by David Hewson
Peroni finally worked his way through the rope, then helped Falcone struggle to his feet. The big man wasn’t even glancing in Costa’s direction. He was looking at Teresa Lupo, who was kneeling by the stricken man, feeling for a pulse, starting to work the helmet off his damaged head.
“I didn’t shoot him, for God’s sake,” Costa said loudly, aware of the chill around him, in the team of men, more than a dozen now, who’d arrived to witness the spectacle.
“What does it matter?” one of them grunted. “How many people did he kill anyway? He—”
The officer went quiet. Falcone was glowering at him, livid, looking his old self, for all the grey, sallow pain in his face.
“None,” Falcone said with a scowl. “Absolutely…”
He bent down, reached in front of Teresa Lupo and dragged the remains of the helmet off the dead man’s head.
“…none.”
The face was older than Nic Costa remembered from the files. But he still had a full head of bright red hair, now matted with blood. All the same, Dino Abati’s features seemed more lined and worn than was right for a man of his age, even in death.
Costa thought again of the cleaner at the back of the incident room, someone who’d been in the Questura all evening, unquestioned, unseen.
“I didn’t kill him,” Costa repeated quietly.
Falcone peered down at the body that lay on the floor, bent in an awkward, prenatal crouch.
“No, you didn’t. Giorgio Bramante shot the poor bastard, while you people were running around like idiots. Now he’s…where? I don’t suppose there’s someone with half a brain on the door.”
It was Prinzivalli, the gruff old uniform sovrintendente from Milan, who finally found the courage to speak.
“We thought you were in trouble, sir,” he answered. “And I’m sure I speak for everyone when I say we’re delighted to see we were mistaken.”
ARTURO MESSINA STOOD ON THE BROW OF THE HILL at the edge of the Orange Garden, gazing out over the river, lost in thought. Next to him, Leo Falcone waited, trying to be the dutiful sovrintendente, struggling to find the right words with which to tell the older man, a well-established commissario, one who carried respect throughout the force, that he might be wrong. Deeply, seriously wrong, in a way that could threaten the entire investigation.
“Sir?” Falcone said quietly in a gap between the loud, throaty roars of the machinery below. Two small mechanical diggers were warming up their engines, awaiting orders, much like him. It was now late afternoon. Five hours had passed since the boy had first been reported missing by his father. Four hours before Messina had put out the call for the six students after listening to Giorgio Bramante’s story. Bramante was their professor. He knew them well and had seen them exiting the underground warren of tunnels when he surfaced to see if his son had somehow escaped the caves without him. In spite of hearing his calls, they had fled down the hill in the direction of the peace camp on the Circus Maximus, trying to lose themselves among three thousand or more people living there in tents, protesting daily about the continuing horrors across the water in what had so recently been Yugoslavia.
Now every officer Messina could muster was on the case: half were hunting for the students, the remainder working with the hundreds of civilians who kept turning up to offer their help in the search for the missing seven-year-old. TV crews and packs of journalists were kept back from the excavation site by the yellow tape cordoning off the small park overlooking the Tiber. A growing crowd of mute bystanders, some of whom looked ready to turn ugly, had joined them. The story about the students had already got out somehow. Blame was already beginning to be apportioned, with a swiftness and certainty that gave Falcone a cold feeling in his stomach. There was a touch of the mob to some of the people lurking around the Aventino just then. Had any of those students happened to emerge in their midst, Falcone knew that he would have to act swiftly to protect them from the public. Rationality and a sense of justice flew out the window in cases like these, depriving a good officer of the cold, detached viewpoint that was necessary in all investigations.
While the father joined—almost led—the hunt for the child, his wife was in a police van inside the cordon, saying little, staring at the outside world with haunted eyes that held little in the way of hope.
And all they had to go on was the fact that, when Alessio went missing, the boy had been deep beneath the dark red earth of this quiet, residential hill, not far from a bunch of students who were probably up to no good. Students his father had heard, gone to track down, telling his son to stay safe where he was, only to return some considerable time later—how long? No one had actually asked—without locating the intruders, to find the boy gone.
