by David Hewson
This isn’t my doing, Alessio. Forgive me. I’ll try and make it right.
“I don’t wanna go to jail, Ludo,” Toni LaMarca pleaded. “Getting kicked out of college I can handle. But this—”
“No one’s going to jail. You won’t tell a soul, will you, kid?”
Alessio Bramante stayed there, tight in his grip, unmoving and not saying a word.
“He won’t say a word,” Torchia said defiantly.
“So…” Abati murmured, trying to force some clarity back into his head. “Tell us all, Ludo. Where now?”
A new sound came to them. It was the tentative clucking of the cockerel, fear covered by some small bravado, filtering out from the tiny, narrow tunnel they’d already passed.
“There,” Torchia answered Abati, lifting his arm from Alessio Bramante’s throat to point at the black chasm behind them. Abati could detect a breath of foul, miasmic air emerging from its mouth. It stank of decay. The very existence of a current of air, however meagre, filled him with the faintest trace of hope. It meant the channel went somewhere.
“Which goes where…exactly?” Abati asked.
Torchia’s foot came out and stabbed him painfully in the shin. The movement released Alessio. The child could have run then. He didn’t move.
Abati staggered to the tunnel, so crudely hacked out of the raw rock it looked unfinished. He could taste the dank, stagnant vapour in the air. Somewhere there was a stream, a fissure in the hill, perhaps, one that led into some unknown natural waterway running beneath the people and the cars on the Lungotevere, back into the real world, straight down to the Tiber. He’d stamped, waist-deep, freezing cold, through subterranean torrents like this before. He’d do it again, with a child in his arms if necessary.
“You tell me, Dino.”
“Ludo…”
“You tell me!”
Torchia’s voice was so loud it felt as if he had entered Abati’s head, and would stay there, spreading his infection wherever he could.
Then another noise. It was the bird again. The black cockerel strutted confidently into view from the hidden crevice ahead, small head bobbing, as if it were trying to force from its tiny mind the idea that there might be something worse ahead, worse even than the crazy Ludo Torchia, who now watched it hungrily.
“Mine,” Torchia barked, grabbing at the bird’s flapping wings and the flailing claws.
When he had hold of the creature, when it became obvious what would happen, Dino Abati took the boy by the shoulders and tried to turn him away. He didn’t want to watch himself. Only Toni LaMarca’s eyes glittered in Ludo Torchia’s direction.
“I thought you needed an altar,” Abati said quietly.
Torchia made an animal grunt, then flung a string of foul epithets in his face.
I thought, Abati wanted to add, but didn’t dare, a bungled sacrifice, rushed, out of place, out of time, was worse than no sacrifice at all.
There was the sound of wild, frightened cawing, one high-pitched screech, then nothing. An odour—fresh, harsh, and familiar—reached them. Blood smelled much the same, whatever the source.
The boy clung to him now, trembling, tight and nervous as a taut wire. Abati gripped him, hoping to keep his small, fragile body hidden. Torchia recognised fear. It stoked his craziness.
Torchia took the feathered corpse and walked round each of them, smearing its blood on their hands, and on Abati, on his face.
He reached Alessio. What Dino Abati thought he saw made no sense. For without warning the boy thrust out his fists, worked them deep into the shiny feathers, washing his hands with quick, eager movements.
“Brothers,” Torchia said, watching him. “See? He understands. Why don’t you?”
But he’s a child, Dino Abati thought. An innocent. He still believes this is a game.
“Where do we go now?” Vignola asked.
“Where this dead thing came from.”
Dino Abati looked at the crude, gaping hole of the tunnel.
“Sure,” he said.
Discreetly, he reached down and gripped the child’s tiny hand, sticky now with blood, then ducked beneath the sharp stony overhanging teeth, bent the beam of the flashlight forwards, and stepped carefully along the ground it revealed, hearing the shuffle of feet behind him, trying to force his aching head to think.
