“Did you know anything about this?” he asked. “Mickey snatching this girl on the side? Be honest now. I’m not pissed off with you.”
Bucci threw back his big shoulders as if it were some kind of insult. “No. You’d have been the first to know. He’s always up to stuff. Stupid little bastard. Why fuck around with crap like that? What’s the point?”
“His dick’s the point. Some things never change.”
Bucci sighed and gave Neri a knowing look. “Stupid—”
“Don’t be ungrateful, Bruno. When the word gets around about this nonsense you come out looking good. No one wants a lunatic running things. You get the business. I get retired. And that black bastard Vergil Wallis gets dead, which is a good lesson for anyone who thinks they can fuck with this house in the future. Understand?”
“Sure.” He really didn’t look happy. “Look, boss. We made lots of good plans here. I can get you out of the country, no problem. If we start messing around like this, I don’t know—”
Neri smiled. “You can do it.”
“Why not let me or one of the boys handle Wallis? We can see to him.”
“Yeah.” Neri grinned. “Mickey and Adele too, huh? You think I’m stupid?”
Bucci was silent. Neri patted him on the shoulder. “Hey, I’d do the same thing myself. Hell, you will do it when I’m out of the way. Let’s not fool ourselves otherwise. But I got a score to settle with Vergil Wallis. Got some personal questions I’d like answered too. He whacked that little accountant of mine. He gave all them private papers to the DIA. It’s thanks to him I get to retire now. I wanna show him a little gratitude. Understand?”
“I understand. But is it worth the risk?”
“Yes,” Neri snapped. “It’s worth the risk. Besides, with you planning things, there is no risk. Am I right?”
Bucci looked at him oddly. There was something going on in his head Neri couldn’t see. “Am I right, Bruno?”
“I never asked you for anything, boss. Let me ask now. Just this one thing. Stick to what we’ve got. No distractions. Just go and enjoy being retired. I’ll look after things.”
Neri would have given up on him then, changed his mind completely. But he was too far down the road and Bucci, he guessed, understood that already. “I’m still running things right now,” Neri snarled. “You do the fuck what I say. A man’s gotta leave a few memories behind him. They got last night. Now they’re gonna get Wallis too. That’s my legacy, Bruno. Don’t fuck with it.”
Bucci grunted something incomprehensible.
“So when do we wrap this up?” Neri demanded. “Where?”
“He’s gonna call us back.”
Emilio Neri thought about his son. And about Adele. Maybe this was all her doing. Maybe this was her way of convincing Mickey she could set him up for life. What a pair they’d make. She’d be screwing the chauffeur before Christmas.
“You know there’s just one thing I don’t understand,” Neri said, more to himself than to Bruno Bucci. “How the hell has Mickey talked Wallis into walking out into the open like that? After all this time? Is he just getting dumb in his old age or what?”
“Maybe he’s thinking of retirement too,” Bucci suggested. “Maybe he wants to even things out.”
Emilio Neri grinned. “Oh, he’s retiring. That’s for sure.”
THEY CLUTCH EACH OTHER on the cold, damp bed. His too-bright eyes, the pupils now dilated, dart everywhere, to places he doesn’t want to see. She watches, face close to his, her breath on his skin, smiling, thinking.
He looks into her eyes and just at that moment, when she’s caught him completely, she says, in a new voice, a low voice that seems as if it should belong to someone else, “Every good deed needs a witness, Nic. Every crime has to meet with some punishment. Without that—”
He’s laughing, can’t help himself, can’t believe the words coming out of his mouth.
Call the cops, he says. That’s what we’re here for.
She slides her slim, taut body onto his chest. Firm fingers grip him, force his eyes to look into hers. Then she turns his head and he looks once more at the shapes on the walls, writhing, laughing, chattering in some unknown language. He closes his eyes. From somewhere deep inside, somewhere he can’t discern, comes a voice, rough and cruel, rumbling up from the guts through a crazy mask’s bulbous lips.
It says, Look, you fucker, look. You got to in the end.
No. He knows the word never leaves his throat.
Sounds from beyond the wooden door. People. Events. Real, perhaps. Or memories, shadows of the past seeping into the present.
I think, she says, there was a girl here once. Years ago, but not so distant we ought to forget. A young girl. Others too. But this girl was special.
Everyone’s special, he murmurs. How?
She was beautiful. Everyone’s beautiful. After a fashion.
The rough voice laughs from behind the hidden mask, a sound filled with scorn.
Hot breath enters his ear, a torrent of words that transform into pictures inside his head. He sees them now, forced into his imagination by what he hears and the pulsing elements roaring through his veins. They both have a stiff schoolgirl stance, backs to him, arms behind, fists clenched. Long blonde hair falls over slim shoulders onto sackcloth robes. A garland of flowers hangs around each too-young neck, a smaller one crowns each shining head. Carnations for love, lilies for death. Their smell fills the room, bright and harsh and cloying, with something else beneath it, a narcotic perfume worming its way into every hidden corner of every head.
One figure turns and he sees Barbara Martelli, now sixteen years younger than the woman he never really knew, long locks down to her waist, smiling face full of warmth, pleased to see someone.
Barbara opens her mouth. No sound emerges. She is a gift. He understands that just by looking at her, the way she stands, the way she beckons, and something in Barbara’s face seems to say she’s aware of this too.
Her slim arms, tanned, still a little chubby from her youth, reach out, seeking a man’s touch and the gift it will bring.
Barbara knows, he thinks. Barbara wants.
Miranda’s lips, damp and scorching, move against his ear.
She whispers, Look.
A second figure turns and he feels his heart become stone, feels the air disappear from his lungs.
Eleanor Jamieson stands in front of him, alive and smiling, and Miranda is right. She is more beautiful than any of them, not because of how she looks, but from the simple light that shines from her eyes, the naÏve, unworldly light of innocence begging to be dimmed because it burns too brightly for the rest. This is her undoing. Men will see this flame, perhaps women too, and want to suck on its power, steal the life from within it, jealous of its intensity. And she understands none of this. She simply smiles, and beckons.
She doesn’t know, fuckhead, the old voice croons. She doesn’t have a clue.
Eleanor Jamieson opens her perfect mouth and smiles.
Her teeth are the colour of mahogany. Her wide, unseeing eyes are pools of black, as deep and as dead as the foetid Tiber.
In her throat something glitters, silver and gold. A coin to pay the ferryman.
Behind her back something moves in the shadows.
VERGIL WALLIS SAID NOTHING for a good five minutes after he read the lab report. At his boss’s suggestion, Peroni went out for some coffee and to find out if there was any news. The men who had been combing had found nothing. Mickey Neri seemed remarkably well organized.