Peroni thought about this. “And those bosses of yours back home wouldn’t be none too pleased, I guess. All the same, I’d want to see the body. Didn’t you want to see the body?”
“Seen a lot of bodies in my time, mister,” Vergil Wallis murmured. “That’s one I didn’t want coming back to haunt me at nights. I just told Neri to get on with it. He’d offed the kid he said brought in the dope. Or so he claimed. I just went back into my shell. And I remembered.” The black eyes flashed at both of them. “I remember well.”
“Dope.” Peroni hated working drugs. Everything got so unpredictable. “Once you walk into that place it all gets so messy. Who’s to say that wasn’t what killed her, really? That it wasn’t little Mickey out of his head thinking he was the love god come to call? And getting all cut up or something when she says no, and by the by, Mickey, I’m carrying a little present for you?”
Wallis pushed his big fists deeper into the overcoat. “What is it you want of me? There’s nothing I can do to bring her back.”
Peroni bridled at that. “There are two women and a cop you could help bring back, Mr. Wallis.”
“Why me?”
“Mickey Neri says you know the way,” Falcone reminded him. “Do you?”
“I have no idea what the hell he’s talking about. All I can guess is what you can guess. He wants me there for my hide. I’d need a damn good reason to lay it on the line for people I don’t even know.”
Falcone glanced at the clock on the wall. It was two minutes to nine. “You might get to find out who really killed her. Isn’t that enough? Isn’t that the lure Mickey’s really dangling in your face? Also, you get me and half the cops in Rome behind you. We quit chasing bombers, quit chasing street thieves and dope dealers, pimps and murderers, and try to save your lying ass instead. The choice is yours, Mr. Wallis. But if I have to pick up any more dead bodies at the end of this, your cosy sweetheart deal with the DIA goes out the window. I don’t see you sitting comfortably in that house of yours on the hill for much longer now. Do you?”
Wallis grimaced. “Is that a deal you’re offering me? Play ball and you stay off my back?”
Peroni was quietly whistling through his teeth, looking livid.
“If that’s the way you care to see it,” Falcone replied.
“And you think you’re good enough to keep me alive? All the dead bodies I’ve seen on the news this past couple of days don’t give me much in the way of optimism.”
Falcone shrugged. “Take it or leave it. Either way we’re pulling away all those people from your gate. The DIA don’t do security. Who do you think’s going to guard your back then? Your golf buddies have got to go home sometime. Neri’s people aren’t going away. And they want blood over that accountant, I imagine. Thanks for the gift, by the way.”
Vergil Wallis leaned over the desk and pointed a long black finger in Falcone’s direction. “Listen to me, man. I didn’t touch Neri’s accountant. I’m retired. OK?”
Then he fell back into his chair and closed his eyes, waiting.
Bang on the minute—Mickey Neri was punctual—the phone rang. The two men watched Vergil Wallis. He waited, just long enough to make them nervous, then picked up the handset.
Wallis hit the button and barked, “Speak.”
He listened. It didn’t last long.
“Well?” Falcone demanded.
Wallis reached inside his coat and pulled out a piece, a silver pistol, nice and shiny, of a kind neither cop recognized. “You’re not thinking of taking this off me now?”
“My,” Peroni observed. “The things retired people carry around with them these days. Does that get covered by the state pension or what?”
Wallis opened the bag and dropped the gun inside. “Front steps of San Giovanni. Twenty-five minutes. I want Mr. Sweet Talk here to drive. I hear he played boss class once. Don’t want any amateurs stepping on my toes.”
MICKEY NERI SNIFFED in the dead air of the caverns and wished he had the courage to walk outside, out into good daylight, away from the mess he was in. That wasn’t possible. Adele had made him place the calls. She said they had no choice. They needed money. They needed his father to give them the chance to start again, free of his anger. So they just sat in one of the chambers in this stinking, dark maze, trying not to bitch at one another. Mickey just couldn’t work out the geography of the place. Adele walked around as if she knew every last corner, every last twist and turn. It pissed him off. He thought he was going to end up in charge. He was grateful for what she’d done at Toni Martelli’s. But he’d have killed the old bastard without her help… in the end.
If it worked out now they’d get some money, some kind of reconciliation, and they would earn the old man’s thanks. Mickey knew his father well. Gratitude was one thing that did count with the old man. Emilio had his faults but he had a thing about fairness, a thing that was almost a virtue. If he and Adele could deliver Vergil Wallis’s head on a plate, then it was possible—just—that everything else could be forgiven. Or if not forgiven, forgotten. These were, as Adele was swift to point out, changed times. Emilio Neri couldn’t go back to being a resident Rome hood, not after felling a bunch of cops with a bomb. His power was failing him. But the cops couldn’t touch Mickey with any of this. He could stick around, live off the cream of the estate. With or without Adele in tow—he hadn’t decided on that one yet.
It all hinged on Vergil Wallis showing up. Without him, Mickey thought, they were both dead. And that thought didn’t leave him any the happier. If he were the big black crook up on the hill, trying to look respectable for all the world, the last thing he’d do would be to run an errand to his worst enemy. It made no sense.
“What if Wallis don’t turn up?” he asked.
“He will.”
“Why are you so sure?”
“You don’t understand anything, do you?” she snapped. “These are serious men. Maybe they do end up trying to kill each other. Maybe that would be good for us. But men like this talk, even in the middle of a war. They have to understand how everything lies, if there’s some middle ground between them. Wallis wants this settled just as much as Emilio. And also—” She gave him that frank look, the one that went right through him. “I imagine he wants to know what happened back then. Don’t you?”
“Why ask me?” he demanded. “Never even knew the stuck-up little kid. Never even touched her.”
“No?” She didn’t sound convinced.
“No. Anyway, that was years ago. It’s time people started thinking about now, not what happened way back.”
She laughed, shook her sleek, perfect hair and gave him the same kind of look his father wore so often. One that said: don’t be so dumb. “That’s what happens when you get older, Mickey. You don’t have so much future ahead of you. It’s the past that gets more real.”
“What do you know? You’ve only got a year or two on me.”
“Guess I grew up more,” she said, watching him reach for his cigarettes. “Don’t light that.”
“Why not?”
“Because if all this goes bad someone’s going to be shooting in the dark. Think, for once in your life. It’s easier to aim at a smell.”
He swore and threw the pack onto the floor. “And if it goes well? What then?”
She moved close to him, smiling, and placed a slender hand against his chest, toying with the buttons on his shirt, a gesture he knew was mocking him somehow. “Then we get to inherit everything. You and me. We can make a couple. Can’t we?”
“Yeah.” He could hear the uncertainty in his own voice. He was trying to stay on top of things. It wasn’t easy. “What’s the cop doing here now, Adele? And that woman too? What do we do with them?”