by David Hewson
Finally, Beatrice moved toward one of the butcher’s stalls. Rosa remembered something else from the previous day, something dark. It was the woman from Santa Maria dell’Assunta almost fainting in this very place, sickened by what she’d seen, and by the visible reminder of it in the stalls. Hunks of bright red meat, white fat, little puddles of blood gathering on the marble slabs beneath. The harsh, organic stink of raw flesh.
Rosa looked at the sign above the stall where Beatrice had stopped. It was a horse butcher’s. The horse butcher’s. This was the place where Giorgio Bramante had worked, half the time killing the animals at the slaughterhouse out in Anagnina, the rest bringing the meat here.
Beatrice Bramante was talking in an animated fashion to a man behind the counter. A man in his early thirties who wore a bloodstained coat and the white pork-pie hat butchers seemed to favour.
Then the man stood closer to Beatrice, staring at her with admiring eyes, slipping some parcel of meat illicitly into her hands. Then following this with a brief, sudden kiss, one that took the woman by surprise, so that she glanced around nervously, wondering if anyone had seen.
Rosa had ducked behind a towering pile of fruit boxes the moment she saw Beatrice turning in her direction. There, her nostrils full of the ripe acid smell of winter lemons from Sicily, her fingers gripped the little bag, with the handgun inside. She’d left the police radio at home deliberately. This was a statement. I’m on my own. But she had her phone, and if she called Leo Falcone, told him she was standing just metres away from someone who might be Giorgio Bramante himself, none of that would matter.
She moved out from behind the lemon boxes. The man and woman were still talking, still close. Rosa took a good look at him. He was quite striking, in a damaged way. Not muscular, but not a college professor either, even one who’d spent the last fourteen years in jail. She’d seen the photos of Giorgio Bramante. They’d warned her he would be different. But not this different. And why would he return to the old job like this? It seemed inconceivable.
She remembered Teresa Lupo’s advice: Either look or don’t look. Just don’t half look.
The reason she had assumed this was Giorgio Bramante was simple: the man and the woman treated each other with a casual, intimate familiarity.
The butcher reached out and lightly brushed Beatrice Bramante’s cheek once more. Then she walked off, out under the market’s iron roof, covering her head against the rain, striding back towards her apartment, eyes on the sidewalk.
Beatrice is not alone, Rosa Prabakaran decided. She has a lover. One who worked with Giorgio. And surely must have known him.
This was valuable, she thought. In a different light, Leo Falcone would be grateful for it. Yet she was immediately aware that he would see instantly she had come to possess the intelligence through what he would view as illicit means, in direct contradiction to the orders he’d issued.
Of itself the knowledge was useless, of such limited value that its revelation could serve only to reveal her duplicity.
“I need more,” she whispered.
When the market closed, she followed him back to where, she assumed, he lived. It was in a block near the old slaughterhouse, a massive complex now being turned over to the arts, not far from the Monti dei Cocci, the small hill of Imperial-era pottery shards that was Testaccio’s one tourist attraction. At night, half of Rome came here for the restaurants and the clubs. In the day, however, it was deserted. Only a handful of visitors were heading for the arts exhibition. Rosa studied the gates of the old slaughterhouse. They’d left the huge original headstone over the building: a winged man wrestling a complaining bull to the earth by the ring through its nose. And beneath both of them a sea of carved bones, animal and human, all grimy stone after years of exposure to the weather.
Lost for what to do next, she hid from the rain in a tiny café opposite. After a while her mobile phone rang. She cursed the intrusion as an unfamiliar, unexpected voice came on the line.
* * *
It was hot that night in the basement of the Questura. Falcone was left alone outside the cell, a punishment for defying Messina over the progress of the investigation. His penance was to listen to a young man being beaten to the brink of death, a point from which there would be no return.
