The Seventh Sacrament

by David Hewson

  She hesitated, gave Peroni a dark look, then said, “If you really want my help, you can cut out that kind of bullshit. I didn’t have anything to do with Alessio getting lost. I haven’t the faintest idea what happened to him. You’re the police, aren’t you? Isn’t that your job?”

  Costa slid a hand across to Peroni’s arm and stopped the big man reacting.

  “Agreed,” he said evenly. “Which is why we’re here, Professor Turnhouse. What was Giorgio like back then?”

  She said something curt and monosyllabic under her breath, then stared deliberately at her watch.

  “Also,” Costa persisted, “what’s he like now? Changed or what?”

  She stopped looking at her wrist and gazed straight into his face. Judith Turnhouse wasn’t a woman who felt frightened of anything, he realised. She was a senior academic, an important cog in an important wheel, at least inside her own head. She wasn’t much interested in anything else.

  “Now?” she repeated icily.

  “Giorgio Bramante came here. A week ago. He had an argument with someone. So loud even the Carabinieri outside heard it. Then he stormed off. My guess is he had that argument with you.”

  She toyed with the pen on the desk. “Really?”

  “You know,” Costa continued, “on that basis alone I could go to a magistrate. Giorgio is a convicted killer who’s picked up his old bad habits. He’s a threat to the community. I could ask for papers that would let me go through everything here. Your computers. Your files. Every last site you’re working on inside that hill…”

  “We’re working on nothing,” she grumbled. “Everything is elsewhere these days.”

  Peroni smiled and folded his very large arms over his chest. “We could sit here looking at you for so long, that year-end report will be about next year. If you’re lucky.”

  Her pale, anxious face was taut with some inner, constrained fury.

  “Or,” Costa suggested, “we could just have a friendly chat, a look around that site, and be out of here by noon. It’s up to you.”

  Judith Turnhouse picked up the phone, then said, in an accent still marked by her native American, “Chiara? Cancel all my appointments.” She glared at them. “Persuasive pair, aren’t you?”

  “Rumour has it,” Peroni concurred.

  “You.” She pointed at Costa. “The polite one. Start taking notes. I’ll tell you everything I know about dear, sweet Giorgio, past and present.”

  She rose and went to a floor-length cupboard by the window. From it, she removed a bright orange jumpsuit, stepping into it in an easy, familiar fashion.

  “After that,” Judith Turnhouse added, “I’ll show you what was once a miracle.”

  BY SEVEN O’CLOCK THEY STILL HAD ONLY THE ONE STUDENT, the one suspect: Ludo Torchia. The others would, Falcone suspected, be found soon. They weren’t the kind to stay invisible for long. They dabbled in drugs and took a close, almost unhealthy, interest in Giorgio Bramante’s theories about Mithraism, Ludo Torchia most of all. But nothing Falcone had seen made him suspect these six were capable of cooking up the conspiracy the media were looking for.

  Torchia had been placed in the last interview room in the basement, a former cell with no window to the outside, just an air vent and bright lighting, a metal table and four chairs. It was the place they reserved for more difficult customers, and ones they wanted to frighten a little. There were four other rooms adjoining it, running to the old metal staircase that led up to the ground floor offices. No one else was in for questioning that night. Falcone was leaving the other rooms open for the remaining students when they were found. The Bramante case was the Questura’s sole focus, and would remain so until either a resolution emerged, or it became apparent that the moment was lost, and the investigation would gradually subside into the low-key, quiet operation that would acknowledge what Falcone now believed to be true: Alessio Bramante was already dead.

  Under instructions to await Commissario Messina’s arrival, he had spoken with the student only to establish the bare essentials: his name, his address. Everything else—all the routine checks and procedures—were to wait. Messina was, it seemed, playing this game by ear. It seemed a dangerous and unnecessary response to the hysteria now being played out in the street and on the TV.

