by David Hewson
Messina’s florid face became a livid red. “Don’t play games with me, Peroni! Damn you!”
Costa turned round and slapped the notebook firmly into the commissario’s fleshy hands, with a sudden, vehement force.
“Someone’s found a dead man. And a half-dead woman who appears to have been raped. Beyond that…”
He didn’t say another word. Peroni was already heading for the door, with the speed of a man half his age.
* * *
“I know the way,” Alessio repeated, making sure he didn’t stutter.
Ludo stopped for a moment. The knife glittered, motionless.
“Little boys shouldn’t tell lies,” he said menacingly.
“Little boys don’t.”
Alessio pulled the end of the string from the spent loop on his belt, the short section, which had broken when he’d first tried to attach it. The main ball had run for several minutes, tugging on his trousers. None of them had noticed back then, in the temple room, as he’d paused for a moment, untied this second loop, and allowed the string to fall on the floor, floating against his legs, tickling like some dead, falling insect.
He held the piece of string in front of him, staring up into those crazy, scared eyes, thinking of chess and how he’d played with his father, hour after hour, in the bright sunny garden room in a house no more than a few minutes’ walk from here, out in the light of day. This, too, depended upon the endgame.
Alessio had fought to memorise each turn they’d taken since that moment: left and right, up and down. He could, he felt sure, retrace their steps, find a way back to the fallen string and the corridor to the surface, one of seven, one that Giorgio Bramante had surely not taken when he disappeared.
He could lead them out of the caves, unseen. Or…
Games always involved a victory. Winners and losers. Perhaps he had a gift, a sacrament, to make, too: six stupid students, trespassing where they weren’t wanted.
“A piece of string,” Torchia said, taunting him. “Is that supposed to make a difference?”
“Listen to him,” Dino Abati cautioned. “We don’t have many options left, Ludo. Sooner or later we’ll stumble into a hole. Or into Giorgio. Which would you prefer?”
“Ludo…” Toni LaMarca whined.
“I know the way out,” Alessio said again, and wanted to laugh. “I can take you past my father. He won’t even see you. He won’t even know you were here. I won’t tell.” He smiled, and held up his left hand, still sticky with the cockerel’s blood. “I promise.”
Torchia stared at his bloodied fingers, thinking.
He lowered the knife.
“If we do this,” Torchia threatened, “you don’t say a word. Not to him. Not to anyone. We don’t talk about you. You don’t talk about us. That’s the arrangement. Understood, little rich boy?”
“I’m not rich,” Alessio objected.
“Understood?”
Alessio looked at the knife, reached forward, and pushed it gently out of his face.
“I won’t tell a soul,” Alessio said. “I swear.”
* * *
For once, the traffic was light. they made it to Testaccio in little more than seven minutes. Four blue marked cars stood outside the market, lights flashing. Peroni knew the most senior uniform on duty. The man nodded them through into a corner of the building that was now deserted except for police. Word had gone round. The stalls were closing for the day.
Rosa Prabakaran sat huddled next to a bread stall, two female officers on either side, a blanket over her hunched frame, clutching a mug of coffee, which steamed in the chill morning air.
Peroni walked over and placed a hand on her shoulder.
She shrieked. The big cop shrank back, muttering curses about his own stupidity, taking the stream of abuse from the women as he did so.
Costa had been in these situations before. At some point Rosa Prabakaran would disclose what had happened, quietly, at her own pace, to some trained officers, all of them female, who knew how to listen. He didn’t need to do more than look at her to understand what, in part at least, she had been through.
“Agente,” Costa said quietly. “Commissario Messina will be here shortly. I suggest, very strongly, you insist on being taken back to the Questura, and talk in your own good time.”
The blanket had slipped. He’d caught sight of something unexpected: a flimsy, provocative slip of a dress underneath. Torn and muddy. She’d seen him notice. After that, her eyes didn’t move from the floor.