In public, Bramante reacted exactly as an individual was expected to in such situations, which gave Falcone pause for thought. Something about the man concerned him. Giorgio Bramante seemed too perfect—distraught to a measured degree, just enough to allow him to benefit from the sympathy of others, but never, not for one moment, sufficient to allow him to lose control.
There was also the question of the wound. The professor had a bright red weal on his right temple, the result, he said, of a fall while stumbling through the caves, searching for his son. Injuries always interested Leo Falcone, and in normal circumstances he would have taken the opportunity to explore this one further. That, however, Arturo Messina expressly forbade. For the commissario, the answer lay with the students. Falcone could not believe they would remain free for long. None had police records, though one, Toni LaMarca, came from a family known for its crime connections. All six were, it seemed, average, ordinary young men who had gone down into the caves beneath the Aventino for reasons the police failed to understand. Messina seemed obsessed with finding out what they were. The same issue intrigued Falcone, too, though not as much as what he regarded as more pertinent questions. What was Giorgio Bramante doing there with his son in the first place? And why did he have a livid red gash on his forehead, one that could just as easily have come from a struggle as a simple accident?
“Say it,” the older man ordered with a barely disguised impatience. “Are you worried this will interfere with the homework for the inspector’s exams or something? I always knew you were an ambitious little bastard, but you could let it drop for now.”
“‘Little’ seems somewhat unfair, sir,” Falcone, who was somewhat taller than the portly Messina, protested dryly.
“Well? What’s on your mind? This is nothing personal, you know. I think you’re an excellent police officer. I just wish you had a spot more humanity. Cases like this…you walk around with that hangdog look of yours as if they don’t even touch you. Shame you screwed up that marriage. Kids do wonders for putting a man in his place.”
“We’re making many assumptions. I wonder if that’s wise.”
Messina’s heavy eyebrows furrowed in disbelief. “I’m stupid now, am I?”
“I didn’t say that at all, sir. I’m merely concerned that we don’t focus simply on the obvious.”
“The reason the obvious is the obvious,” Messina replied testily, “is because it’s what normally gets us results. That may not be fashionable in the inspector’s examination today, but there it is.”
“Sir,” Falcone replied quietly, “we don’t know where the boy may be. We don’t how or why any of this occurred.”
“Students!” Messina bellowed. “Students! Like all those damned anarchists in their tents, fouling up the middle of Rome, doing whatever else they like. Not that I imagine it much concerns you.”
There had been two arrests at the peace camp. They’d had more trouble at religious events. Next to a Roma versus Lazio race, it was nothing.
“I fail to see any relevance with the peace camp—” Falcone started to say.
“Peace camp. Peace camp? What did we find down in those damned caves again? Remind me.”
A dead bird, throat cut, and a few spent joints. It wasn’t pleasant. But it wasn’t a han
ging offence either.
“I’m not saying they weren’t doing something wrong down there. I just think it’s a big leap from some juvenile piece of black magic and a little dope to child abduction. Or worse.”
Messina wagged his finger in Falcone’s face. “And there—there!—is exactly where you’re wrong. Remember that I said that when they make you inspector.”
“Sir,” Falcone said, temper rising, “this is not about me.”
“It begins with ‘a little dope’ and the idea you can pitch a tent in the heart of Rome and tell the rest of the world to go screw itself. It ends…”—Messina waved his big hand at the crowds behind the yellow tape—“…out there. With a bunch of people looking to us to clean up a mess we should have prevented in the first place. Good officers know you have to nip this kind of behaviour in the bud. Whatever it takes. You can’t read a bunch of textbooks while the world’s going to rack and ruin.”
“I am merely trying to suggest that there are avenues we haven’t yet explored. Giorgio Bramante—”
“Oh for God’s sake! Not that again. The man agreed to take his son to school, only to find the teachers are having one of those stupid paperwork love-ins the likes of you doubtless think pass as genuine labour. So he took him to work instead. Parents do that, Leo. I did it, and God forgive me the boy’s in the force now, too.”
