The Seventh Sacrament (8 page)

T
HE LIGHTS WERE STILL ON IN THE INTERNAL PORTICO.
She turned them off, then walked into the diminutive nave, where a thin winter sun was streaming through the cracked stained glass on the western end of the building.

To her dismay, the door to the crypt was open. There was a light in there, too, the familiar weak yellow haze creeping up from the underground cavern.

The sight made her furious. She hated waste. Electricity was more expensive than ever.

She walked to the door and reached for the switch, averting her gaze from the corridor, not through fear but practicality. She needed to try to understand what had happened. To work out whether it was worth calling the police.

It was possible, just, that someone was still down there, hidden with her familiar skeletons, up to no good. That thought hadn’t occurred to her until her fingers touched the old damp powdery plaster of the corridor wall.

But why would anyone break into an empty, deconsecrated church for anything but some idiotic amusement? It was ridiculous, she reminded herself, but then became aware of the smell, elusive at first, but soon familiar. It was the smell of the market in Testaccio, the local one off Mastro Giorgio, where every morning she bought the day’s food: salad and vegetables, and a little meat from one of the many stalls with their vivid red displays of pork and beef, chickens and lamb. Even, in one seldom-visited corner, horse, which only the old people ate these days.

So she didn’t turn off the lights. Something about the smell made that impossible. Instead, Ornella Di Benedetto took three steps down the narrow, worn stone stairs, just far enough to see into the crypt, with its serried rows of grey, tidy bones.

And something else among them, too. Something gleaming under the bulbs, a half-familiar shape transformed somehow, metamorphosed into the source of that rank, permeating stench that wouldn’t quit her nostrils.

When she finally reached the street, babbling like a madwoman, trying to catch the attention of passersby who ignored her shrieking implications, she’d no idea how long she’d spent in that place, or what, in truth, she’d done there.

They stared at her. All of them. Every shopper in the market. Every stallholder. Everyone.

I am not insane,
Ornella wanted to scream at them.
I am not!

Even though she couldn’t recall how she had made her way from the Piazza Albania into Testaccio in order to find the market, or how long it had taken. An hour at least, or so it seemed from the market clock, which now stood at five past eleven. Somewhere along the way, she thought, she’d sat down and passed out for a while, like some neighbourhood drunk, stunned by cheap grappa.

Her eyes worked their way across the hall, to the lines of butchers’ stalls where the meat hung fresh and livid on the hook, scarlet flesh, waxy white fat, veins and organs, limbs and carcasses, entrails and the occasional small pig’s head.

Since she was a child, this market had been a place of delight. The aroma of flowers mingled with the fresh salt tang of the fish stalls. Oranges from Sicily next to stands selling fresh white buffalo mozzarella at prices even ordinary people could afford.

She’d never really thought about the meat stalls until then, when the sight and the stench of the crypt came back to her. Ornella Di Benedetto turned her head away from the butchers’ stands, tried to stop the fleshy, organic stink of them creeping into her mouth and nostrils, breathed deeply once, gasping down a lungful of the market’s now vile and rotting aroma, wondering whether she was about to be sick.

It was an unconscionable time before anyone listened, and that was the closest human being she could think of who knew her: the kindly young girl in the market’s vegetable stall. She listened to Ornella’s ragged, incoherent story, then sat her down with a stiff
caffè corretto
before calling the police.

When Ornetta looked up, still desperately queasy, she found a dark-skinned woman staring thoughtfully into her face, her eyes full of concern and curiosity.

“My name is Rosa Prabakaran,” the woman said. “I’m a police officer.”

“The church…” she murmured, wondering where to begin.

The young policewoman nodded, confidently, in a way that made Ornella Di Benedetto feel a little better.

“We know, signora,” she said, glancing around the hall, not looking too hard at the meat stands either. “I just came from there. Shall we go somewhere else? Now? Please?”

I
T HAD BEEN A GOOD WINTER, THE BEST NIC COSTA COULD
remember in years. There were just two cases left of the
vino novello
they’d made the previous autumn. Costa was surprised to find that the modest homegrown vintage, the first the little estate had produced since the death of his father, met with Leo Falcone’s approval too. Either the wine was good or the old inspector was mellowing as he adjusted to an unaccustomed frailty.

Or both. The world was, Costa had come to realise over the past few months, occasionally ripe with surprises.

That lunchtime they’d taken a few bottles over to the new home Falcone was sharing with Raffaella Arcangelo, a ground-floor apartment in a quiet backstreet in Monti, rented on a temporary basis until the inspector became more mobile. The injuries Falcone had suffered the previous summer were slow to heal, and he was slow to adapt to them. The meal was, they knew without saying, a kind of staging point for them all—Costa and Emily Deacon, Gianni Peroni and the pathologist Teresa Lupo, Leo Falcone and Raffaella—a way of setting the past aside and fixing some kind of firm commitment for the future.

The previous twelve months had been hard and decisive. Their last investigation as a team, exiled to Venice, had almost resulted in Falcone’s death. Nic’s partner Peroni and Teresa had emerged unscathed, perhaps stronger than ever once the dust settled. While Teresa returned to the police morgue, Peroni became a plainclothes
agente
again, walking the streets of Rome, on this occasion in charge of a new recruit, a woman who, as the ugly cop was only too keen to tell anyone in earshot, drove him to distraction with her boundless enthusiasm and naïveté.

