The Seventh Sacrament nc-5

by David Hewson

  “Where does the wife live?” Costa asked.

  Rosa looked nervous for a moment. “Three blocks away,” she said. “And that’s ex-wife. They divorced not long after he went to jail.”

  “Clever as Bramante is,” Costa pointed out, “it’s still hard to believe he could do all of this on his own. When he’s out of jail, maybe. But to kill those people while he was on parole, he’d need transport, money, information.”

  “It wasn’t his wife,” Rosa insisted. “I talked to Beatrice Bramante this morning. After I saw the old lady home.”

  Falcone’s grey eyebrows rose. He said nothing.

  “She saw Giorgio once in the street about two months ago, after he was released. She followed him home to his apartment and tried to talk to him. He wouldn’t talk to her. The woman’s lost everything. Her husband. Her child. Her money. She’s living in a one-room dump in a public housing block, not much better than his. There’s nothing for us there.”

  “Agente,” Falcone said quietly. “When you interview potential suspects, you don’t do so alone. You go with an experienced officer. And at my command. Is that understood?”

  Rosa Prabakaran’s brown eyes widened with anger. Her ambition was, Costa thought, getting the better of her. She said, “You weren’t even on the case when I saw Beatrice Bramante.”

  “I am now,” Falcone snapped. “Interview rules are interview rules. If the mother had told you anything incriminating, it would have been inadmissible as evidence. Do you understand that?”

  “I’d just seen what happened in there!” She pointed towards the yellow barriers outside the church. “I was trying to help.” Her brown eyes looked glassy, misting over with the sudden hint of tears.

  “When you work for me, you work as part of a team. Either that or you don’t work at all.”

  She didn’t burst into tears. Not quite. Then Peroni’s broad, ugly smile broke the chill.

  “Youthful enthusiasm, Inspector,” he declared. “We all had it once. Even you.”

  Falcone glowered at him. “Someone’s going to have to go back and see her,” the inspector said. “Properly this time. And find out what Bramante was up to when he wasn’t working.”

  “Caving,” Rosa said. “He wouldn’t let Beatrice into his apartment because it was full of things he needed. She saw lots of equipment through the door. Ropes. Torches. Clothing.”

  “So she did tell you something!” Falcone declared. “Let’s hope to God I don’t have to try to introduce that into court sometime soon.”

  Rosa Prabakaran fell silent, mute with fury and perhaps a little shame. Falcone was busy flicking through Bruno Messina’s papers again, engrossed.

  “Your shift ends in two hours,” he said to her, staring at a photo of Raffaella Arcangelo lugging shopping back to their apartment in Monti. “It’s been an eventful day. Go home now. I’ll get you reassigned to something more suitable in the morning.”

  “Reassigned?”

  “You heard me.”

  “I figured out what that message on the wall meant. I found that body. I tracked down the woman who discovered it. I—”

  “You did what you were paid to do,” Falcone interrupted. “Now leave us, Officer.”

  “Sir,” she hissed, then snatched her bag and stormed out the door.

  * * *

  Incandescent breath coming in short gasps, aware that their attention had gone elsewhere the moment she’d stalked out of the van, Rosa Prabakaran stood between the vehicle and the old abandoned church, wondering what to do next. The three of them made her feel like an intruder, someone who had walked in on a private gathering. She had been on the force long enough to understand there was a strong, unusual relationship among these men, a relationship other officers talked about with more than a little suspicion.

  She was, Rosa suddenly realised, more than a little jealous.

  The woman pathologist was outside, standing by the yellow lines, gazing up at the weak winter sun, a large, amiable figure whose bright, intelligent eyes never seemed to be still. She ambled over, smiled, and held out a hand.

  “Rosa?” she said.

  Another searching glance from an intimate on Falcone’s team.

  “Did I hear,” the woman asked, “the much-missed sound of our beloved inspector losing his cool?”

  “Is it that common?”

