The Seventh Sacrament nc-5

by David Hewson

This couldn’t wait. She called Silvio Di Capua.

  “Greetings, minion,” she said. “Now get a piece of paper and write this down.”

  “What happened to ‘And how are you this fine day?’”

  “I’m saving it for later. Take these names to Furillo in Intelligence. Just say to him I am now calling in the debt I’m owed and if he so much as tells a soul without my express permission I can guarantee his small yet highly embarrassing medical secret will be on every Questura notice board come Monday.”

  “Subtle persuasion. I like that. Messina’s out there ticking off the sites Peroni had down for Leo, by the way. I am personally responsible for that.”

  “Congratulations. Tell Furillo to look at everything. Debts. Criminal records. Motoring. Social services. Everything he can lay his prying little paws on. I want to know about records. In particular I want to know about connections.”

  “Done. Names.”

  She gave him Bernardo and Elisabetta Giordano, and their address, and crossed her fingers as she spoke. Even leaf-eaters had to step out of line from time to time.

  “More?”

  She looked at the photos on the screen. They weren’t great. This was a guess, perhaps a bad one. All the same…

  “One more,” she said.

  * * *

  The site they first visited in San Giovanni looked more like a bomb crater than an archaeological dig. It stood close to the busy hospital, a mass of buildings, some old, some new, that, in one form or another, had been providing medical aid to the citizens of Rome for sixteen centuries. Peccia and his men had changed into their preferred work uniform: black, all-covering overalls, and, for the handful ready for action, hoods. They were carrying slim, modern-looking machine pistols. Messina, a man who had always preferred to avoid firearms, had no idea what kind of weapons they were or why Peccia would prefer them. They just looked deadly. That, he decided, was enough.

  There was, naturally, a procedure. The interior layout of the target was established. A method of entry was agreed upon. Then a small number of men — Peccia had twelve in all — made the first sortie, watched by backup officers.

  Bruno Messina observed, uneasily, as the squad entered the low, algaed tunnels of the site next to the hospital’s main emergency unit. These men had the slow, mechanical gestures of trained automatons, jerking their way through the open corridors and half-hidden chambers of some ancient underground temple as if they were taking part in some video game. He knew now why Bavetti preferred sending uniformed officers, men and women with visible faces, out into the city to ask questions. It seemed more human, more of a real response than this puppet show.

  The woman didn’t help either. Messina had called her personally at the office she kept in the Piazza dei Cavalieri di Malta, the same place, they now knew, that Falcone had been driven to early that morning, to await his fate. Everything about this case seemed to hinge around the Aventino. It irked him that Judith Turnhouse was unable to find a suitable location for Bramante to hide on the hill itself — the site beneath the Orange Garden had been quickly ruled out. So he had arranged for her to be picked up and brought to the Questura, to run through forensics’ short list, nodding in agreement as she saw the list of names there, adding one herself as a possibility.

  They stood above the abandoned dig, watching two black-clad figures work their way towards what appeared to be a cave running underneath the busy main road. One of the men rolled something like a smoke grenade into the darkness. There was a small explosion and a plume of white cloud. Nothing else. No figures exiting theatrically, arms in the air.

  “I told you, Commissario,” Judith Turnhouse snapped. “I do this on the understanding that there will be no damage to these locations. None whatsoever.”

  “We have a man missing,” Messina replied, almost pleading.

  “That’s not my problem. These sites are irreplaceable. God knows they get little enough care as it is….”

  Peccia, who was watching his team with the aloof distance of an army general, leaned over and said, “They are nothing more than fireworks. A small flash of thunder to daze anyone who’s in there.”

  “No one’s in there!”

  “How do you know?” Messina asked.

  She shook her head. “I just do. I spend half my life in these places. You get a feel for them. Whether they’re current. Whether someone just gave up on them years ago. This site…”

  She glanced down into the pit of rubble and spent rubbish blown in from the road.

  “It feels dead. You’re wasting your time here.”

