The Seventh Sacrament (51 page)

T
ALK TO ME, NIC,” TERESA LUPO ORDERED. “PLAY LEO. I’M
struggling here.”

Costa had done his best to race the unmarked red Fiat, siren screaming, a pulsing police light hastily attached to the roof, from the Questura, through the Forum, past the Colosseum, to the site at the Circus Maximus. The traffic was as bad as he’d ever seen it: gridlocked in every direction, angry, unmoving. For most of the way, Costa had been driving on the broad sidewalks, sending pedestrians scattering. At the Colosseum, he’d abandoned the road completely.

Then the options ran out. There was only road from this stretch on, and it was an intemperate line of stationary metal, pumping foul fumes into the heavy, damp spring air. Costa’s head felt ready to burst. There was too much information in there for one man to absorb, and a nagging, subterranean sensation of guilt, too: Emily had gone to hospital. Costa was aware, soon after his conversation with her ended, that it had been entirely one-sided. He’d scarcely asked about her at all. The hunt for Leo Falcone had caught fire. For him, there seemed nothing else in the world at that moment. And this, he understood all along, was an illusion. Whatever happened to Leo—or had happened already—there would be a tomorrow, a future for Emily and him to share. He didn’t understand how that could have slipped to the back of his consciousness so easily, as if this cruel and stupid amnesia came naturally, a gift of the genes.

He stared at the sea of vehicles ahead of him and cut the engine. Then he thought about Teresa Lupo’s question.

“They couldn’t both know,” Costa said. “If Giorgio realised his son was still alive, none of this would have happened.”

Peroni glowered angrily at the traffic. They were still the best part of a kilometre from the broad sweep of green behind the Palatino.

“Agreed,” he said. “So who’s pushing the buttons here? That Turnhouse woman. She helped Giorgio kill those students over the years. Why? And why take the boy, for God’s sake? What did the boy ever do?”

Costa had been a police officer long enough to understand that the simplest reasons were always the best ones. They were the same reasons that had existed for millennia: love, hate, revenge, or a combination of all three.

“He gave her the means,” Costa answered, and threw open the driver’s door.

There was a motorcycle courier a few metres away, smoking a cigarette, seated on his machine. The man was truly slacking off; his sleek, fast Honda could have cut through the traffic easily if he rode the way most Romans did.

Costa flashed his ID card.

“I’m requisitioning the bike,” he said, then seized the lapels of the rider’s leather jacket and propelled him off the seat. “Gianni? Can you ride pillion?”

Teresa was out after them. “What about me?”

“Sorry,” Costa apologised.

The courier drew himself up to his full height, tapped his chest, and demanded, “What about
me
?”

Then he took a good look at Peroni and backed off.

“No scratches,” the man said, gesturing meekly toward his bike.

Costa turned the key, felt the motorcycle dip as Peroni’s bulk hit the seat behind him, tried to remember how to ride one of these things, then crunched his way through the gears, ignoring the pained gasps of its owner.

He eased it onto the broad pedestrian dirt path that ran from the Colosseum to the Circus Maximus, the route of the Number 3 tram, a quiet, leafy thoroughfare, a place for pleasant evening promenades before dinner.

There was a photographer ahead. A woman in a wedding dress was posing next to her new husband, the Colosseum in the background. Costa steered gently round, making sure not to splash mud, then opened the throttle.

The bike tore along the dirt track, beneath the bare trees on this quiet side of the Palatino.

It took only minutes. There was scarcely a soul along the way, just a few tourists, a handful of curious spectators, and, as they approached the open ground, a swelling number of police vehicles, officers, and the media, penned into a surly crowd.

Without being asked, Peroni took out his ID card, leaned sideways from the seat, letting everyone see his large, distinct face, one known throughout the city force.

No one stopped them, not until they reached the yellow tape that barred everything from going further. They were at the edge of the Circus Maximus. Costa could just make out the racetrack shape on the grassy field, the knot of blue police vans in front of it, and the small sea of bodies, some uniform, some plainclothes.

Again, Peroni’s presence got them through without a word. Costa came to a halt, let Peroni dismount, struggled to put the heavy bike on its stand, then scanned the crowd of officers, pinned down Messina, in his smart dark suit, and walked up to face him. The man had the nervous energy senior officers possessed when awaiting the results of an operation they’d ordered.

“Where’s Judith Turnhouse?” Costa wanted to know.

Messina glowered at him. “You’re off duty, sonny. Don’t try my patience. I’ve enough to throw in your direction later.”

The commissario didn’t look as confident as he was trying to sound. Peroni pushed back Peccia, who was hoping to elbow them out of the way, then Costa took a deep breath and began to explain to Messina, as concisely and accurately as he could summarise it, what they now knew.

The blood drained from the commissario’s swarthy features as he spoke. Peccia turned quite pale too.

“Where is Filippo Battista?” Costa demanded.

Peccia’s eyes turned to the entrance to the subterranean workings beyond the sea of uniforms.

“Let me guess,” Peroni interjected. “He was a volunteer. Nic? That’s enough talking.”

Peccia started barking orders: more guns, more bodies.

“No!” Costa yelled. “Don’t you understand anything about what’s really going on?”

“Educate me, Agente.” Messina said it quietly.

“We’re here because Giorgio Bramante—and Judith Turnhouse—summoned us. Maybe for Leo, in Giorgio’s case. As for the woman…
I don’t know.
” He paused. “But I
do
know this. The more men and weapons you pour into that place, the more chance there is they’ll get used. You’ll look bad enough with a dead inspector on your hands. Do you want Alessio Bramante dead too?”

Peccia’s backup team looked ready. They had metal-stocked machine pistols and black hoods pulled tight over their heads. Peccia himself had a weapon in his own hands too. He looked at Messina with ill-disguised contempt and said, “We will take care of this.”

