The Seventh Sacrament (50 page)

They stared at him.

“Emilio?” the pathologist asked.

“I told you there was no connection between this Signora Turnhouse and the Giordanos. None that I could see. That does not mean,” he continued, “that I found nothing.”

“Out with it,” Teresa ordered.

“Some years ago this woman was stopped for speeding outside Verona. I have the full report on the system….”

“Summarise it,” Peroni said.

“She received a spot fine. However, there was a man in the passenger seat. He was forced to show his papers. Normally this wouldn’t be a matter of record, of course….”

They waited.

“But on this occasion,” Furillo continued smugly, “it was. The man was a prisoner out on weekend leave.”

Teresa blinked at him, openmouthed, like a freshly landed tuna.

“It was Giorgio Bramante,” Furillo announced. “To save you some time, I checked these dates against the incidents on the list Falcone circulated. This was the very weekend the farmer, Andrea Guerino, disappeared. He was later found murdered. Not far from Verona. Make of it what you will.”

“Judith Turnhouse was helping Giorgio?” Peroni asked, amazed. “
And
supporting his son?”

Costa’s mind kept returning to that first meeting with the American academic, and how it had come about. Everything had seemed so easy.

“The reason we spoke to her was because she and Giorgio had a very loud, very public argument, with the Carabinieri within earshot outside,” he pointed out. “Those officers were always there. Bramante and Turnhouse must have known someone would have made the connection. Someone would come, and then she could take us to the body Giorgio had left down by the river. He wants his victims seen. Not hidden away forever.”

Peroni nodded, catching on instantly. “She told us she would have called if we hadn’t arrived,” he pointed out. “I’m sure that was the truth. So we’ve just been picking up the crumbs this pair have been dropping for us all along. Where does Alessio fit in?”

“Tiziano—” Furillo began.

“And now,” the young detective went on, “she’s leading Messina directly to Bramante.”

“Why?” Peroni demanded.

“Because it’s what Bramante wants,” Costa replied immediately. “She pointed us to the fact he was looking for those underground maps. That’s what Messina is using right now. This is…”

It was clear in his head. He just lacked the precise words.

“…a kind of performance. His last act. Leo is his finale. Giorgio Bramante wants to be found. The man needs an audience.”

He glanced at his partner.

“Giorgio Bramante never killed Elisabetta Giordano. He never even knew she existed. But if Judith Turnhouse has been playing both sides…Paying the woman for years. Perhaps even after Alessio left home. She had a reason to keep Elisabetta quiet. The best there was. It could have destroyed everything.”

Costa spoke with authority and a rapid, quick intelligence, Furillo thought. His demeanour reminded the older man of Falcone himself.

“We’ve got to let Messina know,” the young agente added, reaching for a phone. “Now…”

Furillo raised a finger. “Hostage situation. The commissario has called a radio silence for everyone except the control room. And I would seriously advise you three not to show your faces there at the moment. As I was saying, Tiziano—”

“Alessio would be an agente by now,” Teresa Lupo interrupted. “A fully formed one, newly emerged from the cocoon. So where
is
he?”

“Tiziano!”
Furillo yelled. “Are you people listening to me or am I some kind of computer peripheral here?”

Teresa Lupo reached over and patted his right hand. “Emilio,” she said sweetly. “You’re
never
peripheral. Not to me. We’re just a little…stumped.”

“God, I wish I had that on camera,” Furillo sighed. “Judith Turnhouse lives at 117a Tiziano. If you look here—” he pointed at the screen—“you will see that one of the recruits from four years ago, Filippo Battista, gave the very same address in his recruitment forms. Perhaps he is a lodger. I don’t know. However, he is now attached to—”

“—the airport,” Peroni read from the screen.

Costa was already dialling the Fiumicino police office. They waited as he dashed off a rapid-fire set of questions, then put down the phone.

“Filippo Battista still lives in Tiziano,” Costa reported quietly. “The sovrintendente thinks he’s shacked up with some stuck-up American girlfriend almost twice his age. The woman’s a little domineering, or so the gossip goes.”

“Is he on duty?” Peroni asked.

Costa grimaced. “He was on rest day until Messina asked for volunteers. Somehow he talked his way onto the team. He’s in the armed response unit—looking for his own father.”

The three of them took this in for a moment. Then Furillo watched them flee the room.

“You’re welcome,” he muttered to himself, grateful, and a little guilty, that this was their problem, not his.

T
HESE CAVES WERE NEW TO HIM. NO COMFORTING
thread to run through his fingers. Just black damp walls that seemed to go on forever, twisting serpent-like through the hillside. Alessio led, the six of them followed, stumbling upwards on the rough-hewn rock floor, eyes fixed on the flashlight in the child’s hand, the circle of yellow light waning as the batteries wound down.

Then a sharp corner, one that took them all by surprise. Someone fell painfully and let loose a low, frightened curse. The flashlight flickered, became first the pale colour of dry straw, then the dark, fading ochre of the moon in a polluted Roman night sky.

After that, nothing. The dark engulfed them. Ludo Torchia started swearing, started going crazy again, yelling for something to cut through the shadows ahead.

There was nothing left. No batteries that worked. Just two matches, which Toni LaMarca lit in swift succession, only to see them extinguished by some unseen draught of air, swirling at them from a direction he couldn’t discern.

