by David Hewson
The medic swore, slammed the door, and tugged his colleague’s arm. The other one was a thin, unremarkable young man with a head of long blond hair. He was still watching the dials and the screens, a little nervous, as if he hadn’t seen many deaths before.
“Don’t waste your time,” the older man told him. “I’d put money on him being gone by the time we get moving again. Isn’t that right?”
The doctor stared at the monitors attached to Ludo Torchia, whose breathing seemed shallow and faint.
“I believe so,” he replied. “Leo, you should have stayed in the Questura.” He said this with some faint note of reproof. “You have some of the other students, don’t you?”
“We have,” Falcone agreed. Probably all of them by now. As he’d expected, they weren’t good at hiding.
“Then they can tell you,” the doctor suggested.
Falcone shook his head and looked at the motionless figure. “Not after this. They’re surrounded by lawyers. They don’t need to say a thing. Why should they? We’ve allowed one of them to be beaten almost to death in our own interview room. They can stay silent for as long as they like. We can’t even use it against them.”
“I need a cigarette,” the older medic complained. “We’re not going to be moving for a while.”
“As a doctor,” Foglia murmured, “I shouldn’t say this. But go and have one. Both of you.”
The younger medic looked baffled. “I don’t smoke.”
His companion caught something in Foglia’s expression. “I’ll teach you,” he said, and led him out of the ambulance.
Falcone sat there, silent, lost for words.
Foglia took another look at the monitors. “He’s dying, Leo. There’s nothing anyone can do.”
“So you said.”
“You really think he might have talked to you?”
“I don’t know, Patrizio. This case makes me realise I know very little indeed.”
Foglia stood up. He walked to the equipment cabinet on the wall, reached in, and took out a syringe, then, after checking carefully, an ampoule of some drug.
“If I’m lucky, I may be able to bring him back to consciousness for a minute or so. It would be appreciated if the pathologist made no mention of this in his autopsy. I quite like my job and it’s a sight better than prison.”
He primed the syringe, checking the level very carefully.
“Well?” Foglia said. “Falcone. We don’t have all night. Neither does that boy.”
“What else will it do to him?” Falcone asked.
“He’ll probably die of heart failure within fifteen minutes.”
“No!”
“He’s dead anyway, Leo!”
“I said no, Patrizio. I’ve already arrested one man for murder tonight. Don’t make it two.”
Foglia laughed, without conviction. “I’m a doctor. Doctors make mistakes.”
“Don’t do it. Please. For your own sake.”
“What about that child?”
Falcone tried to argue, but the words weren’t there.
“Exactly,” Foglia went on. “Either way, I’m not going to get to sleep tonight.”
He found a patch of clear skin between the bruises on Torchia’s bare right arm, plumped up the vein with the same professional care he would have used on a patient in the Questura surgery, then slipped the hypodermic deep into the flesh.
It took less than a minute. Almost to the rhythm of the horns outside, the student’s chest jerked. Suddenly his eyes opened. They focused on the ceiling and the bright light overhead.
Falcone moved over to crouch by the surgical stretcher.
“Ludo,” he murmured, and found his throat was dry. His voice sounded distant and foreign. “We need to find the boy.”
Torchia’s swollen, blackened lips moved, shiny with blood and spittle. He said nothing.
“Ludo—” Falcone said.
Torchia sobbed, choked back a liquid, guttural cough, and managed to turn his head in their direction.
Falcone caught a glimpse of his eyes. He looked like a child himself at that moment: alone, scared, confused, in pain.
Then something came back, an unreadable certainty in his face, and Leo Falcone felt, against his own wishes, that he’d been wrong all along. Torchia did know something about the boy, and even now the memory amused him.
“Say something,” Falcone pleaded, and thought they were the feeblest words he’d ever uttered in his life.
* * *
Unaware that a fat white planarian, recently dissected in the morgue below, had come to bear his name, Bruno Messina sat in the large leather chair in his office looking like a man at the end of his tether.
