The Seventh Sacrament nc-5

by David Hewson

  “Do you have archaeological data in there too?” Di Capua asked.

  Cristiano nodded vigorously.

  “How many of that twenty-seven have a Mithraeum?”

  The bony fingers flew. “Seven.”

  Di Capua cast an eye over the computer screen. “One of those is San Clemente. I hardly think he’s going to be hiding in a busy church next to the Colosseum, not with all those Irish priests crawling around above him. That leaves six on the list.”

  He scrawled crosses on the map and pushed it over to Messina.

  “Unless you have a better idea,” Di Capua added.

  Bavetti bristled, furious. “We’re not even a third of the way through door-to-door!”

  “This is all I have, Commissario Messina,” Silvio Di Capua said softly. “And do you know something? It’s all you have, too.”

  Messina hated Teresa Lupo and her minions. They were intrusive and irresponsible. They never knew when to shut up, either. Just one thing got them off the hook. They were correct more often than any forensic squad he’d ever known, more often, even, than the overpaid teams of the Carabinieri who had every computer and gadget the Italian state could afford.

  “We need someone who’s familiar with these sites,” Messina pointed out.

  Di Capua nodded. “We’ve been talking to Bramante’s replacement. Judith Turnhouse. She knows these digs, probably as well as he does. I can call.”

  “I can call,” Messina replied. “Get me your best men, Peccia.” He stared at Bavetti. “Door-to-door. What was I thinking? I lead this myself. We start at San Giovanni.”

  Silvio Di Capua perked up. “Are we invited?” he asked hopefully.

  “No,” Messina declared, then pointed to the door.

  * * *

  Alessio Bramante stood at the centre of a photograph taken fourteen years before, holding the hand of an unidentified woman. When they compared this shot with the stock photo Peroni had lifted from the Questura, it was clear his long hair had been cut roughly, perhaps just minutes before this shot was taken. Someone was attempting to disguise Alessio’s true identity, with the boy’s compliance, or so it seemed. All the same, there was little to work with. Ordinarily, Costa would have called the Questura and passed everything to intelligence. The TV and the papers could be running the photo within hours. If this couple were Italian, someone had to know them. If they weren’t, the odds were they could still be traced through European and international links.

  There were two problems: time and Bruno Messina. Running to the media with names always proved a lengthy business. Possible leads had to be sifted from hundreds, perhaps thousands, of incoming calls. Bruno Messina wouldn’t be interested. Not today, not when he had a policewoman who had been viciously assaulted and an inspector who had been abducted right under his nose. Messina wanted Giorgio Bramante’s hide, and the whereabouts of the man’s son seemed, on the surface, to offer nothing to assist that particular quest.

  They talked through the options and got nowhere. Then they ran through the later frames in the film. The boy was in two of them, with the same couple, no one else. Alessio was no longer glowering hatefully at the photographer. They’d taken off the giveaway T-shirt and replaced it with a plain red one marked with a hammer and sickle. He still didn’t seem happy. To Costa he looked like a kid on the edge, one who’d do anything at that moment — however dangerous, however stupid — just to prove that he could.

  Teresa muttered something and went off to fetch Lorenzo Lotto. The journalist returned with the girl, who now wore a new bright white cotton shirt and looked quite pleased with herself.

  “Explain the problem,” Lotto demanded.

  Costa pulled up the first photo. “We need to know who the two people with the child are.”

  Lotto eyed him suspiciously. “Why?”

  “The child’s been missing ever since,” Teresa replied, on the brink of exasperation. “We’d like to know what happened to him. This isn’t some capitalist conspiracy, Lorenzo.”

  He harrumphed. “You have to expect me to ask. Katrina?”

  Katrina spoke, finally. She had an accent. It sounded Scandinavian. “I can find out.”

  She did something with the computer, drawing a rectangle on the fabric of the woman’s shift, then hit more buttons with flashing fingers, clicked on something that Costa recognised, in the brief instant it was on screen, as the word “Similarity.”

