by David Hewson
“It’s already there,” Messina snapped. “Don’t you get it? Bramante isn’t just killing these people one by one to get his revenge. He’s taking someone they’re close to beforehand, holding them ransom, trying to…”
The commissario struggled for the words.
“He wants to put them through exactly the same nightmare he experienced,” Falcone filled in calmly. “But what makes you think he wants me?”
“After we worked out what was going on here, I sent a team round to the apartment Bramante has been using since he got out of prison. He was long gone. But he’s been busy. Too busy to take everything with him. Take a look at these.”
He withdrew three packs of photographic prints out of the briefcase, checked the labels, and passed one to each man. They sifted through the contents in silence.
Nic Costa was halfway through his own when he stopped, bewildered.
He was looking at a photograph of himself and Emily, walking out of the Palazzo Ruspoli, happy, smiling, arm in arm. He recognised the new red coat she was wearing. The picture had been taken two days before. They’d seen the doctor that morning, had the standard talk about what to do, what to expect, during the coming months of impending parenthood.
“What’s this lunatic doing taking photographs of me?” Teresa demanded, pointing at the pack in Peroni’s hand.
Costa glanced at them, then at Falcone’s set. In the photograph in the inspector’s hand was Raffaella, shopping in the Via degli Zingari. Something didn’t ring true.
“He didn’t try and seize any of us today,” Costa said, his eyes returning to Emily’s tired, strained face, still trying to work out what to make of the photo of them together. “He went straight for Leo.”
Messina scowled at the familiarity. “Yes, he went for the inspector. Perhaps he just saw an opportunity. He’s intelligent enough to improvise, isn’t he?”
“He’s intelligent enough to get what he wants first time round,” Falcone answered, giving Costa an interested look.
The commissario looked pleased by this response.
“I’m glad you find this worthy of your attention, Leo. It’s your case now. As I said, sick leave ends today. Peroni’s off the beat. Costa here is done playing museum curator. Head this up or sit inside the Questura trying to remember how to play chess. It’s up to you.”
Some choice, Costa thought. The avid look in Falcone’s eyes told him it was already made. A part of him was glad to see the old inspector fired up by something outside himself for a change. Another part wanted, more than anything, to see Emily, to take her away from this new threat, let her sit down, rest, recover some of the strength she seemed to have lost, without his noticing, in recent weeks.
“And the ladies?” Peroni asked.
Messina smiled. “Yes. The ladies. We have a villa near Orvieto. Big, secluded, and hard to find. A car will take them straight from the Questura. My father’s there. Giorgio Bramante isn’t looking for him. So they’ll be safe. Call it a surprise vacation. I don’t want the complication of having them around in Rome.”
“That’s their decision,” Costa complained.
“No,” Messina replied. “It’s not.”
Teresa Lupo leaned forward and tapped the commissario hard on the knee.
“Excuse me for pointing this out, but I’m a lady too. Maybe I could use that vacation.”
“You’re a pathologist,” he retorted. “And I want to introduce you to Toni LaMarca. What’s left of him.”
* * *
“Basic caving technique,” Abati said, and pushed LaMarca back into the centre of the room. “Know the place you’re in and what’s around it. This wasn’t always a temple. I told you. These were tufa workings. Someone put the temple in here later, after they were finished digging out the stone. This is an underground quarry. Half those things you think of as corridors either lead nowhere. Or they just meet up with some fissure or fault in the rock.”
“I heard water,” Vignola said, puzzled.
“This is Rome!” Abati declared. “There are springs. Fault lines. Unfinished tunnels that lead nowhere. There must be channels that go all the way down to the river. It could link up with the Cloaca Maxima itself somehow. If I had the equipment and the people…” He gave them that condescending look Torchia was beginning to resent. “I could find out. But I don’t think any of you quite fits the bill. So don’t walk anywhere I can’t see you. I really don’t feel in the mood for rescue work.”
