The Seventh Sacrament (12 page)

“If you try and say this was just me, no one will believe you. I’ll tell them we did this between us. Everything.”

“Ludo,” Guerino moaned in his stupid, country-boy whine. “That’s not fair.”

“Just do what I tell you,” Torchia ordered, voice rising, with a commanding tone inside it he hoped was copied from Giorgio Bramante. “Is that so hard? If you stick with me, everything works out fine. If you don’t…”

This was the moment on which everything turned. They outnumbered him. They could walk out, go bleating to the college people. To Giorgio Bramante. And that thought sparked both fear and some deep, interior delight of anticipation in Ludo Torchia’s head.

Dino Abati groaned beneath him, his eyes flickering open.

Torchia held up the rock again, noting the blood on its surface, and raised his arm, as if to strike Abati’s head once more.

“It’s your choice,” he said calmly.

They looked at one another. Then Sandro Vignola plucked up the courage to speak.

“Let’s just keep this among ourselves, Ludo. We can clean Dino up. It was an accident, really. Let’s do what has to be done, then get out of here.”

Vignola was always the smart one. Perses. Number three behind himself and Abati.

Torchia looked at Andrea Guerino.

“Hey. Farm boy. Fetch the bird.”

Then, audible to each of them, came a brief high sound, unintelligible, half terrified, half excited.

It could have been a child, trying to say something that was lost in the shadows.

“Fetch me that, too,” someone ordered, and Ludo Torchia was surprised to find it was him.

N
ONE OF THEM WANTED TO STAY LONG IN THE OLD CRYPT
beneath the abandoned church of Santa Maria dell’Assunta, not when they saw what was down there. They left that to Teresa Lupo and her assistant, Silvio Di Capua, who worked away under the arc lights they’d brought, aided by a team of goggle-eyed morgue monkeys. This was an unusual one, even for them.

Having handed off his responsibility, Bruno Messina went back to the Questura. Falcone began to assemble his team, slowly at first, but with a rapidly growing confidence. Officers were despatched to bring in the latest news on the hunt for Dino Abati. Two more were sent back to the old church in Prati to take a look at the bloodstained T-shirt. Falcone insisted it stay on the wall there so that a surveillance officer could be placed on stakeout duty day and night to see if Bramante returned. Whatever forensic the shirt contained seemed, to Falcone, irrelevant. They already knew the man they were seeking. The abandoned church on the Aventino would provide enough for Teresa Lupo’s team to work on for the foreseeable future. Once that team had gone, Costa, Falcone, and Peroni sat down in the control van and listened to Rosa Prabakaran’s description of her interview with the woman who’d found the body in the crypt.

Costa had seen Rosa in the Questura. The junior officer was a quiet individual in her early twenties who kept herself apart, and not just because of her background. Rosa had ambition written all over her, that careful, reticent attitude Costa had come to recognise among those who kept looking for the way to the up escalator the moment they arrived. She’d been in the force just six months, joining after completing a master’s degree in philosophy in Milan the previous summer. Young, educated, smart, keen, and with an ethnic background…she had just about every qualification the force was looking for in its next generation of officers.

Except, perhaps, some harsh collision with the real world. He’d spoken to Peroni about this briefly, as he accompanied the big man out of the crime scene deep beneath the earth, making sure his partner didn’t go round the corner and buy a pack of cigarettes, falling back into bad habits. Rosa’s experience on the force had been routine and perhaps even a little privileged. But now she was on the Bramante case, and had been for a good half day before it engulfed them. She was the one who had gone to the church in Prati, and deciphered where the message on the wall was pointing them. Early that morning, while they were preparing for a sociable lunch and the news of a wedding to come, a pleasurable moment that already seemed long distant, she’d walked into the crypt, seen the fresh new corpse there. Then, after interviewing the woman caretaker, she’d set about assembling all the data available on Giorgio Bramante, which she had requested after Pino Gabrielli’s identification of the intruder in his little church. It was she who’d managed to link the dates of the attacks with the bloodstains in Sacro Cuore del Suffragio, more rapidly than most old hands on the force could have hoped for. It was clear to Costa from listening to the fluent, concise way she managed to sum up what they already knew about Bramante and his movements after leaving prison that Rosa Prabakaran could, one day, make a formidable officer. Only one thing bothered him. It all seemed to be a touch unreal to her, a cerebral puzzle, like the arguments she might juggle in an academic dissertation. That sort of self-detachment could, in his view, be dangerous, both for her and the outcome of any investigation. If there was one thing he’d learned in his short career it was this: results came from engagement, however painful that sometimes proved to be.

Costa forced himself to put aside his concerns about Rosa Prabakaran, which probably stemmed from nothing more than her inexperience, and got back into the conversation.

“They offered him his old job back?” Peroni asked, amazed.

“Academics…” Falcone said, with a grimace.

According to Rosa, Bramante had walked out of jail after serving fourteen years of a life sentence for murder and found himself immediately faced with the gift of a professorship back at La Sapienza, with university tenure, effectively a job for life. And he’d turned it down.

“Why the hell would he say no?” Peroni demanded.

To Costa it was obvious. “Because he had a job to do, Gianni. He’d already started on it while he was in jail. Bramante felt he had a…”

“Higher calling?” Falcone suggested wryly.