Torchia was getting violent now. Alessio recognised the tone in his voice: fear and fury in equal quantities. They were arguing with each other, the fragile bond of mutual preservation that had kept them together shattering in this all-consuming darkness.

He was scared, too. What confidence the beam from the flashlight had imprinted on his mind was gone. Alessio Bramante couldn’t hide from the knowledge that he was lost deep in the stone maw of some ancient hill, with men he didn’t like, at least one of whom wished to harm him.

But the worst lay in his imagination. At that moment he could feel the tons and tons of rock and dead red earth weighing down over his head, pressing in on him from all sides, racing down his small, constricted throat to steal the air from his lungs.

The grave was like this, he thought. And this
was
a grave, too, for many before him.

When he tried to shout
—Daddy! Daddy!—
he could scarcely hear his own voice. Just the mocking sound of Ludo Torchia somewhere behind him, a malevolent, hateful presence, rising from the rocky intestines of the Aventino, intent on harm.

“Daddy Daddy!” Ludo yelled mockingly. “Where is Daddy now, little boy?
Where are we…?”

Lost,
Alessio wanted to say. Lost and adrift in the lair of the beast, stalked by the Minotaur, which was never a real monster—Alessio Bramante had finally come to understand this—but a malformation that lay inside a man waiting for the catalyst for its birth to emerge.

All hope of victory, of delivering all six of them like a prize, had vanished. In his small, trembling frame, bravado had given way to terror. He wanted to see his father. He needed to feel that strong hand grip his, to be led out into the light and safety, the way only a father could.

How long had he been abandoned?

They could have been in the caves ten minutes or an hour. It was impossible to say. All he knew was that he’d never heard his father’s voice. Not once. He’d never once heard him call, trying to bring this game to a close.

You don’t care,
Alessio Bramante accused his father, whispering under his breath.
You never cared. Not about anything except yourself.

An image came into his head. Giorgio and his mother arguing, sending him out of the room when the fighting grew too loud. And, after that, crouching by the door, an illicit spy, wondering what would come next.

The noises rose in his head. He’d known they would, all along. This was what violence sounded like. Now he heard it twice over: in his memory, and in the mêlée growing behind him, an angry swell of fists and feet, struggling to follow, to find him and exact some kind of brutal, unthinking revenge, because that is what frightened men did when they could think of nothing else; that was the natural solution.

The sounds came from somewhere else too. In the darkness ahead.

A hand clutched his shoulder. He shook in abject fear.

“Alessio…”

The voice was taut but not unfriendly. Alessio recognised it. Dino: the weak one.

“There’s air coming into this tunnel,” Dino said. “It’s a way out. Just run towards it.
Quickly!”

Alessio didn’t wait. He knew the sounds they were making too well: the animal grunts of brute survival, of human beings in terror for their lives.

Alessio Bramante breathed in the dank draught scarcely discernible in the blackness, tried to imagine the direction from which it came, then ran, ran wildly, not fearing the rocks or the sharp corners in this hidden labyrinth, knowing that there was only a single hope of safety, and that hope lay outside, in the light, under the bright, forgiving sun, and the familiar streets that could take him home, to his mother, cowering as she imagined the fury of Giorgio Bramante’s return.

Pater.

The word slipped from his hidden memory and entered his head. This was what Giorgio had hoped to be, and failed. A real
Pater
guarded his children. A Pater tested his children, watching from the shadows, always ready to intervene when needed.

You left me,
the child thought, with bitterness, and stumbled ahead, feeling the current of stale air grow stronger, smelling a hint of freshness inside it. Even something sweet, like orange blossom, the fresh, fragrant scent of
life,
began to drift from the living world into this bleak, cold tomb.

Then those sounds that had raged in his head became real, formed in front of him.

He stopped. Someone bumped into him. Dino’s low, urgent undertone returned.

“Move!”

He let Dino’s arm propel him forward, stopped again, checking himself. There were two voices ahead, though the noises they made weren’t familiar, words he could understand and interpret, just an incomprehensible babble of heat and emotion and some hard, animal savagery he’d never understood.

Pushed again, he lurched forward, seeing light now, the pale, weak illumination of real electricity. It took no more than three steps to enter the chamber. The six followed, stumbling into one another, stumbling into him, a sea of discordant, confused voices, falling into silence. Seeing, like him.

Seeing.

No one spoke. No one dared.

Alessio Bramante stared wide-eyed at the sight that lay in front of him, looking like some crazed living painting, two bodies tight against the wall, moving in a strange, inhuman fashion. He held his breath, refusing to allow his lungs to move, wondering whether, if he tried hard enough, he could freeze this scene out of his life altogether, wind back time to the point that morning where he was peering through the keyhole of the mansion of the Knights of Malta, seeing, through the stupid fly-eye glasses, myriad worlds, none of which contained the comfort of the dome of St. Peter’s, great and grand on its throne across the Tiber.

It didn’t work and he knew why. That was a child’s game. And from now on he would not be—could not be—a child.

Sometimes, he realised, the Minotaur didn’t need to hunt its prey at all. Its victims came willingly, like gifts, like sacraments, delivering themselves into the lair of the beast.