She looked at what he was holding and realized he had a point.
“This,” said Silvio Di Capua, “is what we earthlings call a phone.”
THE TUNNEL RAN beneath the Quirinale Palace, cut straight through rock, four hundred metres, built originally for tram cars, now choked by traffic trying to shortcut the hill above. Big tourist coaches were double-parked on the Piazza di Spagna side to dump their contents for the short walk to the Trevi Fountain. Construction lorries working on the endless repairs in the Via Nazionale habitually blocked the opposite end. It was, in theory, the easiest way from the Questura to most points east. Falcone had dictated this was the route to take, Peroni with Wallis in front, the cover cars following some discreet distance behind.
Peroni didn’t feel at home. He slunk behind the wheel wishing someone else had picked the short straw. This was so far from vice, so distant from the world he knew, he felt like an interloper, just waiting to make some stupid mistake.
They drove straight into the tunnel and hit the jam a third from the end. He banged on the wheel then looked in the mirror. Falcone and the back-up cars were nowhere to be seen. Maybe they’d made it in before the traffic fouled up. Maybe not.
Wallis, mute and expressionless in the passenger seat, took the phone out of his pocket and stared at the little screen. “Not much use in here.” He tapped the mike wired behind the lapel of his leather coat. “This isn’t either.”
Peroni eyed the man in the adjoining seat and wished he could shake off the idea that something somewhere was deeply wrong. “So, Vergil,” he said amicably. “Here’s an opportunity for the both of us. Get this off your chest, man. You can tell me what’s really going down here and nobody but the two of us gets to know.”
Wallis peered at him imperiously. “You’re a very suspicious human being. I’m doing you a big favour. A measure of trust wouldn’t go amiss.”
Peroni shot him a filthy look. “Trust. Excuse me, Mr. Wallis, but I don’t buy this retirement story. I didn’t when that poor bitch Rachele D’Amato spun it for me. I didn’t when I met you. Leopards don’t change their spots. Crooks don’t do the cops favours. Come on. I got a friend involved in this. Level with me.”
Wallis took a deep breath and looked up at the grimy roof of the tunnel. The air in the car was disgusting, just a thin stream of oxygen fighting to get through the clouds of carbon monoxide getting pumped out by the jam around them.
“You know what’s up there?”
“Changing the subject? Understandable I guess. Yeah. Mr. President in his pretty palace. Don’t you just love him? I used to work guard duty at the Quirinale when I wore short pants.”
Wallis gave him a condescending glance. “Interesting. I meant historically.”
“Oh. Excuse me. I’m Italian. What the hell would I know about history?”
“That’s where the Sabines lived. You remember the story? It had rape in it. Gives the thing some modern currency.”
Peroni did remember that story vaguely. It was important. Romulus or Remus, one or the other, stole some women and had to get their act together to clean up afterwards. And out of that mess—out of rape and murder—came Rome. “They lived up there? I thought they came from miles away. I thought they were like foreigners or something.”
“Up there,” Wallis replied, pointing again. “But that’s an interesting reaction, you know. Maybe we like to deal with bad memories that way. By thinking that the only people who got affected were from someplace else, a long way away. It makes everything so much easier.”
“You can say that again.” There was a gap in the traffic out in the daylight ahead. They’d be gone soon. “You know, I kind of admire you for knowing so much about history and stuff. When you grow up on top of it you tend not to notice things. I still don’t understand why, though.”
“Why?” Vergil Wallis shook his head and actually laughed. It was a pleasant sound. It even made Gianni Peroni feel a little less jumpy. “Because it’s Rome. It’s where we all came from, in a way. It’s about how good things can be. And how bad if we choose to make them that way.”
“Really?” Peroni got ready to kick the car into gear.
“Really.”
“You know,” Wallis said in that low, calm drawl of his. “I enjoy talking to you. I think that, in different circumstances, we could maybe have a mutually enlightening conversation.”
“Point taken, point taken.” The idiot up ahead was slow to get moving. Peroni fell angrily on the horn. “All the same, Vergil. I still think you’re a lying sonofabitch.”
“That’s your privilege. Tell me. Whatever happens now, you’ve got Neri and the kid anyway, haven’t you? You know the old man planted that bomb. Now I gave you that camera, you got Mickey too. They’re finished whatever.”
“True.” Peroni found his attention split. Between the gap opening up in the traffic ahead and the sudden loop in Wallis’s conversation.
“So what if the two of us cut a deal? You just give me a spare thirty minutes dealing with this asshole in my own way. After that I call and you get to come in and do what you want.”
Peroni looked at him and knew at that moment he wasn’t driving this black hood anywhere except back to meet Falcone. Something was getting played here he didn’t understand.
Wallis put a large, firm hand on his arm. “Peroni,” he said. “I got your number, man. I know what happened a couple of months ago.”
“You do?”
Peroni thought about that and wished he’d had more time to go through the details back in the Questura. Nic had gone missing sometime before midnight. Vergil Wallis had picked up half a million euros less than eight hours later. What kind of “private banker” did Miranda Julius use? Who on earth had that kind of money lying around ready to be bundled up in a bag at a moment’s notice?
“I heard you got busted down from on high,” Wallis said. “Why’d you think I picked you for this job? It says two things to me. You’re a man who’s open to ideas. Plus you could use the cash.”
Peroni noted the growing gap in the traffic ahead and wondered how quickly he could make a U-turn. “You disappoint me, Vergil. You are a very, very bad judge of character. Best we turn around right now and go through this whole thing again with Inspector Falcone, only in a little more detail and leaving out the lying parts.”
There was enough room, if only the idiot in front would pull forward enough to let him make the turn.
“An honest cop,” Wallis said, nodding his imposing black head. “Who’d have thought it? I admire that, though. And it’s because I do I’m not gonna hit you as hard as I might otherwise.”
Peroni wasn’t sure he heard that last one right. He took his foot off the pedal, screwed up his face and said, “What?”
When he opened his eyes a big black fist was coming towards him, fast, so fast he could do nothing but watch and wait as it crashed straight into his right eye.
It got a little fuzzy after that. Huge hands moved around him. The belt got unbuckled. Vergil Wallis’s collar mike got torn off and thrown onto the floor. A big foot came across and kicked open the driver’s door. Then a pair of arms came beneath his body and hurled him out of the car.
He fell on the filthy road with a crack, took one breath of the stinking air and started to cough.
The unmarked police car was doing a U-turn into the tunnel, now facing a clear run back into the city, headed anywhere but San Giovanni. And—Gianni Peroni would remember this for a long time, he told himself—he’d be damned if the grinning black figure behind the wheel wasn’t waving goodbye.
SHE WHISPERS and, through the chemical fire that rages in his head, he sees.
The thyrsus sits in the same place, now green and vivid, coloured ribbons round its shaft, beneath the bulbous priapic head. The lights are brighter. Men, middle-aged, stiff in their movements, conspiratorial in their shared glances, move beneath them. There are glasses in their hands, brimming with purple wine. A couple smoke, long, hand-made roll-ups that send blue-grey smoke rolling up to the rocky ceiling. They talk among one another: Emilio Neri, the little accountant Vercillo, Randolph Kirk and Toni Martelli, others who are just faces half hidden in the shadows.