The Seventh Sacrament (22 page)

That uncanny sense of confusion returned through the silent gloom, and with it the realisation that this unreadable world was not a place where anything possessed solidity or certainty. Finally, he caught the tail end of some low, throaty laughter, and the sense that Bramante had changed position, with an astonishing speed, in absolute silence, the moment he’d realised how close they were.

“You’re up late for one so young, Mr. Costa. Are you feeling tired? I’m not. I like this time of night.”

Hearing his own name sent a chill up Nic Costa’s spine.

There was a commotion from somewhere beyond where Bramante had to be. It was Peroni, bellowing in a loud, threatening voice. Costa waited for the fury to subside, then shouted, “Stay inside, Gianni! I’ve got a gun. This is covered. There’s backup on the way.”

Somewhere.

There were angry noises still from the distant door, Peroni’s and Teresa’s voices in conflict. He could imagine that argument: common sense clashing with instinct. He didn’t need that distraction right now.

“That’s a pretty girlfriend you have. Nice house, too, out there on the Appian Way. Does a police salary really pay for that?”

“No.” The more Bramante talked, the easier it was to find his position, to keep him stalled. “It was my father’s.”

Bramante didn’t answer straightaway. When the voice came back again, it was different in tone. Less amused. Less human, somehow.

“I wanted Alessio to have that house of ours on the Aventino,” Bramante said without a trace of emotion. “By that time I’d probably have paid it off.”

“I’m sorry. What happened was a tragedy.” There were men outside on the staircase. Costa could hear the babble of their confused voices, and the low, mutual tremor of indecision. “We’ll find out what happened. I promise you.”

“What use is that, in God’s name?”

“I thought it’s what you’d want.”

“I wanted that girlfriend of yours,” the voice said, floating casually out of the dark, almost relaxed again. He’d moved again. “She’d have been good for bargaining.” Another dry, soulless laugh. “And the rest.”

Costa didn’t rise to the bait. He wondered what exactly Bramante hoped to achieve by taunting him like this. “Is that what prison does to you?”

That brittle sound of amusement again. This time more distant.

“Oh yes. It brings out the man inside.”

Bramante was moving to where the corridor opened up to a larger area outside the emergency quarters, a place used for briefings and meetings during training sessions. The bunk rooms were on one side, high blacked-out windows on the other. Costa followed, trying to picture this part of the Questura more accurately in his head. The station was so familiar he thought he knew every last corner. But memory meant nothing without some visual prompts. He’d never expected to have to feel his way around like a blind man, struggling to draw a map out of senses that had nothing to do with vision—hearing, touch, smell. Talents Bramante had surely perfected, in all that time underground.

There were a few desks here. A collection of foldaway chairs. Four, five doors, perhaps six, two to the accommodation rooms, the rest for smaller meeting places.

Try as he might, he couldn’t remember which door was which, or how the seats and tables had been left that evening. Bramante could have walked through in the light, checking out everything before returning to the stairwell, where, Costa assumed, the fuse boxes were situated, and pitching the entire floor into darkness.

Then, from behind, he heard a burst of noise: men’s voices, angry shouts, the clash of metal on metal. Backup wasn’t going to be as easy, he realised. Costa could picture the fire door more clearly than anything else on the floor. It stood, a huge green hunk of iron, atop the staircase, rarely used except in drills. Once someone closed it and threw down the huge clasp, the entire floor was sealed. Bramante had found the time to do that somehow, and now the backup men were hammering away against solid steel, screaming at each other to come up with a solution. The building that housed the Questura was, in parts, three hundred years old. They’d never got around to installing an elevator in this section. It had never seemed necessary.

“How long do you think I have, Agente Costa?” the voice asked him, amused, coming from the darkness. “All I want is a little time with my old friend Leo.”

There was a tense, brittle catch in his voice when he said Falcone’s name.

“You hear that?” Bramante shouted without waiting for Nic’s reply. “A minute or two of your time? That’s all I need. It didn’t used to be so precious. I don’t remember you hiding away in the dark back then.”