Costa walked around the back of the horse butcher’s stall, the shelves white and empty, and waited for the pale-faced uniformed man at the door of the refrigerator to get out of the way.
Then he went inside, aware immediately of the stench of meat and blood.
Peroni followed him. The two of them looked at the shape on a hook in the corner.
“That’s not Leo,” Costa said eventually.
“Thank God for that.”
“Too short. My guess is Enzo Uccello.”
Peroni, a squeamish man at the best of times, made himself stare at the cadaver.
“You’ve a better imagination than me, Nic,” he admitted. “I don’t envy you that.”
He turned and walked outside. Costa joined him almost immediately. Messina and Bavetti were there now, officious voices in a sea of uniforms. Teresa Lupo and her team had arrived too. The pathologist was seated next to Rosa Prabakaran, talking softly to her.
Peroni strode over to the young agente, kept well back this time, bent down on one knee, on the far side from Teresa.
“Rosa,” he said quietly. “I know this is a terrible time to ask. But Leo — did you see him? Do you know what happened?”
She closed her eyes. When she opened them again, they were glazed with tears, so shiny she couldn’t be seeing a thing, except, Costa thought, some unwanted mental images of what had happened.
“No,” she said firmly.
Peroni glanced at Teresa, pleading.
“Leo’s a good man,” she insisted. “I know you didn’t get on well, Rosa, but we really need to find him.”
Something, some memory, made the young policewoman shudder, raising her hand to her mouth. Teresa Lupo hugged her, tight, in a way no man could, perhaps for a long time.
“I don’t know.” Rosa choked with fury on her own ignorance. “He just did what he did, then took us here. I didn’t even know about Inspector Falcone until these men came. What was he doing?”
“He gave himself up to free you,” Teresa answered quietly. “That’s what we think, anyway.”
Rosa’s head went down again.
“You should go back to the Questura now with these officers,” Peroni said, nodding at the uniformed women. “Tell them what you want. Just…”
Rosa Prabakaran’s agonised, tear-stained face rose to look at them. “I didn’t ask him to do that!” she cried. “I didn’t know!”
“Hey, hey, hey!” Peroni said quickly. “Leo would have done that for any of us. That’s…” He cast an ugly glance in the direction of Messina and Bavetti, who’d just walked out of the refrigerated storage room, and now stood, white-faced and shocked, talking in low tones to each other. “That’s what comes naturally to some people.”
Rosa dragged an arm across her face, like a child, angry, ashamed.
Then the two senior officers marched over briskly, trying to look unmoved.
“I want,” the commissario announced to everyone in earshot, “everything focused on finding this bastard Bramante from now on. We assume Falcone is alive. When Bramante killed before, he usually made his handiwork very obvious. Until that is the case — and I pray it won’t be — we assume Falcone is a prisoner, not a victim. I want officers armed at all times. I want helicopter surveillance. And the hostage rescue unit. I want them too. The firearms people.”
Costa blinked. “Firearms?”
“Exactly,” Messina concurred.
There were two specialist state police hostage teams i
n the city. One focused on negotiation, the second was specifically trained to deal with urgent, high-priority incidents involving captives. Messina was making it clear he wanted the latter. The team existed more out of pride than necessity. The Carabinieri and the secret services handled most security events. But what they had, the state police wanted too.
“If Leo’s a hostage,” Peroni observed, “the last thing we want is a bunch of people pointing guns at the man who’s holding him.”
“You’re experts on hostage-taking now, are you?” the commissario barked. “Is there anything you two don’t have an opinion on?”
“We’re just trying to pass on what we think Inspector Falcone would say in the circumstances,” Costa interposed.
“Leo Falcone walked out of the Questura against my direct orders! He’s just made things ten times worse.”
Messina glanced down at Rosa Prabakaran. He looked as if he really didn’t want to see her at all. “What happened here, Prabakaran?” he demanded. “I need to know. Now.”
“No, Commissario.” Teresa Lupo rose. She prodded a stubby finger into his dark serge coat. “Not now. There are protocols and procedures for situations like this. They will be followed.”
