The Seventh Sacrament
Page 31
“There was a tiny amount of bleeding. Three days ago. And then again this morning.”
“These things happen,” the doctor said with a shrug. “Didn’t your physician in Rome tell you that?”
“He did.”
“So. A man. Did you feel comfortable with him?”
“Not entirely,” Emily admitted.
The doctor smiled. “Of course not. This is your first time. You should have a woman to talk to. It makes everything so much simpler. Signora. There must be a reason why you came. So please tell me what it is.”
“I have a little cramp in my side.”
The doctor’s expression changed. “Persistent?”
“For the last few days it’s been there most of the time.”
“How many weeks are you?”
“Seven. Eight, perhaps.”
“Where is the pain exactly?”
“Here.” Emily indicated with her hand. “I had my appendix out when I was a teenager. It’s almost the same place. Perhaps…”
“You have only one appendix.”
The doctor asked more questions, the personal ones Emily was now beginning to field almost without thinking. It was easier with a woman.
Then the doctor grimaced. “What about your shoulder? Is it stiff? Strained perhaps?”
“Yes,” she admitted, unnerved by the connection the woman had made. It had never occurred to her to place the two sensations together. “I thought perhaps I’d wrenched it.”
“Have you ever suffered from a pelvic inflammatory disease?”
This was all too close.
“I had chlamydia when I was twenty. It was nothing. They cured it, they said. Antibiotics.”
The doctor scribbled some notes, then looked up. “Did your doctor in Rome ask any of these questions?”
“No.”
The woman nodded, got up, and reached into the medical cabinet by her desk, taking out a syringe.
“We will need a blood test. And an ultrasound. A special one, I think. We have the equipment here. Your husband?”
“My partner’s working.”
“What is work? He should be here. This is important.”
Nic seemed so engrossed in the search for Leo Falcone. It was impossible to divert him from that.
“I have a friend with me. Outside.”
The doctor bent over her. She smelled strongly of old-fashioned soap. The needle went into her arm. Emily was, as always, amazed how dark that blood appeared in real life.
“What’s wrong?”
“In a little while I hope we will know. Your friend can bring some things for you?”
Emily blinked. “I’ll be staying?”
The woman sighed and looked at the papers on her desk. “Emily, bringing children into this world is a game of chance. In some ways, the odds are better now, because we know more. In others, they’re worse, because of our habits, and little demons like chlamydia. Sometimes events have consequences, long after we’ve forgotten them.”
The doctor paused, wondering, it seemed to Emily, whether to go on.
“Listen to me,” she urged. “You’re an intelligent young woman. I don’t imagine this thought hasn’t run through your head. One in a hundred pregnancies in our wonderful civilised world is ectopic. They are more common in women who have suffered pelvic inflammatory diseases. The symptoms are…your symptoms. Do you want the truth?”
No, she thought. I want a lie. A beautiful lie. The doctor was already on the phone, speaking rapidly, with authority.
“I want the truth,” Emily said when the call ended.
“We will see what the ultrasound reveals. If there is a baby in your uterus, then fine. You will stay here, I shall look after you, and it is entirely possible there is nothing to worry about at all, though you will not leave until I am quite satisfied of that. If the uterus is empty, then this pregnancy is ectopic. Your baby is in the wrong place, somewhere it cannot survive. In that eventuality, what I shall be endeavouring to do is ensure that you will be able to conceive again. Parenthood is often a question of persistence, and I say that as a mother myself.”
Emily felt cold and feeble.
“My name is Anna,” the doctor said. “Please use it.” She stuck out a slender, tanned hand. Emily took it, and found her fingers in a warm, powerful grip.
“Anna,” she repeated.
“Are you sure you don’t want to call your friend in Rome?”
There was a nun at the door already. She held a grey hospital gown and a pale manila folder. Behind her stood Arturo Messina, leaning to see into the room. He looked curious, apprehensive, and, for once, lost.
