The Seventh Sacrament (41 page)

Costa blinked. “Firearms?”

“Exactly,” Messina concurred.

There were two specialist state police hostage teams in the city. One focused on negotiation, the second was specifically trained to deal with urgent, high-priority incidents involving captives. Messina was making it clear he wanted the latter. The team existed more out of pride than necessity. The Carabinieri and the secret services handled most security events. But what they had, the state police wanted too.

“If Leo’s a hostage,” Peroni observed, “the last thing we want is a bunch of people pointing guns at the man who’s holding him.”

“You’re experts on hostage-taking now, are you?” the commissario barked. “Is there anything you two don’t have an opinion on?”

“We’re just trying to pass on what we think Inspector Falcone would say in the circumstances,” Costa interposed.

“Leo Falcone walked out of the Questura
against
my direct orders! He’s just made things ten times worse.”

Messina glanced down at Rosa Prabakaran. He looked as if he really didn’t want to see her at all. “What happened here, Prabakaran?” he demanded. “I need to know.
Now.
”

“No, Commissario.” Teresa Lupo rose. She prodded a stubby finger into his dark serge coat. “Not now. There are protocols and procedures for situations like this. They
will
be followed.”

“You’re the pathologist here,” Messina bawled at her. His hand flapped close in her face. “You do your job, I’ll do mine. I want to know.”

“Know what?” Teresa demanded, standing her ground.

“What happened?”

Costa broke in. “Agente Prabakaran has nothing to tell us about Inspector Falcone. She wasn’t even aware he’d been taken until someone told her this morning.”

“I am the commanding officer. I demand a full report—”

“Oh please!” Teresa interrupted. “Don’t you have eyes, man? Can’t you see what happened?”

“Remember your place,” Messina hissed, and stuck out a beefy arm to push her out of the way.

Costa watched what happened next with amazement.

Teresa Lupo’s arm rose in what seemed to him a passable imitation of a boxer’s right hook, caught Messina on the chin, then sent the large commissario spinning back into the arms of Bavetti, who just managed to break his fall as the man hit the stone floor.

A barely hidden ripple of amusement ran around the officers, uniformed and plainclothes, watching the scene. No one, except Bavetti, moved a muscle to help the fallen man.

Teresa turned to Costa and Peroni. “Do you really think Leo could still be alive?”

“Bramante was in no rush to kill him before,” Costa insisted, adding, with a glance at Messina, half dazed on the ground, “We could be in luck. If we had something to offer him…”

“Such as?” she asked.

“Such as finding out what happened to his son,” Costa suggested.

“This is ridiculous,” Messina snapped savagely, scrambling to his feet, not yet ready to look Teresa Lupo in the face. “If we didn’t get to the bottom of that fourteen years ago, what chance do we have now?”

She shook her head in disappointment. “For you, Commissario, I suspect the answer is none. Silvio?”

Di Capua, who was just loving this, made a military salute. Teresa threw her briefcase across to him with one easy movement.

“You know the routine,” she told her assistant. “Check for anything at the scene that can narrow down that list of potential sites Leo left us. Once the gentlemen here have ceased walking around with their chins dragging on the floor, they will, I trust, realise their time will be better spent trying to find the living instead of gawping at the dead.”

“Done,” Silvio replied happily. “And you?”

The pathologist stroked her forehead with the back of her large hand, then emitted a long theatrical sigh.

“If anyone asks, I have a
terrible
headache. Ladies?”

The two female police officers were helping Rosa Prabakaran to her feet. Teresa Lupo took one big stride towards them, sending Bruno Messina scampering back as she approached.

“I think,” she said, “it’s time to leave this place to the weaker sex.”

“With the exception,” she added, pointing to Peroni and Costa, “of you two.”

T
HE HOSPITAL SEEMED TO BE RUN BY NUNS, MUTE,
unsmiling figures who drifted around busily, taking patients and equipment and pale manila record folders around the maze of endless corridors. It was in a beautiful Renaissance building not far from the Duomo, a massive, ornate, foursquare leviathan that, from the outside, looked more like a palace than a place for the sick, or those just thinking of joining them. Arturo Messina had insisted on accompanying her. He sat with Emily on hard metal chairs in a waiting room with peeling paint and rusty windows that gave out onto a grey courtyard, its cobblestones shining with the constant rain. Four other women in front of her in the queue waited patiently with telltale bulges in their tummies, only partly covered by the magazines they read intently.

Emily Deacon, who was still slim, still, in her own mind, only half-attached to the being growing inside her, glanced at them and felt an unwanted sense of shock.
This is me too,
she thought.
This is how I will look in just a few months.

Arturo, ever the observant one, noted, “It all goes, you know. The weight. Usually anyway. I know women think men are just beasts who’re interested in nothing but their looks. It’s not like that. I always found it hard to take my eyes off my wife when she was pregnant, and I don’t mean that in the way you think. She was…radiant. It’s the only way I know of putting it.”

“One doesn’t feel particularly radiant when one is throwing up at seven in the morning. Men get spared the hard parts.”

For a moment he looked hurt. She’d told him about the conversation she’d had with Nic. The way the case was going in Rome depressed Arturo too.

“Not really,” he commented. “The hard parts just hit us later, in more subtle ways. I don’t want you worrying about Falcone, by the way. I know that’s a stupid thing to say, and that you will anyway. When we get back, I don’t want you hanging over that computer all day. Or the phone. I’ll unplug both if you’re going to be obstinate.”

They’d left Raffaella in the company of Pietro, who was feeding her coffee and biscotti with what seemed, to Emily, a hopeful glint in his eye. Pietro did not share Arturo Messina’s talent for tact.

