The Seventh Sacrament (37 page)

In his ear, he heard Foglia’s long, pained intake of breath.

“It wasn’t in the caves, Leo. The evidence was plain and fresh and incontrovertible. What happened happened shortly before he died. In the Questura. In the cell where you and Messina and Giorgio Bramante questioned him.”

Falcone’s vision became blurred. His breath snagged. “And you told no one?” he asked, incredulous.

“I asked the pathologist to leave it out of his report. He was…accommodating. The Questura was in enough trouble already. Did you really want another scandal on your hands? Whether it was Bramante, Messina…or you…either way, it would have rebounded on us. Besides, what use could it possibly have been? Torchia was dead. Bramante was in custody. You had your man.”

“The
boy
!” Falcone responded, aware he was yelling into the phone, unable to stop himself. “What about the boy? Had I known that…”

Those were the early days of DNA. They could have identified Bramante as the sexual assailant, too, surely, and that would have changed the entire complexion of the case.

“Then what?” the voice on the line demanded crossly. “Do tell me, Leo. I would love to know.”

“Then perhaps…”

There could be no instant answer. What mattered was that he had been robbed of some knowledge that was, surely, useful, if only he could begin to comprehend its significance.

“I’m sorry,” Foglia said. “I just wanted an end to it. We all did. I wish—”

“Good night,” Falcone snapped, then slammed down the phone.

He sat alone, placed his head in his hands, didn’t mind at that moment what a passerby seeing him like this in his office would think.

Was this the ugly truth? That Giorgio Bramante was not simply just a careless father, but a man gripped by some dark, secret side to his character? If it was true, his wife, with her self-inflicted wounds and her compulsive need to paint their lost child, over and over again, must surely have known.

He swore as another realisation struck him. The young Indian detective had been deputed to followed Beatrice Bramante all day long. He’d never even looked for her report.

Falcone keyed the name
Prabakaran
into the computer.

It came up with nothing since the previous evening.

“Novices…”

She would be home by now. He let a low curse slip from his lips, then looked up her mobile number, picked up the phone, and dialled it, steeling himself for the conversation that would follow, one in which he would remind a junior officer that no one on his team ever went off-duty without filing a report.

The phone rang three times. A man’s voice answered.

“I would like to speak to Agente Prabakaran,” the inspector said impatiently, adding, “This is Inspector Falcone.”

“Leo,” said a cold, amused voice at the other end. “What took you so long?”

P
ERONI WAS TRYING TO NAIL DOWN POSSIBLE UNDERGROUND
locations for Bramante in the company of the worm geek, two archaeology students the intelligence team had dug up, and a room full of maps. So Costa found a quiet corner in the office and called Orvieto. Emily’s voice sounded distant, lacking the warm, confident timbre he’d come to expect. She was just a few hours away by car, but she might as well have been on the other side of the world. When he called, the others were having dinner; she was alone in her room, resting. It wasn’t like her.

“What’s wrong?” he asked.

“Nothing. I just didn’t want company. Also, it pains me to watch others enjoying good wine when I can’t join in.”

“How do you feel?”

There was a pause. This was so new for both of them. The doctors had said she should expect to feel tired, perhaps depressed from time to time.

“Perhaps I’ll go and see someone tomorrow,” she conceded, rather than answer his question. “It’s only a little thing.”

“You do that tonight,” he said immediately. “Why wait?”

“Because I know what the doctor will say. He’ll sigh and think, Here’s another first-time mother teetering on the edge of panic. All because it’s new to her. Nothing more. Children come into the world all the time, Nic.”

“They won’t mind. That’s why they’re there.”

“No,” she said firmly. “They’re there to treat sick people. I’ll see a doctor in the morning, just to reassure us both. I really have no reason to think there’s anything wrong. I just feel a little out of sorts. That’s all.”

He knew her well enough by now not to argue.

“When will I see you?” she asked.

“Messina’s given us one more day. After that, if Bramante is still out there, Falcone hands the investigation over to Bavetti. We’ll be gone from the Questura, all three of us. We don’t meet Messina’s approval. He doesn’t sound much like his father.”

“No,” she replied, and he could hear the sadness in her voice. “There’s some distance between those two and I don’t really understand why. Fathers and sons. I thought it was supposed to be some special kind of bond women were meant to envy. They don’t seem to have a relationship at all.”

Costa thought of his own family, the constant, abrasive difficulties he’d experienced with his father, almost till the end, when he was in a wheelchair, stricken too, and when their mutual frailty brought about some painful, redemptive reconciliation that still pricked like an awkward needle when the memories flooded back. So much time wasted on stupid arguments, on both sides. Marco Costa had never made life easy for anyone, himself and his own flesh and blood least of all.

“Just one more myth,” he murmured.

She waited for a moment, then said, “No, it’s not. I never knew your father, Nic. I really wish I had. Even so, I see someone else in your eyes from time to time and I know it has to be him. You two had something between you that never existed for me with my own dad. Or my mom either. And it’s not just you. I’ve noticed this before. It’s men. I think…”

Another, longer pause, one that told him she wasn’t sure she ought to say this.

“You think what?” he said.

“I think, in a way, once you become fathers, you feel guilty if you feel you’re just living in the moment. When a man has a son, he develops some sense of duty that tells him the day will come when he’ll pass on the torch. One generation to the next. And that’s what’s driving all of you crazy about this case. Not the missing kid, or rather not just the missing kid. You see a world where that all got taken away. Some kind of sacred bond that’s been broken. Even Leo…”

“Leo doesn’t have children!”

“Neither do you. But you both had fathers. Have you ever heard Leo mention his?”

“No.”

