by David Hewson
The fake Vespa reached them at that moment, lurching over the cobbles, the curious drunk at the handlebars mouthing something faintly obscene. Bramante timed what came next perfectly, before Costa could intervene. He jumped out in front of the scooter, waving the gun at the rider until he braked, punching the bewildered idiot out of the saddle, then picking the machine off the ground, revving that high-pitched engine up into the red, and leaping up the hill, front wheel rising.
The two officers from the Fiat across the junction had their weapons out. The man on the motorcycle was jinking to the right, trying to head past them, into the skein of alleyways that got narrower and narrower into the heart of Monti, an area where no car stood a chance against a man on a fast, agile bike.
“No guns!” Falcone yelled, clawing himself to his feet on unsteady, wavering legs. “There are civilians here, dammit!”
No one argued with the old inspector when he sounded like that. The uniforms let their weapons drop.
Costa walked over and offered Falcone his arm. The older man took it, furious, then hobbled, in obvious pain, to the crossroads, staring at the fumes of the departing scooter as it disappeared down a turning ahead.
“You’re bleeding,” Costa said, and held out a clean white handkerchief. It wasn’t necessary. Raffaella Arcangelo was already at Falcone’s side, distraught, wiping his face, checking the damage, which was minor. A cut lip. A bruise starting to stain his temple where Bramante’s weapon had struck.
Falcone let her fuss over him, scowling all the while in the direction of the vanished bike.
“There’s nothing wrong with me, Raffaella,” he told her curtly. “Please. This is too much fuss.”
Another police van had navigated the gaping bystanders in the Via degli Zingari. It was now stationary behind Peroni, Emily, and Teresa Lupo, none of whom knew quite what to do next.
A stout, powerful-looking man got out. He was in his thirties, wearing a black woollen overcoat and the disdain that went with rank. Nic Costa had already decided, for no good reason, he didn’t much like Commissario Bruno Messina.
Falcone watched the newcomer approach.
“You know, Leo,” the commissario said, shaking his head, as if dealing with amateurs, “it would be nice if, just this once, you were where you were supposed to be. Home.”
Falcone said nothing, just nodded with that brief smile that was too professional to be classed as insolence.
“Did he say much?” Messina asked. “An explanation? Anything?”
Costa thought of that last whispered message. Bramante meant it to have some private significance, he thought.
“He said,” Falcone replied, looking a little bewildered, a little baffled, “that he was sorry, but I’d have to be the last now. Number seven.”
Commissario Messina listened and then, to Costa’s disgust, burst out laughing.
“I want everyone in the van,” Messina ordered when his private amusement had receded. He pointed to Falcone, Costa, Peroni, and Teresa Lupo. “You four are back on duty, as of this moment.”
Raffaella was squawking a protest already, about Falcone’s sick leave, his injuries, his physical difficulties.
“You…” Messina interrupted her. “…and Agente Costa’s girlfriend here are in protective custody. One of the cars will take you to the Questura. You can wait there.”
“And where,” Teresa Lupo interjected, just loud enough to override the shrieks of protest from Emily and Raffaella, “are we going, might I ask?”
Bruno Messina smiled.
“To see number five.”
GIORGIO BRAMANTE HAD BEEN A MODEL PRISONER. COMMISSARIO Messina had removed the man’s full prison records from his large black briefcase that morning, reading carefully through them as the control van navigated the traffic from Monti to the Aventino. Bramante had spent fourteen unremarkable years in jail after being found guilty of murder in a trial that had triggered many conflicting emotions at the time. No one liked unfinished stories about missing children. No one was happy when an investigation went bad because the police fouled up, and on this occasion in the most unexpected of ways, one in which the wronged party—Bramante—went to prison while the guilty—the students who had apparently kidnapped his son and refused to disclose his fate—went free.
Five of them, anyway.