“Since this is a time for speaking out of turn,” the retired commissario continued, “I should say that I did not find Raffaella’s reaction to be quite what I was expecting. Were things…well with her and Leo before? I’m prying here, of course, so feel entitled to tell me to get lost.”

They hadn’t been getting on, not really, Emily thought. Leo and Raffaella had come back from Venice dependent upon each other in ways that were inexplicable. He needed someone to nurse him through his physical frailty. That much was understandable. But Raffaella’s urge to fill this role—one which was not quite, Emily believed, the same as a craving for love and affection—puzzled her.

“I don’t know, Arturo. I was never very good at relationships until Nic came along.”

“You need only one. The right one, which can be hard, I know. But you’re there already. Stupid old men see things they were blind to when they were stupid young men. I look forward to meeting this Nic of yours.”

“I’m sure you’ll like him.”

“I’m sure too. And yet he gets along with Leo! And don’t tell me the man’s changed. I know that’s impossible. He decides to walk out into the night to try to save this poor young agente for whom he feels responsible—not that he is. Then what does he do next? He phones his lover to tell her it’s all over. And how?”

Raffaella had revealed all this over breakfast, her face grim with fury and spent tears. Then she had insisted on taking a car back to Rome to return to their apartment and await developments.

“By leaving her a message on the answering machine!” Arturo declared, making a broad, incredulous gesture with his hands. “Is that Falcone’s interpretation of kindness? That, before you go out for a rendezvous with some murdering bastard who hopes to kill you, a man must call home and leave a few words on an answering machine, telling a woman who loves you it’s all over?”

“I think he meant it as kindness. Leo’s a little uncomfortable when it comes to personal matters.”

“True. But you see my point? This is precisely what I had to deal with fourteen years ago. Stubborn as a mule, utterly insensitive to the feelings of others and—this is the worst, the very worst—quite uncaring about his own skin too. Being selfless is not necessarily a virtue, my dear. Sometimes it’s just downright infuriating, a way of saying to other people, ‘You can care about me, but I’ll be damned if I care about myself.’”

Emily smiled. He had Leo to a tee. She found herself liking Arturo Messina immensely.

“And the worst thing is,” she replied, “you
do
care. I do. I think you do too. Even after all these years.”

“Of course! Who wants to see a good man go out into the night to confront Lord knows what? Even if we have had our arguments. Leo was right, though. He understood Giorgio Bramante a lot better than I did. If only I’d listened…”

“Nothing, in all probability, would have been any different. Leo was no closer to finding that boy than you, was he?”

“Meglio una bella bugia che una brutta verità.”

“Pardon me?” she asked.

“Ludo Torchia’s final words. Years ago I bullied them out of the doctor who was with him at the time. I was a good bully. Leo knew already, of course, not that he was any the wiser.”

The three women ahead had gone now. Surely her time would come soon.

“I was a police officer,” Arturo went on. “I was used to the idea that there were ugly truths out there. But something about that case fooled me. I found myself looking for beautiful lies. Like a father’s love is always perfect, always innocent, especially when it comes from a seemingly good, intelligent man like that.”

“We don’t know it wasn’t.”

“Perhaps. But there was something wrong with Giorgio Bramante, and in my haste I refused to acknowledge it. Why? Because I didn’t want to. Because I couldn’t bear the idea. I couldn’t stomach the notion that he might somehow have been at fault too.”

He shuffled the raincoat on his lap, a little nervously.

“Leo never played those games,” he continued. “He had never had to learn that they were part of growing up, for a father, and for a son. That both needed some beautiful lies between them, because without those fabrications, there was only the dark and the gloom to fill their lives when things got bad. Back then, I pitied Leo for that ignorance. I still do now. We all need our self-deception from time to time.”

The surgery door opened. A nurse gestured at them.

“I hope to God they can find Leo before more harm’s done,” Arturo added quickly, rising to his feet. “And this will be our final word on this subject until your Nic is here.”

She entered the exam room, acutely aware that waiting in that rigid chair had somehow made the aches worse. The doctor was a woman: slim, mid-fifties, dressed in a dark sweater and black trousers. She looked harassed, too busy to deal with stupid, time-wasting questions.

After a brief discussion of her history, the doctor asked, in a peremptory fashion, “What do you feel is wrong?”

“There was a tiny amount of bleeding. Three days ago. And then again this morning.”

“These things happen,” the doctor said with a shrug. “Didn’t your physician in Rome tell you that?”

“He did.”

“So. A man. Did you feel comfortable with him?”

“Not entirely,” Emily admitted.

The doctor smiled. “Of course not. This is your first time. You should have a woman to talk to. It makes everything so much simpler. Signora. There must be a reason why you came. So please tell me what it is.”

“I have a little cramp in my side.”

The doctor’s expression changed. “Persistent?”

“For the last few days it’s been there most of the time.”

“How many weeks are you?”

“Seven. Eight, perhaps.”

“Where is the pain exactly?”

“Here.” Emily indicated with her hand. “I had my appendix out when I was a teenager. It’s almost the same place. Perhaps…”

“You have only one appendix.”

The doctor asked more questions, the personal ones Emily was now beginning to field almost without thinking. It
was
easier with a woman.

Then the doctor grimaced. “What about your shoulder? Is it stiff? Strained perhaps?”

“Yes,” she admitted, unnerved by the connection the woman had made. It had never occurred to her to place the two sensations together. “I thought perhaps I’d wrenched it.”

“Have you ever suffered from a pelvic inflammatory disease?”

This was all too close.

“I had chlamydia when I was twenty. It was nothing. They cured it, they said. Antibiotics.”

The doctor scribbled some notes, then looked up. “Did your doctor in Rome ask any of these questions?”