Rachele D’Amato’s black Alfa pulled up on the pavement and he watched her get out, watched the way she angled her slender legs carefully so that the tight red skirt she was wearing didn’t ride up too much. For a brief moment Falcone let other thoughts dominate his mind. She was thirty minutes behind him. She’d had to call in at the DIA office on the way. He really had no idea what was going on there behind closed doors.
“She doesn’t need to be here,” he reminded himself, then managed to work up a smile. “Not at all.”
She walked up, eyeing him. “Leo?”
“I don’t recall issuing an invitation, Rachele. This isn’t an open house. You don’t get to walk into every investigation we have.”
She nodded at the door. A couple of the bunny suits were coming out again, taking off their helmets to light cigarettes. The path was clear for the rest of them to go in. “Don’t I get to take a look? You really believed Neri then? You think this guy was a complete stranger?”
“According to what we know Beniamino Vercillo was an accountant. We don’t have a thing on him. He was just a little man. Lived in Paroli on his own. The safe’s open. It’s probably robbery or something.”
She eyed the men by the iron staircase, not believing a word. Falcone resented the idea that she always seemed one step ahead of him. “Is that so? I listened on the radio. I gather you have a witness.”
“You shouldn’t go near our radios,” he said. “That’s not part of the deal.”
“I’m saving time. For all of us. What happened?”
He sighed. “A girl in the optician’s saw a character in a kind of costume going in. Something theatrical. With a mask. There’s a street theatre troupe performing down at the Colosseum so she didn’t think too much of it. We checked. They’re performing Euripides. The Bacchae. One of their costumes is missing. I’ve got men interviewing every last one of them. The trouble is they were rehearsing at the time. Either they’re all liars or it’s someone else who stole the costume. No one saw a soul coming out. It’s—”
Everything was going wrong, heading off in different directions. It denied him the time to think, the opportunity to focus on what mattered. “It’s the last damn thing I need right now.”
D’Amato didn’t look impressed.
“Are you going to tell me or do I have to guess?” Falcone sighed. “We really aren’t working together on this one, are we? Am I the problem? Do you want to liaise with someone else instead?”
Her hand went to his arm. Slim, delicate fingers. He recalled their touch. “I’m sorry, Leo. It’s not you. It’s me. You’re right. This is all… out of sync somehow. The DIA’s no different from you, really. We expect things to happen the way they always did. None of this fits a template.”
“You can say that again. So Vercillo wasn’t some boring little accountant?”
She laughed and it reminded him of how she once was: young, carefree. And how much that used to affect him. “You didn’t really think that, did you, Leo?”
“No.” He’d put on a bunny suit himself for a while and been inside. He’d seen what was there. He couldn’t get the idea of that damned mask out of his head. “I just don’t like jumping to conclusions.”
“We could never pin anything on him,” she went on. “Vercillo was smart. He needed to be. He kept books for Neri. Of that I’m pretty sure. Not that you’ll ever find a sheet of paper to prove it.”
A piece of the puzzle fell into place in his head. Falcone thought of the scene inside the dead man’s office and knew she was wrong for a change, though he kept the news to himself.
“Why would someone murder Neri’s accountant? Has he been taking from the boss?”
She’d considered that already. “It’s hard to imagine. He’d know what the result would be if he got found out. I don’t think Neri would send round a man in a mask either. Vercillo would just be there one moment and gone for good the next.”
“Then what?” he wondered.
“We had some intelligence,” she said eventually. “Early yesterday evening four, maybe five suspicious Americans flew in to Fiumicino. Separate airlines, separate classes for a couple. As if they didn’t know each other. It could be Wallis beefing up his army.”
Falcone stroked his pointed beard. He hated the way she seemed to know so much about the mob, how she seemed to understand their movements instinctively. The DIA were supposed to do that. All the same it left him feeling cheated. “What army? You said he was retired.”
“He is but that doesn’t mean he’s stupid. You saw the security on that place of his. Vergil Wallis doesn’t let his guard slip, any more than Neri does. Men like that have to be careful, retired or not.”
Falcone wondered: could this be Wallis’s first act of vengeance? Then there was a bustle down the street. It was Monkboy and the rest of the path team—except Teresa Lupo—arriving, unusually late.
“What took you?” Falcone barked at them. Silvio Di Capua just put his head down and stumbled onto the staircase. He looked scared.
“You’re saying these men have been summoned?” Falcone asked her.
“Maybe.”
He thought back to the cool way Wallis had greeted them. “It could make sense I guess. If he thinks there’s a war on the way. He didn’t look like a man getting ready for war to me.”
She gave him a sideways glance, as if she thought he was being naÏve. “You should never take these people at face value, Leo. Not even Neri. That was a performance this morning too, though not one I understand. Perhaps Vergil Wallis just feels he has no choice but to get some muscle around him.”
Falcone grimaced and started walking for the door. She raced to keep up with him.
The bunny suits had their helmets off. They were busy, dusting, poking, peering into corners, putting things into envelopes. Falcone glowered at Monkboy trembling over the corpse. Beniamino Vercillo was pinned to his old leather chair by a curving sword through the chest. His body had fallen forward a fraction. It was plain to see that the blade had been thrust up through the ribcage, exiting to the right of the spine and impaling itself into the back of the chair.
Vercillo was a thin man. Falcone wondered how much force such a blow would take. Crazy Teresa would know. She always did know this kind of thing. But she wasn’t there and Monkboy looked out of his depth, surrounded by a bunch of junior morgue assistants waiting to be told what to do.
“Where is she?” Falcone demanded.
“Who?”
“Who the hell do you think? Your boss.”
“Had to go out,” Silvio Di Capua stuttered. “She’ll be here soon.”
Falcone was astonished she would have the nerve to play these games twice in twenty-four hours. “Go out where?” he bellowed.