As Costa listened to Bruno Messina, watching Falcone’s attentive face as he did so, he began to realise the Bramante case was still alive, for both of these men. At the time, Falcone had been on the brink of promotion to inspector, a promising sovrintendente underneath Messina’s commissario father, who had retired from the force in disgrace not long after the case against Bramante’s students had collapsed. Messina senior had seen his career torn apart by what happened in the wake of seven-year-old Alessio Bramante’s disappearance. That fact clearly caused his son pain to this day. The Messinas were, as the entire Questura knew, a police family going back several generations. The uniform ran in the blood. There were professional reasons for Messina, and his father, to be dissatisfied, too, ones Falcone surely shared. Cases that involved missing children demanded resolution more than most. For both parents. Beatrice Bramante, although she had divorced her husband while he was in jail, was still alive and living in Rome. And for the officers involved.
Peroni, always one to come straight to the point, waited for the control van to circumnavigate the round of traffic at the Colosseum, then asked, “Remind me again. Why exactly didn’t these scum go to jail?”
“Because of the lawyers,” Messina replied scornfully. “They said it wasn’t possible.”
Falcone stroked his silver goatee, then emitted a long, pained sigh.
“It’s important we have this conversation, Commissario, so that both of us are sure where we stand. Unlike you, I was there—”
“And don’t I know it?” Messina interupted, scowling.
Falcone didn’t bat an eyelid. Costa had seen him deal with much worse than this young, overambitious commissario with just a few months in the job.
“Good,” the inspector commented placidly. “Then let me explain. There are two reasons why no charges were pursued against any of Bramante’s students. First, we had no evidence. They provided none. Forensic provided none. We had no body. No clue as to where the child had gone or what had happened to him. Only suspicions, created principally by the unwillingness of the students to do much to help themselves. There was absolutely nothing there on which we could base a prosecution….”
Bruno Messina was a thickset man, with a head of fulsome black hair and an expression that could turn from polite to malevolent in an instant.
“I could have got it out of them,” he said with no small hint of menace.
“That’s what your father believed. But he failed. Then he left the ringleader alone with Giorgio Bramante for an hour in a quiet little cell at the far end of the holding block in the basement we all know so well. Which brings me to the second reason why no one ever faced any charges over Alessio Bramante’s disappearance. I hate to remind you of this, but during that hour Bramante beat the unfortunate youth senseless. Ludo Torchia died in the ambulance, while I watched, on the way to hospital. After that, we were knee-deep in lawyers who made sure that the other suspects could get away without saying a damn thing to anyone because we’d already allowed one of their number to be, in all but name, murdered before our very eyes.”
Falcone gave Messina the kind of look he normally reserved for impudent, uncomprehending juniors.
“Case closed,” the inspector concluded without emotion.
Peroni glowered at him. “I’ve got to say, I remember what was in the newspapers back then. It wasn’t quite that clear-cut. You don’t have kids. I do. If I thought one of mine might be alive, if there was the slightest chance of that, I’d have beaten the living daylights out of those students, too.”
Falcone shrugged. “The significance of that being what exactly?”
Peroni tautened, taken aback by the n
onchalant tone in Falcone’s voice. Costa watched Bruno Messina recoil from Peroni’s visible anger, and reminded himself that those relatively new to the Questura still found his partner’s physical presence—the lumpy, scarred face, the corpulent, powerful thug’s body—intimidating.
“That what Bramante did was understandable!” Peroni insisted stubbornly.
“I hate having to repeat myself, but I was there. I walked into that cell because I was sick of hearing the screaming, over and over again. I was the one”—Falcone glowered at Messina—“who made sure it went to a higher authority than your father, Commissario. This wasn’t difficult, since he had, as I recall, decided to attend a management meeting the moment he left Bramante alone with the youth.”
“He was a commissario,” Messina objected. “He was desperate.”
“And I was just the sovrintendente, the junior meant to clean up afterwards. It was quite a mess, too. Look up the photographs. They’ll still be in the records. That cell was covered in blood. I’ve never seen anything like it, before or since. Giorgio Bramante took that student apart. Torchia was barely breathing when I got in there. An hour later he was gone.”