“I understand that…”
“No. You don’t. You can’t.”
“Bramante didn’t take his son to work. He took him underground, into an excavation few people knew about, one that he believed was entirely empty.”
“My boy would have loved that when he was seven.”
“So why did he leave him there?”
Messina sighed. “If there’s a burglar in your house, do you invite your son along to watch you deal with him? Well?”
“We need to interview Giorgio Bramante properly. In the Questura. We need to go through what happened minute by minute. He has that injury. Also…”
Falcone paused, knowing that he was on the verge of being led by his imagination, not good reasoning. Nevertheless, this seemed important, and he was determined Arturo Messina should know. Watching Bramante join the search parties for Alessio that afternoon, Falcone felt sure that the man was looking for someone other than a minor. It was as simple as a question of posture. Children were smaller. However illogical, at close to medium quarters, one tended to adjust one’s gaze accordingly. Giorgio Bramante’s eye level was horizontal, always, as if seeking an adult, or someone on the horizon, neither of which made sense for a seven-year-old boy.
Messina’s dark eyes opened wide with astonishment as Falcone elaborated. “You expect me to pull the boy’s father in for questioning because there’s something you don’t like about the angle of his head? Are you mad? What do you think they’d make of that? Them and the media?” He beckoned towards the crowd.
“I don’t care what they think,” Falcone insisted. “Do you? There’s the question of the wound, his behaviour, and the holes in his story. Those, to my mind, are sufficient.”
“This is ridiculous. Take it from me, Leo. I’m a father too. The way he’s behaving is exactly the way any of us would in the circumstances. He couldn’t be more cooperative, for God’s sake. How the hell would we have found our way around those caves without him? When we have those students, when we know what’s happened to the kid…then you can sit down and go through your stupid procedures. Now tell me how we can find that boy.”
“The injury—”
“You’ve been in those caves! It’s a death trap down there! Are you honestly surprised a man should stumble in them? Do you think all the world is as perfect as you?”
Falcone had no good answer. “I agree,” he replied evenly, “that it is dangerous down there. That affects our efforts to find the boy too. We’ve gone as far as we dare. It’s treacherous. There are tunnels the military don’t feel happy entering. We’ve brought in some equipment they use during earthquakes to locate people who are trapped. Nothing. We need to pursue all possible options.”
Messina scowled. “He could be unconscious, Leo. I know that’s inconvenient but it’s a fact.”
“They tell me he would still show up through thermal imaging if he was unconscious. Given the short time that’s elapsed, he’d show up even if he was dead. If he’s anywhere we could hope to reach, that is.”
“Oh no,” Messina said quietly, miserably, half to himself, eyes on the ground, detached from everything at that moment, even the case ahead of them.
Falcone felt briefly embarrassed. There was something in Messina’s expression he didn’t—couldn’t—share. A man who had no experience of fatherhood could imagine the loss of a child, sympathise with it, feel anger, become determined to put the wrong right. But there was an expression in Messina’s face that Falcone could only guess at. A sentiment that seemed to say This is a part of me that’s damaged—perhaps irrevocably.
“Don’t let him be dead, Leo,” Messina moaned, and for the first time seemed, in Leo Falcone’s eyes, a man beginning to show his age.
LIKE FATHER, LIKE SON,” FALCONE MURMURED AS THE three of them shuffled into Bruno Messina’s office. They were in the quarters on the sixth floor. From Messina’s corner room, there should have been a good view of the cobbled piazza below. All they saw now was a smear of brown stone. The rain was coming down in vertical stripes. The forecast was for a period of unsettled weather lasting days: sudden storms and heavy downpours broken by outbreaks of brief bright sun. Spring was arriving in Rome, and it was a time of extremes.
