by David Hewson
Like a table. Or a hard rock bed.
Something was carved on it.
“Do you see it?” Bramante asked, pushing her forward, and there was an unfathomable bitter note, tinged with sadness, in the words.
Carved into the face of the altar was the long, muscular shape of a creature. It was being wrestled to the ground by a burly figure who wore a winged helmet and held a short, stabbing sword tight in his hand. The animal’s face was contorted: bulging eyes, flared nostrils—it was a living thing struggling for life. Bells rang in her head. It was like the statues on the old Testaccio slaughterhouse, a man overpowering a colossal bull, intent on slaughter. Only here, there was more to the image. A dog was licking the blood that ran from the beast’s throat. A scorpion was pulling hungrily on its taut penis. This was a freak scene from a vivid nightmare.
“It’s insane,” she murmured, and closed her eyes because he was roaring again, like a beast himself, pulling her into him, dragging her head close into his body until his mouth was in her hair, his torso locked tight against the curves of her back.
“A man is either Mithras or the bull,” Giorgio Bramante said quietly. “The giver or the gift. After which he is nothing.”
She caught a glimpse of his face and regretted it immediately. His eyes were dead. Or absent of humanity. She wasn’t sure which.
He leaned even closer, pressing so hard now that it hurt, and whispered eagerly, “I spent so long in prison. No women. No pleasure. No comfort…”
Rosa closed her eyes and tried to remember what they told every woman in the force about a situation like this. Only one word remained clear in her head.
Survive.
WHATEVER DRUG FOGLIA HAD GIVEN LUDO TORCHIA seemed to race through the student’s blood system, like some deadly spike of adrenaline. The young man lay there taut, bloodied, eyes wide open, acutely alert, taking in their faces, taking in the din of the traffic outside: horns and angry human voices, an ordinary evening in the Via Labicana, such mundane noises to accompany the end of a human life.
Falcone was astonished to find those sounds were still there, fourteen years after the event, so real he could hear them. And Ludo Torchia’s face too: shock mixed with something not akin to amusement. The face of a guilty man. A guilty man who was in no mood to be helpful in his dying moments.
“Say something.”
Falcone mouthed the same words now, alone in his office, trying to marshal his thoughts in the way he used to with such fluent ease. It was all getting harder and it wasn’t just his injuries. He was old. Even before the gunshot wound in Venice, he’d passed some invisible point in his life, a moment of profound change, when all his past skills simply solidified inside him and stayed there, clinging on, hoping to defy the years. Even if they found Bramante the following day, Messina still wanted him gone. There would, he now knew, be no new talents, no fresh challenges. The time was approaching when he would have to pass on the reins to a new generation. Nic Costa one day, or so he hoped. Barring some kind of a miracle, only the sidelines waited for Leo Falcone: administration or some other corner of bureaucracy before the inevitable retirement. This part of his life was coming to a close, and he had no idea what could possibly replace it.
Or how he could even begin to approach it without putting the present case into some kind of compartment he could label “solved.” He’d snapped at Messina over the grim word “closure,” unfairly perhaps, because a part of Falcone did want this issue finished, for good. Not just with Bramante back in prison, but with the fate of the boy uncovered too. He believed, with every instinct thirty years of police work had given him, that the two were inseparable.
His mind wandered back fourteen years to the ambulance again. Everything in those last moments was so hazy. It had been hard to catch Torchia’s final, murmured words.
Reluctantly, because he knew the pain it would cause, he took out his personal address book and found Foglia’s number. The doctor had retired from the Questura six months after the Bramante case. Both men knew why, though they had never discussed the matter. Falcone knew Foglia would never be able to live with the consequences of what he’d done that day, perhaps all the more because those actions had never been brought to the light of day. Teresa Lupo’s predecessor in the morgue had quietly overlooked whatever substances he had found in Torchia’s blood—an act of deliberate negligence which Falcone knew he could never expect from Teresa. So the best Questura doctor Falcone ever worked with had taken early retirement and, when his children left home for university, departed his native Rome to live on Sant’Antioco, a little-visited island on the west coast of Sardinia, a place that seemed, to Falcone, to say Don’t visit.
All the same, he did visit, some five or six years before, spending a few quiet days watching the sea from the Foglias’ large, modern villa above a modest holiday resort, passing pleasantries, never talking about work.
It was enough.
Falcone dialled the number, waited, then heard Foglia’s familiar voice. After the excuses and brief exchanges of news, his old friend took a deep breath and announced, “I know why you’re calling, Leo. You don’t need to beat around the bush.”
The Bramante case had made big headlines fourteen years ago. It was back in them now, louder than ever.
“If I had any alternative, Patrizio….”
“My God, you must be desperate, if you need the likes of me.”
“I just…”
But Foglia was spot on. Leo was desperate.
“What do you want?” the voice on the line demanded. “If it’s a free holiday, we’d love to see you. Please come. May or June, when the fresh tuna are in. I’ll teach you how to fish. How to relax.”
“I’ll take you up on that,” Falcone promised.
“No you won’t, Leo. Does it make you feel good? To know you were right all along? That Giorgio Bramante was some kind of animal?”
