The Seventh Sacrament nc-5

by David Hewson

  So they blundered on, Commissario Messina naively believing the job would become simpler as they progressed. Like scooping out the top of an ants’ nest and peering inside, he’d told Leo Falcone. He was fooling himself. The truth was much more messy. The nest was long dead. The interior was a labyrinth of tunnels and crevices, dangerous, friable, liable to collapse at any moment. One of the excavator drivers had been making noises about quitting because it was too risky to continue. The Army sappers had withdrawn and sat watching the proceedings from the grassy mound by the park, smoking, an expression on their faces that said Amateurs. The machines had already reduced to rubble what, to Messina’s untrained eye, looked like some extensive underground temple, shattering visible artefacts, ploughing the remains, and what seemed to be a plentiful scattering of broken bones back into the red earth. There would, he knew, be a price to pay.

  None of which mattered. Only one thing did. Of little Alessio Bramante there wasn’t a sign. Not a shred of clothing, a footprint in the dirt, a distant cry, a faint breath or heartbeat picked up by the sensitive machines Falcone had brought to bear on the job.

  Messina stared out at the traffic and told himself, A boy cannot disappear magically of his own accord. Their only hope now was to prise some truth from Ludo Torchia. And soon. Whatever it took.

  He sat up front in the car as usual. He didn’t like to think of himself as a superior. He was their leader. The man who showed them the way forward. That was what troops — and police officers were troops of a kind, even if they weren’t Carabinieri — needed.

  The driver was one of the uniformed men he used regularly. Taccone, an uninspired but essentially decent drone, someone who was struggling to master the sovrintendente exams. Not a bright, ambitious, questioning individual like Falcone. A commissario needed his foot soldiers, Messina thought, just as much as a good officer.

  “What would you do if someone took your kid like that?” Messina asked, not much expecting an answer.

  Taccone turned and stared at him. There was something in his eyes Messina had never seen before.

  “Just what anyone would do,” Taccone answered quietly. “I’d take the scumbag into a small, quiet room. I’d make sure there was no one around I couldn’t trust. Then…”

  Taccone was a big man. He’d probably done it before, Messina guessed.

  “Those days are past, my friend,” he told his driver. “We live in regulated times. Procedure is what matters. The fine print of the law. Working by the book.”

  The traffic was getting worse and worse. The flashing blue light and the siren were doing them no favours. Cars, buses, and trucks blocked both sides of the Lungotevere as it wound past the piazza of the Bocca della Verità. The peace camp occupied almost the entire area of the Circus Maximus beyond. A ragtag army of tents and bodies sprawled beneath the evening sun, covering every inch of the bare and scratchy green grass that had once been an Imperial racetrack.

  Taccone swore, ran the police Lancia up onto the broad pedestrian sidewalk, then floored the pedal, scattering walkers, not minding whom he pissed off. When he found a break by the next lights, he forced his way into the moving traffic flow, bullying everything else off the road.

  They were outside the Questura in a matter of minutes. A mob of reporters, photographers, and TV crews mulled around the entrance. They knew a suspect was inside the building, Messina guessed. Even if some creep inside the force hadn’t told them in exchange for a few illicit lire, Giorgio Bramante surely had when he’d arrived. Bramante was that kind of man. He played to the media, whatever advice he received to the contrary. Bramante felt wronged, and a man who was wronged would always be moved more by a sense of injustice than common prudence.

  Taccone braked hard to a halt, scattering the scrambling hacks.

  He turned and stared balefully at Messina.

  “Those days are only past, sir,” he said slowly, “if we allow it.”

  * * *

  When Emily called with the question where the hell is Giorgio Bramante? she had suggested it might be a good idea to collect soil samples and any other ground artefacts. She didn’t say, I’m fine, don’t worry, and by the way it’s very nice holed up out here in some swanky mansion in Orvieto while you play cut and stitch with the latest corpse on the production line.