Peroni said again, “Messina thought Bramante’s kid was alive, Leo!”
“It was more than that,” Messina continued. “My father thought that, if you’d not burst in there stopping Bramante when you did, he could have beaten the truth out of that bastard. Perhaps he was right and we could have found the boy. Who knows?”
“No one!” Falcone replied. “Not you. Not me. In situations like that, we deal with certainties, not guesswork. Ludo Torchia was brutally assaulted, in a cell in our own Questura, and he died of that assault. How are we supposed to ignore that? The law’s the law. We don’t pick and choose to whom it applies or when.”
Teresa Lupo raised her large hand in objection. “But if Bramante thought…”
“None of us knows what he was thinking!” Falcone insisted. “I was there when he was interviewed afterwards. I was the one who told him Ludo Torchia was dead. I told him that the doctor in the ambulance said he’d several broken ribs, a punctured lung. It was as bad a beating as I’ve seen in my life, and it was done slowly, deliberately. And Giorgio Bramante? When I told him, he acted as if beating a man to death was just an everyday event. I have no idea what he thought. He scarcely said a word afterwards. Not to us. Not to his wife. To the press. To anyone. Yes, yes, I know what you’re about to say. It was grief. Perhaps. But we still don’t understand what happened, and that’s a fact.”
Messina leaned forward and tapped Falcone on the knee. “I’ll tell you what happened. You made inspector. My father got kicked out of the force. After thirty years. But we’ll leave that to one side for now. Just don’t fool yourself. Those morons were responsible for that boy’s death somehow. Not my father. Not Giorgio Bramante. Ludo Torchia apart, they walked away scot-free. Changed their names, most of them. Grew up and found themselves different lives, mostly in places where no one knew who they were. They thought it was over, like a bad dream that scares the shit out of you at night and just fades away the next morning.”
“As far as they are concerned, it is over,” Falcone replied. “That’s the law.”
Messina pulled a set of folders out of his capacious briefcase.
“Not for Giorgio Bramante it isn’t.”
BRUNO MESSINA SEEMED TO KNOW BRAMANTE’S ENTIRE history from the moment he went to jail.
“He helped other prisoners with their work. He taught them to read and write. Counselled them on giving up drugs. The perfect prisoner. After three years he was getting early day release and he didn’t ever go running to the press. There was nothing to suggest he was anything else but an unfortunate man who lost his temper under stress and paid a heavy price for it, in circumstances where most people would feel sympathetic.”
“And?” Falcone asked, interested now.
“There were six students in those caves when Alessio went missing. Torchia died that day. Another, Sandro Vignola, moved to Puglia, then, three years after the case, came back to Rome for the day. We don’t know why. Vignola was never seen again. Of the remaining four…”
He spread out the papers from the files.
“Andrea Guerino. Farmer’s son. Changed his name. Moved to near Verona, where he ran a small fruit farm. Found dead of shotgun wounds out in the fields, June three years ago. The local police say his wife went missing the day before. She turns up alive. Guerino gets half his head blown off, and his wife’s too scared to say a word about where she’s been, who with, anything. The local force put it down to some kind of affair gone wrong and never charge a soul with his death. Raul Bellucci. Fifteen months ago, he was working as a cab driver in Florence, also under an assumed name. He gets a call at home. Someone’s kidnapped his daughter and wants a ransom or the girl’s gone. The idiot doesn’t go to us, of course. I imagine he’s worried we’d find out who he really is. The following day Raul Bellucci’s dead in some industrial park used by hookers on the edge of town. The police”—the venom in Messina’s voice was unmistakable—“decide that, since Bellucci’s throat’s been cut from ear to ear and his genitals have been removed, this is the work of some African gang. Most of the hookers thereabouts are Nigerian.”
“And today?” Teresa looked interested. She’d been complaining about the lack of challenging work.
