The Seventh Sacrament (26 page)

He pointed along the square, to a small dark door with a sign by it, unreadable from this angle.

“There being…?” Peroni prompted him.

“Where he used to work,” the officer answered, as if it were obvious. “Where all those archaeologists are doing whatever they do. He went in there and next thing we know they were shouting and yelling. We could hear them from here. I was about to go and ask whether someone needed a little help. But then Bramante came out again, face like thunder, and just walked off down the road as if nothing had happened.”

Costa stared at the sign on the wall: the archaeology department of La Sapienza had a small office here, hidden behind a wall, just like the mansion of the Knights of Malta. When he’d gotten out of prison, Giorgio Bramante had turned down his old job. Yet he’d returned to where he used to work, and he wasn’t a man who did anything without a reason.

“Are they still investigating the site?” Costa asked. “The place where Alessio went missing?”

The Carabinieri officer shook his head.

“Not if they’ve any sense. It’s all cordoned off down there. Whatever happened to it back then left the whole area a death trap. Every time it rains badly, we have a mud slide. Kids mess around in it from time to time. If we find them, they go home with boxed ears. And I mean boxed. I don’t want them coming back.”

Peroni looked at Costa, stared at his shoes, then sighed.

“What’s wrong?” the officer asked.

“I just cleaned them this morning,” the big cop moaned.

I
T WAS ALMOST SEVEN BEFORE ARTURO MESSINA FELT ABLE
to leave the Aventino. A lazy orange sun hung over the Tiber. Its mellowing rays turned the river below into a bright still snake of golden water, patterned on both sides by two slow-moving lines of traffic. The squad car, with its siren and blue flashing light, worked its way through them laboriously. Arturo didn’t have the heart to yell at the driver to make better progress.

He cast a final glance back towards the hill. Crowds were gathered on the Lungotevere below, and on the brow too. No one moved much. Even the jackals of the press were beginning to look bored. Messina had been a police officer all his life, worked uniform, plainclothes, everything, before joining the management ladder. The commissario understood that feeling of stasis, of wading through mud, that gripped an investigation when the first buzz of adrenaline and opportunity was lost. There were now only a few hours of light left. The machines had struggled against the patch of ground hanging precipitately beneath the Orange Garden. What initially seemed a simple task had turned into a nightmarish attempt to shift a small mountain of earth and soft stone that kept collapsing in on itself. The amateurish surveyor supplied by the company that brought in the excavators appeared hopelessly out of his depth. Not one of the archaeologists from Bramante’s team was willing to help; they were too infuriated by what was happening. With Giorgio Bramante departed to the Questura, there was no one in the vicinity who could give them an expert opinion on how best to proceed.

So they blundered on, Commissario Messina naively believing the job would become simpler as they progressed. Like scooping out the top of an ants’ nest and peering inside, he’d told Leo Falcone. He was fooling himself. The truth was much more messy. The nest was long dead. The interior was a labyrinth of tunnels and crevices, dangerous, friable, liable to collapse at any moment. One of the excavator drivers had been making noises about quitting because it was too risky to continue. The Army sappers had withdrawn and sat watching the proceedings from the grassy mound by the park, smoking, an expression on their faces that said
Amateurs.
The machines had already reduced to rubble what, to Messina’s untrained eye, looked like some extensive underground temple, shattering visible artefacts, ploughing the remains, and what seemed to be a plentiful scattering of broken bones back into the red earth. There would, he knew, be a price to pay.

None of which mattered. Only one thing did. Of little Alessio Bramante there wasn’t a sign. Not a shred of clothing, a footprint in the dirt, a distant cry, a faint breath or heartbeat picked up by the sensitive machines Falcone had brought to bear on the job.

Messina stared out at the traffic and told himself,
A boy cannot disappear magically of his own accord.
Their only hope now was to prise some truth from Ludo Torchia. And soon. Whatever it took.

He sat up front in the car as usual. He didn’t like to think of himself as a superior. He was their leader. The man who showed them the way forward. That was what troops—and police officers were troops of a kind, even if they weren’t Carabinieri—needed.

The driver was one of the uniformed men he used regularly. Taccone, an uninspired but essentially decent drone, someone who was struggling to master the sovrintendente exams. Not a bright, ambitious, questioning individual like Falcone. A commissario needed his foot soldiers, Messina thought, just as much as a good officer.

“What would you do if someone took your kid like that?” Messina asked, not much expecting an answer.

Taccone turned and stared at him. There was something in his eyes Messina had never seen before.

“Just what anyone would do,” Taccone answered quietly. “I’d take the scumbag into a small, quiet room. I’d make sure there was no one around I couldn’t trust. Then…”

Taccone was a big man. He’d probably done it before, Messina guessed.

“Those days are past, my friend,” he told his driver. “We live in regulated times. Procedure is what matters. The fine print of the law. Working by the book.”

The traffic was getting worse and worse. The flashing blue light and the siren were doing them no favours. Cars, buses, and trucks blocked both sides of the Lungotevere as it wound past the piazza of the Bocca della Verità. The peace camp occupied almost the entire area of the Circus Maximus beyond. A ragtag army of tents and bodies sprawled beneath the evening sun, covering every inch of the bare and scratchy green grass that had once been an Imperial racetrack.

