by David Hewson
“It’s a little early for us, Lorenzo—” Teresa pointed out.
“Tush, tush. This is from the wicked family’s private estate. You can’t even buy it in the shops. Besides, one should always take alcohol when meeting a former lover. It dulls the senses, and God knows we both need that.”
Teresa blushed.
“This day just gets better and better,” Peroni groaned.
THEY’D PHONED FIRST in order to check what material the newspaper possessed from the nineties. Teresa had sounded hopeful. La Crociata Populare was not, in spite of its name, popular, though the paper remained a crusade on the part of its wealthy owner. But it was meticulous about its forty-year history. And, unlike most of the small left-wing weeklies, it didn’t fill its pages exclusively with columns and columns of dense, unreadable text. Several well-known photographers had begun their careers working for Lorenzo Lotto’s pittance salary, the bare union minimum. Even Pasolini had submitted material from time to time during the paper’s brief heyday in the early seventies.
As Lotto led them through what passed for an editorial floor—a shabby room with four desks, three of them unoccupied—Costa’s hopes began to fall. He’d read La Crociata himself from time to time. The photos were good. And numerous. It would surely take a large library to catalogue all the negatives, contacts, and prints from over the years.
Lotto led them to the corner where the one visible member of staff, a small, timid-seeming young woman, sat in front of a gigantic computer screen, working on what looked like the next issue. A headline screaming about government corruption yelled out from the screen in bright red type.
“Katrina,” Lotto said quietly, “it’s time for you to go clothes shopping.”
Her eyes flashed at him, baffled, a little in awe.
“Here.” Lotto reached into his pocket and pulled out a wad of currency. She took it, smiled, and scampered for the door.
“The redistribution of wealth,” Lotto told them. “I pay them what the unions demand. But they’re my children, really. The only ones I have.”
“Pictures, Lorenzo,” Teresa reminded him.
“I know.”
He punched some keys on the computer, then beckoned them to join him. Costa sat down in Katrina’s chair and looked at the screen. There was something marked “Library” there. He clicked on it and saw an entry form.
“Now what?” he asked.
“The state will be brought down by its ignorance of modern technology,” Lotto remarked. “I could drag in a thirteen-year-old child off the street and he’d know more about this than you.”
Keywords, Costa thought. Clues. You typed them in. Then the stupid computer tried to guess what you meant.
“Every photo that has ever passed through our hands is stored somewhere in there,” Lotto boasted. “Not just the ones we printed. Everything. Forty-three years’ worth. It cost me a fortune. Without it, I doubt even I could keep this place afloat.”
“You’re a picture agency now?” Teresa asked.
“As well as…And why not? Engels was a clerk in Manchester when he was keeping Marx and his family from starving in London. Industry and investment, Teresa. Unfashionable these days, I know…”
Costa typed in peace camp.
What seemed like a million tiny photos appeared on the screen.
“Typical lazy liberal thinking,” Lotto declared. “Dialectical materialism, boy. Ideas will only come from precise material conditions. Not obscure generalities.”
“You sound like my father,” Costa snapped.
“Ah,” Lotto replied, warmly, for the first time. “I thought you were that Costa.”
He bent and whispered in his ear, “Do you have a year?”
“Of course.”
“How about a date?”
“Exactly.”
“Good. Why not try that?”
Costa typed in the exact day.
The screen filled again, with just as many photos.
Lotto leaned over and studied the screen. “We had five different photographers supplying material to us then. Everyone wants their picture in the paper, don’t they?”
“How many?” Costa asked.
“Look at the screen! Eight hundred and twenty-eight photographs. Twenty-three rolls of thirty-six-shot film, including the blanks and the failures, naturally. It costs more to take them out than leave them in. You should think yourself lucky. We’re all digital now. There would be ten times that if you were looking today.”
Costa hit on the thumbnail of the first image. It leapt to fill the screen. They could have been looking at anything. A rock concert. A demonstration. A weekend campground. Just hundreds and hundreds of people, quiet, apparently happy under the sun.
“What about time?” Costa asked.
“Sorry. Film never recorded that.”
“What about,” Teresa asked, “telling it, ‘Find me a young boy in a peculiar T-shirt?’”
“It’s a machine,” Lotto said severely. “Are you going to drink my prosecco or not?”
“Later,” she replied.
He grumbled something inaudible and wandered off. Teresa and Peroni pulled up chairs on either side of Nic and started peering at the scores of thumbnails in front of them.
“If we can scan five a minute, we’re done in under three hours,” Peroni said, and made it sound like good news.
Costa began flicking through the first photographer’s rolls. A good third of the shots digitised by Lotto’s machines were useless: out of focus, accidental. The rest were mainly mundane. A few were simply beautiful: sharp, observant, wry pictures of people who didn’t know the camera was there, candid shots still bright with their original summer hues, frozen in time.
After half an hour, with his right hand starting to tire, Costa hit the button and accessed yet another roll. The pictures changed. The light was different, older, more golden, the kind that fell on Rome as the day was coming to a close.
He clicked through five more frames, then stopped. For a moment, none of them spoke.
