by David Hewson
ABATI HAD BEEN DUE to spend the previous night in a hostel run by an order of monks near Termini. At eleven in the evening, after his free meal and an evening spent watching TV, a staff member had found an anonymous letter addressed to him, left in the hostel entrance, at the front desk, by an unseen visitor. Abati read the letter. Then, without saying a word, he’d walked out of the building.
They had recovered the document from a trash can in the communal living room. It said, simply:
Dino:
I was talking to Leo Falcone earlier today. You remember him? He thought it was time the two of you met up. I tend to agree. The sooner the better. Or should we discuss this face to face?
Giorgio.
“Wonderful,” Messina groaned after Falcone filled him in. “This man is three steps ahead of us all the way. What is he? Psychic or something?”
“Tell him,” Falcone told Costa icily.
Costa kept it short. That morning, he’d made this call himself, to Dino Abati’s mother, after the local force had broken the bad news. Three months before, she’d received a letter, supposedly from the missing Sandro Vignola, asking urgently for her son’s whereabouts. The letter had contained personal details that made her believe the message was genuine. They were, when Costa checked, the kind of information Bramante, as Abati’s professor, would have known: birth date, home address, student haunts.
“So…” Messina acknowledged with little grace, “you have got something.”
“More than that,” Costa went on. “We’re checking with the other families too. The Belluccis say they got a similar letter several months before their son died. It’s a reasonable bet we’ll find out the same method was used with the others. That was how Bramante tracked them down.”
“And we never found out?” the commissario asked, incredulous.
“You said it yourself,” Falcone replied. “They were different cases, handled by different forces. No one made the link. Why should they? There’s more. Early this morning we sent men round to each of the obvious hostels you’d expect a well-mannered itinerant to use.”
Costa smiled. It was a typical Falcone shot in the dark. Nine out of ten times such efforts never paid off. But…
“Four hostels close to the Questura, ones that knew Abati, received an identical letter last night,” Costa said. “Each was delivered sometime in the early evening. The one in the Campo has CCTV of the person responsible. He was wearing a cleaner’s uniform, with the insignia of the same private company we use for housekeeping. Their office reported a break-in two nights ago. Clothing and money were taken. Bramante deliberately planned to drive Abati towards the Questura. Where else would he go? And if he didn’t turn up, Bramante had Leo…Inspector Falcone. It’s called covering your options.”
Messina swore under his breath. “Good work, Agente,” he muttered unhappily.
“I just go where I’m told, sir.”
That was true too. What had occurred bore Giorgio Bramante’s style, something Leo Falcone had recognised from the outset. Everything had been planned, down to the last detail, with alternatives should the original scheme go awry.
Even so, Costa felt uneasy. Bramante could have killed both Abati and Leo at that last moment, finished his list for good. And many reading their newspapers the next day would have felt some sympathy with him.
Instead, Bramante let Leo live, and that seemed to enrage—indeed, to infuriate—the inspector more than ever. Costa had seen this steely glint in Falcone’s eye before. This case had become the entire focus of Falcone’s world. Nothing now mattered until every last unresolved detail—and that included the fate of Alessio Bramante—was brought to a satisfactory conclusion.
“Look, Leo.” Messina sounded a little conciliatory. “Put yourself in my position. You’re personally involved in this case. All three of you.”
“We were involved yesterday,” Falcone pointed out. “It didn’t seem to worry you then.”
Messina looked dejected. He wasn’t entirely his own man, Costa thought. There would be pressure from above. A young commissario’s career could hang on how he handled difficult cases like this.
“Yesterday I thought this was going to be simple. Either you brought in Bramante quickly and covered yourself in a little glory. Or you fouled up and—let’s be honest with one another—that would be an end to it. You could retire. Like my father.”
Falcone was unmoved. “I still don’t see what’s changed.”
“What’s changed? I’ll tell you! This bloodthirsty animal isn’t running from us. He’s got the damn nerve to bring his murderous habits right to our own doorstep! That’s an entirely different game. I can’t make…” He glanced away from them. “…I can’t base my decisions on personal issues. I just want this whole mess cleaned up. Now. For good. With no more bodies. Unless it’s Giorgio Bramante’s. He’s caused us enough grief for one lifetime.”
Peroni leaned forward and tapped the desk hard with his fat index finger. “You think we want otherwise?”
“No,” Messina admitted, shrinking back into his leather chair. No one liked the look of Peroni when he was getting mad. “I just don’t intend to take any more risks. How would the three of you feel about a little holiday? I’ll pick up the bill. Sicily maybe. Take your women along. The pathologist too. Two weeks. A month. I don’t mind.”
They looked at one another. It was Peroni who spoke first.
“What kind of men do you think we are?”
“Meaning?” the commissario replied warily.
“What kind of serving police officer walks away from a case like this? To sit in some out-of-season hotel swilling wine at the taxpayers’ expense just because you don’t like having us around?”
“It’s not that—” Messina began to say.
“What kind of senior officer would even contemplate offering such a thing?” Peroni persisted, interrupting him.