COSTA FOUND THE CORRIDOR, FOUND THE LIGHT SWITCH, dashed it up and down, knowing it was futile. Giorgio Bramante had worked some trick with the central fuse box, blacking out the entire floor somehow. If Costa were to believe the front desk, Bramante had been in the building little more than thirty minutes, accompanied only by an inexperienced cadet. Not long. It was as if he knew the place already.
Then he remembered what Falcone had said. Bramante was an intelligent, capable man, one used to being underground in the dark, at home in a foreign world where most would be lost, happy inventing a strategy as he went along. One who stored what he saw and held it for use later.
There were interview rooms on this floor, just a two-minute walk from where Falcone, Peroni, and Teresa were now sleeping, down through the Questura’s old narrow corridors to the cell in the basement where Ludo Torchia had been beaten to a pulp. Bramante could be working from memory, with a set plan in mind, one that had been developed and honed over the years he’d spent in jail.
He played his hand in the least expected places, always. And when it came to Leo Falcone, he could simply pretend to be someone else, someone who was threatened, not a threat. Someone who could talk their way inside the Questura after midnight, when everyone was a little sleepy, and too tired to ask good questions, because all of Rome, if not Italy, had watched TV, read the newspapers, knew full well that Leo Falcone was searching for a man of that name.
Then Bramante could wait for the moment he found himself alone with a rookie cop, one he could pull into a corner, beat the truth out of, quickly, before anyone else in the slumbering Questura woke up to what was happening.
That truth being: Leo Falcone was still in the building, fast asleep somewhere upstairs, believing that here, of all places, he was safe from everything.
The plan had a bleak simplicity that made Costa feel stupid for not having anticipated it.
Sorting through the possibilities as he carefully made his way through the unfamiliar darkness, Costa was aware how obvious the situation now was.
He stepped out into the centre of the corridor—as much as he could guess its location—and began to make his silent way behind the figure he’d seen slipping past the doorway, bound for the rooms that lay somewhere ahead in the dark. The gun lay loose in his fingers. Teresa and Peroni would be safe, but a part of his head was already beginning to calculate what Leo Falcone’s unanswered phone line signified.
A sound came to him through the pitch-black space ahead; someone walking, slowly, with more noise than Costa could have hoped for. Then the movement shifted direction, position too, flitting through the blackness with an infuriating uncertainty, not left, not right, somewhere Nic couldn’t quite pinpoint before there was silence again.
Costa was trying to analyse what had happened when something made him jump, the sweat running electric on his fingers as they gripped the weapon in his hand.
A man was breathing, heavily, the awkward, arrhythmic wheezings of an individual in stress, no more than a metre or two from where he stood.
Giorgio Bramante was only human, Costa reminded himself. A killer. A father who’d lost his only son. Criminal and victim in the same skin.
“Give it up, Giorgio,” he said in a loud, clear voice, trying to pinpoint the source of the sound, wondering if he was close enough to reach out and touch the man, incapacitate him with a sudden burst of violence that just might stay him until help arrived. “Don’t move. Don’t even think you’ve got somewhere to go.”
That uncanny sense of confusion returned through the silent gloom, and with it the realisation that this unreadable world was not a place where anything possessed solidity or c
ertainty. Finally, he caught the tail end of some low, throaty laughter, and the sense that Bramante had changed position, with an astonishing speed, in absolute silence, the moment he’d realised how close they were.
“You’re up late for one so young, Mr. Costa. Are you feeling tired? I’m not. I like this time of night.”
Hearing his own name sent a chill up Nic Costa’s spine.
There was a commotion from somewhere beyond where Bramante had to be. It was Peroni, bellowing in a loud, threatening voice. Costa waited for the fury to subside, then shouted, “Stay inside, Gianni! I’ve got a gun. This is covered. There’s backup on the way.”
Somewhere.
There were angry noises still from the distant door, Peroni’s and Teresa’s voices in conflict. He could imagine that argument: common sense clashing with instinct. He didn’t need that distraction right now.