  Americans, Teresa Lupo said quietly to herself. Everyone needed a work ethic. The trouble was Americans craved one even when they weren’t working.

  Fifteen minutes later, the thing crawled out of dead Toni LaMarca’s throat. Teresa screamed when she saw it. This was a first in the morgue. So was the worm. She’d seen many strange items on the shining silver table that was the focal point of her working life. None had yet scared her, not seriously. But watching — close up, since she was taking a good look at the corpse’s face at the time — a pale flabby beast with prominent eyes and a triangular head, its whole slimy body the length of a little finger, slowly wriggle its way out of a dead man’s throat, then settle on his lips, was enough to make her shriek, something Silvio Di Capua found extraordinarily amusing.

  Thirty minutes later Silvio had called in the friend of a friend who turned out to be Cristiano, the evolutionary biologist from La Sapienza. Cristiano was one of the tallest human beings Teresa Lupo had ever seen, a good head higher than both she and Silvio, as thin as a rake, utterly bald, with a cadaverous face and bulbous eyes. He could have been anywhere between nineteen and thirty-seven, but he didn’t look the type to be interested in girls.

  The worm, on the other hand, turned him on.

  Cristiano spent thirty minutes peering at it from every angle through a magnifying glass, then asked, anxiously, “Can I keep it?”

  “That worm is in police custody, Cristiano,” Teresa explained patiently. “We can’t let a creature like that go walkabout simply because you’ve taken a fancy to him.”

  “It’s not a him. It’s a him and a her. Planarians are simultaneous hermaphrodites. This little fellow…”

  Teresa closed her eyes and sighed, unable to believe anyone could talk so affectionately about the disgusting piece of white slime now meandering around the small specimen dish Silvio had found for it.

  “…predates the Ice Age. They have the sexual appetite of a seventies rock star. Five times a day, if he can get hold of a partner, and he doesn’t much care about the condition either. Also, if you chop him in half, he can grow a new head or tail. Or even several.”

  “So ‘he’ is a he?” she observed slyly.

  “I was being conversational for a lay audience,” Cristiano insisted.

  “You’re too kind. Does he have a name?”

  “Two. We used to call him Dugesia polychroa. Then they decided some dead academic called Schmidt needed something to be remembered by. So it got changed to Schmidtea polychroa.”

  “Cristiano,” Teresa said, taking his skinny arm. “Let me be candid with you. Things are just a touch busy around here at the moment. For example, this ‘little fellow’ worked its way out of the open mouth of a gentleman who got his heart hosed out in a slaughterhouse, and that doesn’t happen too often. Also, last night someone broke into the Questura, probably looking to kill a good friend of mine, then shot dead a potentially important witness in this very case. I hope to work my way round to him a little later. My colleague Silvio here was of the opinion that this creature might provide some significant information for us. It would delight me immensely if you could give me some small clue as to whether my colleague is correct.”

  She paused for effect then demanded, “So what is it?”

  “A flatworm.”

  “Just any old flatworm?”

  Silvio got in on the act. “There’s no such thing as ‘any old flatworm,’ Teresa. If you’d spent a moment reading a few papers on evolutionary biology you’d know that. These things—”

  “Shut up!”

  She squeezed Cristiano’s arm harder.

  “Just tell me, before you go, how that thing got there. Could it have
been inside him when he was alive?”

  “Are you serious?” the biologist asked, eyes bulging. “Who’d let that crawl down their throat?”

  “I meant as a parasite or something. Like a fluke.”

  “Planarians aren’t parasites!” He looked as if she’d insulted a relative.

  “What are they then?”

  “Scavengers, mainly. They feed on dead meat.”

  “So it could have crawled down his mouth when he was dead? Or unconscious?”

  He shook his bald head in violent disagreement. “Not while he was unconscious. These things didn’t live that long by being stupid. They stay away from anything that’s breathing unless it’s smaller. They’re pretty good at devouring young earthworms if they can catch them, but that’s as far as it goes.”