“You’re the pathologist here,” Messina bawled at her. His hand flapped close in her face. “You do your job, I’ll do mine. I want to know.”
“Know what?” Teresa demanded, standing her ground.
“What happened?”
Costa broke in. “Agente Prabakaran has nothing to tell us about Inspector Falcone. She wasn’t even aware he’d been taken until someone told her this morning.”
“I am the commanding officer. I demand a full report—”
“Oh please!” Teresa interrupted. “Don’t you have eyes, man? Can’t you see what happened?”
“Remember your place,” Messina hissed, and stuck out a beefy arm to push her out of the way.
Costa watched what happened next with amazement.
Teresa Lupo’s arm rose in what seemed to him a passable imitation of a boxer’s right hook, caught Messina on the chin, then sent the large commissario spinning back into the arms of Bavetti, who just managed to break his fall as the man hit the stone floor.
A barely hidden ripple of amusement ran around the officers, uniformed and plainclothes, watching the scene. No one, except Bavetti, moved a muscle to help the fallen man.
Teresa turned to Costa and Peroni. “Do you really think Leo could still be alive?”
“Bramante was in no rush to kill him before,” Costa insisted, adding, with a glance at Messina, half dazed on the ground, “We could be in luck. If we had something to offer him…”
“Such as?” she asked.
“Such as finding out what happened to his son,” Costa suggested.
“This is ridiculous,” Messina snapped savagely, scrambling to his feet, not yet ready to look Teresa Lupo in the face. “If we didn’t get to the bottom of that fourteen years ago, what chance do we have now?”
She shook her head in disappointment. “For you, Commissario, I suspect the answer is none. Silvio?”
Di Capua, who was just loving this, made a military salute. Teresa threw her briefcase across to him with one easy movement.
“You know the routine,” she told her assistant. “Check for anything at the scene that can narrow down that list of potential sites Leo left us. Once the gentlemen here have ceased walking around with their chins dragging on the floor, they will, I trust, realise their time will be better spent trying to find the living instead of gawping at the dead.”
“Done,” Silvio replied happily. “And you?”
The pathologist stroked her forehead with the back of her large hand, then emitted a long theatrical sigh.
“If anyone asks, I have a terrible headache. Ladies?”
The two female police officers were helping Rosa Prabakaran to her feet. Teresa Lupo took one big stride towards them, sending Bruno Messina scampering back as she approached.
“I think,” she said, “it’s time to leave this place to the weaker sex.”
“With the exception,” she added, pointing to Peroni and Costa, “of you two.”
* * *
The hospital seemed to be run by nuns, mute, unsmiling figures who drifted around busily, taking patients and equipment and pale manila record folders around the maze of endless corridors. It was in a beautiful Renaissance building not far from the Duomo, a massive, ornate, foursquare leviathan that, from the outside, looked more like a palace than a place for the sick, or those just thinking of joining them. Arturo Messina had insisted on accompanying her. He sat with Emily on hard metal chairs in a waiting room with peeling paint and rusty windows that gave out onto a grey courtyard, its cobblestones shining with the constant rain. Four other women in front of her in the queue waited patiently with telltale bulges in their tummies, only partly covered by the magazines they read intently.
Emily Deacon, who was still slim, still, in her own mind, only half-attached to the being growing inside her, glanced at them and felt an unwanted sense of shock. This is me too, she thought. This is how I will look in just a few months.
Arturo, ever the observant one, noted, “It all goes, you know. The weight. Usually anyway. I know women think men are just beasts who’re interested in nothing but their looks. It’s not like that. I always found it hard to take my eyes off my wife when she was pregnant, and I don’t mean that in the way you think. She was… radiant. It’s the only way I know of putting it.”
“One doesn’t feel particularly radiant when one is throwing up at seven in the morning. Men get spared the hard parts.”
