by David Hewson
She didn’t like him, she decided. She wanted to go and meet Bruno Messina, give him what he wanted, then surprise her father with a bottle of good prosecco to celebrate all those rip-off umbrellas he’d sold this freezing, wet, baffling spring day.
“He’s all yours,” she said brusquely, and turned toward the door. His hand stopped her.
“Let me give you a lift to the station or somewhere,” he said. “You’re going to get drenched, and frankly you’re not dressed for it. I’ve got a civilian vehicle. No one’s going to know. Besides…” He glanced again at the block across the street where the butcher lived. “I don’t think he’s going anywhere now, is he?”
They walked round the corner, a long walk, three hundred metres or more, with him holding the umbrella over her head, letting the rain pelt down on his black hood. He was parked on a little road that ran away from the old slaughterhouse, down what looked like a country lane, narrow, empty, desolate. A line of shattered pot shards from the grassy banks of the Monte dei Cocci had spilled onto the street, dislodged by the rain. They stepped over them and walked towards a white van, parked by a couple of large overflowing trash bins from the restaurants and nightclubs up the street.
He stopped at the rear.
“You never asked to see my ID,” he said, and there was a censorious tone in his voice. “You know, if I was to tell someone that, the commissario say, it wouldn’t go down well for you.”
“You’re right. I’m sorry.”
Rosa felt bone-weary. He’d moved the umbrella so now it didn’t cover her properly. The rain fell on her exposed legs, which were cold. She was shivering.
“It’s important you see it,” he said. “I keep things inside.”
She wasn’t thinking straight, but something still told her this was wrong.
He placed a fist firmly in her back and edged her towards the van doors. There were no windows at the rear. Something was painted on the sides that she couldn’t quite make out, obscured by the rain. Lettering and a symbol, all in blood red.
He pulled out keys, worked the handle, and opened the doors. Then he nudged her forward to look. She blinked. There was a man inside the van, trussed like a Christmas turkey, some kind of rag round his mouth, hands bound behind his back, ankles tied tightly together so that he lay on the floor able only to roll helplessly around, saying nothing, going nowhere. The van interior was spotless, antiseptically clean, and his floundering meant he was careening around it, bumping into white industrial boxes full of meat.
The trussed man on the floor had frightened, familiar eyes. It was the butcher from the market. She knew that the moment she saw him, and was amazed that her first emotion was fury: anger directed at herself for being so stupid.
“What do you give a condemned man?” asked the voice behind her, which was different now. More cultured. More distanced from the interested, human emotion he must have summoned up from somewhere to get her here. “Anything he wants, I guess. Otherwise he just takes it.”
Her hands were trembling as she fought to get the little purse off her shoulder, struggling to find the gun she’d secreted inside. The strap caught. Then his powerful fist wrapped itself around the cord, snapped it, flung the bag and the precious gun into the gutter.
She thought about fighting, struggled to remember the self-defence lessons she’d learned so carefully in the training school out on the Via Tiburtina, day after day, arms and hands hurting, bruises rising on her shins. But this wasn’t a classroom. He was strong, so much more powerful than she could ever be. His hands moved everywhere, grasping, hurting, forcing. Hands that seemed to enjoy what they were doing: pushing her down onto the white metal floor of the van, next to the trussed butcher, twisting a rag around her mouth, one that tasted of something raw and chemical, tying her hands, her ankles, securing her in a few swift easy movements as easily as a man preparing a beast for the knife.
She stared up at him. He saw. The hood came down. It wasn’t the face from the photographs in the files, she realised. Not quite. Giorgio Bramante, in the flesh, had only a passing resemblance to the man Rosa thought she would see. He was greyer, more sallow-faced, with the complexion of someone dying from the inside out of some cruel disease, like a cancer gnawing away relentlessly. Except for the eyes, which blazed at her.
The eyes were happy. Hungry. Amused.