  “It used to be. I haven’t experienced it in a while. You’ll find this strange, but it’s rather heartening to hear him bawling someone out again. It means we stand a chance of getting the old Leo back.” She paused. “He nearly died last year. Remember that.”

  “I know. Still, it doesn’t give him the right to be downright rude.”

  Teresa Lupo frowned. “I’ve known Leo for a long time. He’s… obsessive. It’s nothing personal.”

  “It sounded personal.”

  “That’s one of Leo’s habits, I’m afraid. It always does. Did you, um…” — she smiled slyly — “…deserve it by any chance?”

  Rosa Prabakaran didn’t answer that.

  “Ah.”

  Teresa Lupo studied the blue van and the three heads visible through the still-open door.

  “Being right is another of Leo’s annoying traits. You’d best live with it. You could learn a lot from him. Besides, there are plenty of mediocrities around who’ll bawl you out, too. Best get the treatment from one who can teach you something. You, of all people, should bear that in mind. There are still some… old-fashioned ideas around in corners of the Questura.”

  They’d covered the colour question once before, got it out of the way in the little café around the block from the Questura a few months back after Teresa had taken her to one side and quietly passed on a few tips about how to handle Gianni Peroni. Rosa Prabakaran never once felt the issue of her skin posed much of a problem for the people she worked with. Rome was a multicultural, multicoloured society. It wasn’t a big deal. She was more likely to feel out of place because of her sex.

  “I won’t screw up again,” Rosa said with feeling.

  “Of course you will. We all do. Tell me again. What did this man we’re looking for actually do?”

  “He was a university professor. An archaeologist.”

  Teresa Lupo’s pale, flabby face screwed up with dissatisfaction. The pathologist was, Rosa thought, remarkably like Peroni in some ways.

  “That was years ago.”

  Rosa sighed. Another dissatisfied customer. “That’s what he did. OK?”

  “No, what did Giorgio Bramante do?” Teresa insisted. “In prison. After prison. When he wasn’t being a university professor. Forget about the way you want to think of him. As some nice, middle-class individual gone wrong. Give me what you know about him after he lost his son.”

  “In prison he worked in a slaughterhouse. When he got out, he went and did the same job. In some Testaccio butcher’s shop that had a slaughterhouse somewhere else. A horse butcher, would you believe?”

  The pathologist thought about this, then smiled again, a broad, confident, happy smile. “Odd, don’t you think? A smart man could have got a better job, surely.”

  “I’ve just been through that with Falcone. Bramante had other things on his mind.” She’d hoped the picture of what she’d seen in the crypt wouldn’t come back. The presence of this inquisitive, infuriating pathologist, who understood so much more than she was going to say, made that impossible. With the memory came the inevitable question.

  “What kind of gun does that?” she asked. “I’ve seen photos of wounds before. None of them…” The sight of the man remained in her head, a lurid spectacle lit by her bright police flashlight. And the smell was still there too. The stench of meat and the iron tang of blood.

  “What did you see?”

  “You know what I saw!”

  “Of course I don’t. Tell me. This is important.”

  She wanted to go home. Her real home, not the plain little apartment she’d insisted on renting in order to make a point. She wanted to
talk to her father, sit down with him and have a quiet meal, watch TV, look at her old law books, and wonder why she didn’t take his advice and go for a comfy, well-paid job convicting criminals instead of a difficult, poorly paid one trying to sort them out from the rest of society.

  “I saw a naked man, quite deliberately placed on the ground, as if he were a corpse in some kind of ritual. He was in a crypt full of skeletons. Old ones, all in a line. The odd one out. All to himself. At the front.”

  “Good. And?”

  “Something… a shotgun, I don’t know, had blown a hole in his chest. I could see…” She shook her head. “What’s the point?”

  “The point,” Teresa Lupo said severely, “is that you’re supposed to be a police officer. Either look or don’t look. Just don’t half look.”

  Rosa could feel her temper rising again, ready to snap. “I did look.”

