The Seventh Sacrament (30 page)

Peroni caught up with him, a little out of breath. The big cop stared at the paper, then the woman. She was poking her way into one of the side drains. It didn’t look modern at all, now Costa saw it close up.

“Signora Turnhouse!” Peroni yelled. “Do not go in there. Please.”

She didn’t take any notice.

“Damn,” Peroni muttered. “He could still be around, Nic.”

“Agreed,” Costa said, and scrambled across the slimy stone towards her, shouting to the woman to stand still.

That worked. She stopped. He reached her, hoped she understood there was a reason a gun now rested in his hand.

“This isn’t how I remember the place.” She sounded a little scared. “I can’t put my finger on it. This isn’t as old as the rest. Fifteenth, sixteenth century, maybe. We used to use it for study work. A group of us went in here with Giorgio the first year we were here. But it was different then somehow. That’s impossible.”

Costa worked his way in front of her. The entrance to the drain was under two metres high at this point. A meagre stream of thick, muddy water gripped his ankles in a bone-chilling embrace. He pointed his flashlight into the gloom and saw nothing. Not a man. Not a thing, until a large black animal shape scuttered through the grimy water into the darkness. The woman followed him, then, after a few steps, grabbed his jacket.

“There!”

Peroni yelled that he was calling in backup. Smart move, Costa guessed. If there was anyone around, it was a good idea to let them know they would soon have more to deal with than a pair of puzzled cops and one increasingly jumpy archaeologist.

“What do you see?” he asked Judith Turnhouse; then, before she could answer, found his eyes adapting, realised what was wrong.

Something obstructed the route ahead. It looked like the larva of some gigantic insect, bulging out from the rock wall of the culvert. Except it was red brick, not the dried husk of an insect’s egg. Modern red brick, weakened by something pushing from behind. The pressure of water, perhaps, since what they seemed to be looking at was, he now came to realise, the artificial cap of something that could only be a side drain running into this main channel, one that had, at some time within the last few years, been blocked, and subject to the growing pressure of whatever sporadic force of liquid built up behind it.

The mortar between the bricks was cracked and failing. A steady stream of dank water ran through the base, filtering through the rough cement before falling into the broader flow that swirled in a chilly embrace around their feet.

Costa shone his beam on the protruding brickwork. It looked weak. He stuck out his toe and pushed at the lowermost part. Soft cement crumbled as he watched. A single brick fell, then another, then the entire underside of the small, circular wall in front of him collapsed completely and fell into the grubby stream.

A mountain of trash that must have been building for decades followed: cans and rotting wood, paper, and an unidentifiable thick brown sludge.

Then a bottle with a bright red label. Followed by another object, something Costa dreaded to see. And a smell, organic, vile, fetid, that was at once both alien and all too familiar.

The woman began shrieking. The manic sound of her voice echoed around the artificial cave in which they stood, magnified by the brickwork enclosing them, drowning out the steady rush of the water at their feet.

Behind the gobbets of trash vomited into the sewer, something else dangled down over the brickwork, what lay behind it still hidden, thankfully, in the shadows.

It was the hand and upper arm of a human being. The fingers were now stiff bleached digits of bone. Tatters of pale flesh ran through taut, open tendons to the wrist, shredded in places by what looked like teeth marks.

It was a very small hand, Costa thought. Not that of a man.

R
OSA PRABAKARAN HAD SPENT MOST OF HER LIFE FEELING
prominent, feeling as if the eyes of those around her were always watching, asking:
Why?
There was no reason a woman of Indian extraction couldn’t join the state police. No reason she couldn’t do anything she liked. The colour of her skin was not her problem. It was theirs. All the same, Rosa didn’t like feeling as if she were something to be stared at. Falcone’s admonition—
I want her to see you
—grated. It was unprofessional. It was unnecessary.

So, for the first time in her brief career, Rosa Prabakaran disobeyed orders. After catching up at home on the news of the overnight murder at the Questura, trying to absorb it, she took out some things she hadn’t worn in a long time. Bright, young clothes, from a time before the police, when she had felt free of responsibilities. A short pencil-thin skirt, a shiny leather jacket, red shoes. She put on makeup, raked out her business ponytail and let her long brown locks hang around her shoulders.

It was a touch sluttish, she decided, regarding herself in the mirror. But Beatrice Bramante would surely never recognise her now. She looked like one of the naturalised Indian girls, the kind who hung around the bars and clubs and shops near the Piazza di Spagna, picking up Italian boyfriends, living the modern life, all quick pleasures, and nothing to worry about afterwards. Her father would be out selling umbrellas like crazy in this rain, at twice the normal price, because that was how the street traders worked. Rosa was glad. He’d have worried more about her looks than the fact that she was walking out the door to try to crack some lead in a murder investigation, and in doing so prove some kind of point to people like Inspector Leo Falcone.

There was a handgun in the small patent leather handbag that hung over her right shoulder on a gold chain. Her father might have worried about that, too.

SHE TOOK THE
Number 3 tram to Via Marmorata. Then she walked down to the street where Beatrice Bramante lived and parked herself in the café opposite, nibbling at a cornetto that was still hot from the oven.

