by David Hewson
Falcone didn’t struggle. Instead, he said, quite calmly, “You’re a poor thespian, Giorgio. I’m pleased to find something at which you don’t excel. It makes you more human.”
“Be silent,” Bramante murmured, not taking his gaze from the dark cave mouth ahead. A lone flashlight beam danced there, like a distant firefly, one more sign to betray their approach.
Falcone had been unable to shake from his brain the words of Teresa Lupo when he’d believed, for a few brief moments, they might have solved the riddle of what had happened to Alessio Bramante. And of what Giorgio himself had said to him in Monti, when he was almost snatched. When, if Falcone was honest with himself, he could have been taken, too, had Bramante pushed his luck.
“The seventh sacrament,” Falcone said, peering into Bramante’s face, which now betrayed some trace of fear, and that, too, made him more human. “It’s not me at all, is it, Giorgio? This is about you. It was about you all along. Is suicide not enough? Is that dead child trapped in your imagination so hungry that he needs his father’s blood, too, along with all the others’?”
The figure gripping him flinched.
“If Alessio is dead,” Falcone pressed, “he surely doesn’t require this spectacle. If he isn’t, do you think he’d be happy to know?”
The dark, intelligent eyes flashed at him. “You don’t understand,” Bramante muttered. “You’ve no idea what’s in my head.”
“I’d willingly listen,” Falcone said. “If we’d had this conversation all those years ago…”
“Then you’d hate me even more than you do now, Falcone. This is simple. They kill me. Or I kill you. One or the other. You choose it.”
Falcone waited, thinking about his physical state, what worked, what was still struggling back to health. One thing, above all, he’d learned these last three days: he wasn’t weak. He was merely, to some unknowable extent, damaged.
A flood of yellow illumination burst into the chamber: four flashlights searching, probing. Finding.
With all the remaining strength he could muster, Falcone abruptly twisted hard on his ankle, forced his body round in a fast, powerful spin, tore himself from Bramante’s grip, rolled left, kept on rolling, aware that the man’s attention was divided now, between the captive he’d lost and the group ahead of him — black suits, black masks, four men, and Judith Turnhouse, whose eyes shone with anticipation, like a Fury leading them on.
“No weapons!” Falcone barked, rolling two more turns on the floor. “No damn weapons! That’s an order!”
The dark figure still stood in front of the altar, confused, struggling for some form of response.
Four black barrels rose in a line, aimed directly at the man with the knife who was frozen in front of them.
The woman was screeching something Falcone couldn’t understand.
“Secure the prisoner,” he ordered. “Get the knife. One of you only. The rest, cover.”
A single masked figure stepped out of the line. He lowered his machine pistol.
Bramante held the silver blade in front of him, point upwards.
“Put it down, for God’s sake,” Falcone barked at Bramante, battling to his feet, leaning against the raw rock wall, feeling the breath come back into his lungs. Feeling well, if he was honest with himself. Already, he was thinking of the Questura. An interview room. He’d be in charge. The deal for time he’d cut with Messina hadn’t yet run out. “And one of you get over here and cut these ropes.”
Falcone closed his eyes, fought to clear his head. He’d always been proud of the way he could claw his way back to some form of competence, some quick, avid intelligence, even in the most pressured of situations. It was a skill he hadn’t lost after all.
“We need that conversation, Giorgio. We will have that conversation. I want this finished, once and for all….”
He opened his eyes, determined to control this situation. Then he fell silent. The two of them had acted so swiftly, so silently, that during his brief, self-indulgent reverie he’d not heard a thing. Three officers in black were now being pushed, weaponless, to one side of Bramante, hands in the air. One of their pistols sat easily in Judith Turnhouse’s hands, pointed in their direction. The other two weapons lay on the floor out of reach. The fourth individual in the team moved his gun slowly from side to side, from Bramante to his colleagues and back.
“You think,” Judith Turnhouse spat at Falcone, with a bitter malevolence, “you can take this from me? After all these years?”
“I apologise,” he replied honestly. “I simply had no idea.”
He glanced at Bramante, who looked uncharacteristically helpless.
“But then I’m not alone in that,” Falcone added. “Signora Turnhouse—”
The dark, ugly weapon in her hands swung round and pointed directly at his head. To his surprise, Falcone found that, for the first time since leaving the Questura the previous evening, he was genuinely in fear for his life.
“Say one more thing,” she muttered, “and I will, I swear, empty this into your head and enjoy every moment.”
She walked forward and, without a word, took the blade from Bramante’s hand.
Bramante shook his head, opened his hands, looked at her, glanced at Falcone, then turned to the woman again.
“What is this?” he asked, baffled, a shred of anger rising on his face. “We agreed.”
“I’ve something to show you,” she said, and nodded at the man by her side.
The figure in black crooked the weapon under his left arm, then with his free hand dragged the hood off his head.
* * *
He was a handsome young man, Falcone thought. A little young for the job. A little naive, not fully in control. He stood erect in the shadows, Bramante’s height, his build. And with his looks, too, though they seemed more exaggerated somehow, so that the resemblance was obvious only by comparison.