  She thought about this.

  “Habitat,” she said. “They live in the earth. They come out when they’re hungry. This man was found in a crypt alongside a hundred or so skeletons from the Middle Ages or whenever. A natural place for these wormy things, I guess.”

  “No.”

  She wished he wouldn’t treat her like an idiot, just because she hadn’t spent a joyous afternoon inside the pages of Lifestyles of Rich and Famous Worms lately.

  “Why not?”

  “Where’s the food? Where’s the water? They need water. Without it…”

  That ruled out one way Toni LaMarca could have got a slimy white flatworm down his throat.

  “How about a slaughterhouse?” she suggested. “That’s full of meat. Water, too. The worms could just come out of the drains at night for a munch on the leftovers.”

  Silvio sniffed. “That was a very clean slaughterhouse,” he said. “I took a good look at those drains. They were putting all the right chemicals down them. I doubt anything could live if it got that much disinfectant poured on its head every night. I know I couldn’t.”

  She stared at Cristiano, hoping.

  “If the drains are disinfected properly,” he said, “you wouldn’t get planarians. Even they have limits.”

  And so have I, Teresa thought.

  * * *

  The previous evening, whiling away the hours in the Questura intelligence office, she’d stolen a good look at the papers on LaMarca’s disappearance. It had taken a while to track down the boyfriend who’d been kidnapped by Giorgio Bramante as bait. A while, too, to persuade him to talk. When he did, he told them something interesting. Toni LaMarca had been taken two nights before his body turned up at Santa Maria dell’Assunta, not one night before, as they’d first thought. It was clear from the autopsy that he’d died soon after he was abducted, too, in the slaughterhouse, she supposed. The church had been visited by the woman caretaker the day before she found the body. She’d seen nothing unusual. That meant Bramante had stored LaMarca’s corpse somewhere — out of some unforeseen necessity? — before moving it to the final location. Then, some thirty-six hours after the killing, he’d left the clue to what he had done in Sacro Cuore.

  There was dirt under LaMarca’s toenails, traces of earth on his body that forensic were looking at. But the kind of information she’d get from those sources meant something only with corroboration. Dirt wasn’t unique like DNA. If they had a suspect location, they could look for a match. But without a starting point, everything they had was like that stupid white worm. Information that lacked context, data floating on the wind with nothing concrete to make it useful. It could take weeks to track down, if ever.

  “So where?” she wondered aloud.

  Cristiano shrugged. “Like I told you. Near water. Near a drain maybe. Or a culvert. Underground, overground. You choose.”

  “Thanks a bunch,” she grunted. “You can take your pet home. Provided…” — she prodded the worm nerd in the chest — “…you promise to name him Silvio.”

  The biologist hesitated and risked a glance at his friend.

  “You mean you don’t want me to work on him?” he asked. “Run a few tests? They’re fatal, naturally, but I don’t think the animal liberation people will start squealing. I mean, it’s not like he’s an endangered species.”

  Her mind was already elsewhere. She wanted him out of there.

  “Worm autopsies are not my field, Cristiano. Talk to Silvio about it.”

  “But…”

  “But nothing.”

  “Tell her,” Silvio ordered his pal.

  “Tell me what?”

  “It’s the sex thing again,” Cristiano said. “You didn’t hear me out.”

  She looked at her watch. “Thirty seconds.”

  “It’s a question of allopatry or sympatry, whether they’re sexual or parthenogens…”

  “I will, I swear, hit someone soon. Get to the point.”

  “OK. Some populations of planarians overlap and mate with each other. Some stay apart and reproduce parthenogenetically. They develop female cells without the need for fertilisation. Some… kind of do a little of both.”

