The Villa of Mysteries (2 page)

“What we came here for,” Bobby Dexter said. “Daddy’s going a-hunting.”

She ventured a laugh and wondered if it came out wrong. Maybe it did. Maybe not. It didn’t matter anyway. Bobby Dexter wasn’t listening. He was working his way down to the river, walking over the odd, boggy ground that felt as if it might give way beneath them at any moment. He had the headphones on, listening. And pretty soon Bobby Dexter was laughing too. Something must have been coming through loud and clear. Lianne walked to join him. They were just twenty yards short of the river now. There wasn’t another soul around for miles. Anything they found here now was surely theirs.

“Hear that?”

She took the headphones from him and held one earpiece to her head. It was beeping like crazy, like a kid’s game from years ago.

“Fucking Tom Jorgensen,” Bobby spat and she didn’t dare look into his eyes when he was talking like this. “I’ll teach that big fat bastard. Get me the gear.”

HE WAS SKULKING in the little coffee bar around the corner from the Questura when Barbara Martelli walked in, dressed in her immaculate black uniform, helmet in hand, her long, blonde tresses bouncing above her collar with each step.

“Nic,” she said, looking surprised. “You’re back at work?”

“First day,” he replied, glancing at his watch. “When I decide to turn up.”

“Ah.”

“How are you, Barbara?”

“I’m fine. I’m always fine. And you?”

He drained the macchiato. “Yeah.”

“In case you forgot, this isn’t the café the cops use.”

“So why are you here?”

She laughed. Barbara Martelli was about his height, with the kind of figure that turned every head in the station and a shock of blonde curls that seemed too full to squeeze inside that small black helmet. Her face was wrong for a cop. Too attractive, too ready to break into a smile. She looked as if she ought to be on the TV, announcing the weather or introducing some show. Instead she just floated around Rome on her big bike, handing out tickets with such charm the word was some people simply started speeding the moment they realized she was on their tail.

Back in the old days, before the shooting that put him on his back, fighting demons, Nic Costa wondered sometimes whether she was sweet on him. A couple of the guys egged him on to ask her for a date . . . provided he told everything afterwards. It didn’t happen. She was just too perfect. She topped every driving exam, behind the wheel and on the force motorbikes. She was a tidy shot too, a talent that got her into most diplomatic assignments. Barbara Martelli was just a little too perfect to touch.

“Sometimes you have to escape for a while, Nic. Is that what you’re doing? If so it’s a little early. You have to get back in the ring if you want to hear the bell.”

“I’m having a coffee,” he mumbled.

“How long has it been?”

“Six months.” Six long months of slow recovery from the shooting and the mental damage that followed. Sometimes he wondered if he’d ever make it, whether he wanted to at all.

She looked at him frankly. She was, the more he thought about it, very possibly the most attractive woman inside the Questura. He was amazed he’d never asked her out. Not that he wanted anything to happen. She was just good company to be around, someone who could make you feel special. He didn’t really know her at all. “You do want to come back, don’t you? It’s not just Falcone pushing you into this?”

“No. I mean. I can’t think of anything else. Can you?”

“No.”

“We’re all like that, aren’t we?” he said. “Short of a choice.”

He listened to his own voice and found himself disliking what he heard. What was there? Resentment? Self-pity? He was twenty-eight. He’d never talked like that before. He had been changed by what was now known as “the Denney case,” an unresolved mess of entanglements that had cost his partner, Luca Rossi, his life, and almost left Costa dead too. This new Nic Costa no longer ran every time he wanted to clear his head, pounding the pavements around the Campo dei Fiori, arms flailing like a madman. He’d sold his tiny apartment in the Vicolo del Bologna and moved into his late father’s old home, the sprawling farmhouse off the Via Appia Antica where he grew up. Costa’s physical wounds were, for the most part, healed; the internal ones still ached from time to time.

Nic Costa continued to miss Luca Rossi’s taciturn wit and astute insight, wishing he’d learned to appreciate them more during their brief time working together. He knew, too, that he would return to work touched by the cold, sceptical hardness of the world. It had become necessary to embrace what Falcone, who had single-handedly talked him out of a wheelchair and back into the force, would call “pragmatism.”

Falcone, the cold, single-minded inspector, regarded this transition as inevitable. Maybe he was right. Costa, who with his old self hated cynicism, the defeatism that said sometimes you had to make the best of a bad job because the alternative was to lose the fight completely, was still unsure. He didn’t like the idea of trimming his principles to match the awkward, unyielding shape of brute reality. That much of his father — a stubborn, unbending Communist politician who made more enemies from his honesty than most men did through their deceit — remained.

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 the 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.