And one more thing, one crazy, nagging idea that couldn’t be dismissed. Teresa was unable to forget the pictures of Suzi Julius she’d seen. She and Eleanor were so alike they could almost have been sisters, smiling teenage siblings from the same template of classic blonde beauty. The thyrsus, the tattoo, the seeds… all these coincidences paled next to the physical resemblance they bore to one another, and it was this, she knew, that had triggered Suzi’s disappearance, this alone that made her reach the bottom of some long, dark narrow street and get called into the shadows. Someone who knew what had happened sixteen years ago found his memory jogged when he saw this lovely young stranger walking down the street. The wheel turned. The ritual was in motion.
“Teresa?” Regina Morrison looked worried. “Are you OK?”
“I’m fine,” she said softly, then coughed and felt the mucus move painfully inside her temples. “I need to take these documents.”
Regina Morrison nodded. “Of course. Sure you’re all right? You look as if you could use that drink.”
“No. I’m fine.”
She was lying. Her eyes had started itching again, stinging cruelly.
She looked into Eleanor’s face. It had never happened like this before. They were always dead, truly dead, long dead, dead and gone forever, when they fell beneath her knife. A switch had been turned: life went from on to off, with nothing in between and nothing after.
She remembered cowering in Randolph Kirk’s scruffy little office, remembered what happened when she heard the shots, how something appeared to pass through her with a sudden resigned rush, like the last gasp of a departing persona.
When she stared at Eleanor Jamieson she felt the same sensation, the same lack of certainty about herself and what she did for a living. Just to pay the bills, to feed the prurient maw of the state. And now Suzi Julius was out there, walking in these same shadows, towards the same destination, with no one in the Questura paying sufficient attention because Teresa Lupo, Crazy Teresa, had taken matters into her own hands, pretended she was something she wasn’t and made it all worse.
“Teresa,” Regina Morrison said. “Here’s a tissue. Take it.”
“Thanks,” she said, and put down the page, her hand trembling, her vision awash with tears, gulping at the whisky, gulping at another too when Regina Morrison briskly refilled the glass.
FALCONE CAST an interested eye at the bunch of men lurking on the first floor of Neri’s house. Then the fat old hood hurriedly ushered him and Rachele D’Amato upstairs.
“I didn’t realize you had guests,” Falcone said. “And you answer the door yourself these days. Servants getting too expensive?”
“I don’t need any damn servants,” Neri retorted. “Don’t give me any shit, Falcone. I could’ve turned you back at the door. You got no papers that give you the right to walk into a man’s home like this. And her—”
Neri looked right through D’Amato. “So you two are on speaking terms these days? I heard that ended when the sheets started to get cold.”
“This is business,” she said briskly, then followed Neri into a large living room furnished expensively with a minimum of taste: modern leather sofas and armchairs, reproduction paintings on the plain cream walls, and a big glass table at the centre.
Two people sat on the couch: a slim attractive woman in her thirties, with fiery reddish gold hair and striking, angry features, and a slightly younger man, slim, nervous, with dark, shifty eyes and a bad bleach job.
“I don’t have a lawyer on the premises,” Neri said. “So you can talk in front of my family. That way if you invent stuff I’ve got witnesses.”
Falcone nodded.
“You didn’t introduce us,” the woman said. “I’m Adele. His wife.”
“Current wife,” Neri added.
“True,” she agreed. “This is Mickey. My stepson. Say hello to the nice policeman, Mickey. And stop twitching like that. It pisses me off. Quit gawping at the lady too.”
Mickey ceased fiddling with his fingers and muttered, “Pleasure.”
Neri fell into a large, fat armchair next to them and waved Falcone and D’Amato to the table. “I’d offer you coffee but fuck it. Why are you here? What am I supposed to have done now?”
“Nothing,” Falcone said. “Just a social visit.”
Neri’s big chest heaved with a dry laugh.
“When we decide you’ve done something, Emilio, it won’t be just the two of us who turn up,” Rachele D’Amato said, amused by the way Mickey was still staring at her. “We’ll have lots and lots of people. And the TV crews, the newspapers too. I just know they’re going to hear of it.”
“Not gonna happen,” Neri muttered. “Never. There’s no reason for it.”
She nodded at his son. “Do we take him in too? Is he part of the family firm now?”
“You tell me. You DIA scum never give up spying on me. What do you think?”
She smiled at Mickey. He blushed a little and stared at his feet.
“I think he doesn’t look like you. Maybe he doesn’t act like you. I don’t know.”
“No,” Neri agreed. “You don’t know. Tell you what. If you want someone to keep your statistics up you can take him now. Take her too if you feel like it, so long as…” He took a good look at them when he said this. “… they get to share the same cell. She’s got more brains than him though. You might find it harder fitting her up.”
Falcone smiled. “Happy families. Don’t you love to see them?”
“My patience is wearing thin. Get to the point.”
“The point,” Falcone said immediately, “is that I want to know what you were doing sixteen years ago. I want you to tell me about Vergil Wallis and what happened to his stepdaughter.”
Neri’s bleak, reptilian eyes narrowed. “You’re kidding me. You want me to try to remember all that way back? Who’re you talking about?”
“Vergil Wallis,” D’Amato repeated. “He was your contact with the West Coast mob. Don’t try to deny it. There are intelligence photos of you two together. We know you had dealings.”
“I’m a sociable man,” Neri protested. “I meet a lot of people. You expect me to remember every one?”
“You remember this one,” Falcone said. “He nearly got you on the wrong side of the Sicilians. You screwed him over some deal. Is there still bad feeling between you? Have you spoken recently?”
“What?” Neri’s feigned outrage was unconvincing. He meant it that way. “Look, if you want to throw these kinds of questions at me it’s best we do it some other time, in the company of a lawyer. Not now.”
D’Amato ran her fingers through her perfect brown hair, just for Mickey’s benefit. “You don’t need a lawyer, Emilio. No one’s accusing you of anything. We just want to know what you can recall. You did meet this man. We all know that. That’s not why we’re here. His stepdaughter was murdered. Sixteen years ago. The body turned up recently.”
“You think I don’t read the papers? You think I don’t hear things?”
“So?” Falcone persisted.
Neri nodded at Mickey. “You remember some black guy way back then? Rings a bell for me. Not much more.”
“Sure,” Mickey agreed, looking more nervous than ever. “He and some kid were with us on vacation for a while. They were both history freaks or something. Couldn’t stop talking about all that crap. Museums and stuff. Turned me off.”