But all Emily could think of was Nic, trying to cope with an investigation that was falling apart, worried to death about the disappearance of Leo Falcone, a man who, she’d long recognised, had become a kind of substitute father for him.
“I’m sure,” she answered.
THEY SAT IN A LARGE, EMPTY CAFÉ AROUND THE CORNER from the Testaccio market, stirring three excellent coffees. Teresa had waved for another one already, and was rapidly munching her way through a second honey-and-hazelnut pastry the size of her fist.
“So now that’s out of the way,” Peroni asked, “what career were you thinking of next? Chief negotiating officer with a reconciliation service or something? You know the kind of thing: Two people who hate each other’s guts walk into the room and you state that, unless they promise to leave loving one another to pieces, you’ll punch their lights out.”
“Messina, Messina,” she moaned, pausing for a big bite of the pastry. “I told you. The man’s doomed already. I don’t believe in kicking people when they’re on the ground, but there’s nothing wrong in giving them a little nudge, is there? This woman mingles for Italy, boys. I mingled greatly this morning, with people you wouldn’t even dare talk to. Messina has three days, four maybe, no more. Once this mess is over, however it works out, he’ll be despatched to Ostia to take notes for the committee designing the next generation of parking tickets. In my opinion, they overestimate his abilities, but for now I’ll let that pass.”
IN THE SPACE of ten minutes they’d accomplished much. Free of the ties of the Questura, answerable to no one, it was easy to act. On the way out of the market, Teresa had summarised the growing dissatisfaction with Messina upstairs in the Questura. Then, after agreeing on their options, they’d made three calls to pet journalists they knew: radio, TV, and a newspaper. It was important the news got out quickly. There was one point on which they and Bruno Messina were in agreement. As long as there was no body, they would assume Leo Falcone was alive. Prabakaran and Uccello had been in Bramante’s hands for more than twelve hours. He was not a man to be hurried.
“You really think this fantasy about a new lead on the son will keep Bramante from hurting Leo?” Teresa asked.
The story—which was pure fabrication—would be on the radio and TV news within the hour, and in the early-afternoon editions of the papers.
Costa shrugged. “For a while maybe. It can’t do any harm. Bramante’s got to be curious, hasn’t he? Leo thought the man would give up if he knew. Besides, he must realise that if he murders a police inspector, we’re not going to focus much time on chasing what happened to his son.”
“Leo’s not himself,” Peroni pointed out.
“I’m not so sure about that,” Costa said.
“Nic!” Teresa said, shocked. “He walked out in the middle of the night to get that poor girl freed. Who’s to know this bastard wouldn’t have killed them both?”
It was Peroni who spoke. “No. Bramante wouldn’t do that. He’s bad, but bad within his own rules. Which are, I suspect, pretty much set in stone.”
“He kidnapped poor Rosa!” she objected. “And killed the rest! That’s what kind of man he is.”
Costa recalled Falcone’s words as he left: Check out Bramante before the nightmare began. He’d played around with the records database for a few minutes before Prinzivalli raised the alarm.
“Well?” Peroni asked.
Costa grimaced.
“Not much there. The Questura had received two complaints of sexual harassment from students a couple of years before.”
“Anyone we know?” Teresa demanded.
“No. Someone had spoken to the university and got the usual tale. Students make up that kind of story all the time. Either way, it was impossible to prove.”
“Doesn’t tell us much, Nic,” Peroni pointed out, disappointed. “They probably do get that all the time.”
“How often?” Costa replied. “The officer who went to the university discovered there’d been other complaints about sexual intimidation too. They’d dealt with those internally. The university authorities said they couldn’t release the details. For legal reasons. The two female students who complained to us wouldn’t push the case. Bad for their degrees. So that was where it ended.”
Costa stirred the dregs of his coffee and fought off the urge to buy another. Even if Bramante was a sexual predator, it was difficult to see how that knowledge could help them in their present predicament: finding out what happened to his son. Although it might explain his wife’s habits with knives.
