The Seventh Sacrament (18 page)

A
FTER JUST AN HOUR OF WORK—READING THROUGH
Falcone’s documents and throwing questions at Arturo, whose replies proved he had a clear and capacious memory—it was clear to Emily Deacon that Falcone’s papers covered only a part of the story. When Bramante had been arrested for Ludo Torchia’s death, a grim case of child abduction had turned, instead, into a circus. The police and rescue services were out in force poring over the Aventino and through the labyrinth of tunnels and caves of Bramante’s excavation, looking for the missing boy. Hundreds of civilians had abandoned their jobs to join in the hunt. Swiftly, the investigation became swamped by controversy as the implications of Bramante’s arrest sank in, and it became apparent that the authorities had little idea how to find Alessio Bramante. Emily recognised the symptoms of a full-scale media onslaught: the blind, irrational fury of the public, the angry impotence of a police force driven by legal and public necessities, not what it believed was correct in the circumstances. Then it all petered out in the unsatisfactory way that was all too familiar in cases involving missing children. Alessio was never found. His father held out his hands and went willingly to jail. Five teenagers walked free, then vanished because every lawyer who looked at the case declared, very publicly, that it was impossible to bring anyone to trial after the prime suspect had been beaten to death in police custody. The rules of procedure and evidence had been torn to shreds when Giorgio Bramante had resorted to his fists to bludgeon some information out of the miserable Ludo Torchia. There was no going back.

It was, she thought, a particularly Roman mess, and if they were to stand the slightest chance of peering into this fading mist, it was vital, after so long an interval, for more insight than lay inside Falcone’s hastily assembled documentation.

She pushed the papers aside and looked at Arturo. She didn’t need to say anything. A good police officer still lurked there, she was certain of it, probably itching for a little action. He excused himself and made a phone call. When he returned, he led her to a small and elegant study at the front of the villa, then parked himself at a very new notebook computer on the mahogany desk there and began typing. The emblem of the Polizia di Stato flashed up on the screen, followed by an authentication login. Arturo glanced at a slip of paper with what looked like a username and password scribbled in ballpoint, hammered in a few quick characters, and they were in.

“Are we hacking into the central police network now?” she asked, pulling up a chair.

“No! I’m just…deputising for a friend.” He licked his lips and looked worried for a moment. “I try to stay up-to-date, you know. Up to a point. There’s a generation of police out there who are more at risk from repetitive stress injury than getting a punch in the face. This is not progress. You have to use the tools at your disposal.”

“I’d go along with that.”

“Good. You won’t tell my son about this little escapade, though, will you? He can be a stuck-up prick at times. The poor soul was born fifty years old and he’ll stay that way till he dies. Are we one on that?”

“He’s your son,” she said. “Now…”

It was all there. All the original reports. All the interviews. Photos. Maps. Even an independent archaeological assessment of Bramante’s secret find. Arturo printed out what she asked for. He searched every last digital nook and cranny of the Questura’s system, trying to see if there was something they’d missed. Arturo Messina had hung on to his job for as long as he could during the Bramante investigation. He only got suspended when the hunt for Alessio was “scaled down,” a euphemism for giving up, he claimed, with an abrupt and unexpected bitterness. When there seemed to be no fresh information to uncover, he finally logged off, then they shuffled the stack of papers together and headed for the living room.

Raffaella was there with Arturo’s friend. He was an equally lively-looking pensioner, tall and slim, tanned, with a pleasant, aristocratic face.

“Did Pietro here lead you astray?” Arturo asked Raffaela. “I’m widowed. He’s divorced. Draw your own conclusions.”

She laughed. “I saw the Duomo. Such wonderful paintings.”

“Paintings!” Pietro declared. “Luca Signorelli. My favourite’s
The Elect and the Condemned.
” He nodded towards them. “That’s me and him. You just have to work out which is which.”

“Tonight,” Arturo said, “you’re the cook. Pheasant for four, please.”