He had sat there for so long, racking his brains for some possible solution, some excuse which would allow him to contravene Messina’s direct orders and enter that dreadful room. There was only one, and he’d known it from the outset. What was happening was wrong. Nothing could justify it, not the mysterious disappearance of a child, nor the likelihood that Ludo Torchia was involved in it. Wrong was wrong, and any police officer who tried to run away from that simple fact would surely, one day, pay the price.
When he could take no more — Bramante was left alone in the cell with Torchia for fifty minutes, Falcone was to learn later, though it seemed much longer — Falcone threw open the door, began to say something, and found the words failed in his mouth. This was a sight he knew would never fully fade from his memory.
Giorgio Bramante stood over his victim, still furious, still wanting to go on, hate and a lust for some kind of vengeance blazing in his eyes.
“I’m not done yet,” this learned, respected college professor yelled. “Didn’t you hear your orders, you fool? I’m not done yet.”
“There,” Falcone told him, “you are wrong.”
Then he picked up the phone to the front desk, ordered the duty medic to come immediately, and called for an ambulance. After which he dialled the central complaints bureau. He described, tersely, the situation as he saw it: an act of outright brutality warranting a criminal investigation had happened in the heart of the Questura. When he heard the hesitation on the line, he made it clear that, should the authorities decide to play deaf, he would take the matter higher and higher until someone, somewhere, would listen. There was no going back.
He put down the handset. Giorgio Bramante was glaring at him with such hatred that, for a moment, Falcone feared for his own safety.
* * *
Even for Giorgio Bramante, used to hardship, the weather was bitter. After he’d fled the Questura, surprised at how easily he’d avoided capture, he trudged for two hours along deserted roads which still followed the route of the old Imperial highways, finally passing the Porta San Sebastiano around three a.m., and walking until he found what was once the Via Latina. There he planned to spend the rest of the night, and much of the coming day, dry, if not warm, in the depths of a set of closed caverns, not far from the Ad Decimum catacombs, ten Roman miles from the city, close to what, centuries ago, would once have been a military encampment.
This was the most remote of his several potential hiding places. There were ones much closer to the centro storico — caverns and remains of underground streets that had never been mapped, known only to a handful of scholars. He could live hidden away like this for months undetected.
Circumstances forced him to wait, to be patient. There was only a little more to be done now, but this was the most important of all. So he sat, in the cold, bleak cavern, thinking about the day, and what knowledge he had come to possess of this place over the years.
The present site had been discovered by a local farmer trying to break up the soil for vines. The family had kept the find secret for a decade, hoping there was some hidden treasure in its subterranean web of tunnels. All they uncovered were tombs and bones, niches hacked into the stone, row upon row, tunnel upon tunnel. And, on the final, lowest level, the temple, which they scarcely looked at once they realised there was nothing glittering among its stones.
In late Imperial times this had been a modest agrarian community, probably no more than a few farms and a small army barracks for the men guarding the gatehouses and tax collection points of the Appian Way. This temple had none of the grandeur of the great altar hidden deep within the Aventino. Here, Mithras and the bull were crudely carved. The scorpion squeezing at the beast’s groin was scarcely recognis
able. The place was a mere remnant of the old religion, one that the archaeologists, once they learned of it, decided to overlook in favour of the more obvious Christian symbols that had followed: the insignia of the Cross, the legends carved into the walls that hinted someone, perhaps a saint, had rested here briefly after martyrdom.
On the first Sunday of each month, a local archaeological society led a gaggle of visitors down through the simple modern concrete entry cabin on the surface, taking thrill-seeking tourists beneath the earth to see the skeletons and what remained of the ancient funereal decorations. No one spoke of Mithras. The religion that had once been Christianity’s principal rival — though Bramante doubted any of the men who had worshipped here would have seen it that way — was now a myth to amuse children. A fairy story, a fable to file alongside Aesop.
That worked to his advantage. The site, situated half a kilometre along a narrow, now unused farm track, in a field abandoned by a farmer who’d found more profit in subsidies for growing nothing than planting young grapes, was remote. The archaeologists wouldn’t be back for another two weeks. He had privacy and security. And, thanks to thoughtful city authorities, electricity too, since a single cable feeding electric lights ran through virtually the entire network of caverns, stopping short only of the Mithraeum, which no one wanted to see.