* * *
Costa listened. He’d thought he was getting blasé about this kind of detail. He was wrong. What had happened to Giorgio Bramante’s former student, Sandro Vignola, if Teresa was right — and it was difficult to see how she could be mistaken — was as vicious and heartless as anything Bramante had done to his other victims. Perhaps more so. And that made Costa ask himself: Was this different somehow?
There was much work to be done on the remains. They had suffered badly from animal attack and substantial decomposition in the airless, damp enclosure of the drain. This would take days to complete back in the morgue, and require outside assistance, possibly from a private lab or that of the Carabinieri. But two facts were clear already. Vignola had been gagged. The cloth that had been tied round his mouth to prevent him calling for help was still in place. And he’d been hobbled, hand and foot, so that he could scarcely crawl.
“Hobbled with what?” Falcone asked.
Teresa shouted to one of the morgue monkeys. He came out with a strong nylon tie, with a buckle on one end. It stank.
“I’m only guessing here,” she told them, “but I’d put money on the fact this is the same kind of hobble they use in a slaughterhouse. Remember, Bramante was working in one while he was in jail? He could have stolen a couple when he came out for the weekend. Also…” — she looked at Peroni as if to say Sorry — “…just to make sure, he broke both of the victim’s ankles. He did it after the hobble went on, so perhaps he was worried his original plan wouldn’t work.”
“This plan being?” Peroni asked.
“He crippled Sandro Vignola and put him in the drain. Then he capped the end of it with bricks. It wouldn’t take long. Not if he knew what he was doing. I asked her earlier…” She nodded at Judith Turnhouse, still sitting under the awning, now talking quietly, calmly, to a policewoman. “One of Bramante’s many specialities as an archaeologist was apparently the early uses of brick and concrete,” Teresa reported. “They knew an awful lot about that, even two thousand years ago. They knew the right mortar to make for a situation where there was damp. They knew what kind of material to choose so that it didn’t fall down after a couple of years. That’s what he did here. He bound Sandro Vignola. He made sure he couldn’t utter a sound. Then he walled him up in there and left him to die.”
Peroni muttered something indistinguishable.
“I imagine,” Teresa added, “that we’ll find the cause of death was starvation. I couldn’t see any obvious wounds apart from the broken ankles. Here’s another thing I learned from her too…” Teresa nodded at Judith Turnhouse and, for a moment, looked pleased with herself. “Walling people up and leaving them to die was one way some Roman cults treated those they believed had betrayed them.”
“You mean Bramante’s taunting them with their own rituals?” Costa asked.
“I don’t know what I mean,” she replied. “All I know is this. Geek boy over there” — she flicked a thumb at Di Capua — “did a little research on the Web before this lot came in. Everything to do with Mithras happens in sevens. There were six kids and Giorgio. There were seven different levels of rank in the temple, wet-behind-the-ears beginner to god. Does that mean anything? Who knows? But here’s a fact Silvio did find. Every level had a sacrament. Which, before you jump to conclusions, could just mean a gift to the god. An offering. Or it could be a sacrifice, too. They killed a lot of animals back then, and not necessarily for food either. Or the sacrament could be some kind of ordeal. One of which was being left alone in some dark, deserted cave, wondering whether anyone was ever going to come back and let you out.”
They took this in, stil
l bewildered.
“Seven stages, seven sacraments,” Teresa said firmly. “By my reckoning, our killer’s still one short.”
“I’m not much interested in ancient history, Doctor.” Falcone said it severely.
“Bramante is,” Costa reminded him. “Ancient history was his life. His obsession. Just as much as being a father. Perhaps the two weren’t separate. Didn’t he say you were number seven?”
Falcone stared at him. Once Costa would have felt awed by the older man’s presence. Once he would have been too scared to correct him like that. But Falcone had changed. So had he. And now the inspector was regarding him with a curious expression, one that bore no animosity and possessed, instead, something not far from… approval.