  Bavetti pulled out the map and thrust it in front of her.

  “Where would you go? If you were Bramante?”

  “Straight to the nearest asylum. The man’s nuts. Why try to look into his head?”

  “This isn’t helping us,” Messina said. “Think about it. Please.”

  “I can’t think like Giorgio. No one could. If you wanted the site that was most interesting archaeologically, then I’d be looking at Cavour. If you wanted space, privacy, you’d go for the one near Santo Stefano Rotondo. Tick them off. Send in your little action men and see what they find. Just don’t ruin anything.”

  Three of Peccia’s officers, part of the team that had been held back in reserve, rifles at the ready, stood there listening. Black masks, black guns, black clothing. They didn’t look like police at all. Messina was beginning to have misgivings.

  “What’s the most obvious place?” one of them asked. “The one you’d go to first?”

  “That’s easy,” she replied without hesitation. “The site at the eastern end of the Circus Maximus. Where it meets the Viale Aventino. Everyone in this business knows that one.”

  The men glanced at each other.

  “But it’s so public,” she cautioned. “You’re in the centre of Rome. There are busy roads on either side. You can see into it from miles around, from the grass, from everywhere.”

  “Is it all like that?” Messina asked.

  She thought about the question for a moment, trying to remember.

  “Actually, no. I haven’t been there for years. If you know what you’re looking for, in some ways it’s one of the most interesting Mithraic sites we have. Now that you people have destroyed what was on the Aventino. There are several extant underground chambers. There’s a…”

  She stopped.

  “What?” Bavetti demanded.

  “There’s a very good Mithraic altar there. Giorgio fought a long battle to keep it there, to stop it from ending up in a museum. He wanted it to stay in place.”

  “The map, quick,” Peccia ordered.

  One of the team rifled through the document bag they had and came up with a complex architectural chart. It was large; two of the men in black stretched it out so that everyone could see. Judith Turnhouse’s eyes were glued to the complex illustration.

  “I never did much work there,” she confessed. “It’s a lot bigger than I remember. Three levels. All those rooms.”

  “The corridors are narrow,” Peccia said. “Something like that will take us a while to clear. We’d have to be careful. I’d need to send a small team in first.”

  Messina screwed up his eyes and stared at the illustration in the corner of the map. It was, he presumed, of the altar: a helmeted man fighting to subdue a struggling bull, thrusting a dagger into the dying animal’s neck.

  “Prabakaran was taken uphill, then, for a short distance, down,” he commented. “It would fit with him driving through over the Aventino.”

  Judith Turnhouse nodded in agreement. “I just realised,” she said. “Giorgio’s old house was above this part of the Circus. When you sat in his garden and looked down towards the Palatino, this was what you’d see.”

  Peccia shuffled nervously from foot to foot. The rescue team hadn’t done work like this in living memory. Messina wondered, for just one second, whether he ought to call in more specialist help. But it was one man. A man who had brought the state police disgr
ace twice now. It was no one else’s job to bring him to justice.

  * * *

  Costa took out his gun, pushed against the door, pushed harder, then gave the old, peeling wood a kick. It didn’t budge. This wasn’t the movies. In the real world a man couldn’t go anywhere he liked with a simple shoulder charge.

  “I can try,” Peroni offered.

  “Let’s do this the easy way,” Costa replied.

  He walked to the nearest window, shattered the upper panes with the butt of his pistol, found the latch, unlocked the lower half and, with some considerable effort, managed to lift it. Then he clambered through and found himself in a malodorous dark pit.

  The stench was so bad he hated having to breathe.

  He walked back towards the door and found the light switch. Three weak bare bulbs pulsed with a thin yellow light when he did so. The apartment was a hovel: mess on the floor, papers and clothes, food too. He located the latch on the door and unlocked it. Peroni walked in and glanced around.

  “I wish your girlfriend was here,” Costa murmured. “This smells like her line of work.”

  “True,” Peroni replied.