In his head, Ludo Torchia had allotted each of them a role. Abati was Heliodronus, protector of the leader. Vignola was Perses, clever, quick, and not always willing to reveal what he knew. Big, stupid Andrea Guerino made a good foot soldier as Miles. Raul Bellucci, an underling who always did what he was told, could pass as Leo, the mechanism for the sacrifice. And for Nymphus, the bridegroom, some kind of creature who was both male and female in the same body, the slim, annoying creep who was Toni LaMarca.
There could be only one Pater. Torchia understood exactly what that meant. Pater involved leadership, not blood relationship, certainly not love. He’d watched the way his own father had behaved, the simple, blunt dictatorial attitude that said Here in my own house I am a kind of god too. From obedience came knowledge and security. It had been that way for Ludo Torchia right up to the age of nine, when his father went down to work at the docks in Genoa one day and never came back. A year later, when his weak, incapable mother thought he was over everything, Torchia had stolen into the jetty where the accident occurred. He’d stared at the giant black crane, its head like that of some stupid crow, trying to imagine what had happened, how it would feel to have that mass of evil steel tumble over towards you, ravenous for something to destroy.
Ludo loathed the Church from that moment forward, watching his mother cling to the Bible each night, trying to find some solace in a religion that, the young Ludo Torchia knew, had failed them by allowing the crane to topple in the first place.
When he came to La Sapienza and began, under the careful tutelage of the brilliant Giorgio Bramante, to study Mithraism, Ludo understood finally what his life had lacked, and how that gaping hole could be filled. By duty, responsibility, leadership. Some clear declaration of his own identity, one that set him apart from the drones. He would be Pater one day, part of the old religion, one that kept its secrets beneath ground, didn’t share them foolishly with the masses in vast golden palaces. Here, in the temple that Bramante had uncovered, all the pieces should have been in place, and Ludo could begin by finishing the task those long-dead soldiers had begun almost eighteen centuries before.
Except one detail was missing. The cowardly Vincenzo had failed them, failed his destiny, to be Corax, the initiate, the beginner, a child even, if the old books had it right.
“Also…” Abati added quickly, marching towards the altar again, intent on something Torchia couldn’t predict, “I am not countenancing any of this nonsense.”
To Torchia’s astonishment, Abati now had the bird’s cage in his hands, was lifting it high. The shining black cockerel flapped its wings and made a low, aggressive crowing noise.
“Don’t touch that,” Torchia ordered. “I said…”
Dino Abati was working on the cage lid.
“Ludo. Think about it. We’re in trouble enough without these stupid games.”
“Andrea,” Torchia yelled. “Stop him.”
“What…?” Guerino mumbled. The big farmer’s son looked half stoned already.
None of them understood, Torchia realized. Bramante’s words kept ringing in his ears. How terrible must it have been to have lost your religion? To have seen it snatched from your hands, just before death, to be denied the final sacrament, the last opportunity you would have on this earth to make peace with your god?
Abati had the cage open, was turning it sideways, trying to shake the cockerel out into the damp dark air.
“Don’t do that,” Torchia said, walking over towards the red-suited figure.
Heliod
ronus always wore red, Torchia remembered. He always coveted the position of Pater. Had to. Until Pater died, there was nowhere for him to go.
Ludo Torchia surreptitiously retrieved a fist-sized rock from one of the stone benches as he moved, gripped it low and hidden in his right hand.
“I said…” he began to murmur, then stopped, found he was waving away a cloud of stinking black feathers, flapping furiously around his face.
Maybe he screamed. He wasn’t sure. Someone laughed. Toni LaMarca, by the sound of it. Terrified, screeching with fear and rage, the cockerel dug its claws into Ludo Torchia’s scalp, then launched itself over him, towards the exit, flapping manically, its cawing metallic voice echoing around the stone chamber that enclosed them like a tomb.
He didn’t know why he’d picked a bird that was black. Like a crow, its wings and limbs extended. Like some miniature mocking imitation of a crane.
Sometimes Ludo Torchia didn’t know why he did things at all. When he’d caught his breath again, he found he was on his knees, looking at the bloodied head of Dino Abati, pinning the figure in the red caving suit to the ground.