The child stood centre frame, and for once this was a subject that did look into the camera. He still wore the T-shirt they’d come to associate with this case, the seven-pointed star of the Scuola Elementare di Santa Cecilia. This was Alessio Bramante, sometime during the early evening of that fateful day, when every police officer in Rome, state and Carabinieri, was looking for him.
He was holding the hand of an untidy, overweight woman of middle age, a woman with a blank, rather puzzled expression on her flat, featureless face. She wore a long pink cotton shift and large, open-toed sandals. Next to her was a skeletal, sickly-looking man, perhaps fifty, perhaps older, with a pinched, tanned face and a skimpy grey beard that matched the meagre hanks of hair clinging to his skull.
Neither of them looked remotely familiar from any of the photos of witnesses or related individuals Costa had seen, and tried to commit to memory, in the case.
But that wasn’t the worst thing. Peroni put it into words.
“Good grief,” the big man said with a sigh. “We got it wrong all along, didn’t we?”
They stared at the screen, grateful he was the one who had the guts to say it.
“I thought we were looking for a nice kid,” Peroni said, finishing their train of thought.
“It’s just one photo,” Teresa reminded him.
It was, too. One photo of a child, no more than seven, turning to stare towards the camera, his features tautened into an expression of pure hatred, of unimaginable, unspoken violence directed straight into the lens.
“He was Giorgio’s son,” Peroni pointed out.
“Perhaps he still is,” Costa added grimly.
BACK IN THE QUESTURA, BRUNO MESSINA WAS BEGINNING to feel a touch more in control. Now he sat at the head of the table in his own conference room, a smaller, more private place than the sprawling quarters Falcone preferred when talking to his staff. Messina believed in delegation, in keeping his immediate officers under full scrut
iny while they—in the current jargon—“cascaded” down his desires, and pressure, to those below.
Bavetti was there with two men of his choosing, along with Peccia, head of the specialist armed squad and Messina’s deputy. Forensic had, to Messina’s displeasure, decided they wished to be represented by Silvio Di Capua from the path lab, in place of the absent Teresa Lupo. He would, the commissario thought, deal with her later. There was a mutinous atmosphere in that part of the Questura, and Teresa Lupo surely bore much of the blame. Technically, though, they were separate departments, answerable to civilian officers. It would take a little while and some persuasion for him to work a result there.
Di Capua had brought to the meeting a lanky, bald, odd-looking individual from the university who introduced himself as “Dr. Cristiano.” This odd pair had turned up with a laptop computer, a set of maps of the city, and a report produced principally by Peroni the previous evening.
“Let me make it abundantly clear,” Messina said, opening the meeting, “that my first priority in this investigation is the safe and early release of Inspector Falcone. Nothing is to be spared to that end. No expense, no resource. Is that understood?”
The police officers nodded gravely.
Silvio Di Capua, who had clearly learnt at the knee of his mistress, rolled his eyes and declared, “Well…yes! Did you drag me away from my work to tell me that?”
“I want our priorities clear,” Messina insisted.
“The living—if indeed Leo is still living—come before the dead. I must try to remember that in future.”
“What do we have, Bavetti?” Messina demanded, ignoring Silvio.
The inspector cleared his throat. “Prabakaran is being debriefed by two specialist female officers. This is a slow and patient process, as the procedures allow—”
“I don’t want it too slow and patient,” Messina interrupted.
“Of course.”
“Has she said anything?”
“She’s saying a lot, sir. The officer is being extremely helpful, in the circumstances. Prabakaran is a brave and conscientious policewoman—”
“I hate to interrupt the hagiography here,” Di Capua broke in, “but does she by any chance have a clue where she was held?”
“We haven’t got that far,” Bavetti said, taken aback at being interrogated by forensic.
“Well, what the hell are you asking her about?” Di Capua demanded.
“The woman was raped. She’s with two specialist officers who are trained in dealing with cases like this. They’re going through what happened very carefully—”
“Fine,” the pathologist cut in. “Let me point out three things. First, we know she’s been raped. Second, we know who did it. Third, Falcone’s missing. Asking this poor woman about her getting raped doesn’t help us find him. We need locations. We need facts.”
Bavetti shrugged. “There are procedures…”
“Screw the procedures!”
Di Capua looked at Bruno Messina, pleading. “How,” he went on, “do you think she’s going to feel if Leo turns up dead at the end of all this? Particularly if there’s something lurking in her head that could have saved him?”
“He has a point,” the commissario said, nodding. “Made with forensics’ customary grace, I must say, but he has a point.”
“Thank you.” Di Capua nodded at the uniformed Peccia and his colleague. “Now to the gun people, please? Explain.”
“We are here,” Peccia replied coldly, “at Commissario Messina’s request.”
“What for? Target practice? We don’t have a clue where Giorgio Bramante is! Why the hell are you playing cowboys and Indians at a time like this?”
Messina’s face reddened. “If Leo Falcone is alive, I want him kept that way. Whatever it takes. When we track him down, I’m not dealing with this animal. If they get a clean shot, he goes.”
Peccia nodded, and looked satisfied with that idea.