  He was scanning the room, not looking at the floor. Costa was aware, as always, of Peroni’s squeamish side.

  “What are you looking for?” Costa asked.

  “Something personal. Anything.” He walked over to the fireplace and examined everything that stood above it: cheap ornaments, a tiny vase of plastic flowers. “What I’d really like is a photo. Do you see any?”

  There wasn’t one in the room, not visible anyway. And this was procrastination. They’d been in the apartment long enough now to know what lay waiting for them….

  There was a half-open door ahead. Costa took four purposeful strides and threw it wide. He was greeted by a warm, miasmic smell, a cloud of flies, and, in the corner, several sets of twinkling feline eyes.

  He reached for the light.

  Peroni, who had followed behind him, spookily silent for such a large man, swore, turned round, and went back to the entrance.

  Costa stayed.

  There was a body there, lying on its back, rigid on the bed. The dead woman was in a dressing gown, her hands taut around her throat.

  One step closer and he’d seen all he needed. The knife was still in her body, plunged deep into her throat. Her fingers gripped the shaft and the blade. Black gore caked around the neckline of her grubby nightdress. As he watched, one of the cats ran across the room, dashed onto her chest, and began to lick in a proprietorial, threatening gesture, staring at him, daring him to intervene.

  Costa yelled at the thing, then shooed it away with a violent gesture. It darted into the shadows and waited.

  He tried to hold his breath as he took a good look around. Then he went back to where Peroni stood. The odour was still there, identifiable: cat piss and old dried blood.

  “Is it what I think?” the big man asked.

  “Stabbed in the throat. Probably as she lay in bed. As you noticed, there are no photographs at all. Just this…”

  He passed Peroni the photo frame he’d found in the bedroom. The glass was broken. Half the picture had been torn away. What remained showed the sickly-looking Bernardo Giordano out of doors, standing, smiling proudly, the way a man would have smiled if he were being photographed next to someone, a child perhaps, of whom he was inordinately proud.

  “What the hell’s going on, Nic?” Peroni asked. “Why would Giorgio Bramante want to kill some crazy old woman out here? Did he know about Alessio?”

  Costa shook his head. A knife in the throat? Torn-up photos?

  Peroni took two steps up the stairs, found a patch in the lee of the wall that had been left reasonably dry, sat down and stared glumly at his partner.

  “If we do nothing but call in about this, Messina will have our hides. I don’t care a damn about that. In fact, unlike you, I might welcome it. But we’ll either get thrown into a cell to await his pleasure or bullied into going back on duty. Then we’ll have to wait for him and Bavetti to read the instruction manual on how to start a murder investigation. If Leo has any time left at all, it’s not that kind of time.”

  Peroni hit the target spot on. He always did. Costa wondered whether he’d ever be able to work with another officer when the big man finally gave in to temptation and took retirement.

  “I agree,” Costa said.

  “So what do we do?”

  “When we have something we can work with, we go. And make that call on the way out.”

  Peroni nodded. “And when will we have something?”

  “As soon as we talk to the old man.”

  Peroni smiled. He wasn’t slow. He’d picked it up instantly too. He just wanted Costa to make the connection, to take the lead he knew was there already.

  “‘You’d think that boy of hers would help,’” he quoted.

  “Exactly.”

  Finally, something was moving. Costa’s head felt light and clear, the way it did when a case began to open up.

  They walked back up the stairs, grateful for what might almost pass for fresh air. As he hit the top step, Costa’s phone rang.

  * * *

  Giorgio Bramante turned the flashlight on his watch and frowned. Falcone sat on the broken stone wall in his cell, following his movements in the gloom.

  “Are you in a hurry, Giorgio?”

  “Perhaps they’re happy to let you rot,” Bramante replied without emotion.

  “Perhaps,” he agreed.