Raffaella was beaming, keen to help. She disappeared with Pietro, into the kitchen, a different woman, Emily thought. Her relationship with Leo Falcone was odd, a little forced, a little subservient. She’d moved in after he’d been shot, cared for him during the long difficult months of convalescence. There was something that puzzled Emily about the bond between them. It was almost as if Raffaella had decided to look after Leo out of a sense of guilt, of responsibility for the tragedy in Venice involving her family which had also almost cost him his life. Free of her old home in Murano, of Rome, and, it seemed, of Leo, she seemed more relaxed, more independent.

Arturo was at the table with the papers again.

“There’s very little here I haven’t seen before,” he muttered. “This case was beyond me then and it’s beyond me now. Perhaps I should just go and peel potatoes with Pietro in the kitchen and let you women have some time together.”

They heard the pop of a bottle from the back of the house then the sound of laughter. Pietro marched back in, followed by Raffaella. He was bearing a bottle of
prosecco
; she had glasses and plates of supermarket crostini. They looked like a couple about to throw a dinner party, which was, Emily realised, quite close to the mark. She and Nic had never, it now occurred to her, been round to Falcone’s apartment in the evening. Leo and Raffaella weren’t that kind.

“Not for me,” Emily said, turning away the glass with her hand. “I need a clear head.”

“And I work best with a fuzzy one,” Arturo declared. “So serve, then back to the chopping board. Some of us have work to do.”

“More fool you,” Raffaella murmured, on her way out.

Arturo Messina’s face fell. “Perhaps she’s right,” he said with a sigh, after gulping at the brimming glass, an act Emily envied deeply. “What on earth can I do?”

“What you said. Go and peel the potatoes.” She reached for the phone. “I, on the other hand, need to talk to the man who sent us all this in the first place.”

“Not on your own,” he declared, dashing to plug in the conference phone. “Leo and I haven’t spoken for fourteen years. It’ll be a pleasure to hear his miserable voice again, just to hear the shock in it.”

But she wasn’t listening. She found herself staring once more at the photos of Alessio Bramante. He was an unusual-looking boy. Beautiful, a little effeminate, perhaps, with his long hair and round, open eyes. It was easy to see how the papers would love a story featuring a kid like this: pretty, smart, middle-class, with a father who’d killed someone on his behalf. She knew from her time in the FBI that photogenic victims always got the best coverage.

“Do you know what puzzles me most?”

“No,” Arturo admitted. “What did they do to the kid? Was he still alive when Giorgio was trying to beat the truth out of that evil bastard? And why? Why were those students there in the first place? Why Giorgio and his son? There’s so much…”

She agreed. There was. But the Bramante case had changed in nature once the father had been charged with murder. It had ceased to be a simple mystery about supposed child abduction. Instead, it had turned into a public debate about how far a parent should be allowed to go to protect his child. It had become as much the story of Giorgio Bramante as of his son. More, in a way, because Giorgio had been there on every front page, his picture on every news programme. He was an emblem for every last parent who’d ever looked down a dark street and wondered where a son or daughter had gone.

“What puzzles me is simple,” she said. “You had teams and teams of men. You had mechanical diggers. It says here you virtually destroyed Bramante’s archaeological site looking for his son. And still you never found him. Not a single trace of him.”

Arturo Messina licked his lips and, for a moment, looked his age. “He’s dead, Emily,” he said miserably. “Somewhere inside that hill. Somewhere we didn’t find or the cavers didn’t dare go.”

In her heart, she knew she ought to believe that too. So why didn’t she?

“What else,” Arturo Messina asked, “could possibly have happened?”