Not that it was necessary. Abati’s eyes were glassy. His mouth flapped open, slack-jawed. Torchia didn’t actually remember hitting Abati, which meant, he realised, he could have smashed the big, jagged rock that was still in his hand deep into his skull time and time again.
The rest were crowded round the two of them now. No one spoke. The chamber stank. Of dope and the bird and blood and of sweat and fear, too.
“Oh Christ, Ludo,” Toni LaMarca — it had to be Toni LaMarca — whispered. “I think you killed him….”
Torchia looked down at Abati. There was blood seeping from his nostrils. It bubbled, then subsided as he watched. Abati was breathing. He was probably just unconscious. That was all. Still, he’d made his point. He’d established himself, the way the Pater had to.
Torchia turned, gripping the rock, and looked up at the four of them. The Pater must rule. That was how it worked.
“Listen. All of you.”
He realised he was speaking in a different kind of voice already. Older. A voice with an authority he hadn’t quite found inside himself before.
“If you try and say this was just me, no one will believe you. I’ll tell them we did this between us. Everything.”
“Ludo,” Guerino moaned in his stupid, country-boy whine. “That’s not fair.”
“Just do what I tell you,” Torchia ordered, voice rising, with a commanding tone inside it he hoped was copied from Giorgio Bramante. “Is that so hard? If you stick with me, everything works out fine. If you don’t…”
This was the moment on which everything turned. They outnumbered him. They could walk out, go bleating to the college people. To Giorgio Bramante. And that thought sparked both fear and some deep, interior delight of anticipation in Ludo Torchia’s head.
Dino Abati groaned beneath him, his eyes flickering open.
Torchia held up the rock again, noting the blood on its surface, and raised his arm, as if to strike Abati’s head once more.
“It’s your choice,” he said calmly.
They looked at one another. Then Sandro Vignola plucked up the courage to speak.
“Let’s just keep this among ourselves, Ludo. We can clean Dino up. It was an accident, really. Let’s do what has to be done, then get out of here.”
Vignola was always the smart one. Perses. Number three behind himself and Abati.
Torchia looked at Andrea Guerino.
“Hey. Farm boy. Fetch the bird.”
Then, audible to each of them, came a brief high sound, unintelligible, half terrified, half excited.
It could have been a child, trying to say something that was lost in the shadows.
“Fetch me that, too,” someone ordered, and Ludo Torchia was surprised to find it was him.
* * *
None of them wanted to stay long in the old crypt beneath the abandoned church of Santa Maria dell’Assunta, not when they saw what was down there. They left that to Teresa Lupo and her assistant, Silvio Di Capua, who worked away under the arc lights they’d brought, aided by a team of goggle-eyed morgue monkeys. This was an unusual one, even for them.
Having handed off his responsibility, Bruno Messina went back to the Questura. Falcone began to assemble his team, slowly at first, but with a rapidly growing confidence. Officers were despatched to bring in the latest news on the hunt for Dino Abati. Two more were sent back to the old church in Prati to take a look at the bloodstained T-shirt. Falcone insisted it stay on the wall there so that a surveillance officer could be placed on stakeout duty day and night to see if Bramante returned. Whatever forensic the shirt contained seemed, to Falcone, irrelevant. They already knew the man they were seeking. The abandoned church on the Aventino would provide enough for Teresa Lupo’s team to work on for the foreseeable future. Once that team had gone, Costa, Falcone, and Peroni sat down in the control van and listened to Rosa Prabakaran’s description of her interview with the woman who’d found the body in the crypt.
Costa had seen Rosa in the Questura. The junior officer was a quiet individual in her early twenties who kept herself apart, and not just because of her background. Rosa had ambition written all over her, that careful, reticent attitude Costa had come to recognise among those who kept looking for the way to the up escalator the moment they arrived. She’d been in the force just six months, joining after completing a master’s degree in philosophy in Milan the previous summer. Young, educated, smart, keen, and with an ethnic background… she had just about every qualification the force was looking for in its next generation of officers.
