“I said to cut the crap. The point is that she’s pregnant six weeks or so after she met Mickey Neri, who’s now been hanging around her look-alike, a sixteen-year-old kid who happens to have disappeared.”
It came so suddenly she wished she’d had the time and the strength to react. Gianni Peroni stepped forward, grabbed her face with both hands, then kissed her rapidly on the lips. She sat, transfixed. The ponytailed waiter was staring at the pair of them.
“Don’t ever do that again,” she whispered. Then added, “Not without asking first.”
“Give me more.”
“I don’t have any more,” she objected. “Not until the lab gets back on the DNA.” She smiled. “We’ve Mickey Neri on file already. He was accused of rape two years ago. Somehow the thing never got to court. It could be waiting on my desk right now.”
“Oh sweet Jesus.”
Gianni Peroni was beaming. “Don’t even think of kissing me again,” she warned. “Too early in the morning. Just go and find Nic, will you?”
“Yeah,” he agreed, nodding. “You bet.”
He stopped and stared out into the road. A tall dark figure was walking across the road, towards the Questura. It was Vergil Wallis, leather coat flapping around his shins, striding deliberately like a man with a mission.
“Two miracles in a minute,” Peroni murmured. “Maybe there is a God.”
NIC COSTA WOKE UP on a large, old double bed in an enclosed chamber that stank of damp. A single yellow bulb cast a pool of waxy light into the cold, dusty room. His head hurt. He ran his fingers gingerly over the faint, tender bump on the back of his scalp then sat upright, legs over the side of the bed, trying to think. His jacket lay crumpled on the floor. Costa picked it up. The mobile phone was still in the pocket. He stared at the screen in vain. He was deep inside the rock of the Palatine now. There was no chance of a signal. No sign of his gun either, or a soul anywhere nearby.
He stood up, paused for a moment to let the pain at the back of his head subside, then walked around the room. It looked like the kind of place Randolph Kirk would have used, professionally and for his private pleasure too. There were paintings on the walls, old, rough ones, never retouched over the centuries. He stared at the images that, just like at Ostia, ran around the place in a continuous frieze a good metre deep. It was the same theme that he’d seen in the underground chamber by the coast, an initiation ceremony. A young girl, more puzzled than frightened on this occasion, was being led through a crowd of revellers, only some of them human.
As he walked round the room, following the story, he realized this was different somehow. The rape looked more like seduction here. The girl seemed passive, willing even, with bright, knowing eyes and the hint of pleasure in her face. There was a graphic depiction of her coupling with the god, locked in his powerful arms, eyes closed, mouth just open, ecstatic, but this was no longer the final piece in the saga. It appeared midway through the frieze and was followed by some kind of frenzied orgy, in which the girl took part voluntarily, watching the fights and the lovemaking, the vicious wrestling bouts and the acts of bloody violence around her with a nonchalant sense of detachment. Then, in the last frame, she was the central figure once more. The girl stood in front of the god who was now tethered to a stake, his arms held both by ropes and the grip of two female acolytes, his body shrinking in fear. Now she held a knife which she plunged into his right eye. Blood soaked his dreadlocks. A silent scream rose from his throat. The girl was laughing like a maniac and Costa found himself thinking of Randolph Kirk, slaughtered in his grimy little office by a Maenad much like this one, greedy for vengeance over some unseen, unexplained crime. Had the “god” failed her, and Barbara too in some mysterious way? Was she now more important than him? Or was this simply the last part of an intrinsically inexplicable drama, the fury in which every participant, man and woman, human and mythical, visited the extremes of their imagination?
The simple answer—that the god, and by implication Kirk and his associates, were exploiters of young women—didn’t fit this story. There was, Costa realized, some form of reward on both parts, and some kind of revenge if, for whatever reason, the bargain wasn’t kept.
He forced himself to stop examining the pictures. They had a hypnotic, openly erotic quality that drew him in, made it hard to think of anything else. Costa scanned the corners, his eyes becoming more used to the shade. There was a door, dimly visible in the shadows beyond the bed. He walked towards it and touched the surface: old, tough wood. It was locked but as he rattled the handle he heard a sound from the other side: a surprised gasp, not far away. And female.
He thought of the night before and the bright blonde head disappearing into the maw of the cave, that repeated again and again in the photographs that covered the walls of the central chamber. Costa drew himself close to the crevice and tried to peer through. The wood wasn’t a perfect fit. There was light on the other side, the same dim, faint luminescence as in his own chamber.
“Suzi—” he whispered through the crack. Someone moved on the far side. He heard her breathing.
“Suzi—” he said again, more loudly. “My name is Nic Costa. I’m a police officer. Please look at the door. See if you can let me in. Let me help you.”
The person on the other side didn’t make a sound. He tried to put himself in her shoes: trapped, lost in this labyrinth, not knowing what to do, or who to trust.
“I talked to your mother,” he said in a normal, controlled voice. “She’s worried about you. This will all work out. Trust me. Please.”
He thought he heard a choked sob. Maybe she wasn’t alone. Maybe Mickey Neri was there, holding a knife to her throat, trying to work out what to do with the pair of them. Costa hadn’t thought about his own fate for a moment. Now that he did, something puzzled him. Why had Mickey let him live at all? If Neri just wanted him out of the way he’d surely be dead, or somewhere far from the heart of what was going on.
“Suzi—” he said for one last time.
There was a sound on the other side of the door: a bolt being drawn back.
Costa made a conscious effort to think like a cop again. He needed a weapon. He needed to know where they were, how the hell they could find a way out of this damp, stinking place.
The door didn’t move. He heard footsteps receding on the other side.
“It’s OK,” he said. He took hold of the handle, turned it and pushed gingerly. The old wood creaked open. On the other side was a room much like the one he’d woken in: small, almost circular, with paintings round the wall, a double bed with a single light bulb above it, and opposite, in the shadows, another door.
She stood against it with her back to him, hair shining under the wan light, shoulders hunched, crying he guessed, most likely terrified.
Nic Costa walked over and put his hands on her shoulders, unable to take his eyes off that bright, gleaming head of hair.
“Suzi—”
She turned suddenly and thrust her face into his chest, threw her arms around him, clenching his back hard with her hands.
He held the taut, slim body, his head beginning to spin, trying to work out why this felt wrong.
Her mouth worked its way to his neck. Warm, damp lips brushed his skin, a tongue flickered against day-old bristle.
Automatically, his hand went to her head, felt the soft hair, pushed her gently away.
“Suzi—” he said, then was quiet.
It was as if two people had merged into one. Or as if they had never been quite separate in the first place.
Tears starting to stain her cheeks, her face framed by this bright shock of too-young hair, Miranda Julius looked up at him, pleading, drawing him ever closer.