  From what he could work out — Bramante had taken his watch after searching him in the piazza after the taxi had left — Falcone had spent a half day or more trapped in this subterranean prison, locked behind an iron door in a chamber of brick, rock, and earth that appeared to be as old as Rome itself. To his faint surprise he had been treated with a distant respect. No violence, not much in the way of threats. It was as if Bramante’s mind was, in truth, elsewhere, on other matters, and abducting Falcone was merely a step along the way.

  He had been given a blanket and some water, left alone for hours, though Falcone had the sense Bramante never strayed far from the site. The man had a mobile phone and a pair of binoculars. Perhaps he simply walked to the distant entrance they’d passed on the way in to see if they were still alone. Perhaps he was waiting….

  Now that he was back, he looked as if he would stay for good, perched on the remains of an old, upright fluted column outside the iron gate, unwrapping a supermarket panino.

  “I could use something to eat,” Falcone remarked.

  Bramante looked at him, grunted, then broke the sandwich in half and passed it through the bars.

  “Is this the last meal for a condemned man?” Falcone wondered. “I’d always pictured something more substantial.”

  “You’re a curious bastard, aren’t you?”

  “That is,” Falcone replied, nodding, “one of my many failings.”

  “You were curious all those years ago.”

  “About you, mainly. There was so much that puzzled me.”

  “Such as?”

  Falcone took a bite of the sandwich. “Why you took Alessio there in the first place.”

  Bramante cast him a dark look. “You don’t have children.”

  “Enlighten me.”

  He looked at his watch again. “A son must grow. He has to learn to be strong. To compete. You can’t protect them from everything. It doesn’t work. One day — it comes, inevitably — you’re not around. And that’s when it happens.”

  “What?”

  “What people think of as the real world,” Bramante answered wearily.

  “So being left alone in a cave, somewhere he was frightened — that would make Alessio stronger?”

  Bramante scowled and shook his head. There was something Falcone, to his dismay, still didn’t grasp.

  “I never had the courage to think about parenthood,” Bramante confessed. “When I married, it was one of the first things my wife learned about me. You�
�d think she would have worked that out before. Being a father seems to require something selfless. To raise a child, knowing that, in the end, you must send it on its way. Cut the strings. Let it go. Perhaps I’m too possessive. The few things I love I like to keep.”

  The last sentence surprised Falcone. He wondered if Bramante really meant it. He wondered, too, how Raffaella Arcangelo was feeling. It had been a cruel, hard way to say goodbye. But wasn’t that the point?

  Then he heard something from above, a loud, high-pitched sound. The screech of a police siren.

  “But at the age of seven?” Falcone asked. “He was too young, Giorgio. Even a man like me knows that. You were his father. You, of all people…”

  Bramante reached into his jacket pocket and withdrew a black handgun. He pointed it straight through the bars, holding the barrel a hand’s length away from Falcone’s skull.

  The inspector took a final bite of the sandwich, finishing it.

  “I hate processed cheese,” he commented. “Why do people buy this rubbish?”

  “What is it with you, Falcone?” Bramante snapped. “Don’t you know how many men I’ve killed?”

  “I’ve a pretty good idea,” the inspector replied. “But you didn’t kill Alessio, even if a part of you feels you did. Yet that is what instils the most guilt in you. Surely you see the irony?”

  Bramante didn’t move.

  “I had hoped,” Falcone went on, “to find him. Not just for you. For his mother. For us all. When a child goes missing like that, it breaks the natural order somehow. It’s as if someone’s scrawled graffiti on something beautiful. You can fool yourself it doesn’t really matter. But it does. Until someone removes the stain, you never feel quite happy. You never come to terms with what’s happened.”

  “And you’re that person? The person who removes the stain?”

  “I’m supposed to be. But I failed. I’m sorry.”

  “And he’s still dead,” Bramante insisted.

  “You don’t know that for sure. I certainly don’t. We searched everywhere. Ludo Torchia never said he was dead. Not to me. Nor to you either, I think. Did Ludo confess? You beat him so hard. I would have expected…”

  “Just lies. Lies and nonsense. My son is dead,” Bramante repeated.