He was moving again. Then the men at the doorway broke through, hammering down the old iron, screaming at each other to fight their way inside, their cries echoing down the long, long corridor.

Costa heard a door creak open ahead of him and then a familiar sound: Leo Falcone’s pained shuffle, the unsteady gait of a man struggling to be himself once more.

A small flicker of flame fluttered in the shadows on the far side of the room. It illuminated Falcone’s aquiline face and the upper part of his body: the bald head, the large, crooked nose, the jut of his silver goatee, and the lighter he held raised in his hand.

Costa gripped the gun more tightly, felt how the icy sweat made it slip in his palm, and edged towards the man by the puny flame, knowing that Bramante must be doing the same.

“Fourteen years ago,” the old inspector said nonchalantly, “I was busy putting you in jail for murder, Giorgio. It seems unfortunate I have to repeat that exercise now.”

Falcone held the flame aloft.

“If you have something you wish to say to me…” he continued, in a firm, untroubled voice.

The backup men were almost in but they were still a long way behind. Costa began to move, feeling the gun in his grip, wondering what use it might be, and how dangerous, with so many unseen figures filling the shadows around them.

Then Falcone cried out. The flame vanished. One muffled moan, perhaps two, broke through the darkness which enveloped everything again, disorienting Costa, making him wonder which way was forward, which back.

The iron door fell onto the Questura’s old tiles with a crash that roared through the building. A team of officers, angry, frustrated, were now fumbling in the direction of the small anteroom where Leo Falcone had been engulfed by the night, and something else.

“He’s got Leo!” Costa yelled at them. “Don’t shoot—”

The warning froze in his throat. Another light had come on now. The pencil beam was lit again, attached to the black helmeted head of a figure who was struggling manically against the far wall, wrestling with Leo Falcone, arms around his white shirt, doing something Costa could only imagine.

He remembered the slaughterhouse, the knives, and the sight of Toni LaMarca, his heart ripped apart while he hung alive from a meat hook, staring down at the face of the man who was murdering him.

The gun hung clammy in his fingers. He could hear men racing down the corridor now, men who’d no idea what they were facing, no clue about how it might be tackled.

Nic Costa recalled the layout of this hidden chamber very carefully, then pointed the weapon sideways, away from the oncoming team, out towards the dusty glass of the blacked-out windows. He pulled the trigger.

The resulting sound was so loud it seemed to take on a hard, physical dimension, reverberating around him as if multiple firearms had spent their ammunition in multiple dimensions, pummeling his head until he couldn’t think straight, couldn’t sort out what was happening around him in a sea of bodies, surging towards the white shirt on the floor, dimly visible in the flashlight beam which was now at the same level as Leo Falcone’s body.

There was something on the white fabric. A stain, dark and fluid.

Costa threw the gun aside, fought his way through the bodies, shoved forward until he saw Falcone.

A flashlight came on behind him: its beam broad and yellow, all-revealing.

The sight wasn’t what he expected. Leo Falcone was glaring at them all, eyes as bright as the bloodstained shirt that stuck to his chest. The figure of a man still clung to him, unmoving, clad in black, with a woollen helmet of the same colour tight around his head.

“Are you….” Costa feared to ask.

“Yes!” Falcone spat back. “Now get him off me.”

Costa took hold of the man’s body.

“You’ll need a knife,” Falcone said, inexplicably.

“What…?”

The rest of them crowded in. Costa could hear Teresa Lupo yelling to be allowed through. They needed a doctor. They all knew that.

Then, finally, someone found the fuses, flipped whatever switches Giorgio Bramante had manipulated to send this entire section of the Questura into the darkness the killer thought of as his own.

The lights blazed on in a sudden, cruel flood. Costa blinked, unable to make sense of what he now saw.

In Leo Falcone’s arms was the same man he’d seen in the beam of the flashlight. The caver’s helmet was shattered along one side, revealing a wet and shiny scalp, damp with blood. Something else, bone, maybe, some kind of matter, was visible beneath.