“How long will it take them to work through Leo’s list of sites?” Teresa asked.
“A day, two maybe,” Peroni said. “That is going to be a long and tiresome job.”
“I wouldn’t want to be banged up in some subterranean hellhole with Leo for two days,” she muttered. “He’d drive me crazy. I can push Silvio to narrow it down. Maybe Rosa will come up with something. But we don’t have much time, gentlemen.”
Yet…Costa still struggled with some hidden aspect of the case.
“What if Leo’s not what he really wants?” he suggested. “What if he’s just the route to getting it?”
“You mean Alessio?” Teresa wrinkled her big nose in disbelief.
“Perhaps. I don’t know what I mean. I just feel that, if all he wanted was Leo dead, it would have happened by now. Yesterday or the day before. And also”—of this he was sure—“I think Leo feels the same way too. He’s been fascinated with something—with what’s really driving Bramante. He has been all along, and didn’t want to let us know.”
“Too much talk,” Peroni interjected. “We’re free of Messina. We can do any damn thing we like. So what’s it to be? Back into the hill?”
“Alessio’s not in the hill,” Costa replied. “I don’t think he was ever there, not when they were looking. We would have found him.”
“Then where?” Teresa wanted to know.
“What if Alessio was too scared to return home for some reason?”
They stared at him, dubious.
“Bear with me for a moment,” Nic told them, and outlined his thinking.
Most of the roads from the summit of the Aventino would not have been appealing to Alessio Bramante. The Clivo di Rocca Savella was surely too steep and too enclosed to attract a scared child fleeing his own father. The streets that led to the Via Marmorata in Testaccio would pass too close to his own home for comfort.
There was only one obvious direction: to the Circus Maximus, and the huge crowd gathered there at the time, a sea of people in which a terrified young boy could surely lose himself.
“He’d end up in the peace camp. There was nowhere else for him to go.” Costa glanced at Teresa. “Emily told me you were involved in events like that when you were young. She thought you might even have been there.”
Teresa Lupo blushed under Peroni’s astonished gaze. This was, Costa realised immediately, a part of her past the two of them had never shared.
“I had a rebel streak back then,” she confessed. “I still do. I just disguise it well.”
“Really?” Peroni wondered with a sigh of resignation. “You were there when all this happened?”
She winced. “No. Sorry. I was asked. But at the time, I was in Lido di Jesolo sharing a very small tent with some hairy medical student from Liguria who thought—wrongly, I hasten to add—that he was God’s gift to women.”
Peroni cleared his throat and ordered another coffee.
“Even Lenin had holidays, Gianni,” she continued defensively.
“Not with hairy medical students in a tent,” Peroni grumbled.
“Oh for God’s sake,” she snapped. “I apologise. I had a life before we met. Sorry. We all existed before. Remember? What the hell were you two doing fourteen years ago? It’s OK, Nic. I can answer that in your case. You were at school. And you?” she demanded of Peroni, who watched his macchiato getting made on the silver machine before replying.
“We’d just had our second child. I was like Leo, a sovrintendente waiting to take the inspector’s exams. I got three weeks’ paternity leave, more than I was owed but some people upstairs were in my debt. The weather was beautiful, from May right through to September. I remember it so clearly. I thought…” He grimaced. “I thought life had never been so good and it would all just roll on like that forever.”
Costa recalled that year too. It was then that his father first started making mysterious appointments with physicians, the beginning of a slow, unremarkable personal tragedy that would take more than a decade to unfold.
“It was a beautiful summer,” she agreed. “Unless you happened to be living on the other side of the Adriatic. I stayed in that stupid little tent for two weeks, with some jerk I didn’t even like. You know why? Because I couldn’t face it anymore. Thinking about all the horrors that were going on then. It wasn’t that long since the Berlin Wall fell, and we’d all sat around for a couple of years waiting for the global paradise of happiness and plenty to reveal itself. What did we get? Wars and massacres. A little more madness with every passing day. Just a little local conflict in the Balkans, some small reminder that the world wasn’t the safe, comfortable place we all dreamed it would be. We went from there to here in the blink of an eye, and for the life of me I don’t remember much of what happened in between.” She shook her head. “I went because I was running away. Sorry.”