“The kind of officer who doesn’t like going to funerals.” Messina picked up a pen and waved it in the big man’s direction. “Is that so bad? Understand this. I don’t know if I can keep you alive. Any of you. If I can’t guarantee your safety in the Questura, where the hell am I supposed to put you? In jail? How would you run an investigation from there, Leo? Answer me that.”
Falcone thought about it for a very short moment.
“I keep this case for two more days. I give you my word I won’t put myself in the way of danger. Costa and Peroni here…it’s up to them. I think they can look after one another.”
“Correct, sir,” Costa said.
“If there’s no concrete progress,” Falcone continued, “if I don’t seem to be on the point of closing Bramante down after forty-eight hours, you give the whole show to Bavetti. That’s the deal.”
Messina laughed. It didn’t seem to be a sound he made often. “A deal? A deal? Who the hell do you think you are to come in here and offer me deals? You’re a cripple living on past gratitude. Don’t stretch my patience.”
“Those are my conditions.”
Messina made that strange dry noise again. “Conditions. And if I say go to hell?”
“Then I quit,” Falcone answered. “Then I do something I’ve never even contemplated before: I walk straight out there and tell those jackals from the newspapers why.”
“Quit,” Peroni repeated. “I love that word.”
He reached into his jacket pocket, pulled out his wallet, withdrew his police ID card, and placed it on the desk.
Costa did the same. Then he added the handgun he’d used to no good purpose the previous night.
Peroni looked at the weapon, then glanced at him. “You never really liked guns, did you, Nic?”
“There are a lot of things in this job you get to dislike,” Costa said. “It’s just a question of learning to live with them.”
Messina glared at them from across the polished desk.
“I’ll remember this, you bastards,” he muttered, furious. “Forty-eight hours, Falcone. After that, it’s
not Giorgio Bramante you have to worry about. It’s me.”
THEY HAD BREAKFAST IN THE CONSERVATORY: COFFEE and pastries, and a view out to the Duomo. The weather had changed. Rain clouds had thrown a grey-winged embrace around the hilltop town of Orvieto. There would be no walks today, as Arturo and Pietro had planned. Instead Emily would rest, and think about the case a little. Not too much, though. She still felt tired, a little wrong, and it wasn’t just being disturbed by Nic’s call and the frenzy that followed. She hadn’t gone to bed until three, which was how long it had taken to discover he was safe. Even then she hadn’t slept well. She couldn’t stop thinking of the missing Alessio Bramante, wondering whether Nic’s customary optimism could possibly be correct. Instinct told her the opposite. Instinct was sometimes to be avoided.
Pietro had stayed the night at the villa. He looked a little the worse for wear. So did Raffaella; Emily had retired to a corner with a coffee and a newspaper after a brief conversation with them, an exchange of pleasantries, a question about Emily’s health, a mutual sharing of observations about the predictable nature of men. In spite of the commotion in the Questura, Falcone had never phoned. Nor had he returned Raffaella’s call when, in desperation, she had attempted to reach him around two. Emily had tried to tell her he’d be busy. It hadn’t cut much ice. It hadn’t deserved to.
Then, after Arturo and Pietro had carefully tidied away the cups and plates, Emily retreated to the study, fired up the computer, spent thirty minutes reading the American papers online: the Washington Post, the New York Times. Familiar pillars she could lean on, established icons that never changed, were always there when you needed them. It wasn’t the news she sought. Emily Deacon had spent more of her life in Italy than in her native America. All the same, she knew she wasn’t fully a part of the country she was coming to regard as her home. She lacked the true Roman’s frank, open, immediate attitude to existence. She didn’t want to face the good and the bad head-on, day in, day out. Sometimes it was best to circumvent the subject, to pretend it didn’t exist. To lie a little, in the hope that sometime soon, tomorrow perhaps, next week, or maybe even never, one could hope to stare the day down without blinking.
And so she read idly, of a world of politics that was now foreign to her, of football games and movie stars, bestsellers she’d never heard of, and corporate scandals that mattered not a jot in Italy. After a while Arturo Messina came in with coffee, which she refused. He sat down in the large, comfy leather chair at the end of the desk, took a sip of his own, and said, very politely, “You’re using too much of my electricity, Emily. Unless you tell me that’s something other than Alessio Bramante you’re hunting on my computer, I will, I swear, turn the damn thing off.”
“I was reading about the New York Mets,” she said, and it was only half a lie. She’d been about to follow up on Nic’s comments about what happened to abducted children, and how they were absorbed by the alien culture in which they found themselves. “But I’m done.”
She leaned back, shut her eyes, and took a deep breath. It would be a long day, with very little to fill it.
“I talked to your Nic last night,” Arturo revealed. “He’s a little concerned about your health. I didn’t realise…” He nodded in the direction of Emily’s stomach. “Congratulations. In my day we had this antiquated habit of getting married first, then bringing the babies along a little later. But I am, of course, part dinosaur, so what do I know?
“It’s the biggest adventure a couple can take together,” he went on. “Whatever it costs. However painful it is at times, and it will be, I can promise you that. Children give you more than you can possibly imagine. They bring you back down to earth, and make you realise that’s the right place to be. When you watch them growing, day by day, you understand we’re all just small and mortal and we’d best make the most of what we have. You realise we’re all just here for a little time, and now you have someone to whom you can pass on a little of yourself before you go. So you lose a few shreds of your arrogance if you’re lucky. You’re not the same person anymore.”