“Exactly. He wasn’t going to be deflected from that for anything. Besides…”

A man who spent years in jail, carefully plotting the elaborate deaths of those he blamed for the loss of his son, was someone capable of powerful emotions.

“Perhaps he’d feel guilty too,” Costa went on. “If he got his old life back, and nothing had changed.”

Falcone stared at Rosa. “Do you agree?”

She shrugged, with the dismissive confidence of the young. “Why complicate matters by trying to think yourself into his head? What does it matter?”

Costa couldn’t stop himself flashing a look of disappointment in her direction. He’d felt much the same way at her age, believing that cases came down to facts and procedures. It was only with age and practice that a more subtle truth emerged: motivation and personality were important issues too. In the absence of hard evidence, they were often the only trails an investigation team could follow.

“I’m sorry,” Rosa said testily. “It seems obvious. Bramante knew exactly what he was planning to do. He wasn’t going to let anything get in the way. Why else would he have taken the job he did?”

“Which was?” Peroni asked.

“The one he had part-time in jail,” she replied. “Working in a slaughterhouse. For one of the butchers in the market here.”

She let that sink in.

“A horse butcher,” she added. “I’d sort of forgotten they even existed.”

But this was Testaccio, Costa thought. One of the oldest working-class communities in Rome. Less than a kilometre away from where they were stood the old slaughterhouse, a vast complex now being turned over to the arts, after years of dereliction. The killing had moved elsewhere, out to the hidden suburbs. The shops still remained, though, in the quarter’s narrow streets, and the busy market where Rosa Prabakaran had found the caretaker of Santa Maria dell’Assunta that morning. Bramante’s cheap little apartment had been close by. It was now being swept clean for less obvious clues than a set of photographs of men and women who could lead him to Leo Falcone. Not, it seemed to Costa, that there would be much there to help. Bramante was gone, to a hiding place he’d doubtless prepared in advance. He was a brilliant, organised, careful individual. That much was clear already. The kind of man who was unlikely to betray himself easily.

“Where does the wife live?” Costa asked.

Rosa looked nervous for a moment. “Three blocks away,” she said. “And that’s ex-wife. They divorced not long after he went to jail.”

“Clever as Bramante is,” Costa pointed out, “it’s still hard to believe he could do all of this on his own. When he’s out of jail, maybe. But to kill those people while he was on parole, he’d need transport, money, information.”

“It wasn’t his wife,” Rosa insisted. “I talked to Beatrice Bramante this morning. After I saw the old lady home.”

Falcone’s grey eyebrows rose. He said nothing.

“She saw Giorgio once in the street about two months ago, after he was released. She followed him home to his apartment and tried to talk to him. He wouldn’t talk to her. The woman’s lost everything. Her husband. Her child. Her money. She’s living in a one-room dump in a public housing block, not much better than his. There’s nothing for us there.”

“Agente,” Falcone said quietly. “When you interview potential suspects, you don’t do so alone. You go with an experienced officer. And at my command. Is that understood?”

Rosa Prabakaran’s brown eyes widened with anger. Her ambition was, Costa thought, getting the better of her. She said, “You weren’t even on the case when I saw Beatrice Bramante.”

“I am now,” Falcone snapped. “Interview rules are interview rules. If the mother had told you anything incriminating, it would have been inadmissible as evidence. Do you understand that?”

“I’d just seen what happened in there!” She pointed towards the yellow barriers outside the church. “I was trying to help.” Her brown eyes looked glassy, misting over with the sudden hint of tears.

“When you work for me, you work as part of a team. Either that or you don’t work at all.”

She didn’t burst into tears. Not quite. Then Peroni’s broad, ugly smile broke the chill.

“Youthful enthusiasm, Inspector,” he declared. “We all had it once. Even you.”

Falcone glowered at him. “Someone’s going to have to go back and see her,” the inspector said. “Properly this time. And find out what Bramante was up to when he wasn’t working.”

“Caving,” Rosa said. “He wouldn’t let Beatrice into his apartment because it was full of things he needed. She saw lots of equipment through the door. Ropes. Torches. Clothing.”

“So she
did
tell you something!” Falcone declared. “Let’s hope to God I don’t have to try to introduce
that
into court sometime soon.”

Rosa Prabakaran fell silent, mute with fury and perhaps a little shame. Falcone was busy flicking through Bruno Messina’s papers again, engrossed.

“Your shift ends in two hours,” he said to her, staring at a photo of Raffaella Arcangelo lugging shopping back to their apartment in Monti. “It’s been an eventful day. Go home now. I’ll get you reassigned to something more suitable in the morning.”

“Reassigned?”

“You heard me.”

“I figured out what that message on the wall meant. I found that body. I tracked down the woman who discovered it. I—”

“You did what you were paid to do,” Falcone interrupted. “Now leave us, Officer.”

“Sir,” she hissed, then snatched her bag and stormed out the door.

I
NCANDESCENT BREATH COMING IN SHORT GASPS, AWARE
that their attention had gone elsewhere the moment she’d stalked out of the van, Rosa Prabakaran stood between the vehicle and the old abandoned church, wondering what to do next. The three of them made her feel like an intruder, someone who had walked in on a private gathering. She had been on the force long enough to understand there was a strong, unusual relationship among these men, a relationship other officers talked about with more than a little suspicion.