A heavy rope bound Leo Falcone and the figure in black tightly at the waist. It was tied with a serious knot and held with the kind of metal clamp that Costa remembered from his climbing days. One called a krab.

“I didn’t shoot him,” Costa said quietly, almost to himself, as he watched Peroni kneel and start to work on the rope with a penknife, Falcone struggling impatiently all the time. “I didn’t shoot him. I pointed the gun over…”

He paused and looked around him. Now that it was lit, the room looked nothing like the place he’d pictured in his head. In truth, Costa had no idea where he’d pointed the weapon. It was stupid to have discharged it in the dark. Had it not been for the sight of Falcone, struggling with the man who’d butchered another human being not long before, he’d never have considered it.

Peroni finally worked his way through the rope, then helped Falcone struggle to his feet. The big man wasn’t even glancing in Costa’s direction. He was looking at Teresa Lupo, who was kneeling by the stricken man, feeling for a pulse, starting to work the helmet off his damaged head.

“I didn’t shoot him, for God’s sake,” Costa said loudly, aware of the chill around him, in the team of men, more than a dozen now, who’d arrived to witness the spectacle.

“What does it matter?” one of them grunted. “How many people did he kill anyway? He—”

The officer went quiet. Falcone was glowering at him, livid, looking his old self, for all the grey, sallow pain in his face.

“None,” Falcone said with a scowl. “Absolutely…”

He bent down, reached in front of Teresa Lupo and dragged the remains of the helmet off the dead man’s head.

“…none.”

The face was older than Nic Costa remembered from the files. But he still had a full head of bright red hair, now matted with blood. All the same, Dino Abati’s features seemed more lined and worn than was right for a man of his age, even in death.

Costa thought again of the cleaner at the back of the incident room, someone who’d been in the Questura all evening, unquestioned, unseen.

“I didn’t kill him,” Costa repeated quietly.

Falcone peered down at the body that lay on the floor, bent in an awkward, prenatal crouch.

“No, you didn’t. Giorgio Bramante shot the poor bastard, while you people were running around like idiots. Now he’s…where? I don’t suppose there’s someone with half a brain on the door.”

It was Prinzivalli, the gruff old uniform sovrintendente from Milan, who finally found the courage to speak.

“We thought you were in trouble, sir,” he answered. “And I’m sure I speak for everyone when I say we’re delighted to see we were mistaken.”

A
RTURO MESSINA STOOD ON THE BROW OF THE HILL
at the edge of the Orange Garden, gazing out over the river, lost in thought. Next to him, Leo Falcone waited, trying to be the dutiful sovrintendente, struggling to find the right words with which to tell the older man, a well-established commissario, one who carried respect throughout the force, that he might be wrong. Deeply, seriously wrong, in a way that could threaten the entire investigation.

“Sir?” Falcone said quietly in a gap between the loud, throaty roars of the machinery below. Two small mechanical diggers were warming up their engines, awaiting orders, much like him. It was now late afternoon. Five hours had passed since the boy had first been reported missing by his father. Four hours before Messina had put out the call for the six students after listening to Giorgio Bramante’s story. Bramante was their professor. He knew them well and had seen them exiting the underground warren of tunnels when he surfaced to see if his son had somehow escaped the caves without him. In spite of hearing his calls, they had fled down the hill in the direction of the peace camp on the Circus Maximus, trying to lose themselves among three thousand or more people living there in tents, protesting daily about the continuing horrors across the water in what had so recently been Yugoslavia.

Now every officer Messina could muster was on the case: half were hunting for the students, the remainder working with the hundreds of civilians who kept turning up to offer their help in the search for the missing seven-year-old. TV crews and packs of journalists were kept back from the excavation site by the yellow tape cordoning off the small park overlooking the Tiber. A growing crowd of mute bystanders, some of whom looked ready to turn ugly, had joined them. The story about the students had already got out somehow. Blame was already beginning to be apportioned, with a swiftness and certainty that gave Falcone a cold feeling in his stomach. There was a touch of the mob to some of the people lurking around the Aventino just then. Had any of those students happened to emerge in their midst, Falcone knew that he would have to act swiftly to protect them from the public. Rationality and a sense of justice flew out the window in cases like these, depriving a good officer of the cold, detached viewpoint that was necessary in all investigations.