The previous day had exhausted him. He’d slept for eight straight dreamless hours before waking. Now he sat on the first level, by a series of niches, under the dim illumination of the bulbs and the grey light of day slipping down a slender ventilation shaft. In this sector all but one of the graves was empty. In the last alcove lay a female skeleton, carefully posed for the visitors, a real human being, someone who had walked and breathed in the fields above some seventeen hundred or more years before, her remains now arranged for the curious, like a waxworks dummy from a travelling circus.
Bramante still understood the archaeological mind. His former colleagues were historians, not grave robbers. They would move only what was absolutely necessary. The bones remained, in all probability, where they had been found, which meant that he knew the girl’s name, too, since it was carved over the tomb with the odd added inscription — nosce te ipsum, “Know yourself” — a sign, surely, that there was more here than the obvious. Above the alcove was a crude tableau, no more than two hands high: a young female figure in a shift, standing, leaning on one leg, holding a cat in her arms, stroking its head, in a pose so timeless, so natural, it made any parent’s heart ache. At her feet stood a cockerel and a goat. Bramante had accompanied a couple of tours here. He’d listened to the guides talk fondly of the carving, citing it as an illustration of the idyllic pastoral life lived in the vicinity. He’d kept his own opinions to himself. People always saw what they wanted to see. For him, as a rational investigator, one who tried to sift small nuggets of truth from the dust of history, it was important to deal with the facts. The cockerel and the goat were common emblems in certain kinds of Roman statuary, notably pieces of a ritual and votive nature. The animals were there as sacrifices, not emblems of the kind of bucolic heaven Virgil tried to portray in his poetry. The truth was more mundane and more complex. While this girl clearly lived, and died, in a Christian community, it had been one that, like many, kept alive the old gods, furtively, with covert references, exactly as the followers of Jesus had done before they rose to power. The bird and the goat were there because the girl, in the mind of her mourners, was about to kill them, to dedicate a sacrament to Mercury, who would decide whether her transition to the next world would be swift and painless.
Bramante reached for the bag of food and drink he’d bought in the supermarket at San Giovanni two days before. The instant coffee tasted disgusting but at least it was warm. He ripped open a prepackaged cake, took a bite, idly examining the label. Alessio had loved these. The boy always had a sweet tooth. It was a bad habit, one his parents had found hard to discourage.
Then he looked again at the inscription above the tomb and the small, familiar assembly of brown and white bones, the fragile simulacrum of a once-living human being.
“Salute, Valeria,” Bramante said quietly, toasting her with the disgusting coffee…. I hope Mercury listened when you called. I hope you haven’t spent the last seventeen hundred years waiting for him to wave you on. The young police officer lived not far from here, with his American girlfriend. She was an attractive woman. Bramante would have taken her, had a hostage been necessary. It wasn’t personal.
He thought of the blonde American and of the way men amused themselves in jail. All that effort, all the concentration on the corporeal elements of the sexual act, as if the cerebral didn’t matter for a moment. He was aware that, at that moment, he could so easily have done exactly what many did in prison; a minute or so of grunting effort, then a kind of relief. But there was a young girl in the room, albeit a long-dead one. And Giorgio Bramante needed — prized — real contact.
He needed so much. I…
His breath began to come in short, pained gasps. His eyes started to sting.
It took just a thought to bring on an attack now. This had the makings of one as bad as any in recent days. The buzzing came back, drove a sharp, tormenting stake between his temples. His hands began to tremble. His whole body began to shake so hard he spilled some of the foul scalding coffee on his hands as he struggled to set the drink on the floor.
The stupid cake got flung into a corner by the spasmodic jerk of his arm, down into the dark where the rats could find it. Bramante didn’t care anymore. He just threw back his head, teeth clenched tight, let the rage consume him.