“People tell me that.”
“But you don’t understand yet. None of us ever do. Not till it happens. And then…” A shadow of concern crossed his face. “Then you can’t see the world in any other way,” he continued. “This is, I suspect, a failing in a police officer. Emily, I don’t want to talk about the case if it upsets you. It’s a very serious affair. I’ve asked the local police to put an armed car on the gate here. I don’t want you to feel insecure for any reason. Or unhappy. Just read a book. I’ll fetch something from town if you like. I can probably get you a real American paper.”
She stared at the distant black and white cathedral, shining under the drenching rain. Then she said, “He wouldn’t come here, Arturo. This is about Rome. He’s playing out his final act. He wouldn’t want it anywhere else.”
He laughed. “I can see why Leo sent you the files. I wish I’d had someone like you around all those years ago.”
“You had Leo.”
“I know,” he replied, with obvious regret. “And I was very hard on him. Cruel. I don’t think that’s too strong a word. He brought that out in me. Few people do. But Leo was so damned resolute. As if none of it really touched him. To him, it was just another case. He can be so…infuriating. With that cold, detached manner of his.”
“That’s not the real Leo. He’s a considerate man at heart. He feels the need to suppress that sometimes. I don’t know why.”
Arturo raised one bushy eyebrow. “I‘ll take your word on that. All the same, I owe him an apology. I keep thinking of what happened then. The stupid, bullheaded way I handled everything. I should have listened to him more. But…”
He didn’t finish the sentence.
“But what?”
“I told you! I was a father too. Like Bramante. Leo wasn’t. He and I were two human beings looking at the same facts from very different parts of the universe. All I could think of was Alessio Bramante, somewhere inside that blasted hill. Hurt perhaps. Unconscious. Capable of being rescued, and that is what any father would hope to do in those circumstances. It’s something genetic that leaps out from under your skin. Save the child. Always save the child, and ask questions later. Everything else was just a side issue. Leo has this insufferable ability to detach himself from the emotional side of a case. I resented that.”
He dashed back the last of his coffee.
“And I envied it, to be honest,” he added. “Leo was right. I was wrong. I knew that back then but I was too stubborn to admit it. We should have been asking a lot more while we were trying to find Alessio. But Giorgio Bramante was a good man, a well-connected, middle-class university professor. And they were a bunch of grubby, dope-smoking students. It all seemed so obvious. I was a fool.”
Emily reached over and touched his hand. Something seemed to stir inside her at that moment. A warm feeling below the pit of her stomach. It was impossible to tell whether the sensation was good or bad, pleasure or pain.
“Arturo, we don’t know what happened. Perhaps those students did kill Alessio. Accidentally, maybe. Those caves were dangerous. Perhaps the child simply escaped them and fell down some hole. And they were too frightened to admit their part in it all. Or…”
Nic’s idea wouldn’t leave her, and it wasn’t just because its very substance was so typical of his character, such a telling reminder of why she loved him.
“…or perhaps he’s still alive.”
He glanced at her, then his eyes meandered to the window, but not before she detected the sadness in them.
“He’s not alive, Emily. Don’t fool yourself.”
“We don’t know,” she insisted. “We’re in the dark about so many things. Why the boy was there in the first place. Why Bramante left him. The truth is we don’t understand much of anything about that man.”
“That’s true.” Arturo admitted it miserably.
“Even now,” she went on. “Where the hell is he? He must
have access to equipment. To money. To the news. But I can’t believe he’s holed up in some apartment somewhere. It would be too dangerous, and Giorgio Bramante isn’t a man who’ll take unnecessary risks. Not when he thinks he’s got unfinished business.”
He brightened immediately.
“Come, come. It’s obvious where Giorgio is.”
“It is?”
“Of course! He spent most of his life in the Rome the rest of us never see. Underground. Have you never been there?”
“Only once. I went to Nero’s Golden House. It made me claustrophobic.”
“Ha! Let an old policeman tell you something. The Domus Aurea is just one tiny fraction of what’s left. There’s an entire underground city down there, almost as big as it was in Caesar’s day. There are houses and temples, entire streets. Some of them have been excavated. Some of them were just never fully filled with earth for some reason. I talked to a couple of the cavers Leo called in. They hero-worshipped Giorgio. The man had been to places the rest of them could only dream about. Half of them unmapped. That’s where he is, Emily. Not that it does us any good now, does it? If we wanted to find Giorgio today, the best person to ask would be…Giorgio! Wonderful.”
She thought about this, and the stirring in her stomach ceased. She asked, “I imagine you never put much store in forensic evidence, did you?”
“Not unless I was really desperate,” he admitted. “That’s all they think of these days, isn’t it? Sitting around waiting for some civilian in a white coat to stare at a test tube, then point at a suspect lineup and say, ‘That one.’ Use science if you have to. But crimes are committed by people. If you want answers, ask a human being. Not a computer.”