  “No, you didn’t. Was he killed in that room?”

  “I don’t know…. No. I don’t remember seeing much blood. I would have thought there’d be lots. When you shoot someone.”

  “There is when you shoot someone, at least with something that could cause a wound that big. But he wasn’t shot.”

  “I saw!”

  “You saw a wound on his chest. Then you jumped to easy, quick conclusions. Don’t be too hard on yourself. Most people would have done the same. But if you want to work around Leo Falcone, you need to drag yourself out of the category of ‘most people.’”

  “I saw…” Rosa tried to summon the scene again, painful as it was. The man’s chest had been a mess, worse than anything she’d seen in any photos of a car accident or a murder.

  Teresa Lupo was waiting.

  Finally, Rosa said, “I saw bone. Not broken bone. Part of a rib cage. It wasn’t damaged. It looked like all those other skeletons in there. Except it was white. Very white.”

  The pathologist nodded. “Good. Next time I’d prefer not to have to drag it out of you. Now let me tell you something I saw when I took a close look at him. On his back, beneath the scapula — the shoulder blade — was another wound. It was made by some sharp, spiked metallic object, one that had gone through the flesh and under the bone, causing some very extensive bruising. As if whatever caused the wound had carried the dead man’s weight, too, for a while anyway.”

  “So he was stabbed in the back? With a spike?”

  “You’re being literal again, Rosa. What if the spike was stationary and he was put on it?”

  She wanted to scream. This wasn’t how they’d told her to work at the training college. This was imagination, not the slow, methodical technique she’d believed was the way to proceed with criminal investigations.

  “That’s ridiculous,” she said finally, exasperated. “It doesn’t make sense.”

  The expression of amused exasperation on Teresa Lupo’s face worried her. Rosa Prabakaran was suddenly aware that she was developing a Force 10 headache.

  “Oh my God,” she blurted out, shocked, baffled by not knowing what thought process had tied those two disparate threads of knowledge together. “He worked in a slaughterhouse.”

  “Great place to kill people, if you think about it,” Teresa said with a grin. “And full of hooks. Now, by way of thanks, do you want me to talk you back into this case or not?”

  Rosa found herself staring hungrily at the control van. The three of them were still deep in conversation.

  “You think you can do that?” she asked hesitantly.

  “Watch…” Teresa Lupo declared, marching for the door already, “…and learn.”

  * * *

  Twenty minutes later a plain blue Fiat was speeding past the ageing concrete façade of the film studios at Cinecittà, out to the nondescript modern suburb of Anagnina. Peroni was driving. Teresa and her right-hand man, Silvio Di Capua, were in the back looking like five-year-olds on their way to a party, though one to which they had, for the moment, no invitation. There were no papers to guarantee entry to the slaughterhouse where Giorgio Bramante worked. Papers took time, and preparation. They were hoping to circumvent both. Somehow…

  Costa glanced out the window. Little more than a kilometre away was his home. When he and Emily had left the farmhouse that morning, it was to spend a pleasant, lazy day in the city with friends. The old job had intervened without warning. He’d no idea when he’d be back, or see Emily again. There’d been time only to make a brief call to her before they left. She’d been in the car to Orvieto, as the commissario had promised, just a few minutes from the villa owned by Messina’s father. She’d sounded a little puzzled, resigned to being out of the city for a while, accepting that there wasn’t much alternative. Raffaella Arcangelo felt the same way, she’d said. Costa wondered whether Falcone had found the time to speak to her yet.

  He watched the flat, dead lands of the modern suburbs flash past the window. He hadn’t raised the subject of Emily’s health. He didn’t know how. Not on a phone call from a police van outside a former church overrun with scene-of-crime officers trying to piece together a picture of a murder. That would have to wait.

  A hand came over from the back seat and tapped his shoulder.

  “They kill horses on your doorstep,” Di Capua declared, with his customary tact. “I bet you didn’t know that.”

  “Being a vegetarian,” Costa observed, “I’m not sure it’s any of my business. How do you carnivores feel?”

