The Seventh Sacrament (43 page)

“The newspapers would have taken photos,” Costa said abruptly. “We could try the newspapers’ libraries.”

“Nic,” Peroni groaned, “how long would that take? And how willing do you think they would be to help two off-duty cops and a nosy pathologist?”

“We just gave three of them great stories!” Teresa objected.

“For our own reasons,” Peroni countered. “They’re not stupid. They don’t think we’re doing this out of charity.”

“Vultures,” she spat out, so loudly the waiter gave them a worried glance.

“Vultures perform a useful social function,” Peroni reminded her, but by then Teresa was bouncing up and down on her seat with unbounded excitement, scattering pastry crumbs everywhere as she did so.

“You two really have led sheltered existences! There’s more to the media than a bunch of political cronies in flash suits. What about the radical press? They were surely there.”

Peroni gave her his most condescending look. “You mean longhaired people like that individual you shared a tent with? Teresa. Listen to me, dear heart. The radical press hate us even more than the others.”

“Not,” she disagreed, slyly, “when you’re in the company of a comrade.”

T
HE PAPER WAS IN A SMALL FIRST-FLOOR OFFICE ABOVE A
pet shop in the Vicolo delle Grotte, a half-minute walk from the Campo dei Fiori, in a part of Rome rapidly being taken over by expatriates and tourists. On the steep internal staircase, Costa, who’d lived nearby a few years back, and found it hard to afford the rent even then, muttered something about this being an expensive home for a weekly publication dedicated to liberating the downtrodden masses.

“You misunderstand the patrician breed of Italian socialist,” Teresa declared, taking the steps two at a time, clearly keen to reacquaint herself with this lost piece of her past. “This is about raising the proletariat up to their standards, not bringing them down to the hoi polloi.”

At the head of the stairs stood a tall, gaunt man with a long, aristocratic face and a head of thinning, wayward grey hair. In his bony hands he held a tray bearing four brimming wineglasses. It was not yet eleven in the morning.

“If they were Carabinieri, I wouldn’t let them on the premises, you know,” he announced in a high-pitched, fluting voice of distinctly upper-class origin. “I still have my principles. I am Lorenzo Lotto. Yes, I know what you’re thinking. Is that the Lorenzo Lotto you read about in the papers all the time? Rich son of that family of wicked oppressors who pollute the Veneto with their factories? It is indeed. The papers should find something better to write about. A man does not choose his own parents.”

He thrust the tray at them.

“I was thinking of the painter,” Costa said.

Lotto’s beady eyes looked him up and down.

“How extraordinary, Teresa,” the man declared. “Trust you to find the one police officer in Rome with half a brain.
That
Lorenzo died destitute, scribbling numbers on hospital beds for a living, though he was a better man, and a better artist, than Titian. I am a mere revolutionary, a small yet significant cog in the proletarian machine. Drink, boy. Tame that intellect or you’ll be counting paper clips in the Questura for the rest of your life.”

“It’s a little early for us, Lorenzo—” Teresa pointed out.

“Tush, tush. This is from the wicked family’s private estate. You can’t even buy it in the shops. Besides, one should always take alcohol when meeting a former lover. It dulls the senses, and God knows we both need that.”

Teresa blushed.

“This day just gets better and better,” Peroni groaned.

THEY’D PHONED FIRST
in order to check what material the newspaper possessed from the nineties. Teresa had sounded hopeful.
La Crociata Populare
was not, in spite of its name, popular, though the paper remained a crusade on the part of its wealthy owner. But it was meticulous about its forty-year history. And, unlike most of the small left-wing weeklies, it didn’t fill its pages exclusively with columns and columns of dense, unreadable text. Several well-known photographers had begun their careers working for Lorenzo Lotto’s pittance salary, the bare union minimum. Even Pasolini had submitted material from time to time during the paper’s brief heyday in the early seventies.

As Lotto led them through what passed for an editorial floor—a shabby room with four desks, three of them unoccupied—Costa’s hopes began to fall. He’d read
La Crociata
himself from time to time. The photos were good. And numerous. It would surely take a large library to catalogue all the negatives, contacts, and prints from over the years.

Lotto led them to the corner where the one visible member of staff, a small, timid-seeming young woman, sat in front of a gigantic computer screen, working on what looked like the next issue. A headline screaming about government corruption yelled out from the screen in bright red type.

“Katrina,” Lotto said quietly, “it’s time for you to go clothes shopping.”

Her eyes flashed at him, baffled, a little in awe.

“Here.” Lotto reached into his pocket and pulled out a wad of currency. She took it, smiled, and scampered for the door.

“The redistribution of wealth,” Lotto told them. “I pay them what the unions demand. But they’re my children, really. The only ones I have.”

“Pictures, Lorenzo,” Teresa reminded him.

“I know.”

He punched some keys on the computer, then beckoned them to join him. Costa sat down in Katrina’s chair and looked at the screen. There was something marked “Library” there. He clicked on it and saw an entry form.

“Now what?” he asked.

“The state will be brought down by its ignorance of modern technology,” Lotto remarked. “I could drag in a thirteen-year-old child off the street and he’d know more about this than you.”

Keywords,
Costa thought.
Clues.
You typed them in. Then the stupid computer tried to guess what you meant.