While the father joined—almost led—the hunt for the child, his wife was in a police van inside the cordon, saying little, staring at the outside world with haunted eyes that held little in the way of hope.

And all they had to go on was the fact that, when Alessio went missing, the boy had been deep beneath the dark red earth of this quiet, residential hill, not far from a bunch of students who were probably up to no good. Students his father had heard, gone to track down, telling his son to stay safe where he was, only to return some considerable time later—how long? No one had actually asked—without locating the intruders, to find the boy gone.

In public, Bramante reacted exactly as an individual was expected to in such situations, which gave Falcone pause for thought. Something about the man concerned him. Giorgio Bramante seemed too perfect—distraught to a measured degree, just enough to allow him to benefit from the sympathy of others, but never, not for one moment, sufficient to allow him to lose control.

There was also the question of the wound. The professor had a bright red weal on his right temple, the result, he said, of a fall while stumbling through the caves, searching for his son. Injuries always interested Leo Falcone, and in normal circumstances he would have taken the opportunity to explore this one further. That, however, Arturo Messina expressly forbade. For the commissario, the answer lay with the students. Falcone could not believe they would remain free for long. None had police records, though one, Toni LaMarca, came from a family known for its crime connections. All six were, it seemed, average, ordinary young men who had gone down into the caves beneath the Aventino for reasons the police failed to understand. Messina seemed obsessed with finding out what they were. The same issue intrigued Falcone, too, though not as much as what he regarded as more pertinent questions. What was Giorgio Bramante doing there with his son in the first place? And why did he have a livid red gash on his forehead, one that could just as easily have come from a struggle as a simple accident?

“Say it,” the older man ordered with a barely disguised impatience. “Are you worried this will interfere with the homework for the inspector’s exams or something? I always knew you were an ambitious little bastard, but you could let it drop for now.”

“‘Little’ seems somewhat unfair, sir,” Falcone, who was somewhat taller than the portly Messina, protested dryly.

“Well? What’s on your mind? This is nothing personal, you know. I think you’re an excellent police officer. I just wish you had a spot more humanity. Cases like this…you walk around with that hangdog look of yours as if they don’t even touch you. Shame you screwed up that marriage. Kids do wonders for putting a man in his place.”

“We’re making many assumptions. I wonder if that’s wise.”

Messina’s heavy eyebrows furrowed in disbelief. “I’m stupid now, am I?”

“I didn’t say that at all, sir. I’m merely concerned that we don’t focus simply on the obvious.”

“The reason the obvious
is
the obvious,” Messina replied testily, “is because it’s what normally gets us results. That may not be fashionable in the inspector’s examination today, but there it is.”

“Sir,” Falcone replied quietly, “we don’t know where the boy may be. We don’t how or why any of this occurred.”

“Students!” Messina bellowed. “Students! Like all those damned anarchists in their tents, fouling up the middle of Rome, doing whatever else they like. Not that I imagine it much concerns you.”

There had been two arrests at the peace camp. They’d had more trouble at religious events. Next to a Roma versus Lazio race, it was nothing.

“I fail to see any relevance with the peace camp—” Falcone started to say.

“Peace camp. Peace camp? What did we find down in those damned caves again? Remind me.”

A dead bird, throat cut, and a few spent joints. It wasn’t pleasant. But it wasn’t a hanging offence either.

“I’m not saying they weren’t doing something wrong down there. I just think it’s a big leap from some juvenile piece of black magic and a little dope to child abduction. Or worse.”

Messina wagged his finger in Falcone’s face. “And there—
there!
—is exactly where you’re wrong. Remember that I said that when they make you inspector.”

“Sir,” Falcone said, temper rising, “this is not about me.”

