infidelity had wounded her deeply, and her abrupt departure, without the slightest attempt at reconciliation, hurt him more than he realized at the time. Or perhaps the pain came from Rachele D’Amato, who had abandoned him with the same degree of certainty Mary had shown, and rather less grace, the moment he became free.

  He’d never forgiven himself for allowing these events to happen. He never forgave them either. And now Mary was getting married, while Rachele was a successful lawyer turned investigator, steadily working her way up the ranks of the DIA, an organization which, thanks to the case Teresa Lupo had placed before him, Falcone knew he must soon approach.

  His feelings about the DIA went beyond the recent sting that had wrecked Gianni Peroni’s career, an exercise that was more about public relations than the defeat of organized crime. They stretched back years. There was scarcely a cop in the Questura who didn’t hear those three initials and feel a small sense of dread. He realized, the moment the dead girl’s identity became plain, that there could be no avoiding them. Strictly speaking he should have acted already, as soon as he realized the kind of people he would have to interview.

  Falcone stared at the pages and pages of reports and tried to remember what the case was like when it was fresh. Sixteen years before he’d just been a plain detective. The inspector in charge was Filippo Mosca, an old-fashioned Rome cop who walked both sides of the track and, like many a man of his generation, made little effort to hide his friendship with people who were best avoided.

  Eleanor Jamieson was reported missing on 19 March, a full two days after her American stepfather last saw her. She had just turned sixteen and had been living in Vergil Wallis’s rented villa on the Aventine Hill since arriving from New York the previous Christmas. The girl was English. Her mother had left Wallis a year before, after a marriage that lasted just six months. Falcone never could find out why. Nor would he. The woman killed herself in New York ten days after the disappearance of her daughter.

  It was, Falcone recalled, a maddening case. Wallis was a curious man: educated, almost scholarly, yet black and originally from the ghetto. He was in his late forties then, vague about his business and his antecedents, a reluctant witness, unforthcoming about the girl’s movements, what friends she had made in the city, any motive she might have to run away. The man had no good reason to explain why it took two days to report her absence, simply pleading that meetings had called him out of Rome. He had even seemed reluctant to hand over the few photographs he possessed, which revealed a young, naÏve-looking girl, very pretty, with shoulder-length blonde hair and a ready smile. And, on her shoulder, fully revealed in a picture taken a day before she vanished, the curious tattoo, for which Wallis had no explanation. It had fascinated Falcone from the moment he saw it. There was a craze for tattoos at the time. All the rock stars and the hotshots in the movie world were doing it. But they didn’t have anything like this etched into their skin. The ancient hieroglyph looked wrong on the girl, more like a branding mark than some badge of fashion.

  It seemed out of character too, as much as any of them could judge. According to Wallis, Eleanor had bummed around Italy for a while then spent two weeks on an intensive Italian course at a language school near the Campo. She was an intelligent girl, with good exam grades. There was talk of her going to study at an art college in Florence later that year. She had few acquaintances beyond the school, and, if Wallis was to be believed, no boyfriend, current or ex. Nothing they could turn up explained why she should suddenly disappear. She had, her stepfather said, simply set out for school on her scooter around nine on the morning of 17 March and never arrived.

  It only took a couple of days for Mosca’s team to acquire the sickening sense of powerlessness that comes with abduction cases. No one had seen Eleanor on her way into the city. A re-creation of her supposed last movements on TV failed to elicit a single reliable response from the public. It was as if she had existed one moment and then been abruptly removed from the face of the earth.

  All along Falcone wanted to scream foul. Because something stank to high heaven and pretty soon he had an inkling what it was. Mosca had taken him to one side on the third morning and told him, in confidence, what he’d heard the previous night from a friend in the Foreign Ministry. Vergil Wallis was not, as he claimed, a straightforward businessman from LA who loved Rome so much he was thinking of buying a second home in the city. He was a high-up figure in the West Coast mob, a black fixer who’d risen through the ranks to live in Italy half the year for his own crooked reasons. Interpol had been following Wallis for years and steadfastly failing to bring him to justice on a wide range of counts, from racketeering to murder. Nor had the carabinieri, who had been assigned to Wallis’s case, fared much better.

  This was shortly before the creation of the DIA. Then, as now, the civilian state police maintained an uneasy rivalry with the carabinieri, who were part of the military. The lines of responsibility were, at best, blurred and on occasion deliberately murky. Privately Falcone was in agreement with the growing number of critics calling for a single, unified state police force. It was a logical, inevitable solution. But this was judged a heresy by those in charge of both organizations, and one that could cost a man his job. He was careful never to make his views known. They were, in any case, irrelevant. Soon the DIA came along, adding another layer of complexity to the business of chasing the swelling tide of crime that seemed to grow stronger with every passing year.

  And Vergil Wallis was still free. So much for progress.

  Mosca quietly closed the case of Eleanor Jamieson, marking it unworthy of further investigation without new evidence. Wallis’s relationship with the Italian mobsters was far from easy. Some stories, garnered at great expense and with no small risk to those who supplied them, placed him in the role of criminal diplomat, a go-between trying to ensure the interests of his own particular buddies meshed with those of the Sicilians. It made sense to Falcone. The West Coast mob that Wallis represented was only loosely connected to the Italian organizations in the USA. There was plenty of room for misunderstandings. The bosses had learned long ago that pacts and partnerships, even with those they hated, put more dollars in their bank accounts than ruthless competition and turf wars. Money was what mattered these days. No one went to the barri
cades over honour anymore. These were practical times in which cash was king.

  Falcone had been present at three different interviews with Wallis and still couldn’t work out what to make of the man. The American was thoughtful and articulate, quite unlike any crook Falcone had ever met. He was well read. He knew more about ancient Roman history than some Italians. The word was that he’d been groomed for the role of diplomat for years, put through law college after rising through the black ranks in Watts. It wasn’t hard to see him smoothing out the rough edges of a relationship which must always have hovered on the brink of disaster.

  There was, however, one fundamental problem. If the street gossip was right, he had been given as his prime contact Emilio Neri, a brutal thug who had worked his way from the public housing slums of Testaccio to the pinnacle of the Rome mob through the vicious and heartless disposal of anyone who stood in his way. Neri now sat on the boards of opera houses in Italy and America. He lived in an elegant house in the Via Giulia, behind an army of servants and bodyguards. It was a place Falcone knew only too well from his many futile visits there. The old crook had a carefully cultivated outward appearance of elegance, a mask of deceit worn for the public. It only fooled those who were too stupid or too scared to realize the truth. Almost from the moment Falcone had joined the force he had followed Neri’s career, and with good reason. The man habitually bribed any cop who would take his money, simply to put him on his side. Falcone himself had turned down a thinly disguised offer of money from one of Neri’s hoods in the middle of an investigation into a protection racket involving some of the smaller shops off the Corso, an assignment Filippo Mosca had closed down just when it was making progress. Three cops who were known to be on Neri’s payroll had been jailed for corruption in the past decade. Not one named him as the source of the largesse found in their bank accounts. They preferred prison to the consequences of his fury.

  What set Neri apart from his fellow hoods was the obsessive system of personal control he wielded over his own family. Most bosses of his stature had long since ceased to dirty their hands with the day-to-day business of running a crime organization. Neri never stepped back from the front line. It was in his blood from the old days in Testaccio. He liked it too much. Word had it he still enforced his rule in person from time to time, with the same harsh violence he’d employed as a young hood. Maybe he got one of his junior thugs to hold the poor bastard down while Neri went about his work. Falcone had looked into the old crook’s dead, grey eyes often enough to understand the pleasure it would give him.