“You’ve got four men down there already, one of whom is the man’s son!” Messina barked. “And that woman…”

“I told you we didn’t need the woman. Battista is one of ours. We
will
take care of this—”

“Leo Falcone is my friend,” Costa interrupted with an abrupt vehemence that silenced the pair of them. “I am not waiting any longer.”

“No…” Messina replied quietly. He closed his eyes, looking like a man who was about to break. “Listen…” he began.

“I don’t have time.
We
don’t have time…” Costa answered.

“Listen, damn you!”
Messina snarled.

He had a black, lost look in his eyes. Costa glanced at his watch and thought,
Maybe a few seconds.

“I’m sorry,” the commissario went on. “My father wrecked this case fourteen years ago through his instinct. I hoped to rectify that by being detached, whatever that means. I didn’t…”

He shook his head and stared at the distant golden walls of the broken palaces on the green hill, as if he wished he were anywhere else at that moment.

“How the hell do you and Falcone cope with all this? It’s not…natural.”

“We cope,” Costa answered instantly. “Now if you’ll excuse me—”

Peccia moved to their side as they started forward.

“Stay here,” Messina ordered. “This is my responsibility. No one else’s.”

One of the men in black stopped in his tracks. Then he held out the ugly, lethal-looking weapon: a gift.

Messina shooed the gun away with his hand.

“There are three armed men down there I ought to be able to rely on. I think that’s enough weapons for one day. Agente?”

Costa was already heading for the entrance. He paused.

“Allow me the privilege, please,” the commissario insisted, and took the lead.

G
IORGIO BRAMANTE’S KNIFE GLITTERED IN A SHAFT
of dying sunlight from a crack in the earth above. Falcone watched it, unmoved, thinking. Bramante had tied his hands behind his back, pushed him around, into the position he wanted. This was not, Leo thought, the way a man who was about to die would be treated. Bramante’s attention lay elsewhere. Falcone’s presence in this underground chamber, next to the altar, was of importance to this event. But he was a prop, not the central actor, much as he’d been in Monti when Bramante had seemed to want to snatch him. And in the Questura, too, the night before last.

There was a faint sound down the corridor, the route by which he assumed they’d approached. The gap in the rock was barely wide enough for two men. What little Falcone knew about tactical training told him this was an impossible position to attack. Anyone entering the room would be fatally exposed to Bramante’s view the moment they arrived. And given a broad, uninterrupted view of the scene ahead of them, two men at an altar, one apparently about to die.

He thought about Bramante’s last words.

This isn’t about you.

Then there was a single, distinct sound: the voice of a woman, her Italian still bearing the faint imprint of an American accent. Judith Turnhouse. Falcone recognised her hard monotone from their brief conversation by the banks of the Tiber the day before. He couldn’t begin to imagine what reason she had to be there or why a police team that was surely attempting to operate with some secrecy and surprise would allow her to break silence in this way.

He and Bramante stood upright before the altar in anticipation, like figures on a stage. The woman’s voice drifted to them sporadically, approaching. As the police team grew closer, Bramante gripped Falcone’s coat, held the knife to his throat, eyes on the entrance, both bodies exposed to the line of fire.

Falcone didn’t struggle. Instead, he said, quite calmly, “You’re a poor thespian, Giorgio. I’m pleased to find something at which you don’t excel. It makes you more human.”

“Be silent,” Bramante murmured, not taking his gaze from the dark cave mouth ahead. A lone flashlight beam danced there, like a distant firefly, one more sign to betray their approach.

Falcone had been unable to shake from his brain the words of Teresa Lupo when he’d believed, for a few brief moments, they might have solved the riddle of what had happened to Alessio Bramante. And of what Giorgio himself had said to him in Monti, when he was almost snatched. When, if Falcone was honest with himself, he could have been taken, too, had Bramante pushed his luck.

“The seventh sacrament,” Falcone said, peering into Bramante’s face, which now betrayed some trace of fear, and that, too, made him more human. “It’s not me at all, is it, Giorgio? This is about you. It was about you all along. Is suicide not enough? Is that dead child trapped in your imagination so hungry that he needs his father’s blood, too, along with all the others’?”

The figure gripping him flinched.

“If Alessio is dead,” Falcone pressed, “he surely doesn’t require this spectacle. If he isn’t, do you think he’d be happy to know?”

The dark, intelligent eyes flashed at him. “You don’t understand,” Bramante muttered. “You’ve no idea what’s in my head.”

“I’d willingly listen,” Falcone said. “If we’d had this conversation all those years ago…”

“Then you’d hate me even more than you do now, Falcone. This is simple. They kill me. Or I kill you. One or the other. You choose it.”

Falcone waited, thinking about his physical state, what worked, what was still struggling back to health. One thing, above all, he’d learned these last three days: he wasn’t weak. He was merely, to some unknowable extent, damaged.

A flood of yellow illumination burst into the chamber: four flashlights searching, probing. Finding.

With all the remaining strength he could muster, Falcone abruptly twisted hard on his ankle, forced his body round in a fast, powerful spin, tore himself from Bramante’s grip, rolled left, kept on rolling, aware that the man’s attention was divided now, between the captive he’d lost and the group ahead of him—black suits, black masks, four men, and Judith Turnhouse, whose eyes shone with anticipation, like a Fury leading them on.

“No weapons!” Falcone barked, rolling two more turns on the floor.
“No damn weapons! That’s an order!”

The dark figure still stood in front of the altar, confused, struggling for some form of response.

Four black barrels rose in a line, aimed directly at the man with the knife who was frozen in front of them.

The woman was screeching something Falcone couldn’t understand.

“Secure the prisoner,” he ordered. “Get the knife. One of you only. The rest, cover.”