“No problem. It was a wild hope.”
“Damn right. There must have been thousands of people there!”
“The authorities said two thousand.” Costa had checked that too. “The protesters said ten.”
“The authorities lie. They always do.” She downed the last of her pastry. “Mind you, ten’s a bit much. You really thought I’d remember some child wandering around looking lost? You haven’t been to many demonstrations, have you? They’re full of lost kids, of all ages. It’s just real life, only magnified. Chaos from start to end.”
“I suppose…” Costa said, thinking.
Peroni stared at his new coffee. “So what the hell do we do now?”
Falcone would have achieved more than this. He wouldn’t just have imagined where Alessio might have wandered. He would have looked ahead, trying to work out how this fact might be extracted from the hazy lost world of fourteen years before.
“The newspapers would have taken photos,” Costa said abruptly. “We could try the newspapers’ libraries.”
“Nic,” Peroni groaned, “how long would that take? And how willing do you think they would be to help two off-duty cops and a nosy pathologist?”
“We just gave three of them great stories!” Teresa objected.
“For our own reasons,” Peroni countered. “They’re not stupid. They don’t think we’re doing this out of charity.”
“Vultures,” she spat out, so loudly the waiter gave them a worried glance.
“Vultures perform a useful social function,” Peroni reminded her, but by then Teresa was bouncing up and down on her seat with unbounded excitement, scattering pastry crumbs everywhere as she did so.
“You two really have led sheltered existences! There’s more to the media than a bunch of political cronies
in flash suits. What about the radical press? They were surely there.”
Peroni gave her his most condescending look. “You mean longhaired people like that individual you shared a tent with? Teresa. Listen to me, dear heart. The radical press hate us even more than the others.”
“Not,” she disagreed, slyly, “when you’re in the company of a comrade.”
THE PAPER WAS IN A SMALL FIRST-FLOOR OFFICE ABOVE A pet shop in the Vicolo delle Grotte, a half-minute walk from the Campo dei Fiori, in a part of Rome rapidly being taken over by expatriates and tourists. On the steep internal staircase, Costa, who’d lived nearby a few years back, and found it hard to afford the rent even then, muttered something about this being an expensive home for a weekly publication dedicated to liberating the downtrodden masses.
“You misunderstand the patrician breed of Italian socialist,” Teresa declared, taking the steps two at a time, clearly keen to reacquaint herself with this lost piece of her past. “This is about raising the proletariat up to their standards, not bringing them down to the hoi polloi.”
At the head of the stairs stood a tall, gaunt man with a long, aristocratic face and a head of thinning, wayward grey hair. In his bony hands he held a tray bearing four brimming wineglasses. It was not yet eleven in the morning.
“If they were Carabinieri, I wouldn’t let them on the premises, you know,” he announced in a high-pitched, fluting voice of distinctly upper-class origin. “I still have my principles. I am Lorenzo Lotto. Yes, I know what you’re thinking. Is that the Lorenzo Lotto you read about in the papers all the time? Rich son of that family of wicked oppressors who pollute the Veneto with their factories? It is indeed. The papers should find something better to write about. A man does not choose his own parents.”
He thrust the tray at them.
“I was thinking of the painter,” Costa said.
Lotto’s beady eyes looked him up and down.
“How extraordinary, Teresa,” the man declared. “Trust you to find the one police officer in Rome with half a brain. That Lorenzo died destitute, scribbling numbers on hospital beds for a living, though he was a better man, and a better artist, than Titian. I am a mere revolutionary, a small yet significant cog in the proletarian machine. Drink, boy. Tame that intellect or you’ll be counting paper clips in the Questura for the rest of your life.”