“A complex case doesn’t necessarily demand complex solutions,” Falcone declared. “So this killing happened, what…”
“Eleven years ago.” Teresa shrugged. “That’s when Sandro Vignola disappeared, isn’t it? I’m amazed we’ve got as much to work on as we have, what with the rats and the water.”
Falcone scowled. “And there’s absolutely nothing here that’s going to be of any use to us today? No forensic? Nothing? We know this was Bramante’s work. He’s hardly likely to deny it when we find him.”
The three men stared at each other miserably.
Teresa Lupo clicked her fingers at Silvio Di Capua.
“If you people are going to ask me a question,” she said, “it would be polite to wait for an answer before you dive into your own personal pits of gloom. Show them, Silvio.”
Di Capua bent down. There was a transparent plastic case in his hand. Inside it wriggled a large, pale, corpulent worm, of a kind Costa had never seen in his life, and would feel happy never to encounter again.
“Planarian,” Di Capua said firmly, as if it meant something, and pointed towards the drain.
Teresa rapped her fat fingers on the box and beamed at the thing when it moved.
“It’s a worm,” Peroni observed.
“No,” she corrected him. “Silvio is right. It’s a planarian. Our friend in Ca’ d’Ossi had one too. That planarian didn’t come from there. It didn’t come from the slaughterhouse. It came from the underground place where Giorgio stored him before moving him in with all those other dead people.”
“It’s a worm,” Falcone said.
The Lupo forefinger waved at them, like the wagging, warning digit of a schoolteacher about to deliver up a secret.
“A very special worm,” she said. “I’ve decided to call him… Bruno. What do you think?”
* * *
The ambulance fought through the busy city streets, rocking violently across the cobblestones of the centro storico, battling the traffic to find the hospital at San Giovanni. The police doctor, Patrizio Foglia, sat next to his patient, ignoring the two medics, who seemed to be working on Ludo Torchia out of duty rather than conviction.
Falcone took the bench opposite, held on tight for the ride, and didn’t shrink from the man’s severe gaze.
“This was not my doing, Patrizio,” he said. “Save your anger for someone else.”
“You mean these things simply happen in our own Questura and no one notices? What the hell is going on, Leo?”
“There’s a child missing,” Falcone replied, and found himself depressed to discover how much he sounded like Arturo Messina. “In cases like this, people change. Giorgio Bramante is a highly respected man. Who was to know?”
“So we allow parents to carry out their own interviews now, do we? If you can call it that.”
Falcone shrugged. “If they’re parents like Bramante. Reputable, middle-class citizens who could, I imagine, make a phone call to the right person if they wanted. This was not my decision. I opposed it as vigorously as I was able. But I am a mere sovrintendente around here. I was overruled. I regret that deeply. In the end, I disobeyed Messina and stopped this when I was able.”
Torchia wasn’t moving. Falcone didn’t know a lot about medicine. Nor did he want to know much. What he saw were all the usual totems he associated with a life about to fail: oxygen and syringes, masks and mechanisms, crude toys waging a useless battle against the inevitable.
“You could have stopped it in the first place,” Foglia said with a scowl.
“Probably not. Messina would simply have dismissed me and put someone in there who would have done nothing.”
“You could have told them upstairs!”
He tried to smile. “Messina was upstairs. Please. We’ve been friends for so many years. Don’t imagine these things didn’t run through my head.”
Foglia seemed to have given up on the injured man, judging by the way he allowed the medics to do everything. This surprised Falcone. He was a good doctor. A good man. They had been friends for many years.
“Is there nothing you can do?”
He grunted at that. “As one of my illustrious forebears once said, ‘I cannot cure death.’”
“Perhaps Messina and his kind have a point,” Falcone replied idly, thinking aloud as much for his own benefit as anyone else’s. They were in the wide straight line of the Via Labicana now, a medieval pope’s highway to the great church of San Giovanni in Laterano at the summit of the hill ahead. The hospital wasn’t much further. This part of Ludo Torchia’s journey was coming to an end.
