sought the company of others. It was an unsatisfactory, tedious respite from routine that left him mildly disturbed. He was glad to be back at his desk and with a challenging case to tackle.
Even so, a rare note of self-doubt lurked at the back of his mind. Falcone had, to his surprise, been aware of his own loneliness during the long, drab holiday. It was now five years since his divorce. There had been women in that time, attractive, interesting women. Yet none had stimulated him sufficiently to take the relationship beyond the routine round of meals, the cinema, and the physical necessity of the bedroom. He’d come to realize the previous night – when, completely out of character, he’d consumed an entire bottle of a wonderful, deeply perfumed and expensive Brunello – that there had been only two real lovers in his life: his English wife Mary, who was now back in London, pursuing a legal career; and the woman who was the reason Mary left, Rachele D’Amato.
Here, in the light of day, obscured only slightly by the remains of a hangover, lay a curious coincidence. In Sri Lanka he had thought consciously about these two women for the first time in several years. When he returned to Italy, it was to find them ready to re-enter his life. Mary had written to invite him to her marriage, to another rich English lawyer, at a country house in Kent. He would find an excuse and decline. She would, he thought, expect this. The invitation came out of politeness, nothing more. His infidelity had wounded her deeply, and her abrupt departure, without the slightest attempt at reconciliation, hurt him more than he realized at the time. Or perhaps the pain came from Rachele D’Amato, who had abandoned him with the same degree of certainty Mary had shown, and rather less grace, the moment he became free.
He’d never forgiven himself for allowing these events to happen. He never forgave them either. And now Mary was getting married, while Rachele was a successful lawyer turned investigator, steadily working her way up the ranks of the DIA, an organization which, thanks to the case Teresa Lupo had placed before him, Falcone knew he must soon approach.
His feelings about the DIA went beyond the recent sting that had wrecked Gianni Peroni’s career, an exercise that was more about public relations than the defeat of organized crime. They stretched back years. There was scarcely a cop in the Questura who didn’t hear those three initials and feel a small sense of dread. He realized, the moment the dead girl’s identity became plain, that there could be no avoiding them. Strictly speaking he should have acted already, as soon as he realized the kind of people he would have to interview.
Falcone stared at the pages and pages of reports and tried to remember what the case was like when it was fresh. Sixteen years before he’d just been a plain detective. The inspector in charge was Filippo Mosca, an old-fashioned Rome cop who walked both sides of the track and, like many a man of his generation, made little effort to hide his friendship with people who were best avoided.
Eleanor Jamieson was reported missing on 19 March, a full two days after her American stepfather last saw her. She had just turned sixteen and had been living in Vergil Wallis’s rented villa on the Aventine hill since arriving from New York the previous Christmas. The girl was English. Her mother had left Wallis a year before, after a marriage that lasted just six months. Falcone never could find out why. Nor would he. The woman killed herself in New York ten days after the disappearance of her daughter.
It was, Falcone recalled, a maddening case. Wallis was a curious man: educated, almost scholarly, yet black and originally from the ghetto. He was in his mid-forties then, vague about his business and his antecedents, a reluctant witness, unforthcoming about the girl’s movements, what friends she had made in the city, any motive she might have to run away. The man had no good reason to explain why it took two days to report her absence, simply pleading that meetings had called him out of Rome. He had even seemed reluctant to hand over the few photographs he possessed, which revealed a young, naïve-looking girl, very pretty, with shoulder-length blonde hair and a ready smile. And, on her shoulder, fully revealed in a picture taken a day before she vanished, the curious tattoo, for which Wallis had no explanation. It had fascinated Falcone from the moment he saw it. There was a craze for tattoos at the time. All the rock stars and the hotshots in the movie world were doing it. But they didn’t have anything like this etched into their skin. The ancient hieroglyph looked wrong on the girl, more like a branding mark than some badge of fashion.
It seemed out of character too, as much as any of them could judge. According to Wallis, Eleanor had bummed around Italy for a while then spent two weeks on an intensive Italian course at a language school near the Campo. She was an intelligent girl, with good exam grades. There was talk of her going to study at an art college in Florence later that year. She had few acquaintances beyond the school and, if Wallis was to be believed, no boyfriend, current or ex. Nothing they could turn up explained why she should suddenly disappear. She had, her stepfather said, simply set out for school on her scooter around nine on the morning of 17 March and never arrived.
It only took a couple of days for Mosca’s team to acquire the sickening sense of powerlessness that comes with abduction cases. No one had seen Eleanor on her way into the city. A re-creation of her supposed last movements on TV failed to elicit a single reliable response from the public. It was as if she had existed one moment and then been abruptly removed from the face of the earth.
All along Falcone wanted to scream foul. Because something stank to high heaven and pretty soon he had an inkling what it was. Mosca had taken him to one side on the third morning and told him, in confidence, what he’d heard the previous night from a friend in the Foreign Ministry. Vergil Wallis was not, as he claimed, a straight-forward businessman from LA who loved Rome so much he was thinking of buying a second home in the city. He was a high-up figure in the West Coast mob, a black fixer who’d risen through the ranks to live in Italy half the year for his own crooked reasons. Interpol had been following Wallis for years and steadfastly failing to bring him to justice on a wide range of counts, from racketeering to murder. Nor had the carabinieri, who had been assigned to Wallis’s case, fared much better.
This was shortly before the creation of the DIA. Then, as now, the civilian state police maintained an uneasy rivalry with the carabinieri, who were part of the military. The lines of responsibility were, at best, blurred and on occasion deliberately murky. Privately Falcone was in agreement with the growing number of critics calling for a single, unified state police force. It was a logical, inevitable solution. But this was judged a heresy by those in charge of both organizations, and one that could cost a man his job. He was careful never to make his views known. They were, in any case, irrelevant. Soon the DIA came along, adding another layer of complexity to the business of chasing the swelling tide of crime that seemed to grow stronger with every passing year.
And Vergil Wallis was still free. So much for progress.
Mosca quietly closed the case of Eleanor Jamieson, marking it unworthy of further investigation without new evidence. Wallis’s relationship with the Italian mobsters was far from easy. Some stories, garnered at great expense and with no small risk to those who supplied them, placed him in the role of criminal diplomat, a go-between trying to ensure the interests of his own particular buddies meshed with those of the Sicilians. It made sense to Falcone. The West Coast mob that Wallis represented was only loosely connected to the Italian organizations in the USA. There was plenty of room for misunderstandings. The bosses had learned long ago that pacts and partnerships, even with those they hated, put more dollars in their bank accounts than ruthless competition and turf wars. Money was what mattered these days. No one went to the barricades over honour any more. These were practical times in which cash was king.
Falcone had been present at three different interviews with Wallis and still couldn’t work out what to make of the man. The American was thoughtful and articulate, quite unlike any crook Falcone had ever met. He was well read. He knew more about ancient Roman history than some Italians. The word was that he’d been groomed for the role of diplomat for years, put through law college after rising through the black ranks in Watts. It wasn’t hard to see him smoothing out the rough edges of a relationship which must always