I
T FELT LIKE THE OLD TIMES. AHEAD OF THEM, PAST THE
long window of Falcone’s office, now vacated by the temporary inspector despatched elsewhere that afternoon by Bruno Messina, a team of fifteen men and women were working the phones and computers, sifting records, chasing leads, trying to find a simple answer to a complicated question: Where would a university professor turned murderer go to ground in his native city? They weren’t finding any easy answers. The scooter Bramante had used to flee the scene in Monti had been found abandoned in a back street near Termini station. From where he’d dumped the bike, he could catch the subway, the tram lines, the buses, the trains…

Or, Costa thought, he could do what any Roman probably would in the circumstances. Walk. It wasn’t that large a city really. From Termini, Bramante—a fit and active man by all accounts—could be in any one of a number of suburbs on foot within the hour. And from there? Giorgio Bramante was no fool. He’d know, surely, that it was always simplest to be anonymous in a crowd. With time, the police could work the areas where the vagrant populations lived, shiftless, nameless people among whom any fugitive could easily disappear. Bramante may even have known such men in jail. He could be renewing an old friendship, or calling in favours from the past. For a man willing to sleep rough, able to find the thousands of underground caves hidden beneath the back streets and small parks throughout the city, Rome was an easy place in which to hide. Falcone had his officers running through the usual techniques. But the customary tools—video surveillance cameras most of all—were useless. The scope was too wide, the data too large to absorb. Bramante was a man playing by rules of his own making. That effectively made him invisible.

The TV was running stock photos. The morning papers would repeat the exercise, all with pleas for help and a phone number set up to handle sightings. Costa had no good, clear recollection of Bramante’s appearance from their brief encounter that morning. He’d been too focused on Leo Falcone, too worried that the inspector was in grave danger, to think ahead that much.

Still, the figure he remembered—dressed entirely in black, hat low, scarf around his mouth, scarcely anything visible of his face—provided enough for him to realise that the photos of Giorgio Bramante they had were hopelessly out of date. Fourteen years ago he’d been good-looking, clean-shaven, and sported long dark hair. Most of the photos taken before his arrest made him look like what he was: an intelligent, probably slightly arrogant academic. From what little Costa had glimpsed that morning, he now understood, very clearly, that Bramante didn’t fit that image anymore. Nothing could be taken for granted. They were locked inside a sequence of events Giorgio Bramante could have been planning for years. Unlike them, he was prepared, working on the basis of prior knowledge. It was possible, they all knew, that Bramante had managed to track down the elusive Dino Abati under whatever name he now bore. Abati would be thirty-three now. His parents hadn’t heard from him in years. But eighteen months before, he had been recorded reentering the country from Thailand. Since then there was no record of him departing through any international airport. Given the freedom of movement within Europe available to anyone with an Italian ID card, that could still put him anywhere from Great Britain to the Czech Republic. Costa wasn’t alone in wishing the man were anywhere else on the planet but Rome.

There was a commotion on the far side of the office. Both he and Falcone turned their attention away from the pile of reports on the inspector’s desk and looked out into the pool of busy officers at their desks. Gianni Peroni and Teresa Lupo were marching through the aisles throwing out bags of panini and cans of soft drinks like a couple of Santas turning up at a child’s party.

Leo Falcone laughed. It was an open, honest sound Costa hadn’t heard in a while. That of a man who was back in his element.

“I don’t know why they’re feeding them,” Falcone complained cheerfully. “You’d think we were under siege. Being forced to stay here. It’s ridiculous.”

“Not for you…”

The grey eyebrows rose.

“He could have killed you this morning,” Nic said.

“He could have killed me this morning,” Falcone agreed evenly. “So why didn’t he?”

“Perhaps he thinks this is some kind of a ritual, too. Everything has to be done in the proper way. None of the men he did kill went easily. A water jet through the chest…”

“He hated them more than he hates me.” Falcone said it firmly. “Don’t ask me how I know that. I just do. In fact…” He shook his head, disappointed with his own abilities at that moment. “God. I wish I could think straight. Be honest. How am I doing, Nic? I may be a touch paranoid, but Bruno Messina could have more than one motive for giving me this job. Yes, you could say it’s my responsibility. But if I screw up the way his father screwed up, it won’t take much to put my head on the block, too, will it?”