“That’s a pretty girlfriend you have. Nice house, too, out there on the Appian Way. Does a police salary really pay for that?”
“No.” The more Bramante talked, the easier it was to find his position, to keep him stalled. “It was my father’s.”
Bramante didn’t answer straightaway. When the voice came back again, it was different in tone. Less amused. Less human, somehow.
“I wanted Alessio to have that house of ours on the Aventino,” Bramante said without a trace of emotion. “By that time I’d probably have paid it off.”
“I’m sorry. What happened was a tragedy.” There were men outside on the staircase. Costa could hear the babble of their confused voices, and the low, mutual tremor of indecision. “We’ll find out what happened. I promise you.”
“What use is that, in God’s name?”
“I thought it’s what you’d want.”
“I wanted that girlfriend of yours,” the voice said, floating casually out of the dark, almost relaxed again. He’d moved again. “She’d have been good for bargaining.” Another dry, soulless laugh. “And the rest.”
Costa didn’t rise to the bait. He wondered what exactly Bramante hoped to achieve by taunting him like this. “Is that what prison does to you?”
That brittle sound of amusement again. This time more distant.
“Oh yes. It brings out the man inside.”
Bramante was moving to where the corridor opened up to a larger area outside the emergency quarters, a place used for briefings and meetings during training sessions. The bunk rooms were on one side, high blacked-out windows on the other. Costa followed, trying to picture this part of the Questura more accurately in his head. The station was so familiar he thought he knew every last corner. But memory meant nothing without some visual prompts. He’d never expected to have to feel his way around like a blind man, struggling to draw a map out of senses that had nothing to do with vision—hearing, touch, smell. Talents Bramante had surely perfected, in all that time underground.
There were a few desks here. A collection of foldaway chairs. Four, five doors, perhaps six, two to the accommodation rooms, the rest for smaller meeting places.
Try as he might, he couldn’t remember which door was which, or how the seats and tables had been left that evening. Bramante could have walked through in the light, checking out everything before returning to the stairwell, where, Costa assumed, the fuse boxes were situated, and pitching the entire floor into darkness.
Then, from behind, he heard a burst of noise: men’s voices, angry shouts, the clash of metal on metal. Backup wasn’t going to be as easy, he realised. Costa could picture the fire door more clearly than anything else on the floor. It stood, a huge green hunk of iron, atop the staircase, rarely used except in drills. Once someone closed it and threw down the huge clasp, the entire floor was sealed. Bramante had found the time to do that somehow, and now the backup men were hammering away against solid steel, screaming at each other to come up with a solution. The building that housed the Questura was, in parts, three hundred years old. They’d never got around to installing an elevator in this section. It had never seemed necessary.
“How long do you think I have, Agente Costa?” the voice asked him, amused, coming from the darkness. “All I want is a little time with my old friend Leo.”
There was a tense, brittle catch in his voice when he said Falcone’s name.
“You hear that?” Bramante shouted without waiting for Nic’s reply. “A minute or two of your time? That’s all I need. It didn’t used to be so precious. I don’t remember you hiding away in the dark back then.”
He was moving again. Then the men at the doorway broke through, hammering down the old iron, screaming at each other to fight their way inside, their cries echoing down the long, long corridor.
Costa heard a door creak open ahead of him and then a familiar sound: Leo Falcone’s pained shuffle, the unsteady gait of a man struggling to be himself once more.
A small flicker of flame fluttered in the shadows on the far side of the room. It illuminated Falcone’s aquiline face and the upper part of his body: the bald head, the large, crooked nose, the jut of his silver goatee, and the lighter he held raised in his hand.
Costa gripped the gun more tightly, felt how the icy sweat made it slip in his palm, and edged towards the man by the puny flame, knowing that Bramante must be doing the same.
“Fourteen years ago,” the old inspector said nonchalantly, “I was busy putting you in jail for murder, Giorgio. It seems unfortunate I have to repeat that exercise now.”