  Falcone also decided that Giorgio Bramante, to the man’s obvious fury, would wait elsewhere until Messina’s arrival. He half hoped he could make his superior see sense. Then, at ten minutes to eight, the commissario returned to the Questura. Falcone took one look at his face and realised it wasn’t even worth the effort. The man looked as furious as Bramante himself. He also looked lost, something which Falcone did not see in Alessio’s father.

  “The others?” Messina demanded.

  “Still looking,” Falcone replied. “We’ll find them.”

  “Doesn’t matter,” the commissario grumbled. “One will do. Where’s Giorgio?”

  Reluctantly, aware that there was no sense in arguing, Falcone went to fetch the man himself.

  Giorgio Bramante didn’t say a word when he saw Messina. That, in itself, Falcone found intriguing.

  Messina clapped him on the shoulder and peered into his eyes.

  “We will find your boy, Giorgio,” he said firmly. “Give us twenty minutes with this creature to ourselves. If we have nothing after that…it’s your turn.”

  IT WAS HARD TO BELIEVE THERE HAD EVER BEEN ANYTHING of value here. Beyond the Orange Garden, on the steep slope that led down the sharp riverside incline of the Aventino, adjoining the Clivo di Rocca Savella, was what now looked like a rubbish dump. The ground was uneven, part grass, part dun earth. Empty plastic bottles were strewn around in patches of debris beneath low, meagre scrub. Costa spotted two used syringes before they’d even scrambled down the muddy narrow path that led from the park above, then wound, by a snaking, perilous route, on to the throng of the riverside road below.

  They stumbled through the mud until they found a small platform of even earth. The rain had stopped. Judith Turnhouse had dragged up the hood of her caving suit. She looked around, grimaced, then pulled the hood down again.

  “This is it?” Peroni asked.

  “This was it,” she replied.

  Costa kicked over a couple of sods of grass. There was stone beneath, the ribbed surface of what looked like some kind of column.

  “They brought in the bulldozers,” Turnhouse added. “They tore everything down. When we found it, all this area was still beneath the earth. There was an original entrance fifteen, twenty metres, by the park up there.”

  “You mean it was made that way?” Peroni asked. “Underground? Why?”

  She shrugged. “We don’t know. A place like this could have helped us understand. Mithraism was some kind of male cult, most popular among the military. It involved strict codes of behaviour, a series of rituals and hierarchies, with just one leader, a man who had absolute power. Apart from a few contemporary descriptions that survive, we’re speculating about the rest.”

  Peroni scowled at the area around them. There were, Costa could see, what looked like the remnants of blocked-up tunnels and even a few small holes. Large enough for a child, perhaps, nothing bigger.

  “So,” Peroni persisted, “this was like all that black magic stuff you still read about in the countryside from time to time?”

  “No!” she replied quickly. “Mithraism was a faith. A real one. Followed very scrupulously, in secret, by thousands and thousands of people. Christianity was underground for most of three centuries before it became the dominant religion. The day that happened, the day Constantine won his victory at the Milvian Bridge in AD 312, is when everything here was destroyed the first time round. Somewhere in there,”—she pointed to what looked like a former entrance, now blocked with rubble and wire mesh to keep out intruders—“we uncovered the remains of more than a hundred men who’d been gathered together and slaughtered. By Constantine’s army. It couldn’t have been anyone else. The evidence is still there somewhe
re. It was one reason Giorgio felt so nervous about letting people understand the full extent of what we’d found here. There were…resonances.”

  Peroni glanced at Costa. The two of them had discussed this idea already.

  “If Alessio got lost, it would all have been made public anyway, wouldn’t it?” Costa asked her. “Could that have been why he brought the boy here?”

  She treated the question as if it were irrelevant.

  “Search me. You had fourteen years to ask that of Giorgio.”

  “Then why did he come back to see you last week?” he persisted.

  She actually laughed. “It was absurd. He wanted all his old files. His reports. His maps. Everything he’d worked on.”

  “And?” Peroni asked.

  “I threw him out! He worked for the university. Everything he produced during his employment is legally ours. I wasn’t giving it all away.”