Taccone swore, ran the police Lancia up onto the broad pedestrian sidewalk, then floored the pedal, scattering walkers, not minding whom he pissed off. When he found a break by the next lights, he forced his way into the moving traffic flow, bullying everything else off the road.

They were outside the Questura in a matter of minutes. A mob of reporters, photographers, and TV crews mulled around the entrance. They knew a suspect was inside the building, Messina guessed. Even if some creep inside the force hadn’t told them in exchange for a few illicit lire, Giorgio Bramante surely had when he’d arrived. Bramante was that kind of man. He played to the media, whatever advice he received to the contrary. Bramante felt wronged, and a man who was wronged would always be moved more by a sense of injustice than common prudence.

Taccone braked hard to a halt, scattering the scrambling hacks.

He turned and stared balefully at Messina.

“Those days are only past, sir,” he said slowly, “if we allow it.”

W
HEN EMILY CALLED WITH THE QUESTION
WHERE
the hell is Giorgio Bramante?
she had suggested it might be a good idea to collect soil samples and any other ground artefacts. She didn’t say,
I’m fine, don’t worry, and by the way it’s very nice holed up out here in some swanky mansion in Orvieto while you play cut and stitch with the latest corpse on the production line.

Americans,
Teresa Lupo said quietly to herself. Everyone needed a work ethic. The trouble was Americans craved one even when they weren’t working.

Fifteen minutes later, the thing crawled out of dead Toni LaMarca’s throat. Teresa screamed when she saw it. This was a first in the morgue. So was the worm. She’d seen many strange items on the shining silver table that was the focal point of her working life. None had yet scared her, not seriously. But watching—close up, since she was taking a good look at the corpse’s face at the time—a pale flabby beast with prominent eyes and a triangular head, its whole slimy body the length of a little finger, slowly wriggle its way out of a dead man’s throat, then settle on his lips, was enough to make her shriek, something Silvio Di Capua found extraordinarily amusing.

Thirty minutes later Silvio had called in the friend of a friend who turned out to be Cristiano, the evolutionary biologist from La Sapienza. Cristiano was one of the tallest human beings Teresa Lupo had ever seen, a good head higher than both she and Silvio, as thin as a rake, utterly bald, with a cadaverous face and bulbous eyes. He could have been anywhere between nineteen and thirty-seven, but he didn’t look the type to be interested in girls.

The worm, on the other hand, turned him on.

Cristiano spent thirty minutes peering at it from every angle through a magnifying glass, then asked, anxiously, “Can I keep it?”

“That worm is in police custody, Cristiano,” Teresa explained patiently. “We can’t let a creature like that go walkabout simply because you’ve taken a fancy to him.”

“It’s not a him. It’s a him and a her. Planarians are simultaneous hermaphrodites. This little fellow…”

Teresa closed her eyes and sighed, unable to believe anyone could talk so affectionately about the disgusting piece of white slime now meandering around the small specimen dish Silvio had found for it.

“…predates the Ice Age. They have the sexual appetite of a seventies rock star. Five times a day, if he can get hold of a partner, and he doesn’t much care about the condition either. Also, if you chop him in half, he can grow a new head or tail. Or even several.”

“So ‘he’ is a he?” she observed slyly.

“I was being conversational for a lay audience,” Cristiano insisted.

“You’re too kind. Does
he
have a name?”

“Two. We used to call him
Dugesia polychroa.
Then they decided some dead academic called Schmidt needed something to be remembered by. So it got changed to
Schmidtea polychroa.
”

“Cristiano,” Teresa said, taking his skinny arm. “Let me be candid with you. Things are just a touch busy around here at the moment. For example, this ‘little fellow’ worked its way out of the open mouth of a gentleman who got his heart hosed out in a slaughterhouse, and that doesn’t happen too often. Also, last night someone broke into the Questura, probably looking to kill a good friend of mine, then shot dead a potentially important witness in this very case. I hope to work my way round to
him
a little later. My colleague Silvio here was of the opinion that this creature might provide some significant information for us. It would delight me immensely if you could give me some small clue as to whether my colleague is correct.”

She paused for effect then demanded, “So what is it?”

“A flatworm.”

“Just any old flatworm?”

Silvio got in on the act. “There’s no such thing as ‘any old flatworm,’ Teresa. If you’d spent a moment reading a few papers on evolutionary biology you’d know that. These things—”

“Shut up!”

She squeezed Cristiano’s arm harder.

“Just tell me, before you go, how that thing got there. Could it have been inside him when he was alive?”

“Are you serious?” the biologist asked, eyes bulging. “Who’d let
that
crawl down their throat?”

“I meant as a parasite or something. Like a fluke.”

“Planarians aren’t parasites!” He looked as if she’d insulted a relative.

“What are they then?”

“Scavengers, mainly. They feed on dead meat.”

“So it could have crawled down his mouth when he was dead? Or unconscious?”

He shook his bald head in violent disagreement. “Not while he was unconscious. These things didn’t live that long by being stupid. They stay away from anything that’s breathing unless it’s smaller. They’re pretty good at devouring young earthworms if they can catch them, but that’s as far as it goes.”

She thought about this.

“Habitat,” she said. “They live in the earth. They come out when they’re hungry. This man was found in a crypt alongside a hundred or so skeletons from the Middle Ages or whenever. A natural place for these wormy things, I guess.”