They returned to the living room. Miranda Julius was red-faced and puffy-eyed. Falcone must have been working her hard. She looked at them as they came in and read their faces instantly.
‘What is it?’ she asked.
Costa showed her the thyrsus and the packet of seeds. ‘Have you seen these before? Do you know what they are?’
She looked at them and shook her head. ‘I’ve no idea. Where did you find them?’
‘In her bedroom,’ Costa replied.
‘What are they?’ She could be crying again soon.
‘It could be coincidence,’ Costa said.
‘It could be anything,’ Falcone interjected. ‘We’ll log your daughter’s disappearance, Mrs Julius. We’ll circulate her description. Usually these cases end with the child coming home. Usually they’ll call. Probably today.’
‘Look,’ Teresa interjected, ‘there’s time. There are a lot of loose ends to work on here. If …’
Falcone stood up, glowering at her. She knew when to shut up.
‘Doctor,’ he grunted. ‘Here’s the deal. I don’t go around cutting up bodies. You don’t go around interrogating potential witnesses.’
Costa thought, for one moment, she might hit him and wondered what would happen after that. Instead Teresa went over to Miranda Julius, sat next to her on the sofa and put an arm around her shoulders.
Falcone led Costa and Peroni away from the women.
‘This is serious,’ Costa said. ‘I know it looks odd but—’
‘Don’t tell me my job,’ Falcone said curtly. ‘We’ve got one clear-cut case of murder and one missing teenager to add to the scores we get every week. There’s nothing that links them. Nothing you can count on. Be honest, Nic. If there were …’
Costa looked at Falcone. He wished the inspector wouldn’t play his cards so close to his chest so often. It was coincidence. But that didn’t mean they should reject it.
‘We could hand out her picture to the media,’ Costa suggested.
‘And say what?’ Falcone asked. ‘This is a girl who hasn’t been seen by her mother since this morning? Do you want us to look like fools?’
‘I don’t care what we look like.’
Peroni patted Costa on the back. ‘Think about it, Nic. What’s there to go on?’
‘Circulate the girl’s picture internally,’ Falcone ordered, walking for the door, watching Teresa Lupo glower at him from the sofa, her arms still round the mother. ‘Make sure it gets seen all round. And pull out whatever CCTV footage we’ve got of the Campo. We can look at that later. You could be right, Nic. I just don’t feel ready to jump straight in at the moment. Beside, we’ve got an appointment.’ He scowled at Costa. ‘And note that word “we”. Keep your friend from the morgue out of this. She’s got other work to do.’
These days when Emilio Neri went out on his rounds he left most of the muscle work to Bruno Bucci, a muscular thirty-year-old hood from Turin. Bucci had been on the payroll since he was a teenager running dope dealers around Termini Station. Neri liked him, as an employee and as a man. He was taciturn, loyal and dogged. He knew when to talk and when to shut up. He never came back until the job was done, whatever it took. If Neri felt like slapping someone around personally, Bucci didn’t mind holding the yo-yo still, making sure he didn’t get any stupid ideas just because the individual rearranging his face was pushing sixty-six and wheezing and croaking like a set of malodorous old bellows.
Sometimes Neri wondered why Mickey hadn’t turned out this way. If that had happened, he’d feel a whole lot easier about what would become of his empire when he was too old to stay in the driving seat. Which could be sooner rather than later the way he was starting to feel. It wasn’t a question of age. Neri felt sure he could carry on for a good decade more without handing over the reins. Something else, boredom maybe, or a sense of being out of place, bothered him. The big house, the servants, even Adele lounging around like a pampered plaything … all these accoutrements of wealth and power now seemed unreal, almost improper, silky bars for a prison that threatened to drown him in luxury.
He ought to be thinking about the transition. He knew that. The problem was Mickey’s character. The kid did as he was told, mostly, but he was always chasing something on the side too, pursuing private scams that he liked to keep to himself. Neri had found himself forced to clean up this kind of mess – dope, women, money – too often. Mickey never lied when confronted like that. Neri just had to know to ask the right questions. He could put up with that when Mickey was twenty. Now it was getting tedious. Maybe there was some kind of a trade-off he could work. Bucci got to run the business, Mickey could sit back and take his cut from the proceeds.
Neri thought about this from Bucci’s point of view. He knew what any decent working-class hood with ambition would do in that position. Wait till the old man was out of the way then take the lot, leaving the spoilt brat to drive a cab or wake up dead one morning more likely. Maybe that was the way of the world, Neri reasoned. He’d have done the same. Families were imperfect entities. Nothing said they had to last forever.
They spent the morning chasing up debts around the city, Neri fuming all the time about the way Mickey and Adele squabbled in his presence, wondering whether he ought to punish them both. He couldn’t get them out of his head and he couldn’t figure out why. His mind wasn’t as quick as it used to be. Was there something going on that he should have seen? Some new scheme of Mickey’s? He sat back in the rear seat of the armoured Mercedes and closed his eyes, wishing to hell he didn’t have to worry about those two constantly. The bitch ran up a small fortune on credit cards. He footed every penny of the gigantic bills that fell through the door each month. Mickey was no better. The kid seemed consumed with a desire to own anything that possessed an internal combustion engine. He’d been through four sports cars in as many months, dabbled with a plethora of two-wheeled vehicles and was only cut short from buying a four-seat Piper Comanche when the owner of the flying school discreetly rang Neri on his mobile to warn him of the deal his son was trying to nail down. Then there were the women. All shapes, all sizes. All colours, all backgrounds. The only thing they had in common was the money they consumed with a vengeance, and none of that was Mickey’s.
In his own way, Neri loved them both. Or, more accurately he thought, enjoyed owning them, having them dependent upon him in every way. In return they were supposed to stick to the rules, and one of those was never to display their antipathy towards each other in his presence. But they just couldn’t bring themselves to do that one small thing and the resentment he felt was growing by the minute, making it impossible for Neri to concentrate on the work in front of him. On one occasion he broke off from watching Bucci beat the shit out of some cheating Termini pimp to call Mickey and find out what the louse was doing to earn his keep. All he got was the recorded message from the mobile. Later he’d got Bucci to pin down Toni Lucarelli, a Trastevere bar-keeper who was siphoning off the dough Neri was due in order to pay for some piece of Algerian skirt on the other side of town. Neri punched Lucarelli a few times in the face, not hard, because his heart wasn’t in it. Lucarelli was a nice guy. He just wanted more fun than his wallet allowed.
Then the stupid bar-keeper spoiled everything by breaking down and blubbing instead of taking it like a man. Neri wanted to let the big guy from Turin loose on the jerk, crying like a baby there in the storeroom of his crummy