  “About horse-eating?” Peroni waved a massive, pale hand at the passing landscape. “Barbaric. Cows. Pigs. Lambs. That’s what they’re bred for. Horses… it just doesn’t feel right.”

  “Exactly,” Teresa agreed.

  Silvio Di Capua said nothing, until a jab in the ribs from his companion prompted him to complain, “I haven’t eaten horse in ages. You hardly find it anywhere these days. Besides, it’s dead already, isn’t it?”

  Teresa’s hand swatted his shoulder. “If you didn’t buy it, they wouldn’t kill horses for you to eat in the first place, idiot.”

  “In which case they wouldn’t breed the things, would they?

  Except as ponies for rich kids, and…” — he waved at the housing tracts flashing past outside — “…I don’t see much of a market for them around here. So instead of being dead, they’d just be unalive. You’re arguing that’s an improvement?”

  No one said anything for a while after that, until Peroni simply muttered “Barbaric” again, then turned the car onto a small industrial park, cruised slowly along until he got the right number, and pulled up by a large iron security gate behind which lurked an anonymous low building, much like a factory unit anywhere. A sign on the gate said, simply, Calvi. Just the owner’s name. Not a hint of what went on inside. Horse butchers didn’t advertise their presence too loudly.

  They got out, Peroni pressed the bell, and the five of them waited. A truck was just visible on the other side of the barbed-wire fence. It was an animal transporter. Dark, glittering eyes moved behind the slats on the rear door. They could hear the occasional sound of hooves tramping on wood and a low, nervous neighing.

  “What kind of hours do you think a slaughterhouse works?” Teresa asked. “I mean… I’ve no idea. I never met anyone who worked in one. I never thought about it….”

  She fell silent. A short, elderly man with a pained gait, the kind that spoke of hip trouble, had left by a side door and was now hobbling towards them.

  When he arrived and stared suspiciously through the iron bars of the gate, Costa flashed his ID card and asked, “Calvi?”

  He had a thick walrus moustache and was wearing a heavy lumberjack shirt. Stained.

  “The only one. This is about Giorgio, I guess.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  He sighed and unlocked the gate. It was a heavy mechanism. It wouldn’t be easy to get inside without a key. Certainly not if you had a reluctant companion with you.

  “The probation people phoned this morning. Said he hadn’t called in or something. I don’t get it. Either h
e’s free or he’s not. You tell me. Which is it?”

  “You haven’t been listening to the news?” Costa asked.

  The lurid circumstances surrounding Toni LaMarca’s murder had already made it onto the hourly broadcasts. Costa didn’t want to think what overimaginative junk would fill the papers tomorrow. Somehow Giorgio Bramante’s name had been mentioned as prime suspect. Given the number of memories that were still fresh about the original case, this had the makings of a story the media would love. He couldn’t help but wonder whether Bruno Messina had realised that and called a few TV and newspaper friends himself, just to stir things a little. Fourteen years before, all the sympathy had run one way. For Bramante and, by implication, Messina’s fired father. If the story was to get big — and that seemed inevitable — well, Messina was a political animal. He’d make sure it came complete with the spin he wanted.

  “Something’s happened to Giorgio?” Calvi asked, with a sudden concern. “Don’t tell me that. The poor guy’s been through enough as it is. Going to jail for what he did. Unbelievable.”

  “We need to know where he is,” Costa replied carefully. “Do you have any idea? When did you last see him?”

  “He was on the morning shift here yesterday. Till three in the afternoon. Then he went home. Never came back. I don’t know where else he spends his time. Ask Enzo Uccello. They were in jail together. Got released around the same time. No — Enzo was a couple of months before Giorgio. Good men. Good workers. I don’t mind giving them a break.”

  Teresa caught Costa’s eye. Here was the opening they sought.

  “Where do we find Enzo?” Costa asked nonchalantly.

  Calvi nodded at the building. “Working.”