“Not at all,” he replied honestly. “I wish to God I’d been wrong. That he’d just come out of jail, gone to a quiet academic job somewhere, and put the past behind him.”
“But he couldn’t, could he? Not without knowing.”
“No.”
Falcone could recall precisely Torchia’s dying words in the back of that ambulance, amid the cacophony of horns and furious human voices outside. They hadn’t made sense at the time. They didn’t now.
“You must have seen many people die, Patrizio. Does it matter what they say?”
“Rarely. I had one miserable, tightfisted old bastard tell his wife to remember to turn off the lights afterwards. That was one to remember.”
“And Ludo Torchia?”
There was a pause on the line. Then Foglia said softly, “Meglio una bella bugia che una brutta verità.”
The words were just as Falcone remembered them, spat out by the dying Torchia one by one, punctuated by some kind of ironic, choking laughter.
Better a beautiful lie than an ugly truth.
“Funny old saying at the best of times,” Foglia declared. “They seem to me the dying words of an actor, someone who is playing a game in his head, even to the end. Do you have any idea what he meant?”
“The beautiful lie was surely Giorgio Bramante. The idea that he was some kind of loving father figure, the man we all believed him to be.”
“And the ugly truth?”
“There you have me.”
There was an awkward pause on the line.
“Leo, you will visit us again one day, won’t you? It’s lovely here in the spring. We would both enjoy your company.”
“Of course. You heard nothing more? There was a moment…”
When Torchia had closed his eyes again, as the drug seemed to wear off, Falcone—furious, desperate—had thrown open the ambulance door and screamed at the two medics there to find some way, any way, through the snarl of cars and buses and lorries blocking the Via Labicana. It was a slender hope, but perhaps there had been some few words that had eluded him.
“H
e said nothing more, Leo. I’m sorry.”
“No. I’m the one who should apologise. I should never have dragged this back into the light of day for you. It’s unfair.”
The silence again. A thought pricked at Leo Falcone’s mind. Patrizio Foglia did have some secret weighing on his conscience, surely.
“There’s something I never knew, isn’t there?” he asked.
Foglia sighed.
“Oh God. Why does it have to keep coming back? Why doesn’t the man simply mourn his own child and find himself a life somehow? Or put a gun to his own head for a change?”
“Tell me what you know. Please.”
He could never, not in a million years, have predicted what he heard next.
“I took a close interest in the autopsy,” Foglia said softly. “I had good reason, as you must appreciate.”
“And?”
“There was clear evidence Torchia had anal sex that day. Brutal. There was blood and bruising. It had…culminated too. Possibly rape. Possibly sadomasochistic. I am not an expert in these matters.”
Falcone’s mind went blank. Without thinking, he said, “Those boys were down those caves for some kind of ritual. There were drugs. I imagine we shouldn’t be surprised.”
In his ear, he heard Foglia’s long, pained intake of breath.
“It wasn’t in the caves, Leo. The evidence was plain and fresh and incontrovertible. What happened happened shortly before he died. In the Questura. In the cell where you and Messina and Giorgio Bramante questioned him.”
Falcone’s vision became blurred. His breath snagged. “And you told no one?” he asked, incredulous.
“I asked the pathologist to leave it out of his report. He was…accommodating. The Questura was in enough trouble already. Did you really want another scandal on your hands? Whether it was Bramante, Messina…or you…either way, it would have rebounded on us. Besides, what use could it possibly have been? Torchia was dead. Bramante was in custody. You had your man.”
“The boy!” Falcone responded, aware he was yelling into the phone, unable to stop himself. “What about the boy? Had I known that…”
Those were the early days of DNA. They could have identified Bramante as the sexual assailant, too, surely, and that would have changed the entire complexion of the case.
“Then what?” the voice on the line demanded crossly. “Do tell me, Leo. I would love to know.”
“Then perhaps…”
There could be no instant answer. What mattered was that he had been robbed of some knowledge that was, surely, useful, if only he could begin to comprehend its significance.
“I’m sorry,” Foglia said. “I just wanted an end to it. We all did. I wish—”
“Good night,” Falcone snapped, then slammed down the phone.
He sat alone, placed his head in his hands, didn’t mind at that moment what a passerby seeing him like this in his office would think.
Was this the ugly truth? That Giorgio Bramante was not simply just a careless father, but a man gripped by some dark, secret side to his character? If it was true, his wife, with her self-inflicted wounds and her compulsive need to paint their lost child, over and over again, must surely have known.
He swore as another realisation struck him. The young Indian detective had been deputed to followed Beatrice Bramante all day long. He’d never even looked for her report.
Falcone keyed the name Prabakaran into the computer.
It came up with nothing since the previous evening.
“Novices…”
She would be home by now. He let a low curse slip from his lips, then looked up her mobile number, picked up the phone, and dialled it, steeling himself for the conversation that would follow, one in which he would remind a junior officer that no one on his team ever went off-duty without filing a report.
The phone rang three times. A man’s voice answered.
“I would like to speak to Agente Prabakaran,” the inspector said impatiently, adding, “This is Inspector Falcone.”
“Leo,” said a cold, amused voice at the other end. “What took you so long?”