“So there’s nothing?” he demanded, half furious, half pleased he was able to launch this accusation in their direction and deflect it from himself.
Costa had to nudge his boss for an answer. Falcone had been staring out the window, into the night, lost in thought, as if recollecting something. Fragments from the old Bramante case kept reentering the conversation they’d had on the way to the Questura, like flotsam released from the depths of some murky sea, surfacing in Falcone’s troubled mind. There had been a moment when Costa wondered whether it would be wiser for the old man to retire from the case altogether, to make way for a younger, more physically sound man. Then, just before the car parked in the secure piazza behind the station, Falcone had taken a call from the intelligence team tracing Bramante’s movements in the city and, in the space of one minute, conducted the kind of intense, rapid-fire interrogation of a junior officer no other man in the Questura could begin to match. The old Leo Falcone was there when needed, Costa realised. He was just distracted, for reasons Costa couldn’t quite comprehend.
* * *
The team had stayed at the murder scene by the river for two hours. When they returned to the Questura, Falcone had summoned a meeting of all the senior officers in the case, along with Teresa Lupo and Silvio Di Capua. That had taken more than ninety minutes. It was now just past eight o’clock, a time when shifts change, when stalled investigations risked falling into stasis, indolence, and, eventually, despair.
“Furthermore,” Messina added, “you disobeyed my express orders, Inspector. You left the Questura.”
“I thought I was only a prisoner at night,” Falcone replied, without the slightest hint of guile. “I apologise if there was some misunderstanding.”
“What are we supposed to do, Leo? One more day and all we have to show for it is one more body.”
“That’s not quite fair, sir,” Costa interjected. “We know that Bramante has been trying to find his old maps of underground sites.”
“That narrows it down,” Messina said dryly.
“We know from Bru—” Peroni corrected himself. “We know from the worm we found down by the river that he didn’t keep the last victim there.”
“I say again: that narrows it down.”
“But it does,” Costa objected. “The worm Teresa got out of Toni LaMarca isn’t in any of the databases. That means we know where Bramante didn’t hide LaMarca before he took the body to Ca’ d’Ossi.”
“Tell me something you do know!”
“Of course,” Falcone replied, taking control of the conversation, and shooting Costa a glance that said Mine now. “There are more than one hundred and fifty registered subterranean archaeological sites for which La Sapienza has no planarian records. The university archaeological department has a further forty-three that are not officially registered but were visited by Bramante in the course of his work. That means he could have used any one of them. Or somewhere else entirely.”
“This could take years!”
Falcone laughed. “No. A couple of days at most, I think. We could start now, but in the dark… he’d be gone the moment he heard something. Wherever he is, he knows the place well and we don’t. Besides, we have other work to do.”
Bruno Messina sighed. “Nearly two hundred sites…”
“That�
��s the total,” Costa interrupted. “It’s coming down all the time. We can rule out some because they’re not close to running water, so it’s highly unlikely there would be a planarian population. Also, we assume he’s in reasonable proximity to the Aventino. This is the area he knows best. He took LaMarca’s body to Ca’ d’Ossi in a stolen car. We found it near the Circus Maximus this afternoon. It has LaMarca’s blood in the trunk. Bramante was running a considerable risk there. An intelligent man would wish to minimise that. He won’t be far away; he’ll think it’s safer for him where he knows the sites. Tomorrow, right after sunrise, we start looking in a radius out from Ca’ d’Ossi.”
Messina exploded. “This is ridiculous! How many searches can you perform a day? Ten? Fifteen? You should have men out there now!”
“I’ve already told you,” Falcone said evenly, “it would be counterproductive in the dark. Besides, Bramante has no one left on his list but me. The others are all dead. I’d like this finished as soon as possible too. But being realistic, there is no rush. If I don’t have him when my time runs out, I hand everything over to Bavetti. He can have the credit. I don’t care. And…” He paused. “…we should not fall into the trap of acting first and thinking afterwards. That’s happened too much in relation to Giorgio Bramante already. It’s almost as if he expects it of us.”