  “I imagine he didn’t like that,” Costa commented.

  “That’s one trait he didn’t lose in jail,” she replied. “Giorgio always did have a temper. He was screaming at me as if I was still some timid little student of his. That I don’t take. Not from anyone.”

  Judith Turnhouse hesitated. There was more, Nic realised.

  “I ran off some copies of the maps he wanted. That was as far as I was willing to go. I was about to phone and tell you people about it when I read what was happening.”

  She went quiet.

  “When?” Peroni asked, nodding.

  “This afternoon.”

  “After the year-end budget?”

  “Don’t patronise me.” Judith Turnhouse spoke with a slow, hard fury.

  Costa was poking around at the edge of the clearing. There was a multitude of potential openings and tunnels in the ground that stretched from the fence by the narrow Roman alley, and ended in the sheer face of the hill on the other side.

  “Where could a child have gone in a place like this?” he asked, almost to himself. “Why didn’t they find him?”

  “I don’t know!” she exclaimed, exasperated.

  “You went down there,” Peroni pointed out. “You were one of his students.”

  “Yes! And that’s exactly why I don’t know. The conditions here were the worst I’ve ever encountered. Giorgio took such risks I sometimes wondered if we’d get out of the place alive. Some of the underground tunnels were so fragile you could bring down a landslide just by putting your hand against the wall. It’s a nightmare down there. There are man-made tunnels, natural fissures, drainage…Some parts link up with at least two branches of the river in ways we don’t even understand. Also, there are ways down to springs that emerge in the riverbed, too. If a child got lost in there, he could find a hundred different holes to fall down, and every one of them would kill him. Or…”—she stared at them—“someone could have thrown him down one.”

  “You knew those students,” Costa stated. “Would they have done that?”

  “Ludo Torchia was a twisted bastard. He could have done anything. But I still believe…”

  She thought of something. Judith Turnhouse stooped and picked up one of the empty water bottles, one with a very visible bright red label.

  “If you want to understand what we’re standing on here—a honeycomb no one, not even Giorgio, got round to mapping—watch this.”

  The woman twisted the cap off the bottle, scooped some earth into the neck as ballast, and walked over to one of the few open fissures in the rock behind.

  “This is a trick we learned when we were working here. My bet is it happens even more quickly now than it did back then. More rain. More erosion. Watch…”

  She beckoned them to come close, held the plastic bottle over the hole, and let go. They heard the thing bouncing off rock, softer, softer. Then a distant splash into water. Then nothing, except the echoing soft ripple of a distant current, moving somewhere beneath them, constant.

  “We thought this was a natural culvert, never part of the temple at all. There’s some kind of channel that descends, meets something else in the hill, then runs to the river. See there?”

  She pointed towards the city, at an area of foaming water on the near side of the bridge before Tiber Island.

  “By the weir there’s an outlet of the Cloaca Maxima, on the bend. You can just about make it out. The head itself is Claudian. There’s a modern arch around it they made when they built the road and the flood defences.”

  Costa sought the gap in the line of the flood wall, almost directly by the churning waters of the weir.

  “Got it,” he said.

  “As you’ll see in a moment, somehow—and for the life of me I fail to see how this is possible—that little channel here works its way through several hundred metres of horizontal rock and ends up there. What we’re standing on is porous, fault-ridden stone, full of holes and hidden passages we can’t even begin to chart. If a child went down a place like that…” She sighed and looked at her watch. “So how is your eyesight? Mine’s not so great these days. I’m afraid this is the only party trick I have.”

  “Very good,” Costa replied, watching the bobbing debris on the distant river like a hawk.

  They waited five minutes. No red bottle appeared.

  “When did you last try this?” Peroni asked. “Before Alessio disappeared? Or after?”

  “I don’t remember. After, I think.”

  “So it’s years? The drain probably got blocked.”