Madness, maybe. That’s what the woman doctor in the hospital had hinted at. Guilt perhaps, she said once, and after that, he cancelled all future appointments with her.
Psychiatrists didn’t really believe in psychopomps, invisible beings that tried to achieve their ends through ordinary humans, hoping, perhaps, in his case, to find some possible fate for Alessio, wherever he might be, longing to be home, at peace, joined with the grey world that lived alongside the present one, flitting in and out of its consciousness at will.
He wasn’t sure he believed in pscyhopomps himself. At moments like this, it didn’t really matter.
Eyes closed tightly, teeth grinding, sweat running down his brow, Giorgio Bramante saw the picture forming in his head and tried to fight it, knowing the effort was futile.
After an effort to resist — a second? a minute? an hour? — he opened his inner eye and found himself back in the place that never really left him anymore: Piranesi’s square on the Aventino. He was on his knees, neck upright, head straining, eyes ready to burst from the pressure behind them as he sought in desperation to see something through the keyhole in the door of the mansion of the Cavalieri di Malta.
It was Alessio’s voice in his ear, filling his head. Older now, and full of some emotion his father had never noticed in life. Determination. Hatred. A cold, mocking detachment.
“Can you see it?” this young-old imaginary creature asked.
Giorgio didn’t answer. There was no point in talking to a ghost.
“Well?” the voice asked in a louder, harder, crueller tone. “Or are you just thinking about yourself again, Giorgio? Who’s next on your list? That skeleton in the corner?”
He’d no idea how long the fit lasted. When it was over, when his muscles relaxed and his jaw unclenched, aching, teeth sharp and edgy from the effort of crushing them together so hard it felt something might break, Bramante was dismayed to find he’d pissed himself. He got up, grateful only that he wasn’t in his caving suit, climbed out of the jeans and underwear he was wearing, scooped some icy water from the bucket he’d brought with him, towelled himself down, then put on the last pair of clean underwear and jeans he had.
He threw the dirty ones into the corner, as far away from the skeleton’s alcove as he could manage. Then he sat down, recovered the coffee and the cake, ate and drank and thought.
“No,” he said, starin
g at the bones of a girl called Valeria who had died centuries ago, “I didn’t see it.”
After finishing the food and drink, he took out the little digital camera he’d stolen from a Chinese tourist dawdling outside the Pantheon three weeks before and began to flick through the pictures.
The blonde American girl really was quite pretty. Given the opportunity and the motive, he would have liked the chance to take her. He flicked through five frames, watching her walk from the entrance of the Palazzo Ruspoli, out into the Via del Corso, fighting his desire to linger because he was getting hard, in spite of himself, in spite of the watchful, dead, judgemental presence of the bones in the shadows. Then he passed over Falcone and his woman, then the other two.
The weather was made for work like this. He could go anywhere, do anything, take pictures where and when he liked, and none of them would know.
He returned to the last few pictures, the shots taken from the café across the road near Santa Maria dell’Assunta. He’d drunk a cappuccino and eaten a sandwich watching Falcone and his men bicker and fumble their way inside the old abandoned church.
It was so easy to read Leo Falcone, Bramante thought. The old man’s smiles were so rare they had to mean something. At that moment, captured in the distance, across the road, behind the yellow police tape, Falcone was looking at someone with — not affection, Bramante decided — but a kind of respect. The sort of respect he seemed to reserve for the young these days, judging by the way he kept close to the short, clever agente with the beautiful girlfriend.
He stared at the picture, once again felt certain of its use to him, but surprised, almost shocked, all the same. The police had changed in a decade and a half. That made things so much easier. Before he put on the office cleaner’s uniform the night before, he’d walked into a café and sat in front of a computer for half an hour, preparing his options. It had been so easy to track down the name of the only recent female Indian recruit to the Rome police. They liked to make a big deal of ethnic recruitment these days. The woman had been in most of the city papers three months earlier, with a photo. And her name.