“If that’s a criticism of my father, Falcone—”
“No, no, no.”
The old inspector looked dissatisfied, with himself more than anyone. When Costa compared him with Peroni, it was hard to believe these two men were around the same age. Gianni had found something over the past eighteen months. A new life — the odd blossoming of love in autumn with Teresa — had revived him, put colour into his battered farmer’s features, a spring into his step. Falcone had been brutally wounded in service, a shock from which he had yet to recover fully, both physically and mentally.
A stray thought entered Costa’s head at that moment: What if he never quite makes it back? How would Falcone, a man whose self-knowledge had a candid, heartless intensity, be able to face that fact?
“This is not about your father,” the inspector told Bruno Messina. “Or me. Or any of us. It’s about Giorgio Bramante and his son. His son more than anything. It’s the same now as it was fourteen years ago. If we could find out what happened to the boy, all of this would end. Had it been Alessio in that hellhole down by the river today, Bramante would walk into this Questura tonight to give himself up. I’m convinced of that.”
“Closure,” Messina said, then nodded sagely, in agreement. “You could be right.”
“Please don’t use that kind of trite cliché around me,” Falcone said immediately, sending a red flush to Messina’s choleric face. “I may not be a parent but I surely understand one thing. When you have lost a child, there’s never closure. It’s a myth, a convenient media fantasy which the rest of us adopt in order to allow ourselves to sleep at night. You’ll be asking me to ‘move on’ next….”
“I may well,” Messina snapped. “Bavetti’s chasing your heels, Leo.”
“Good. I like competition. If we find Alessio, discover what happened to him, Giorgio Bramante will give himself up because he’s lost what’s driving him — his anger, which would seem to be directed solely at me by this stage, though I still fail to understand why. Uncovering the fate of that child will take the sting out of that rage, supplant it with what should have been there in the first place and for some reason never was. The natural response of a father. Grief. Mourning. The kind of grim and bitter acceptance we’ve all seen before.”
Messina snorted. “I didn’t realise psychology was your subject.”
“Neither did I until recently,” Falcone replied. “I wish I’d made this discovery earlier. But there you are. So…” He leaned back in his chair, stretched his long legs, and closed his eyes. “This morning you said we had another forty-eight hours,” Falcone said.
“This morning you held a gun to my head,” Messina replied, offended.
“I’m sorry, Commissario. Genuinely. We haven’t had a good start to this relationship, have we? I imagine, in the circumstances, it’s inevitable. You blame me for what happened fourteen years ago. Come to think of it, so does Giorgio Bramante.”
“I want no more surprises,” Messina emphasised, bristling at the thought. “No more trips outside the Questura. No more wild-goose chases.”
Falcone threw his arms open wide in protest. “As I said! It was a misunderstanding.”
Bruno Messina drew in a deep, agonised breath. “Very well,” he conceded. “You go nowhere. None of you. Not till it’s daylight. If you have nothing come Thursday, this is Bavetti’s case. You three get out of my sight for a while. Everything runs so smoothly without you around. Why is that?”
Falcone struggled to his feet, holding on to the desk for a moment, then letting go, standing unaided. Costa restrained the urge to help him. A point was being made.
“Perhaps you’re just not looking hard enough,” the inspector suggested mildly.
Messina shot him a furious glance. “Don’t push your luck,” he said with menace. “It’s not that great at the moment, is it?”
“A day,” the inspector emphasised. “That’s all I ask. I will bring you Giorgio Bramante. That…” — he clicked his fingers at Costa and Peroni, then pointed at the door — “…is a promise.”
* * *
The three of them stood outside the commissario’s office, glad to be out of Messina’s presence.
“How exactly?” Peroni asked.
They didn’t get an answer. Falcone was already stomping down the corridor, not looking back.