“Today, or rather last night, was the turn of Toni LaMarca, the only student who stayed in Rome. He was some hoodlum’s kid from Naples. Perhaps he thought that would protect him. Bad piece of work. Involved in dope and prostitution rings around Termini. Not a man to mourn. It was the same story as the others. Well, similar. LaMarca’s teenage boyfriend got kidnapped on the way home from the cinema. He managed to claw his way out of some lockup near Clodio this morning and went straight to us. It doesn’t take a genius to work out what happened. Someone called LaMarca. A ransom perhaps. He went out—”
“Commissario,” Peroni cut in. “I thought you said Bramante was in jail until three months ago. Maybe he could have kidnapped this kid and killed LaMarca. But the others?”
Messina pulled out a prison file and thrust it in front of them.
“Pay attention. I told you Giorgio Bramante was a model prisoner. He had all the parole he wanted. They even let him out from time to time to do odd jobs for people. Nothing illegal in that. Nothing that wasn’t by the book. When Vignola disappeared, Bramante was on emotional leave to visit his sick mother. Here in Rome. When Guerino died, he was on a free weekend. Plenty of time to do what he did. Same with Raul Bellucci.”
“These people had changed their names,” Teresa pointed out. “How the hell would he know how to find them?”
“That’s for you to discover,” Messina answered, then stuffed the pages back into the briefcase. “One more thing. The boy’s mother gave a T-shirt to some weird little church in Prati. They have a collection of memorabilia that appeals to psychics. She told them that soon after Alessio went missing, and Ludo Torchia was pronounced dead, she found it at home. With a fresh bloodstain on it. As if the two events were connected. The church collects that kind of thing apparently.”
Teresa scowled. “Leave me out of this. I’m a scientist. I don’t do witchcraft. Maybe someone had a nosebleed?”
“They didn’t,” Messina said flatly. “This T-shirt has gained a few more bloodstains over the years, not that we found that out until this morning. The church warden tried to keep it all quiet. But he’s a precise man. He made a note of the date each fresh bloodstain appeared. Any guesses?”
They looked at one another and stayed silent.
“The first happened just after Sandro Vignola went missing. Then, following each death, a day, two at the most, the warden finds another stain on Alessio Bramante’s shirt. It’s no big deal. The place scarcely has any security. Anyone could get in there, open the case, and pour something on the shirt. It doesn’t take magic. This morning…”
He paused to look out the wind
ow. They were moving into the Viale Aventino at last. It couldn’t be far away.
“…the church had a visitor. A man on his own, with a physical description that matches Bramante. This was around seven-thirty. Afterwards there were several fresh stains. Big stains this time, ones they couldn’t keep quiet. And some writing. That’s what brings us here. Not, unfortunately, before the caretaker had got in there first. Rosa Prabakaran is talking to her.”
Peroni’s face lit up with fury. “You’ve got a junior officer straight out of school on something like this? Aren’t there any grown-ups around?”
Messina gave him a cold managerial stare. He didn’t appreciate the interruption.
“She’s got nothing to worry about. You people, however…”
Even Falcone looked lost for a clue at that moment.
“He’s got two left on his list,” Messina continued implacably. “Dino Abati. God knows what he calls himself these days or where he’s living. And the police officer Bramante blames for stopping him beating the truth out of Ludo Torchia fourteen years ago. I hope you like the emergency quarters in the Questura, by the way, Leo. You’ll be staying there, all four of you, until this is over.”
“Oh no,” Peroni declared, waving his hand. “I’m just a man on the street these days. Don’t lay this at my door.”
“It’s already there,” Messina snapped. “Don’t you get it? Bramante isn’t just killing these people one by one to get his revenge. He’s taking someone they’re close to beforehand, holding them ransom, trying to…”
The commissario struggled for the words.
“He wants to put them through exactly the same nightmare he experienced,” Falcone filled in calmly. “But what makes you think he wants me?”
“After we worked out what was going on here, I sent a team round to the apartment Bramante has been using since he got out of prison. He was long gone. But he’s been busy. Too busy to take everything with him. Take a look at these.”
