The Seventh Sacrament (36 page)

She’d taken a class trip when she was in school: the catacombs somewhere out on the Appian Way. They smelled like this, the same powerful, pervasive reek, earthy and organic, that had probably hung around for centuries.

Rosa Prabakaran hated being in the catacombs, not that she let this show. It felt as if she were trapped in a grave.

Finally, pushed on by Bramante’s feet and fists, they found themselves in some subterranean chamber. Not large. Not complete either, because part of it was open to the night air, letting in some soft, slow drizzle that curled down from a dark velvet sky in which stars were faintly visible.

There were chambers off this principal vestibule, guarded with iron gates, modern ones designed to keep out intruders.

Bramante unlocked the cell to the right, opened the door, and took out a large clasp knife.

The butcher whimpered and stared in horror at the weapon. Bramante cut through the thick climbing rope with one strong swipe, then propelled the man inside with a vicious kick. The butcher fell to the floor in a pained heap, still whimpering. The door closed behind him with a clatter.

Rosa closed her eyes, found herself wondering what this meant, then immediately fought to stifle the thoughts that rose in her head.

Bramante shoved her into the adjoining chamber, closed the door behind him, locked it. He had a set of keys, she noticed. Several, on a chain, the kind a caretaker would use. Or an archaeologist going back to his old haunts.

He pushed her forward again until they were standing at the end of the room, then he lifted a large electric lantern and turned on the light. A broad sallow beam illuminated what appeared to be a cavernous chamber, with brick walls clinging to the rock and earth. One corner was open to a luminous night sky. Some dim illumination from an artificial bulb joined the light from the stars and an unseen moon there. A man or woman at ground level just might have seen them from the right position, Rosa thought, but it gave her no comfort, since Bramante must have realised this too.

They had to be somewhere central yet sufficiently deserted to avoid detection. Rosa racked her brain to imagine such a place in the heart of Rome. There were, when she came to think of it, scores. Possibly hundreds. Abandoned excavations, old archaeological finds that never brought in sufficient tourists to keep them open. The city was a honeycomb of ancient sites, some on the surface, many more below the earth. Giorgio Bramante doubtless knew them all.

One large, strong hand curled round her to lie flat on her stomach. His face crept close to hers, his breath, hot and anxious, panted in her ear.

Then the blade rose in his other hand, flashed past her eyes to prick her cheek. She felt the sharp edge of the chill metal against her skin. The knife tip found the corner of her gag, lifted it, sliced through fabric. The material fell away and she found herself choking, too terrified to say anything, aware he still had the rope in his hand, aware, too, that Bramante was an intelligent man, a man who would never have returned to her the power of speech if it could have been of any possible use.

“Do you know what this place is, Rosa?” he whispered.

“Don’t call me that,” she said, once the choking ended, struggling to adopt a quiet, firm tone, one that didn’t expose the fear she felt.

Bramante released his grip on her, just a little.

“A woman with self-respect,” he observed. “That’s important. So. Let’s try this again. Do you know what this place is, Agente Prabakaran?”

“Some…” She shivered, cold in the flimsy, stupid clothes she’d chosen.

He was hard. She could feel the anxious pressure as he held her close.

“…temple.”

“A-plus,” he said, and, thankfully, released his grip, just a little.

Giorgio Bramante pulled a flashlight out of his jacket and played the beam on the object in front of them. It was an altar, perhaps five metres long and two high. Its stone surface was still flat and level.

Like a table. Or a hard rock bed.

Something was carved on it.

“Do you see it?” Bramante asked, pushing her forward, and there was an unfathomable bitter note, tinged with sadness, in the words.

Carved into the face of the altar was the long, muscular shape of a creature. It was being wrestled to the ground by a burly figure who wore a winged helmet and held a short, stabbing sword tight in his hand. The animal’s face was contorted: bulging eyes, flared nostrils—it was a living thing struggling for life. Bells rang in her head. It was like the statues on the old Testaccio slaughterhouse, a man overpowering a colossal bull, intent on slaughter. Only here, there was more to the image. A dog was licking the blood that ran from the beast’s throat. A scorpion was pulling hungrily on its taut penis. This was a freak scene from a vivid nightmare.

“It’s insane,” she murmured, and closed her eyes because he was roaring again, like a beast himself, pulling her into him, dragging her head close into his body until his mouth was in her hair, his torso locked tight against the curves of her back.

“A man is either Mithras or the bull,” Giorgio Bramante said quietly. “The giver or the gift. After which he is nothing.”

She caught a glimpse of his face and regretted it immediately. His eyes were dead. Or absent of humanity. She wasn’t sure which.

He leaned even closer, pressing so hard now that it hurt, and whispered eagerly, “I spent so long in prison. No women. No pleasure. No comfort…”

Rosa closed her eyes and tried to remember what they told every woman in the force about a situation like this. Only one word remained clear in her head.

Survive.

W
HATEVER DRUG FOGLIA HAD GIVEN LUDO TORCHIA
seemed to race through the student’s blood system, like some deadly spike of adrenaline. The young man lay there taut, bloodied, eyes wide open, acutely alert, taking in their faces, taking in the din of the traffic outside: horns and angry human voices, an ordinary evening in the Via Labicana, such mundane noises to accompany the end of a human life.

Falcone was astonished to find those sounds were still there, fourteen years after the event, so real he could hear them. And Ludo Torchia’s face too: shock mixed with something not akin to amusement. The face of a guilty man. A guilty man who was in no mood to be helpful in his dying moments.

“Say something.”