PERONI WAS TRYING TO NAIL DOWN POSSIBLE UNDERGROUND locations for Bramante in the company of the worm geek, two archaeology students the intelligence team had dug up, and a room full of maps. So Costa found a quiet corner in the office and called Orvieto. Emily’s voice sounded distant, lacking the warm, confident timbre he’d come to expect. She was just a few hours away by car, but she might as well have been on the other side of the world. When he called, the others were having dinner; she was alone in her room, resting. It wasn’t like her.
“What’s wrong?” he asked.
“Nothing. I just didn’t want company. Also, it pains me to watch others enjoying good wine when I can’t join in.”
“How do you feel?”
There was a pause. This was so new for both of them. The doctors had said she should expect to feel tired, perhaps depressed from time to time.
“Perhaps I’ll go and see someone tomorrow,” she conceded, rather than answer his question. “It’s only a little thing.”
“You do that tonight,” he said immediately. “Why wait?”
“Because I know what the doctor will say. He’ll sigh and think, Here’s another first-time mother teetering on the edge of panic. All because it’s new to her. Nothing more. Children come into the world all the time, Nic.”
“They won’t mind. That’s why they’re there.”
“No,” she said firmly. “They’re there to treat sick people. I’ll see a doctor in the morning, just to reassure us both. I really have no reason to think there’s anything wrong. I just feel a little out of sorts. That’s all.”
He knew her well enough by now not to argue.
“When will I see you?” she asked.
“Messina’s given us one more day. After that, if Bramante is still out there, Falcone hands the investigation over to Bavetti. We’ll be gone from the Questura, all three of us. We don’t meet Messina’s approval. He doesn’t sound much like his father.”
“No,” she replied, and he could hear the sadness in her voice. “There’s some distance between those two and I don’t really understand why. Fathers and sons. I thought it was supposed to be some special kind of bond women were meant to envy. They don’t seem to have a relationship at all.”
Costa thought of his own family, the constant, abrasive difficulties he’d experienced with his father, almost till the end, when he was in a wheelchair, stricken too, and when their mutual frailty brought about some painful, redemptive reconciliation that still pricked like an awkward needle when the memories flooded back. So much time wasted on stupid arguments, on both sides. Marco Costa had never made life easy for anyone, himself and his own flesh and blood least of all.
“Just one more myth,” he murmured.
She waited for a moment, then said, “No, it’s not. I never knew your father, Nic. I really wish I had. Even so, I see someone else in your eyes from time to time and I know it has to be him. You two had something between you that never existed for me with my own dad. Or my mom either. And it’s not just you. I’ve noticed this before. It’s men. I think…”
Another, longer pause, one that told him she wasn’t sure she ought to say this.
“You think what?” he said.
“I think, in a way, once you become fathers, you feel guilty if you feel you’re just living in the moment. When a man has a son, he develops some sense of duty that tells him the day will come when he’ll pass on the torch. One generation to the next. And that’s what’s driving all of you crazy about this case. Not the missing kid, or rather not just the missing kid. You see a world where that all got taken away. Some kind of sacred bond that’s been broken. Even Leo…”
“Leo doesn’t have children!”
“Neither do you. But you both had fathers. Have you ever heard Leo mention his?”
“No.”
Costa’s gaze wandered to the glass-fronted office
across the room where Falcone was still working, pale-faced. It was past eleven. The inspector looked as if he would go on for hours.
“If you want to discuss the case,” she went on, “call me, Nic. It doesn’t bother me, really.”
“I don’t have anything left to tell you. We think we can start to narrow down tomorrow where he’s hiding. It’s just a standard operation: search the possibilities, eliminate what we can, until we find something. As far as Alessio’s concerned…”
The shadow of the lost boy hovered behind everything like a ghost. Without telling anyone, Costa had, during his break earlier that evening, driven over to the little church of Sacro Cuore in Prati, talked to the church warden there, a good man who was a little scared and greatly puzzled by what had happened. Costa had spoken with the plainclothes officer on surveillance outside on Falcone’s orders, satisfied himself that the likelihood was that Bramante had never been near the place that day. Then he’d returned to the church, gone into the little room, with the strange, unworldly name—Il Piccolo Museo del Purgatorio—studied the items on the wall, the bloodstained T-shirt in particular, and tried to imagine what all this meant to Giorgio Bramante.
Plain screws fastened the glass to the case on the wall. They would be easy to remove. What eluded Costa was the reason to do so: it was a public act with a private meaning.
Bramante blamed Ludo Torchia and the other students for Alessio’s fate. That much was clear. But an intelligent man couldn’t fool himself either. He was the father. He carried the responsibility for his young son. He had brought the boy to that place. He bore his share of the blame, too, blame that had somehow transmuted, in his wife’s head, into an act of self-mutilation: cutting her own flesh to stain a garment belonging to her missing son, placing it on the wall of this dusty place that reeked of emptiness and cold damp stone. Was this act—Bramante placing a mark of each of his victims on the missing child’s shirt—some way in which he hoped to make amends?
“Perhaps you’re right, Nic. I tried to disregard what you said because it seemed so you.”