  She shook her head. “No. That’s just not possible. We know when there’s a drainage problem around here. We’ve got sites that flood straightaway. There’s been nothing like that for a long time. On a day like this…” She pointed at the foam on the weir. Small white horses, lively, wild. “…without a blockage the water should be running more freely than usual. The channel’s still open here. You heard it yourself. I don’t know…”

  For the first time since they met her, Judith Turnhouse looked uncertain of herself, vulnerable, capable of thinking that there might, perhaps, be something in her world that hadn’t been discovered, labelled, and filed safely away for the future.

  “This may sound stupid but I don’t think this is quite right,” she said, so quietly it seemed she didn’t like to hear the sound of her own self-doubt.

  Costa glanced down. There was a narrow, slippery path that led to the alley of the Clivo di Rocco Savella. Then a short walk across the busy Lungotevere to some steps that ran close to the weir.

  The waters looked cold and grey and angry.

  “I may need your suit,” Costa told her, and heard nothing, no complaint, no objection, in return.

  HE WAS TWENTY-ONE BUT DIDN’T LOOK LIKE AN ADULT to Falcone. Ludo Torchia had the shifty, stupid grin of a teenager, one who’d done something bad, and was now challenging them to find out exactly what.

  Messina sat opposite. Falcone took a chair in the corner and pulled out a notepad.

  “We don’t need that,” the commissario said immediately.

  Falcone put the pad away and closed his eyes for a moment. From what he’d observed of Torchia already, confrontation was exactly what this strange young man wanted.

  “Do us all a favour, son,” Messina began. “You know Professor Bramante. You know his boy. Tell us where Alessio is. Don’t make things worse.”

  Torchia sniggered and stared back at them. He had the smell of cheap stale wine about him.

  He began to pick at his fingernails.

  “I don’t talk to scum like you. Why should I?”

  Messina blinked furiously, then managed to calm himself. “This is a police matter,” he said through clenched teeth. “When I ask you a question, I want an answer.”

  Torchia leaned over the table, looked the commissario in the eye, and laughed. “I didn’t hear a question, moron.”

  “Where’s the boy?” Messina yelled.

  “Dunno,” Torchia said, then went back to picking his fingernails.

  “Tell us why you were in that place,” Falcone inter
vened, and ignored the caustic glance he got from Messina.

  “I am Giorgio Bramante’s student,” he replied, as if talking to a child. “I have the right to visit any academic site he’s working on.”

  Falcone struggled to interpret Torchia’s attitude. It was resentful, aggressive, unhelpful. But the student was at ease, too, and that seemed odd.

  “You mean Bramante invited you there?” he asked.

  “No!” An angry flush finally rose in Torchia’s cheeks. “I had to find it for myself. You ask him why that was. We were supposed to be a family. Students. Faculty. All together. The only secrets were supposed to be the ones we shared.”

  “This isn’t about the site. It’s about the boy!” Messina barked back at him, leaning over the table, spittle flying from his mouth.

  Torchia didn’t even flinch. Falcone had seen this type before. Even if Torchia did get a beating, he probably wouldn’t mind that much. It simply validated what he believed: that he was in the company of the enemy.

  “I was there to see what was mine by rights,” he said slowly. “Something Giorgio should have shown us a long time ago.”

  Falcone pulled his chair nearer the table and looked Torchia in the eye.

  “A child is missing, Ludo,” he said. “Somewhere in a place that’s extremely treacherous. You were seen leaving it. You ran away—”

  “Nobody likes the police,” Torchia said, hastily. “Why should I help you?”

  “Because it can help Alessio?”

  “I don’t know anything.”

  “You ran away,” Falcone repeated. “All of you. There was a reason for that. We need to know what that reason was. If something bad has happened to Alessio, you can see, surely, that you will get the blame. Unless you tell us—”

  “I didn’t see him.”

  He was lying. As if this were all some game. Ludo Torchia was toying with them, it seemed to Falcone, merely because he felt like it.

  “Who else was there?” Messina asked. “Give me the names.”

  “I don’t betray my comrades,” he said, then went back to staring at his fingernails.