  “I will…”

  “In Rome we have sexual types and parthenogens, and they’re allopatric. Which means they live in geographically diverse communities and are basically slightly different versions of the same organism. It’s a big deal. We have underground waterways that have been untouched, sometimes unconnected, for two thousand years. What that means is that over the centuries we’ve come to have hundreds of communities of planarians and no two are exactly the same. There’s a team that’s been logging them for over a decade at La Sapienza along with a couple of other universities too. I’m amazed you never heard of it.”

  “I never kept up on worms,” Teresa muttered. “One more personal failing. So what you’re saying is that if you dissect his love tackle under a microscope, you can tell me where he came from? Which waterway?”

  “Better than that. If he’s in the database, I can tell you even whereabouts. Whether it’s the head of the Cloaca Maxima or the outlet. They’re that distinct.”

  She picked up the specimen dish and peered at the creature wriggling inside it.

  “I’d like to say this is going to hurt me more than it hurts you,” she murmured. “But it won’t. Silvio — that’s you, not the worm — kindly find this gentleman a white coat, a microscope, a desk, and anything else he needs. We have human beings who require our attention.”

  * * *

  Judith Turnhouse didn’t have the words academic Bitch stencilled in gold on a sign on her desk. As far as Peroni was concerned, she didn’t need them. Costa watched the body language as he and his partner entered the woman’s office in the outpost of La Sapienza’s archaeology department and felt his heart sink. It was hate at first sight. Tall, excruciatingly thin, with an angular face framed by lifeless brown hair, Judith Turnhouse sat stiff and serious behind a desk where everything — computer, files, papers, keyboard — had been tidied into a neat, symmetrical pattern.

  Before Costa could even finish his introduction, she took one look at their cards and said, “Make it quick. I’m busy.”

  Peroni breathed a deep sigh and picked up a small stone statue on her desk.

  “What’s the hurry?” he said. “Does this stuff go bad or something?”

  The woman removed the object from his hands and placed it back where it belonged.

  “This is our year-end. I’ve a budget to approve and an annual report to write. You can’t do research without a proper administrative structure to back it up. We tried that once before. It was a disaster.”

  Costa glanced at his partner and, uninvited, the two men took a couple of seats opposite the desk. Judith Turnhouse just watched, her sharp pale grey eyes noting every movement.

  “Giorgio Bramante’s disaster?” Costa asked.

  “I might have guessed. In case you hadn’t noticed, Officer, Giorgio doesn’t work here anymore. They gave me his chair a few years ago. It’s a big job. Especially if you do it properly.”

  “I thought Giorgio was a star.” Peroni looked puzzled. “That’s what everyone tells us.”
>
  “Giorgio was an excellent archaeologist. He was my professor. I learnt a lot from him. But he couldn’t handle admin. He couldn’t handle people either. For him, it was all about the research, and nothing about people.”

  “Even a painter needs someone to pay for his paint,” Costa suggested.

  She nodded, thawing a little. “If you want to put it like that. Giorgio thought everything revolved around the pursuit of some holy grail called academic truth. The result? We discovered one of the greatest undiscovered archaeological treasures in Rome. Now it looks like a bomb site. It’s tragic.”

  More tragic for Judith Turnhouse, it seemed to Costa, than the loss of one young boy.

  “You were in on the secret?” Peroni asked.

  “Of course. You can’t work a site of that size on your own. Giorgio took five of his best postgrad students into his confidence and told us what was going on. We laboured down there for a year. Another three months and we could have been in a position to tell people what we had.”

  “Which was?” Costa asked.

  “The largest and most important mithraeum anyone’s ever found in Rome. Probably the best source of information we were ever going to have on the Mithraic cult.”

  “And now it’s all gone.”

  “No,” she snapped. “It’s all in little pieces. In fifty years’ time, perhaps, when everyone’s forgotten about Giorgio’s mess, maybe they’ll come up with the budget to try to put it all back together. Maybe. Not that it will matter to me by then. Just because what I work with is timeless doesn’t mean I’m that way myself.”