Falcone held the flame aloft.
“If you have something you wish to say to me…” he continued, in a firm, untroubled voice.
The backup men were almost in but they were still a long way behind. Costa began to move, feeling the gun in his grip, wondering what use it might be, and how dangerous, with so many unseen figures filling the shadows around them.
Then Falcone cried out. The flame vanished. One muffled moan, perhaps two, broke through the darkness which enveloped everything again, disorienting Costa, making him wonder which way was forward, which back.
The iron door fell onto the Questura’s old tiles with a crash that roared through the building. A team of officers, angry, frustrated, were now fumbling in the direction of the small anteroom where Leo Falcone had been engulfed by the night, and something else.
“He’s got Leo!” Costa yelled at them. “Don’t shoot—”
The warning froze in his throat. Another light had come on now. The pencil beam was lit again, attached to the black helmeted head of a figure who was struggling manically against the far wall, wrestling with Leo Falcone, arms around his white shirt, doing something Costa could only imagine.
He remembered the slaughterhouse, the knives, and the sight of Toni LaMarca, his heart ripped apart while he hung alive from a meat hook, staring down at the face of the man who was murdering him.
The gun hung clammy in his fingers. He could hear men racing down the corridor now, men who’d no idea what they were facing, no clue about how it might be tackled.
Nic Costa recalled the layout of this hidden chamber very carefully, then pointed the weapon sideways, away from the oncoming team, out towards the dusty glass of the blacked-out windows. He pulled the trigger.
The resulting sound was so loud it seemed to take on a hard, physical dimension, reverberating around him as if multiple firearms had spent their ammunition in multiple dimensions, pummeling his head until he couldn’t think straight, couldn’t sort out what was happening around him in a sea of bodies, surging towards the white shirt on the floor, dimly visible in the flashlight beam which was now at the same level as Leo Falcone’s body.
There was something on the white fabric. A stain, dark and fluid.
Costa threw the gun aside, fought his way through the bodies, shoved forward until he saw Falcone.
A flashlight came on behind him: its beam broad and yellow, all-revealing.
The sight wasn’t what he expected. Leo Falcone was glaring at them all, eyes as bright as the bloodstained shirt that stuck to his
chest. The figure of a man still clung to him, unmoving, clad in black, with a woollen helmet of the same colour tight around his head.
“Are you….” Costa feared to ask.
“Yes!” Falcone spat back. “Now get him off me.”
Costa took hold of the man’s body.
“You’ll need a knife,” Falcone said, inexplicably.
“What…?”
The rest of them crowded in. Costa could hear Teresa Lupo yelling to be allowed through. They needed a doctor. They all knew that.
Then, finally, someone found the fuses, flipped whatever switches Giorgio Bramante had manipulated to send this entire section of the Questura into the darkness the killer thought of as his own.
The lights blazed on in a sudden, cruel flood. Costa blinked, unable to make sense of what he now saw.
In Leo Falcone’s arms was the same man he’d seen in the beam of the flashlight. The caver’s helmet was shattered along one side, revealing a wet and shiny scalp, damp with blood. Something else, bone, maybe, some kind of matter, was visible beneath.
A heavy rope bound Leo Falcone and the figure in black tightly at the waist. It was tied with a serious knot and held with the kind of metal clamp that Costa remembered from his climbing days. One called a krab.
“I didn’t shoot him,” Costa said quietly, almost to himself, as he watched Peroni kneel and start to work on the rope with a penknife, Falcone struggling impatiently all the time. “I didn’t shoot him. I pointed the gun over…”
He paused and looked around him. Now that it was lit, the room looked nothing like the place he’d pictured in his head. In truth, Costa had no idea where he’d pointed the weapon. It was stupid to have discharged it in the dark. Had it not been for the sight of Falcone, struggling with the man who’d butchered another human being not long before, he’d never have considered it.