Alessio Bramante let the hood fall to the floor, then took up the gun again, angling the firearm — casually, with uncertainty? Falcone couldn’t decide — towards the figure in front of the altar.
“See him, Giorgio!” Judith Turnhouse demanded, her voice anxious and excited, her flashlight shining into the face of the young man in front of him. “See!”
Bramante watched as her hands fell on the young man’s dark head, caressed his full black hair, fell down his body, reached towards his groin, lips on his young neck, damp, hungry, a gesture to which he submitted.
“He has your eyes,” she murmured. “Your lips. Your face.” She smiled, teeth a glimmer of brightness in the gloom. “Everything. I raised him to be you and not you. I raised him to be mine, and you never even guessed.”
The boy — Falcone could think of him as nothing else — uttered the faintest breath of an objection. She ignored it.
“Alessio?” Bramante asked, his voice a croak, his hands outstretched, face creased with shock and bewilderment. “Son?”
The shape in black recoiled, waving the weapon.
“Don’t call me that! Don’t you dare call me that!”
A chill entered Leo Falcone’s blood. A terrible thought began to dawn in his imagination when he heard that dreadful sound.
The voice was wrong, too high, almost falsetto, marked with unimaginable pain and burden, breaking with some inner fury struggling to escape from inside his chest.
Judith Turnhouse’s caress turned to a grip. Rigid and determined, her fingers tore into the head of fine black hair, twisted his face to hers.
She grabbed the weapon in the young man’s hands, thrust it hard against his chest, and said…
“Remember.”
* * *
A seven-year-old child stands stiffly erect, feet frozen to the cold red earth, icy sweat trickling down his spine, motionless like a living statue erected in a chamber half-lit by flashlights, a bare room, with no ceremony, no decoration, nothing of age about it at all.
A mundane place, a side room, an afterthought in a hidden maze of wonders. A pla
ce to hide. A place to flee for furtive, shameful reasons.
He can’t speak. Creatures tread wildly at the back of his mind, primeval figures that have lurked there since his earliest days of remembering, waiting for the moment to emerge.
These primitive beasts tear his dreams to shreds. Ambitions shrivel to become bitter, sere fragments of a lost world.
Dreams…
… that he would deliver a gift, a sacrament, to his father…. that inside this precious offering would be something to heal them all — mother, father, son. To fire the rough, malleable, formless clay of their fragile family, set it firm, young to old, old to young, a bond that was natural, would last a lifetime, until the torch got handed on, as it always would, one black day when a life was extinguished, its only remaining flame the memories burning in the head of the one who remained.
All these intimate emotions, all of a child’s deepest, most private aspirations, expire at this instant, in this half-lit nothing of a place.
Nor is this small death a solitary affair. Others bear witness and add to the shame.
Behind him, the child Alessio Bramante hears them.
Sheep.
Terrified sheep, giggling in fear, and, in Ludo Torchia’s knowing voice, some threat, some dark knowledge there too. Like the boy, these six understand that what they see now will mark them forever, slither into their lives, bringing with it the poison of a memory that can never be smothered.
Nothing, from this moment forward, will be the same, the child realizes. He is unable to take his eyes off what he sees, unable to believe that it continues, even though his father…
Giorgio, Giorgio, Giorgio… knows someone is there, has acknowledged the presence of these seven with a single backwards glance over his shoulder, eyes rolling wildly like a beast’s, before returning to wrestle the human body pinned to the wall.
The two figures are crushed against each other on the pale grey stone, upright, half naked, locked together like two creatures fighting to become one.
His father…
Giorgio… impales her from behind with all his strength, his back moving, pumping with a fast, relentless rhythm, his eyes, in the brief seconds they are visible, those of some crazed animal. A bull in agony, fighting for release.
Her face, half turned, glancing backwards from the rock, racked with a mix of ecstasy and pain, is familiar. A student from the class. Alessio remembers. That bright May day when he was left alone in the Palatino, for an hour, possibly more, wondering whether he would be claimed by Livia’s ghost.
The woman was there afterwards, when Giorgio came to retrieve him, smiling in a strange, distanced way, he’d thought at the time. Like him: a little scared, yet excited too.
A detail rises in his mind: there was sweat on her brow then too.
And, in the cave’s shadows, her bright crazed eyes are on them, some shame in her face, which is bruised a little, blood at the corner of her mouth, growing, like a bubble of life, forced out of her by the brutal repetition of his lunging.
She screams.
No, no, no, no, no.
Infuriated, unfinished, Giorgio breaks free, turns to face them, a taut, bare figure of skin and hair, familiar yet foreign, screaming, his features contorted into an image from a nightmare, a demon, risen from the depths.
The child gapes at his father, wide-eyed, astonished by this sudden, physical presence he must witness, is unable to avoid. He recognises this anger too. It is the same fury he, and his mother, have faced at home, in the seemingly perfect house overlooking the Circus Maximus. It is the violent rage that stems from any intrusion into his father’s private world: of work, of books, of concentration, of himself.
There is an animal inside the man, a bull beneath the skin. There always was. There always would be.