Falcone mouthed the same words now, alone in his office, trying to marshal his thoughts in the way he used to with such fluent ease. It was all getting harder and it wasn’t just his injuries. He was old. Even before the gunshot wound in Venice, he’d passed some invisible point in his life, a moment of profound change, when all his past skills simply solidified inside him and stayed there, clinging on, hoping to defy the years. Even if they found Bramante the following day, Messina still wanted him gone. There would, he now knew, be no new talents, no fresh challenges. The time was approaching when he would have to pass on the reins to a new generation. Nic Costa one day, or so he hoped. Barring some kind of a miracle, only the sidelines waited for Leo Falcone: administration or some other corner of bureaucracy before the inevitable retirement. This part of his life was coming to a close, and he had no idea what could possibly replace it.

Or how he could even begin to approach it without putting the present case into some kind of compartment he could label “solved.” He’d snapped at Messina over the grim word “closure,” unfairly perhaps, because a part of Falcone did want this issue finished, for good. Not just with Bramante back in prison, but with the fate of the boy uncovered too. He believed, with every instinct thirty years of police work had given him, that the two were inseparable.

His mind wandered back fourteen years to the ambulance again. Everything in those last moments was so hazy. It had been hard to catch Torchia’s final, murmured words.

Reluctantly, because he knew the pain it would cause, he took out his personal address book and found Foglia’s number. The doctor had retired from the Questura six months after the Bramante case. Both men knew why, though they had never discussed the matter. Falcone knew Foglia would never be able to live with the consequences of what he’d done that day, perhaps all the more because those actions had never been brought to the light of day. Teresa Lupo’s predecessor in the morgue had quietly overlooked whatever substances he had found in Torchia’s blood—an act of deliberate negligence which Falcone knew he could never expect from Teresa. So the best Questura doctor Falcone ever worked with had taken early retirement and, when his children left home for university, departed his native Rome to live on Sant’Antioco, a little-visited island on the west coast of Sardinia, a place that seemed, to Falcone, to say
Don’t visit.

All the same, he did visit, some five or six years before, spending a few quiet days watching the sea from the Foglias’ large, modern villa above a modest holiday resort, passing pleasantries, never talking about work.

It was enough.

Falcone dialled the number, waited, then heard Foglia’s familiar voice. After the excuses and brief exchanges of news, his old friend took a deep breath and announced, “I know why you’re calling, Leo. You don’t need to beat around the bush.”

The Bramante case had made big headlines fourteen years ago. It was back in them now, louder than ever.

“If I had any alternative, Patrizio….”

“My God, you must be desperate, if you need the likes of me.”

“I just…”

But Foglia was spot on. Leo was desperate.

“What do you want?” the voice on the line demanded. “If it’s a free holiday, we’d love to see you. Please come. May or June, when the fresh tuna are in. I’ll teach you how to fish. How to relax.”

“I’ll take you up on that,” Falcone promised.

“No you won’t, Leo. Does it make you feel good? To know you were right all along? That Giorgio Bramante was some kind of animal?”

“Not at all,” he replied honestly. “I wish to God I’d been wrong. That he’d just come out of jail, gone to a quiet academic job somewhere, and put the past behind him.”

“But he couldn’t, could he? Not without knowing.”

“No.”

Falcone could recall precisely Torchia’s dying words in the back of that ambulance, amid the cacophony of horns and furious human voices outside. They hadn’t made sense at the time. They didn’t now.

“You must have seen many people die, Patrizio. Does it matter what they say?”

“Rarely. I had one miserable, tightfisted old bastard tell his wife to remember to turn off the lights afterwards. That was one to remember.”

“And Ludo Torchia?”

There was a pause on the line. Then Foglia said softly,
“Meglio una bella bugia che una brutta verità.”

The words were just as Falcone remembered them, spat out by the dying Torchia one by one, punctuated by some kind of ironic, choking laughter.

Better a beautiful lie than an ugly truth.

“Funny old saying at the best of times,” Foglia declared. “They seem to me the dying words of an actor, someone who is playing a game in his head, even to the end. Do you have any idea what he meant?”

“The beautiful lie was surely Giorgio Bramante. The idea that he was some kind of loving father figure, the man we all believed him to be.”

“And the ugly truth?”

“There you have me.”

There was an awkward pause on the line.

“Leo, you will visit us again one day, won’t you? It’s lovely here in the spring. We would both enjoy your company.”

“Of course. You heard nothing more? There was a moment…”

When Torchia had closed his eyes again, as the drug seemed to wear off, Falcone—furious, desperate—had thrown open the ambulance door and screamed at the two medics there to find some way, any way, through the snarl of cars and buses and lorries blocking the Via Labicana. It was a slender hope, but perhaps there had been some few words that had eluded him.

“He said nothing more, Leo. I’m sorry.”

“No. I’m the one who should apologise. I should never have dragged this back into the light of day for you. It’s unfair.”

The silence again. A thought pricked at Leo Falcone’s mind. Patrizio Foglia did have some secret weighing on his conscience, surely.

“There’s something I never knew, isn’t there?” he asked.

Foglia sighed.

“Oh God. Why does it have to keep coming back? Why doesn’t the man simply mourn his own child and find himself a life somehow? Or put a gun to his
own
head for a change?”

“Tell me what you know. Please.”

He could never, not in a million years, have predicted what he heard next.

“I took a close interest in the autopsy,” Foglia said softly. “I had good reason, as you must appreciate.”

“And?”

“There was clear evidence Torchia had anal sex that day. Brutal. There was blood and bruising. It had…culminated too. Possibly rape. Possibly sadomasochistic. I am not an expert in these matters.”

Falcone’s mind went blank. Without thinking, he said, “Those boys were down those caves for some kind of ritual. There were drugs. I imagine we shouldn’t be surprised.”