“What?” Foglia replied, his voice high-pitched with disbelief. “Beating a man to death has a point?”
“Not for me but, as I am constantly reminded, I’m no parent. You, Patrizio, are.”
They were lovely kids, two girls, twins, fast approaching the age at which they’d go to college. Foglia and his wife would, Leo knew, be heartbroken when they left home.
“Imagine this was Elena or Anna,” he went on. “Imagine you knew that she’s still alive somewhere, but she won’t be for much longer. She’s underground. Trapped. Frightened. Unable to do anything to help herself. And this… individual can tell you where she is. Possibly.”
There was a sudden chill in the ambulance. Falcone ignored it.
“Put yourself in that situation, Patrizio,” he went on. “You don’t want vengeance. You don’t care about anything but your child. If this man speaks, she may live. If he remains silent, she will surely die.”
Foglia wriggled on his chair.
“What would you do in the circumstances?” Falcone demanded. “Rattle off a suitable section of the Hippocratic Oath, then walk out of the room and start phoning around for estimates for the funeral? Not that you can be certain there will be one, naturally, because the odds are we’ll never find a body. That you will never know what happened to your own flesh and blood. You will go to your grave with that big black hole inside you till the end….”
“Enough!” Foglia yelled. “Enough!”
The ambulance lurched to a complete halt. A trumpet voluntary of car horns rose in harmonic unison and filled the air with their angry cries, like some crazed ironic fanfare for the dying man on the stretcher.
The older medic, a man in his forties, who was watching the oxygen machine like a hawk, took hold of the tube running to Torchia’s mask, waited for the commotion outside to lessen, then said, “I’d beat it out of him. Without a second thought. If I thought it would help right now, I’d squeeze this oxygen supply until the bastard came clean. What else can you do?”
“And if he’s innocent?” Falcone asked.
“If he’s innocent,” the medic answered straightaway, “he’d say so, wouldn’t he?”
Not always, Falcone thought. Sometimes, in the middle of an investigation, logic and rational behaviour went missing. In sensational cases it was by no means uncommon for some troubled individual to walk into the Questura and confess to a crime he had never committed. Some strange, inner guilt drove men to the most curious and damaging of acts on occasion. Maybe Torchia was culpable of something dark and heinous he didn’t wish to share with a couple of police officers. That didn’t guarantee it had to do with the disappearance of Alessio B
ramante.
“We can do what we’re paid to do,” Falcone replied. “We can try to find out what has happened, to sort some facts from the mist. That sounds a little feeble, I know, but sometimes it’s all we have. Besides, someone tried to beat the truth out of him and look at the outcome. He didn’t say a single helpful word. We still don’t know where the boy is. Which means…”
What? He still wasn’t sure.
“Perhaps he is genuinely innocent,” he continued. “That he was just in the wrong place at the wrong time, though I doubt that. Or he wanted Bramante to do what he did for some reason. It gave him some satisfaction.”
Foglia shook his head. “What possible motive could he have for that?”
Falcone felt a little ashamed. It had been wrong of him to personalise the case in the way he had, to put that cruel picture inside Foglia’s head. It had disturbed his old friend, who was now red-faced, exasperated, and confused.
“I don’t know. I honestly don’t, Patrizio. And I wish I did.” He hesitated. “Is there any chance he’ll live?”
Both of them, the doctor and the older medic, shook their heads.
“Will he regain consciousness?” Falcone asked. “I was clinging to some faint hope he might tell a stranger something he wouldn’t disclose to Giorgio Bramante. If there was a personal reason behind this we don’t understand, perhaps I’d have a chance—”
“He’s not coming back,” the medic muttered, then gingerly opened the door and peered outside. The driver stood there, lighting a cigarette. He stared back at them, guilty at first, then smiled, the quick, cheeky Roman smile everyone used when they were caught. There was an accident in the road ahead, the driver explained. They were stuck in solid traffic. It would be some time — perhaps more than fifteen minutes — before they got to the hospital.