* * *
They’d turned off the Via Galvani quickly, parked somewhere, maybe, Rosa guessed, in one of the deserted dead-end alleys on the far side of the Monte dei Cocci. There was no escape. Bramante had walked round to the back of the van, punched the butcher hard in the face when he tried to resist, then tied the two of them tightly together with thick, tough climbing rope. Then he’d disappeared, for hours. She’d watched the daylight die in the front windows of the van as night fell, trying to find some way of communicating with the sweating, terrified man to whom she was tethered. It was impossible. Finally, she’d persuaded him to help her kick the walls of the van for long periods on end, and still no one came. Not until Bramante returned, threw open the doors, face furious from the noise, fists flailing at the butcher again.
After that, Bramante got in behind the wheel and drove for no more than ten minutes, uphill — the Aventino, it could be nowhere else — then down a winding road, meeting no traffic, travelling so rapidly his two prisoners rolled helplessly around in the back, tethered, bumping into each other, close enough for her to see the all-consuming fright in her fellow captive’s eyes. The vehicle came to an abrupt halt. The doors flew open. Briefly — all she glimpsed were the distant lights of a tram, the Number 3, she was certain of it — they were outside, before being dragged down a stony path, falling, tumbling on the hard stones and cold damp grass, winding up in some dank passageway drenched in the rank smell of age and sewers.
She’d taken a class trip when she was in school: the catacombs somewhere out on the Appian Way. They smelled like this, the same powerful, pervasive reek, earthy and organic, that had probably hung around for centuries.
Rosa Prabakaran hated being in the catacombs, not that she let this show. It felt as if she were trapped in a grave.
Finally, pushed on by Bramante’s feet and fists, they found themselves in some subterranean chamber. Not large. Not complete either, because part of it was open to the night air, letting in some soft, slow drizzle that curled down from a dark velvet sky in which stars were faintly visible.
There were chambers off this principal vestibule, guarded with iron gates, modern ones designed to keep out intruders.
Bramante unlocked the cell to the right, opened the door, and took out a large clasp knife.
The butcher whimpered and stared i
n horror at the weapon. Bramante cut through the thick climbing rope with one strong swipe, then propelled the man inside with a vicious kick. The butcher fell to the floor in a pained heap, still whimpering. The door closed behind him with a clatter.
Rosa closed her eyes, found herself wondering what this meant, then immediately fought to stifle the thoughts that rose in her head.
Bramante shoved her into the adjoining chamber, closed the door behind him, locked it. He had a set of keys, she noticed. Several, on a chain, the kind a caretaker would use. Or an archaeologist going back to his old haunts.
He pushed her forward again until they were standing at the end of the room, then he lifted a large electric lantern and turned on the light. A broad sallow beam illuminated what appeared to be a cavernous chamber, with brick walls clinging to the rock and earth. One corner was open to a luminous night sky. Some dim illumination from an artificial bulb joined the light from the stars and an unseen moon there. A man or woman at ground level just might have seen them from the right position, Rosa thought, but it gave her no comfort, since Bramante must have realised this too.
They had to be somewhere central yet sufficiently deserted to avoid detection. Rosa racked her brain to imagine such a place in the heart of Rome. There were, when she came to think of it, scores. Possibly hundreds. Abandoned excavations, old archaeological finds that never brought in sufficient tourists to keep them open. The city was a honeycomb of ancient sites, some on the surface, many more below the earth. Giorgio Bramante doubtless knew them all.
One large, strong hand curled round her to lie flat on her stomach. His face crept close to hers, his breath, hot and anxious, panted in her ear.
Then the blade rose in his other hand, flashed past her eyes to prick her cheek. She felt the sharp edge of the chill metal against her skin. The knife tip found the corner of her gag, lifted it, sliced through fabric. The material fell away and she found herself choking, too terrified to say anything, aware he still had the rope in his hand, aware, too, that Bramante was an intelligent man, a man who would never have returned to her the power of speech if it could have been of any possible use.