  Scores of thumbnails filled the screen, most of them in situations they hadn’t yet reached, on different film stock, from different photographers. The woman was in all of them. Katrina had tracked her down through the unique colour and pattern of her clothing.

  “What next?” Teresa shouted.

  “I keep telling you!” Lotto complained. “It’s a machine. Ask the right question and you just might get an answer.”

  “Who were they with?” Costa asked.

  “I like this man,” Lotto declared. “I liked your father, too, by the way. Katrina…”

  She flicked through the photos faster than Costa could count them. After a minute she closed in on a sequence of four. The couple were at a stand of some kind. There were publications for sale, and a large banner behind, with an anti-American slogan and the name of some left-wing group Costa had never heard of.

  “Ooh.” Lorenzo Lotto’s face creased with an expression of extreme distaste. “I’d quite forgotten those people ever existed.”

  “Who are they?” Costa asked.

  “They were a bunch of tree-hugging lunatics. Wanted us all to return to the woods and eat leaves. Try telling that to some Fiat worker in Turin who’s about to lose his job to a sweatshop in the Philippines.”

  “Lorenzo!” Teresa chided.

  But he was on the phone already, talking in a low, private whisper none of them could hear. The conversation lasted less than a minute. Then he put down the phone, scribbled something on a pad, and passed the paper to Katrina.

  “E-mail all four photos to this address now, please.”

  Peroni shuffled uncomfortably on his big feet. “Do we get to know with whom you are sharing our evidence?”

  Lotto’s grey eyebrows rose in disbelief.

  He leaned forward and stabbed a finger at a large, bearded man seated behind the stand, in front of the banner. In this shot, he was talking animatedly to the couple. The light was brighter. This was earlier in the day, before Alessio’s arrival.

  “The likes of us inhabit a small world these days,” Lotto said simply, bestowing upon Teresa a short glance of reproof. “Him.”

  They were silent. Then the phone rang. Lotto picked it up, walked away until his voice was indistinct again, and spoke for a good minute or more, making notes continuously.

  The call ended. He returned and allowed himself a brief smile.

  “The man’s name was Bernardo Giordano. He died two years after these photographs were taken. Cancer. So much for living on leaves. Give me tobacco and alcohol any day.”

  “What about the woman? Did she have kids?” Costa demanded.

  “They had a nephew who came to live with them in Rome some years back. It seemed he stayed a very long time. Family problems back home supposedly.” Lotto winced. “They were a strange pair. Even for the Vegetarian Revolutionary Front or whatever they called themselves. They wouldn’t have anything modern in their lives, apparently. Not even a phone.”

  “The woman’s still here?” Teresa asked.

  “Yes, but it may not be the same child. Not the one in the picture,” Lotto cautioned. “There are still several hundred photos you haven’t even looked at. And I was starting to enjoy your company.”

  “I’ll go through the photos,” Teresa promised.

  Lotto sighed, then tore off a strip of the paper from his notepad. “She still lives at the same address. Flaminio. Her name is Elisabetta, and don’t shorten it or she’ll kill you. Three minutes by car, the way you people drive. Don’t raise your hopes too much, though. The ‘nephew’ left home a whi
le back. Also, Elisabetta’s somewhat crazy, it seems. A diet of leaves…”

  Costa took the note gratefully and looked at his watch. “I wish we could work that quickly,” he grumbled.

  “I am delighted,” Lorenzo Lotto replied, “you can’t.”

  * * *

  It looked unimpressive these days, but the Flaminian Way was one of the oldest and most important roads in Rome, a busy route into the city built two centuries before Christ, running directly from the Capital through the Apennines to modern Rimini on the Adriatic. Half a kilometre ahead it crossed the Tiber at the Milvian Bridge, a landmark that, Costa now recalled, had something to do with Giorgio Bramante’s obsession. It was here that Christianity had become all-powerful in Rome, here, not far from the modern trams and the buses locking horns with frustrated motorists, that much of Western mankind’s history had been shaped in a fateful battle eighteen centuries before. The past shaped the present; it always had, it always would, and that knowledge informed Costa’s professional outlook as much as his personal one. The line from there to here was omnipresent; part of his job was always to try to discern its path in the surrounding darkness.