“Every photo that has ever passed through our hands is stored somewhere in there,” Lotto boasted. “Not just the ones we printed.
Everything.
Forty-three years’ worth. It cost me a fortune. Without it, I doubt even I could keep this place afloat.”

“You’re a picture agency now?” Teresa asked.

“As well as…And why not? Engels was a clerk in Manchester when he was keeping Marx and his family from starving in London. Industry and investment, Teresa. Unfashionable these days, I know…”

Costa typed in
peace camp.

What seemed like a million tiny photos appeared on the screen.

“Typical lazy liberal thinking,” Lotto declared. “Dialectical materialism, boy. Ideas will only come from precise material conditions. Not obscure generalities.”

“You sound like my father,” Costa snapped.

“Ah,” Lotto replied, warmly, for the first time. “I thought you were that Costa.”

He bent and whispered in his ear, “Do you have a year?”

“Of course.”

“How about a date?”

“Exactly.”

“Good. Why not try that?”

Costa typed in the exact day.

The screen filled again, with just as many photos.

Lotto leaned over and studied the screen. “We had five different photographers supplying material to us then. Everyone wants their picture in the paper, don’t they?”

“How many?” Costa asked.

“Look at the screen! Eight hundred and twenty-eight photographs. Twenty-three rolls of thirty-six-shot film, including the blanks and the failures, naturally. It costs more to take them out than leave them in. You should think yourself lucky. We’re all digital now. There would be ten times that if you were looking today.”

Costa hit on the thumbnail of the first image. It leapt to fill the screen. They could have been looking at anything. A rock concert. A demonstration. A weekend campground. Just hundreds and hundreds of people, quiet, apparently happy under the sun.

“What about time?” Costa asked.

“Sorry. Film never recorded that.”

“What about,” Teresa asked, “telling it, ‘Find me a young boy in a peculiar T-shirt?’”

“It’s a machine,” Lotto said severely. “Are you going to drink my
prosecco
or not?”

“Later,” she replied.

He grumbled something inaudible and wandered off. Teresa and Peroni pulled up chairs on either side of Nic and started peering at the scores of thumbnails in front of them.

“If we can scan five a minute, we’re done in under three hours,” Peroni said, and made it sound like good news.

Costa began flicking through the first photographer’s rolls. A good third of the shots digitised by Lotto’s machines were useless: out of focus, accidental. The rest were mainly mundane. A few were simply beautiful: sharp, observant, wry pictures of people who didn’t know the camera was there, candid shots still bright with their original summer hues, frozen in time.

After half an hour, with his right hand starting to tire, Costa hit the button and accessed yet another roll. The pictures changed. The light was different, older, more golden, the kind that fell on Rome as the day was coming to a close.

He clicked through five more frames, then stopped. For a moment, none of them spoke.

The child stood centre frame, and for once this was a subject that did look into the camera. He still wore the T-shirt they’d come to associate with this case, the seven-pointed star of the Scuola Elementare di Santa Cecilia. This was Alessio Bramante, sometime during the early evening of that fateful day, when every police officer in Rome, state and Carabinieri, was looking for him.

He was holding the hand of an untidy, overweight woman of middle age, a woman with a blank, rather puzzled expression on her flat, featureless face. She wore a long pink cotton shift and large, open-toed sandals. Next to her was a skeletal, sickly-looking man, perhaps fifty, perhaps older, with a pinched, tanned face and a skimpy grey beard that matched the meagre hanks of hair clinging to his skull.

Neither of them looked remotely familiar from any of the photos of witnesses or related individuals Costa had seen, and tried to commit to memory, in the case.

But that wasn’t the worst thing. Peroni put it into words.

“Good grief,” the big man said with a sigh. “We got it wrong all along, didn’t we?”

They stared at the screen, grateful he was the one who had the guts to say it.

“I thought we were looking for a nice kid,” Peroni said, finishing their train of thought.

“It’s just one photo,” Teresa reminded him.

It was, too. One photo of a child, no more than seven, turning to stare towards the camera, his features tautened into an expression of pure hatred, of unimaginable, unspoken violence directed straight into the lens.

“He
was
Giorgio’s son,” Peroni pointed out.

“Perhaps he still is,” Costa added grimly.

B
ACK IN THE QUESTURA, BRUNO MESSINA WAS BEGINNING
to feel a touch more in control. Now he sat at the head of the table in his own conference room, a smaller, more private place than the sprawling quarters Falcone preferred when talking to his staff. Messina believed in delegation, in keeping his immediate officers under full scrutiny while they—in the current jargon—“cascaded” down his desires, and pressure, to those below.

Bavetti was there with two men of his choosing, along with Peccia, head of the specialist armed squad and Messina’s deputy. Forensic had, to Messina’s displeasure, decided they wished to be represented by Silvio Di Capua from the path lab, in place of the absent Teresa Lupo. He would, the commissario thought, deal with her later. There was a mutinous atmosphere in that part of the Questura, and Teresa Lupo surely bore much of the blame. Technically, though, they were separate departments, answerable to civilian officers. It would take a little while and some persuasion for him to work a result there.

Di Capua had brought to the meeting a lanky, bald, odd-looking individual from the university who introduced himself as “Dr. Cristiano.” This odd pair had turned up with a laptop computer, a set of maps of the city, and a report produced principally by Peroni the previous evening.