Wide-eyed, furious, he stares at their nakedness, remembering the rumours in school, through whispers and the small legends that children pass to their peers. Of that moment when the low, crude act between two people surpasses reason and something old rises in the blood.
It is the fury of the Minotaur, cornered in his labyrinth, of the false god, faced with his lies.
Of Pater betraying his charges.
The rage encompasses them all. The six sheep, who cower behind him, swearing they will never tell, never, though Ludo Torchia’s voice is surely absent from these imprecations. The woman, who has picked up her torn clothing from the ground to clutch it to herself.
In the man, more than any.
And the boy… … the boy, she calls, wild eyes staring at him, some sign of sympathy, some mutual shard of pain there that stops him hating her in an instant.
Nothing halts the man in his wrath, fists flailing, filling the air with menace. He is, the child understands, an elemental creature interrupted in some ancient private ceremony destined for the dark, and now doubly damned since it was both exposed and incomplete, like a sacrifice spoiled, a ritual ruined.
A rock rests in her hand. She lunges forward, dashes it against his father’s head, not a powerful blow, a spirit’s fist against the monster.
Stunned, Giorgio Bramante falls to the red earth, silent for a moment, eyes hazy, lacking vision.
The sheep flee, feet echoing into nothing down a corridor lit by the chain of dim yellow bulbs that lead from this grim and deadly place. Alessio wants to join them. Running in any direction, provided it leaves this hidden tomb behind, forever.
Anywhere except home, a place to which Giorgio will return. A spoiled dream of lost memories and deceptions.
As his father writhes, half conscious, in the dust, the woman bends, stares into Alessio’s face, and for a moment his heart stops again. It is as if she knows his thoughts, as if nothing need be said at all, because in her eyes is a message they both comprehend: We are the same. We are what he owns, what he uses.
The blood is dry on her mouth now. She looks at him, pleading. For his forgiveness, perhaps, which he grants readily, since she is, he understands, a part of his father’s damage too.
And for his hand, which joins hers, tight, the blood of Ludo Torchia’s slaughtered offering joining them, and with that bond comes a promise of safety at last, perhaps, even, of release.
“Run,” she urges softly, and his eyes flicker towards his father, still barely conscious, but recovering quickly. “Run to the Circus. Don’t stop. Wait there. I will meet you.”
“And then?” the boy asks meekly, frightened and hopeful at the same time.
She kisses him on the cheek. Her lips are damp and welcome. A sudden rush of warmth falls down her cheek and enters his open mouth, a sacrament made of salt and pain and tears.
“Then I’ll save you forever,” she whispers in his ear.
* * *
Remember…
The pain below, the delicious violence, the taste, the feel of blood that first time he took her, with brutal, rapid force, in a lonely dig down some desolate country lane in Puglia.
Judith Turnhouse lost her incurious virginity that day, in the remains of a dusty, unremarkable Dionysian temple while the other students worked with their trowels and their brushes, no more than fifty metres away, out in the sun, unaware. The condition was taken from her in no more than three or four savage minutes, as if it were truly meaningless, a pathway to some brief instant of fruition on his own part, one that lay outside her own small individuality, dismissive even of its existence.
She was the simple vessel, the physical route to this conclusion, and somehow this made it all the more rewarding. In her humiliation and his animal fire lay a reality, so hard and wretched and alive that she could nurture it later, cradle the feeling on the cold lonely nights when she thought of him, nothing but him, over and over.
Here, now, in the Mithraeum beneath the Circus Maximus, in the place they’d agreed on all along, she could recall everything of the last fourteen years, every time they’d coupled, every savage, bloody encounter, beneath the earth, against rough stone, fighting, fucking… it was all
the same, and had been from the beginning.
That act was the closest she would ever achieve to ecstasy, the ritual that took her out of herself, sent bruised and battered angels flying through her head, then left her exhausted, praying for the next time.
Never again.
That’s what he’d said, all those years ago, before the world changed.
It was a lie, on both their parts. She’d watched his son stare through the keyhole in Piranesi’s piazza that morning, followed them furtively as he led the child into the dig.
She’d caught his attention, drawn him away from his child. Away from the boy, they had argued in near silence. They had fought again. And then, on the promise that this was the last time — no more violent encounters in the dark, no more mouldy soil in her hair — she’d won, proved victorious through the brute physicality of the madness that conjoined them.
Not love. That was too mundane a word, and besides, there was scant affection inside it, and no respect.
This was need and, that last time, as he heaved so ruthlessly into her she could feel her skull cracking against the rock wall, she knew he would deprive of her of this, her only delight, because that was Giorgio Bramante: hard and cold and supreme in his own mind, a man to rule over everything and everyone, to take from them what they found most precious, simply because he could.
Even on that hot June day, feeling his power inside her, some mindless, ecstatic agony rising alongside every thrust, she understood that he would still take what he wanted, leave her there, walk out, with his strange little child, go home, to his miserable battered wife, believing nothing had really changed, that he could return to his world of papers and study, the life of a successful, intellectual academic, and no one would know, not even when it happened again, with some other naive student this time, some other vessel to take her place.
Giorgio Bramante was at war with everything: her, his family, the world. But most of all, she knew, he was at war with himself. And there lay his weakness…