  The rain had ceased by the time they reached the address in Flaminio that Lorenzo Lotto had given them, a narrow back alley behind the main road, close to the point where the trams changed direction, filling the air with their metallic wheezes and groans. It was an old, grimy block. The woman lived in what a real estate agent would have called “the garden apartment.” In truth it was the basement, a dark, dismal-looking place down a set of greasy steps. Peroni opened the rusted iron gate bearing the name Giordano, stared down the mossy steps to the flecked red door which stood behind two trash cans and muttered, “I don’t know about you, Nic, but I never much liked cats.”

  The stench of feline urine was everywhere, rising like a fetid invisible cloud from behind the stairwell, made worse somehow by the recent downpour.

  Elisabetta Giordano didn’t just refuse to have dealings with the phone. She didn’t answer the doorbell either. Peroni kept his index finger hard on the button at the head of the steps for a good minute and heard nothing. Maybe it didn’t work. Nor was there a neighbour around to offer a clue as to whether the woman might be at home, not until they were halfway down the stairs. At that moment an old man appeared behind them, waving a skinny fist in their direction.

  “You two friends of the old witch?” he demanded.

  “Not exactly,” Peroni replied. “Is the old witch around?”

  “What am I, social services? Why’s it my job to look after these lunatics? What do I pay taxes for?”

  Costa was getting impatient. The windows were opaque with dirt and dust. All he could make out behind them were a few grubby curtains; it was impossible to tell whether anyone was at home.

  “Have you paid much in tax recently, sir?” he asked nonchalantly and immediately regretted it.

  “Paid a fortune in my lifetime, sonny! And what do I get for it? Nothing! I phoned you morons two days ago!”

  The men looked at one another.

  “Phoned who?” Peroni asked. “About what?”

  “Social services! That’s who you deadbeats are. I know your look. All cheap clothes and bored faces. You’d think that boy of hers would come back and help from time to time. Not that the young lift a finger for anyone these days.”

  Costa took three steps upwards towards the man, who stood his ground, leaning on a hefty stick. He showed him his card.

  “We’re not social services. What did you call about?”

  The man looked a little taken aback by the realisation he was shouting at the police.

  “What else? What we’ve all been complaining about for years. The noise. Crazy bitch. Plays music all night, all day. Yelling to herself and calling it singing. She shouldn’t be left on her own like that. We’ve told them a million times.”

  “She sings to herself?” Peroni asked.

  “Yes! She sings. Sounds worse than her stupid cats. Would you like to live next to that?”

  “No,” Costa said, and put away his card.

  “Also” — the stick came out and jabbed perilously close to Costa’s face — “it wasn’t just the singing. The last time, she was yelling and screaming worse than ever. Why do you think I called?”

  Costa looked at him. “Yelling and screaming what?”

  The old man hunted for the words. “Like she was in trouble or something,” he said grudgingly. “But don’t start getting on your high horse with me. We’ve put up with all manner of shit from that woman over the years. If I called for help every time she went bananas, you’d be here three times a day.”

  “Have you heard her since?” Costa asked.

  He looked guilty all of a sudden. “No…”

  “Where do you live?”

  “Number three. First floor. Been there twenty-two years—”

  “Go home,” Costa interrupted. “We may want to talk to you later.”

  He didn’t wait to see if the old man did as he was told. Costa walked down the steps, got in front of Peroni, and stared at the door.

  The smell was terrible. Peroni sniffed and screwed up his big, plain face.

  “I hope I’m wrong,” he observed miserably, “but I don’t think that’s just cat.”