Costa had pulled the best prize of all out of the bag: a winter spent organising security for a vast art exhibition set around the works of Caravaggio, one that had played to full audiences in the Palazzo Ruspoli from its opening in November to its much-mourned closure two weeks before. There had been some last work to be done, most important of all a final round of security meetings for the return shipping of exhibits, and one long trip to London to liaise with the National Gallery. Then finally, two days before, nothing. No meetings. No deadlines. No phone calls. Only the realisation that this extraordinary period of his life, one which had opened up so many new avenues, was now over. After a week’s holiday he, too, would be back on the job, an agente working the
centro storico
of Rome, uncertain of his future. No one had told him if he’d be reunited with Peroni. No one had hinted when Falcone might be back in harness. Only one piece of advice had been handed down to Costa from on high by Commissario Messina. It was time, Messina said one evening on his way out, for a man of Costa’s age to start thinking about his future. The exams for promotion were being scheduled. Soon, Nic ought to consider trying to take one step up the ladder, from
agente
to
sovrintendente.

Emily had looked at him sceptically when he passed on this information and said, simply, “I’m not sure I can imagine you as a sergeant, Nic. You’re either up there with Falcone or out on the street with Gianni. Although I suppose we could use the money….”

There were always decisions to be made, ones that conflicted with his own personal desires in the perpetual dilemma faced by any police officer with enthusiasm, ambition, and a conscience. How much of a man’s life was owed to his profession? And how much to those he loved?

Costa had found the answer to those questions eight weeks before, when Emily had joined him in an expensive restaurant in London, after his final meeting at the Gallery in Trafalgar Square. She had been living in his house on the outskirts of Rome for a year now. Come summer, she would possess sufficient qualifications to seek work as a junior architect.

When he looked into her face that night in the West End, over some of the most costly bad food he’d ever eaten, Nic Costa knew, finally. For once, he wasn’t hesitant. Too many times she’d reprimanded him with an amused look and the teasing words “Are you sure you’re Italian?”

Sometime that summer, in July possibly, or the early part of August, depending on how many relatives of Emily’s wanted to make the journey from the U.S., there would be a wedding, a civil affair, followed by a reception on the grounds of the house on the Via Appia. Sometime in late August—around the twenty-fourth if the doctors were right—they would have a child. Emily was now seven or eight weeks pregnant, enough for them to tell others of their plans. And when they were parents, Nic Costa promised himself, life would surely begin in earnest, something he was about to say to the four of them gathered in Leo Falcone’s living room, after he and Emily had made their two announcements, only to find his words drowned out in the clamour of noise around them.

Falcone hobbled off to the kitchen talking excitedly of the bottle of vintage champagne—real champagne, not just good
prosecco
—he’d been keeping for such an occasion. Raffaella was busy fussing over Falcone, while hunting for even more food to pile on the table. Teresa Lupo was piling kisses on the pair of them, looking worryingly close to tears or hysteria or both, before dashing to help Raffaella with the glasses.

And Gianni Peroni just stood there, a big smirk over his battered face, one aimed in the disappearing Teresa’s direction, saying
I told you so.

Emily, a little amazed by the histrionics, leaned her head onto Costa’s shoulder, and whispered, “Haven’t they had any weddings in this country for a while?”

“It seems not,” he answered softly, and then, theatrically, took her in his arms and kissed her.

She broke away, laughing, as they were both confronted by a forest of waving arms bearing glasses and plates of food.

“Is it going to be like this forever from now on?” she asked, avoiding the wine, reaching for a glass of mineral water instead.

“Forever,” Gianni Peroni declared, and began to make a toast so eloquent, touching, and funny that Costa found it hard to believe he hadn’t rehearsed it many times before.

T
HERE WAS AN ENTIRE COMMUNITY OF CAFÉS IN THE VIA
degli Zingari, the narrow street round the corner that wound down the hill towards the Forum. When Falcone’s bottle of champagne was done he suggested a walk for some proper coffee. That bachelor habit had yet to disappear; the inspector still resolutely refused to believe it was possible to make a decent
macchiato
at home.

Half an hour later they were ambling towards Falcone’s preferred destination, enjoying the meagre warmth that had arrived with the disappearance of the morning murk. The wedding arrangements and the pregnancy had been dealt with, in a flurry of frantic questions, hugs, and no small amount of tears on Teresa’s part. Then, as so often happened with such dramatic personal news, they’d found the need to move on to other matters. For Costa, it didn’t get much better than this. Emily, friends, Rome, his home city, a few days of holiday. And both Peroni and Teresa in garrulous, postprandial mood, she reminiscing about work, Peroni fixated with its avoidance.

After one brief and inconclusive argument, the pathologist caught up with them, fat arms pumping with delight, pointed across the square, towards the Via dei Serpenti, tugged on Emily’s shirtsleeve, and exclaimed, in her gruff Roman tones, “Look! Look! I had this wonderful customer down there once. Some dreadful accountant skewered with a sword. It was—”

“It was horrible,” Peroni complained.