For a moment he looked hurt. She’d told him about the conversation she’d had with Nic. The way the case was going in Rome depressed Arturo too.
“Not really,” he commented. “The hard parts just hit us later, in more subtle ways. I don’t want you worrying about Falcone, by the way. I know that’s a stupid thing to say, and that you will anyway. When we get back, I don’t want you hanging over that computer all day. Or the phone. I’ll unplug both if you’re going to be obstinate.”
They’d left Raffaella in the company of Pietro, who was feeding her coffee and biscotti with what seemed, to Emily, a hopeful glint in his eye. Pietro did not share Arturo Messina’s talent for tact.
“Since this is a time for speaking out of turn,” the retired commissario continued, “I should say that I did not find Raffaella’s reaction to be quite what I was expecting. Were things… well with her and Leo before? I’m prying here, of course, so feel entitled to tell me to get lost.”
They hadn’t been getting on, not really, Emily thought. Leo and Raffaella had come back from Venice dependent upon each other in ways that were inexplicable. He needed someone to nurse him through his physical frailty. That much was understandable. But Raffaella’s urge to fill this role — one which was not quite, Emily believed, the same as a craving for love and affection — puzzled her.
“I don’t know, Arturo. I was never very good at relationships until Nic came along.”
“You need only one. The right one, which can be hard, I know. But you’re there already. Stupid old men see things they were blind to when they were stupid young men. I look forward to meeting this Nic of yours.”
“I’m sure you’ll like him.”
“I’m sure too. And yet he gets along with Leo! And don’t tell me the man’s changed. I know that’s impossible. He decides to walk out into the night to try to save this poor young agente for whom he feels responsible — not that he is. Then what does he do next? He phones his lover to tell her it’s all over. And how?”
Raffaella had revealed all this over breakfast, her face grim with fury and spent tears. Then she had insisted on taking a car back to Rome to return to their apartment and await developments.
“By leaving her a message on the answering machine!” Arturo declared, making a broad, incredulous gesture with his hands. “Is that Falcone’s interpretation of kindne
ss? That, before you go out for a rendezvous with some murdering bastard who hopes to kill you, a man must call home and leave a few words on an answering machine, telling a woman who loves you it’s all over?”
“I think he meant it as kindness. Leo’s a little uncomfortable when it comes to personal matters.”
“True. But you see my point? This is precisely what I had to deal with fourteen years ago. Stubborn as a mule, utterly insensitive to the feelings of others and — this is the worst, the very worst — quite uncaring about his own skin too. Being selfless is not necessarily a virtue, my dear. Sometimes it’s just downright infuriating, a way of saying to other people, ‘You can care about me, but I’ll be damned if I care about myself.’”
Emily smiled. He had Leo to a tee. She found herself liking Arturo Messina immensely.
“And the worst thing is,” she replied, “you do care. I do. I think you do too. Even after all these years.”
“Of course! Who wants to see a good man go out into the night to confront Lord knows what? Even if we have had our arguments. Leo was right, though. He understood Giorgio Bramante a lot better than I did. If only I’d listened…”
“Nothing, in all probability, would have been any different. Leo was no closer to finding that boy than you, was he?”
“Meglio una bella bugia che una brutta verità.”
“Pardon me?” she asked.
“Ludo Torchia’s final words. Years ago I bullied them out of the doctor who was with him at the time. I was a good bully. Leo knew already, of course, not that he was any the wiser.”
The three women ahead had gone now. Surely her time would come soon.
“I was a police officer,” Arturo went on. “I was used to the idea that there were ugly truths out there. But something about that case fooled me. I found myself looking for beautiful lies. Like a father’s love is always perfect, always innocent, especially when it comes from a seemingly good, intelligent man like that.”
“We don’t know it wasn’t.”
“Perhaps. But there was something wrong with Giorgio Bramante, and in my haste I refused to acknowledge it. Why? Because I didn’t want to. Because I couldn’t bear the idea. I couldn’t stomach the notion that he might somehow have been at fault too.”