After almost two hours and three coffees, she watched Beatrice leave her apartment block through the big iron gates at the front, nodding on her way out to the caretaker in his little cabin.

Rosa followed the woman to the market, where she bought some vegetables, bread, and a little cheese. She recalled Beatrice during the awkward interview with Falcone, trying to hide the scars on her wrists, grabbing for the booze bottle when the inspector pushed too hard. Beatrice hadn’t looked like a woman who coped well with today, let alone her tomorrows.

Finally, Beatrice moved toward one of the butcher’s stalls. Rosa remembered something else from the previous day, something dark. It was the woman from Santa Maria dell’Assunta almost fainting in this very place, sickened by what she’d seen, and by the visible reminder of it in the stalls. Hunks of bright red meat, white fat, little puddles of blood gathering on the marble slabs beneath. The harsh, organic stink of raw flesh.

Rosa looked at the sign above the stall where Beatrice had stopped. It was a horse butcher’s.
The
horse butcher’s. This was the place where Giorgio Bramante had worked, half the time killing the animals at the slaughterhouse out in Anagnina, the rest bringing the meat here.

Beatrice Bramante was talking in an animated fashion to a man behind the counter. A man in his early thirties who wore a bloodstained coat and the white pork-pie hat butchers seemed to favour.

Then the man stood closer to Beatrice, staring at her with admiring eyes, slipping some parcel of meat illicitly into her hands. Then following this with a brief, sudden kiss, one that took the woman by surprise, so that she glanced around nervously, wondering if anyone had seen.

Rosa had ducked behind a towering pile of fruit boxes the moment she saw Beatrice turning in her direction. There, her nostrils full of the ripe acid smell of winter lemons from Sicily, her fingers gripped the little bag, with the handgun inside. She’d left the police radio at home deliberately. This was a statement.
I’m on my own.
But she had her phone, and if she called Leo Falcone, told him she was standing just metres away from someone who might be Giorgio Bramante himself, none of that would matter.

She moved out from behind the lemon boxes. The man and woman were still talking, still close. Rosa took a good look at him. He was quite striking, in a damaged way. Not muscular, but not a college professor either, even one who’d spent the last fourteen years in jail. She’d seen the photos of Giorgio Bramante. They’d warned her he would be different. But not this different. And why would he return to the old job like this? It seemed inconceivable.

She remembered Teresa Lupo’s advice:
Either look or don’t look. Just don’t
half
look.

The reason she had assumed this was Giorgio Bramante was simple: the man and the woman treated each other with a casual, intimate familiarity.

The butcher reached out and lightly brushed Beatrice Bramante’s cheek once more. Then she walked off, out under the market’s iron roof, covering her head against the rain, striding back towards her apartment, eyes on the sidewalk.

Beatrice is not alone, Rosa Prabakaran decided. She has a lover. One who worked with Giorgio. And surely must have known him.

This was valuable, she thought. In a different light, Leo Falcone would be grateful for it. Yet she was immediately aware that he would see instantly she had come to possess the intelligence through what he would view as illicit means, in direct contradiction to the orders he’d issued.

Of itself the knowledge was useless, of such limited value that its revelation could serve only to reveal her duplicity.

“I need more,” she whispered.

When the market closed, she followed him back to where, she assumed, he lived. It was in a block near the old slaughterhouse, a massive complex now being turned over to the arts, not far from the Monti dei Cocci, the small hill of Imperial-era pottery shards that was Testaccio’s one tourist attraction. At night, half of Rome came here for the restaurants and the clubs. In the day, however, it was deserted. Only a handful of visitors were heading for the arts exhibition. Rosa studied the gates of the old slaughterhouse. They’d left the huge original headstone over the building: a winged man wrestling a complaining bull to the earth by the ring through its nose. And beneath both of them a sea of carved bones, animal and human, all grimy stone after years of exposure to the weather.

Lost for what to do next, she hid from the rain in a tiny café opposite. After a while her mobile phone rang. She cursed the intrusion as an unfamiliar, unexpected voice came on the line.

I
T WAS HOT THAT NIGHT IN THE BASEMENT OF THE
Questura. Falcone was left alone outside the cell, a punishment for defying Messina over the progress of the investigation. His penance was to listen to a young man being beaten to the brink of death, a point from which there would be no return.

He had sat there for so long, racking his brains for some possible solution, some excuse which would allow him to contravene Messina’s direct orders and enter that dreadful room. There was only one, and he’d known it from the outset. What was happening was wrong. Nothing could justify it, not the mysterious disappearance of a child, nor the likelihood that Ludo Torchia was involved in it. Wrong was wrong, and any police officer who tried to run away from that simple fact would surely, one day, pay the price.

When he could take no more—Bramante was left alone in the cell with Torchia for fifty minutes, Falcone was to learn later, though it seemed much longer—Falcone threw open the door, began to say something, and found the words failed in his mouth. This was a sight he knew would never fully fade from his memory.

Giorgio Bramante stood over his victim, still furious, still wanting to go on, hate and a lust for some kind of vengeance blazing in his eyes.

“I’m not done yet,” this learned, respected college professor yelled. “Didn’t you hear your orders, you fool? I’m not done yet.”

“There,” Falcone told him, “you are wrong.”