Except, perhaps, some harsh collision with the real world. He’d spoken to Peroni about this briefly, as he accompanied the big man out of the crime scene deep beneath the earth, making sure his partner didn’t go round the corner and buy a pack of cigarettes, falling back into bad habits. Rosa’s experience on the force had been routine and perhaps even a little privileged. But now she was on the Bramante case, and had been for a good half day before it engulfed them. She was the one who had gone to the church in Prati, and deciphered where the message on the wall was pointing them. Early that morning, while they were preparing for a sociable lunch and the news of a wedding to come, a pleasurable moment that already seemed long distant, she’d walked into the crypt, seen the fresh new corpse there. Then, after interviewing the woman caretaker, she’d set about assembling all the data available on Giorgio Bramante, which she had requested after Pino Gabrielli’s identification of the intruder in his little church. It was she who’d managed to link the dates of the attacks with the bloodstains in Sacro Cuore del Suffragio, more rapidly than most old hands on the force could have hoped for. It was clear to Costa from listening to the fluent, concise way she managed to sum up what they already knew about Bramante and his movements after leaving prison that Rosa Prabakaran could, one day, make a formidable officer. Only one thing bothered him. It all seemed to be a touch unreal to her, a cerebral puzzle, like the arguments she might juggle in an academic dissertation. That sort of self-detachment could, in his view, be dangerous, both for her and the outcome of any investigation. If there was one thing he’d learned in his short career it was this: results came from engagement, however painful that sometimes proved to be.
Costa forced himself to put aside his concerns about Rosa Prabakaran, which probably stemmed from nothing more than her inexperience, and got back into the conversation.
“They offered him his old job back?” Peroni asked, amazed.
“Academics…” Falcone said, with a grimace.
According to Rosa, Bramante had walked out of jail after serving fourteen years of a life sentence for murder and found himself immediately faced with the gift of a professorship back at La Sapienza, with university tenure, effectively a job for life. And he’d turned it down.
“Why the hell would he say no?” Peroni demanded.
To Costa it was obvious. “B
ecause he had a job to do, Gianni. He’d already started on it while he was in jail. Bramante felt he had a…”
“Higher calling?” Falcone suggested wryly.
“Exactly. He wasn’t going to be deflected from that for anything. Besides…”
A man who spent years in jail, carefully plotting the elaborate deaths of those he blamed for the loss of his son, was someone capable of powerful emotions.
“Perhaps he’d feel guilty too,” Costa went on. “If he got his old life back, and nothing had changed.”
Falcone stared at Rosa. “Do you agree?”
She shrugged, with the dismissive confidence of the young. “Why complicate matters by trying to think yourself into his head? What does it matter?”
Costa couldn’t stop himself flashing a look of disappointment in her direction. He’d felt much the same way at her age, believing that cases came down to facts and procedures. It was only with age and practice that a more subtle truth emerged: motivation and personality were important issues too. In the absence of hard evidence, they were often the only trails an investigation team could follow.
“I’m sorry,” Rosa said testily. “It seems obvious. Bramante knew exactly what he was planning to do. He wasn’t going to let anything get in the way. Why else would he have taken the job he did?”
“Which was?” Peroni asked.
“The one he had part-time in jail,” she replied. “Working in a slaughterhouse. For one of the butchers in the market here.”
She let that sink in.
“A horse butcher,” she added. “I’d sort of forgotten they even existed.”
But this was Testaccio, Costa thought. One of the oldest working-class communities in Rome. Less than a kilometre away from where they were stood the old slaughterhouse, a vast complex now being turned over to the arts, after years of dereliction. The killing had moved elsewhere, out to the hidden suburbs. The shops still remained, though, in the quarter’s narrow streets, and the busy market where Rosa Prabakaran had found the caretaker of Santa Maria dell’Assunta that morning. Bramante’s cheap little apartment had been close by. It was now being swept clean for less obvious clues than a set of photographs of men and women who could lead him to Leo Falcone. Not, it seemed to Costa, that there would be much there to help. Bramante was gone, to a hiding place he’d doubtless prepared in advance. He was a brilliant, organised, careful individual. That much was clear already. The kind of man who was unlikely to betray himself easily.