  * * *

  Lorenzo Lotto was right. the questura ought to have these toys. They probably did, but all the familiar obstacles — procedures, bureaucracy, interoffice feuding — got in the way. Photo records were in the firm grip of intelligence, a bunch of secretive, surly, computer freaks who were capable of doing a great job, but only on their terms, and only if they and they alone pushed the buttons. Large organisations choked on their own fat, whether they were police forces or huge companies. Teresa had known that for years. What she’d never understood was how quickly technique and skill had progressed out in the real world, where machines and working practices were embraced without the need for committees or long consultative procedures. Lorenzo and Katrina could achieve in minutes what would take her days to do. And that was another good reason not to slink back to the Questura, apologise for slugging the duty commissario, and then try to lend some weight to the hunt for Leo Falcone.

  Teresa liked toys. They intrigued her. She wondered about their possibilities.

  After Costa and Peroni left, she spent forty minutes with Katrina going through the photos of Bernardo and Elisabetta Giordano, finding a few more with Alessio Bramante in them, learning nothing. The boy didn’t look quite as angry in the other photos. He didn’t look totally normal either. Something had happened to the child that day. Something had sent him scuttling down from the Aventino, fleeing something that could, if there were such a thing as logic in this case, only be his father. And whatever it was, it was also, it seemed to her, quite out of reach. Kids ran away, of course. They probably had sour, bitter faces like this when they did so. It was possible Alessio had run in the wrong direction. And that a couple of left-wing leaf-eaters like the Giordanos were child molesters or worse, simply looking for an opportunity to find their next victim.

  But it didn’t feel right. She’d got Lorenzo to call a couple of other people and check on them. The same message came back from everywhere. The Giordanos were solitary, decent, if deeply weird people, who didn’t like the modern world, hated mixing with their fellow human beings outside gatherings of other tree-huggers, but would, when called upon, perform acts of extraordinary kindness up to the point that their meagre standing in society allowed.

  Bernardo had been a tram driver all his life. His wife worked part-time in a bakery. The word ordinary didn’t do them justice. But they’d kept a “nephew” for years, a kid who became a teenager, then left. Only two facts seemed to be agreed upon about him: he didn’t go out much, even when he got older. And Elisabetta, possibly with help from some fellow leaf-eaters, educated him at home.

  There had to be more. Teresa had drunk one of Lorenzo’s glasses of prosecco — which was so good
she steeled herself against accepting another — then sent him fishing again. One thing bothered her. The old one: money. Even leaves didn’t come for free. When Bernardo died, Lotto’s informant said, Elisabetta had given up her job at the bakery. This didn’t ring true. A tram driver’s pension wouldn’t provide enough money to retire on. Most women in those circumstances, particularly one with a child to raise, would have looked for more work, not abandoned what she had.

  Lorenzo shook his head. No one knew where Elisabetta got her income, and that had intrigued plenty at the time. She never seemed well off. But she never seemed short either. It was one of life’s mysteries.

  “Another for the list,” Teresa grumbled, then glared at Katrina, who was starting to look bored. There were no more images of Elisabetta’s horrible pink dress to be found. The machine couldn’t find anything reliably on the basis of a face. People changed too much when seen from different angles. The mind was used to working in three dimensions. Stupid chunks of silicon weren’t.

  She studied the final picture of Alessio. He looked surly, holding Bernardo’s hand — or, more accurately, being held by him, since there was a tight possessiveness to the man’s grip that surely said This one won’t run away again.

  “The T-shirt he was wearing,” Teresa murmured. “The one with that seven-pointed star. Can you search for that?”

  She glanced at Katrina, who pulled up a photo of Alessio with it on almost immediately. The keyboard clacked. Some invisible digital robot went off on its whirring work.

  “Seven is a magic number,” Katrina said, apropos of nothing.

  “Only if you believe in such things,” Teresa muttered.

  The screen cleared. It revealed most of the photos they’d seen before. Katrina did something to get rid of them. Just three remained now.

  Teresa Lupo stared at them and, to her surprise, found herself wondering exactly where she stood on the subject of magic.

  “Be there, be there,” she whispered, stabbing at the speed-dial keys on her phone.

  The idiotic beep came back at her: unavailable.

  She swore. Men.