Messina sat in a leather chair behind his large, well-polished desk trying to look like a man in control. It was an act he needed. The Questura was teeming with officers. Local, pulled in from leave. Strangers, too, since Messina had demanded an external inquiry into the security lapses that had allowed the attack on Falcone, wisely choosing to endure the pain of outside scrutiny before it was forced upon him. No one yet seemed much minded to blame Leo Falcone or those close to him. How could they? But the low, idle chatter had begun. Scapegoats would be sought for the disaster of the night before.
The commissario had suspended the civilian security officer who had failed to spot that the ID used by Bramante to pose as a cleaner actually belonged to a woman, one whose handbag had been stolen while shopping in San Giovanni a week before and was now on vacation in Capri, a fact that would have been obvious from the personal diary that had disappeared along with the rest of her belongings. The rookie agente ambushed by Bramante when he abducted Dino Abati was now at home recovering from a bad beating, and scared witless, Costa suspected, about what would happen when the inquiry came round to him. Messina was acting with a swift, ruthless ferocity because he understood that his own position, as a commissario only nine months into the job, was damaged. That had led him to put some distance between himself and Falcone as head of the investigation, hoping perhaps to shift the blame onto his subordinate should the sky begin to fall.
The effect was not as Messina had planned. The word that was on everyone’s lips that morning was “sloppy.” The media were enjoying a field day about a murder that had happened in the heart of the centro storico’s principal Questura. Politicians, never slow to seize an opportunity to deflect criticism from their own lapses, were getting in on the act. What had occurred, rumors inside and out of the force were beginning to say, had taken place because the juniors, Messina in particular, were now in charge. They had lax standards when it came to matters of general routine. They put paperwork and procedural issues ahead of the mundane considerations of old-style policing. No one, it was whispered, had ever accused Falcone of such lapses of attention. Nor would they now throw that accusation in the direction of the fast-recovering individual who was marching around his old haunt like a man who’d rediscovered the fire in his belly.
Messina looked as if he couldn’t wait to stamp that fire into ashes. The commissario watched the three of them—Falcone, Costa, and Peroni—take the
ir seats, then stated, “I’ve brought in someone else to run this case, Falcone. Don’t argue. We can’t have a man heading an inquiry into his own attempted murder. The same goes for you two. There’s a young inspector I want to try out. Bavetti. You’ll give him every assistance—”
“You’re making a mistake,” Falcone said without emotion.
“I’m not sure I want to hear that from you.”
“You will, nevertheless,” the inspector went on. “I kept quiet for too long when a Messina was screwing up once before. I’m not doing it twice.”
“Dammit, Falcone! I won’t be spoken to like that. You listen to me.”
“No!” the inspector yelled. “You listen. I’m the one Giorgio Bramante came looking for last night, aren’t I? These two and their women got their photos taken by that man. Doesn’t that give us some rights?”
Messina folded his arms and scowled. “No.”
“Then listen out of your own self-interest. If your old man had heard me out fourteen years ago, he’d never have left the force in disgrace. Do you want to go the same way?”
Messina closed his eyes, furious. Falcone had hit his target.
Without waiting, Falcone launched into retelling the information he’d managed to assemble overnight, speaking rapidly, fluently, without the slightest sign that he was affected by the previous year’s injuries or Giorgio Bramante’s more recent attentions. If anyone doubted whether the shooting in Venice had diminished the man’s mental faculties, Costa thought, they were unlikely to harbour those misconceptions for long in the face of the precise, logical way Falcone now painted, in a few short minutes, a picture of recent events and how he had reacted to them.
Two officers had spent the night checking with contacts in the social agencies and the hostels dealing with itinerants. It was clear Dino Abati was far from a stranger to them. He had made a polite street bum, one who never asked for much more than simple charity. Those who dealt with him regarded him as educated, honest, and more than a little lost. Abati stood out, too, with that head of red hair. Given the facts—Abati was in Italy, outside the normal system of ID checks, social security records, and tax payments—the street was an obvious place for the authorities to look for him. Bramante just happened to have been several steps ahead of them.