“Aren’t there ‘procedures’ when it comes to shooting people?” Di Capua wanted to know.
“Screw the…” Messina began to say, then checked himself. “You’re here to offer forensic input. Nothing else. Is there something you have to say?”
Di Capua seized the papers in front of him and slapped them on the desk. “Peroni’s report—”
“Peroni’s report tells us nothing,” Bavetti interjected. “It’s a list of possible underground sites which Bramante may or may not have visited at some stage in the last week. It’s a shot in the dark.”
“Most things are,” Di Capua replied. “Tell them, Cristiano.”
The lanky bald individual tapped the computer keyboard idly and said, “We know from the planarian samples we have that the site used to store the body from Ca’ d’Ossi was somewhere the university has never looked for genetic material. Last night your officer and I worked to try to narrow down the scope of listed archaeological locations which could fit this description. Numerically it amounts to—”
“Days of work,” Bavetti interrupted. “Weeks. For what?”
“To chase down one of the few facts you have,” Di Capua replied. “The body from Ca’ d’Ossi was stored somewhere known to Bramante, near water, with a planarian population that has not been logged by La Sapienza. So what are you doing instead?”
It was Bavetti who rose to defend the investigation.
“House to house. Throughout Testaccio and the Aventino. Someone must have seen him. All we need is one lead.”
“What?” Di Capua almost leapt out of his seat. “All you need’s a miracle? Do you think Bramante’s waiting for you in some Testaccio tenement? Think about what we know about this man. Everything he does is underground. Living. Killing. Planning, too, I’d guess. Those places are his. Out of sight in some subterranean city we don’t even know. And you’re going door to door showing people photos? I don’t believe it!”
The man from the university shook his bald head and said, “Gentlemen. I am no expert in these matters. But this seems a little illogical to me.”
“What the hell is this freak doing here?” Peccia demanded, furious.
“Trying to tell you people something,” Di Capua shot back. “Listen to me and try to understand. You know nothing. We know nothing. But the nothing we know is smaller than the nothing you know, and I think we could make it smaller still. So small that, with a little help and a little luck, it just might, at some point, become something.”
“What do you want us to do?” Messina asked.
“Rosa knows where she was picked up. And then she was taken somewhere and raped. She must have some idea how long it took to get there. Ask that. It’s a start.”
The commissario paused for a moment, then turned to Bavetti and muttered, “Do it.”
“Sir. The idea is to allow the victim to tell her own story—”
“Do it!”
Messina used the ensuing five minutes to listen to a more detailed explanation of what Peroni had been working on the previous evening. As he did so he was aware of an increasingly uncomfortable realisation: he had rejected Peroni’s ideas because they were a part of Falcone’s investigation, the kind of long-shot, imaginative leap that he regarded as typical of the inspector. Messina was envious of Leo’s talent, and it had coloured his behaviour. This was bad police work. And worse—bad leadership.
Bavetti put down the phone and said, “Bramante drove her somewhere close by to begin with.”
“Close?” Di Capua echoed, incredulous. “Don’t give me words like ‘close.’ Minutes? Seconds?”
“A minute. Perhaps two.”
“So they were still in Testaccio? Near the market?” Di Capua asked, and unfolded a city map on the table.
“Yes. After that, much later, in the evening, they drove for no more than eight or ten minutes.”
“Quickly? Or was there traffic?” Di Capua demanded.
“Very quickly. Without stopping. Uphill, then downhill.”
The young pathologist smiled at that. “H
e went from Testaccio on to the Aventino.”
“And then?” Messina asked.
“Let’s assume he continued in a northerly direction.”
Di Capua took out a red felt-tip pen and drew a circle on the pristine map. It ran from the foot of the Aventino by the Circus Maximus stretching past the Colosseum to Cavour directly north, then to the Teatro Marcello in the east, and as far as San Giovanni to the west.
“Not good,” Cristiano grumbled. “There’s as much under the surface as there is on it.”
“How many on our list?” Di Capua demanded.
The university man hammered at the keyboard. “Twenty-seven. Sorry.”
Messina shook his head and murmured, “Impossible.”
“Do you have archaeological data in there too?” Di Capua asked.
Cristiano nodded vigorously.
“How many of that twenty-seven have a Mithraeum?”
The bony fingers flew. “Seven.”
Di Capua cast an eye over the computer screen. “One of those is San Clemente. I hardly think he’s going to be hiding in a busy church next to the Colosseum, not with all those Irish priests crawling around above him. That leaves six on the list.”
He scrawled crosses on the map and pushed it over to Messina.
“Unless you have a better idea,” Di Capua added.
Bavetti bristled, furious. “We’re not even a third of the way through door-to-door!”
“This is all I have, Commissario Messina,” Silvio Di Capua said softly. “And do you know something? It’s all you have, too.”
Messina hated Teresa Lupo and her minions. They were intrusive and irresponsible. They never knew when to shut up, either. Just one thing got them off the hook. They were correct more often than any forensic squad he’d ever known, more often, even, than the overpaid teams of the Carabinieri who had every computer and gadget the Italian state could afford.
“We need someone who’s familiar with these sites,” Messina pointed out.