Costa’s gaze wandered to the glass-fronted office across the room where Falcone was still working, pale-faced. It was past eleven. The inspector looked as if he would go on for hours.

“If you want to discuss the case,” she went on, “call me, Nic. It doesn’t bother me, really.”

“I don’t have anything left to tell you. We think we can start to narrow down tomorrow where he’s hiding. It’s just a standard operation: search the possibilities, eliminate what we can, until we find something. As far as Alessio’s concerned…”

The shadow of the lost boy hovered behind everything like a ghost. Without telling anyone, Costa had, during his break earlier that evening, driven over to the little church of Sacro Cuore in Prati, talked to the church warden there, a good man who was a little scared and greatly puzzled by what had happened. Costa had spoken with the plainclothes officer on surveillance outside on Falcone’s orders, satisfied himself that the likelihood was that Bramante had never been near the place that day. Then he’d returned to the church, gone into the little room, with the strange, unworldly name—Il Piccolo Museo del Purgatorio—studied the items on the wall, the bloodstained T-shirt in particular, and tried to imagine what all this meant to Giorgio Bramante.

Plain screws fastened the glass to the case on the wall. They would be easy to remove. What eluded Costa was the reason to do so: it was a public act with a private meaning.

Bramante blamed Ludo Torchia and the other students for Alessio’s fate. That much was clear. But an intelligent man couldn’t fool himself either. He was the father. He carried the responsibility for his young son. He had brought the boy to that place. He bore his share of the blame, too, blame that had somehow transmuted, in his wife’s head, into an act of self-mutilation: cutting her own flesh to stain a garment belonging to her missing son, placing it on the wall of this dusty place that reeked of emptiness and cold damp stone. Was this act—Bramante placing a mark of each of his victims on the missing child’s shirt—some way in which he hoped to make amends?

“Perhaps you’re right, Nic. I tried to disregard what you said because it seemed so you.”

“Right about what?”

The memory of Santo Cuore bothered him for some reason that remained out of reach.

“That Alessio didn’t die in that hill. If he had, someone, surely, would have found something.”

But that idea, which he’d come to dismiss himself, now raised so many unanswerable questions.

“Someone would have known, Emily. And he would have come forward.”

“There was the peace camp at the Circus Maximus. You found out about that.”

“True…but that was fourteen years ago. I’ve no idea how we could investigate that today.”

“Quite…” He heard a deep breath on the line. “Have you talked to Teresa about this?”

“No,” he replied, baffled. “Why should I?”

“Women have conversations with each other that men avoid. All you see is the present. Teresa has an interesting past, too.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning she was a student firebrand back when she was young. Does that surprise you?”

Not for a moment, he realised. And it would never have occurred to him, either. Emily was right: all he saw was the woman he’d come to know and admire over the last few years. He’d no idea of the journey that had brought her there.

“I can imagine that. You think she’d know about this demonstration?”

“Look at the newspaper cuttings. If you were young, radical, and living in Rome back then, it’s difficult to see how she could have avoided that camp. She would have been around the same age as the one who died. Torchia, wasn’t that his name?”

“She would,” he agreed, although the very idea seemed alien and improbable.

“Another thing struck me. It’s absolutely clear these students were doing something weird down there. You found that rooster. They’d sacrificed that, right?”

“There was a dead bird. They’d been messing around. I’m just guessing about what happened to that cockerel. Because of what happened to Torchia, none of them gave a statement.”

“They weren’t there for a class assignment, that’s for sure. So let’s say it was some kind of ritual…”

“Let’s say.”

“Where do you think they got the idea?” she asked. “Everything those kids knew about Mithraism they learned from Giorgio Bramante.”

This conversation was beginning to depress him. He could hear tension, excitement, in her voice, the same emotion he’d heard when they’d worked together officially, just once, on the same case.

“What idea?”

“Nic, no one understands much about Mithraism, but what we do know suggests it was an organised, highly ritualistic cult that demanded a gift from its followers if they wanted to rise through the ranks.”

“Seven orders, seven sacraments,” he said, recalling what Teresa had told them.

“Precisely. And it’s not unreasonable to think that the higher you rose, the more you had to offer. It’s like the hierarchical structure in the Masons or some modern cults. Or the FBI, for that matter.”

“No.” He wasn’t even going to countenance this. “We’ve been here before and I still won’t accept it. I can’t believe any father would put his child through pain—or worse—just because of some ancient ritual. A stupid student, maybe. Torchia, maybe. Not a man like Bramante.”

“I told you!” Her voice rose. It worried him. “Maybe something went wrong. He probably never thought for a moment that Alessio would be harmed. He just wanted to initiate his son into the mysteries or something. Or to take part in his own sacrament. Who’s to say Torchia wasn’t part of that game, unwittingly, maybe? Who’s to say that’s why Giorgio Bramante beat him to death? Out of revenge. And to make sure none of us ever got to know what
really
happened down there?”

He was silent. It was a good point, even if he felt, in his bones, it needed to be challenged.

“Perhaps the reason you never found Alessio,” she persisted, “is because he just didn’t want to face his father after whatever happened. Because he couldn’t bear the sight of him for one more minute.”

“So a seven-year-old child walks out into the streets of Rome and just disappears?”

“It’s happened before. You know that as well as I do. He could be alive. He could have fallen prey to some genuine maniac out there, somewhere else, say in that peace camp. Nic…” That pained intake of breath again, as she steeled herself to say something he didn’t want to hear. “…At some stage of your life you’re just going to have to face up to the fact that there are some mad, bad people out there and it doesn’t actually matter why they’re like that. What matters is stopping them from harming the rest of us.”