“It begins with ‘a little dope’ and the idea you can pitch a tent in the heart of Rome and tell the rest of the world to go screw itself. It ends…”—Messina waved his big hand at the crowds behind the yellow tape—“…out there. With a bunch of people looking to us to clean up a mess we should have prevented in the first place. Good officers know you have to nip this kind of behaviour in the bud. Whatever it takes. You can’t read a bunch of textbooks while the world’s going to rack and ruin.”

“I am merely trying to suggest that there are avenues we haven’t yet explored. Giorgio Bramante—”

“Oh for God’s sake! Not that again. The man agreed to take his son to school, only to find the teachers are having one of those stupid paperwork love-ins the likes of you doubtless think pass as genuine labour. So he took him to work instead. Parents do that, Leo. I did it, and God forgive me the boy’s in the force now, too.”

“I understand that…”

“No. You don’t. You can’t.”

“Bramante didn’t take his son to work. He took him underground, into an excavation few people knew about, one that he believed was entirely empty.”

“My boy would have loved that when he was seven.”

“So why did he leave him there?”

Messina sighed. “If there’s a burglar in your house, do you invite your son along to watch you deal with him? Well?”

“We need to interview Giorgio Bramante properly. In the Questura. We need to go through what happened minute by minute. He has that injury. Also…”

Falcone paused, knowing that he was on the verge of being led by his imagination, not good reasoning. Nevertheless, this seemed important, and he was determined Arturo Messina should know. Watching Bramante join the search parties for Alessio that afternoon, Falcone felt sure that the man was looking for someone other than a minor. It was as simple as a question of posture. Children were smaller. However illogical, at close to medium quarters, one tended to adjust one’s gaze accordingly. Giorgio Bramante’s eye level was horizontal, always, as if seeking an adult, or someone on the horizon, neither of which made sense for a seven-year-old boy.

Messina’s dark eyes opened wide with astonishment as Falcone elaborated. “You expect me to pull the boy’s father in for questioning because there’s something you don’t like about the angle of his head? Are you mad? What do you think they’d make of that? Them and the media?” He beckoned towards the crowd.

“I don’t care what they think,” Falcone insisted. “Do you? There’s the question of the wound, his behaviour, and the holes in his story. Those, to my mind, are sufficient.”

“This is ridiculous. Take it from me, Leo. I’m a father too. The way he’s behaving is exactly the way any of us would in the circumstances. He couldn’t be more cooperative, for God’s sake. How the hell would we have found our way around those caves without him? When we have those students, when we know what’s happened to the kid…then you can sit down and go through your stupid procedures. Now tell me how we can find that boy.”

“The injury—”

“You’ve been in those caves! It’s a death trap down there! Are you honestly surprised a man should stumble in them? Do you think all the world is as perfect as you?”

Falcone had no good answer. “I agree,” he replied evenly, “that it is dangerous down there. That affects our efforts to find the boy too. We’ve gone as far as we dare. It’s treacherous. There are tunnels the military don’t feel happy entering. We’ve brought in some equipment they use during earthquakes to locate people who are trapped. Nothing. We need to pursue all possible options.”

Messina scowled. “He could be unconscious, Leo. I know that’s inconvenient but it’s a fact.”

“They tell me he would still show up through thermal imaging if he was unconscious. Given the short time that’s elapsed, he’d show up even if he was dead. If he’s anywhere we could hope to reach, that is.”

“Oh no,” Messina said quietly, miserably, half to himself, eyes on the ground, detached from everything at that moment, even the case ahead of them.

Falcone felt briefly embarrassed. There was something in Messina’s expression he didn’t—couldn’t—share. A man who had no experience of fatherhood could imagine the loss of a child, sympathise with it, feel anger, become determined to put the wrong right. But there was an expression in Messina’s face that Falcone could only guess at. A sentiment that seemed to say
This is a part of me that’s damaged—perhaps irrevocably.

“Don’t let him be dead, Leo,” Messina moaned, and for the first time seemed, in Leo Falcone’s eyes, a man beginning to show his age.