The Seventh Sacrament nc-5

by David Hewson

  “Sir—” Peccia began to say.

  “If the professore wishes to help,” Messina interrupted, “it would be foolish to reject her offer.”

  She muttered some short thanks.

  “I must insist,” Messina went on, “that you follow the strict orders of Peccia’s men. This is important.”

  “I’m not intent on getting myself killed, Commissario. You don’t need to worry about that.”

  “Good.” Messina stabbed a finger at the map. “I want a team down there within twenty minutes. Look at this map. Listen to Signora Turnhouse. Go where she suggests. Your men in front. Always, Peccia.”

  “Sir…” Peccia seemed to expect something else. “What are your orders?” he asked.

  “If Falcone’s alive, get him out of there.”

  “And if Bramante resists?”

  “Then do what you will. If there’s a corpse at the end of this, let it be his. No one else. You hear me?”

  Peccia gave him a cold look.

  A large black helicopter swooped overhead, its blades so loud the roar blocked out the desperate timbre Messina knew was in his own voice. He waved to Bavetti and ordered him to call off the surveillance flights. They were, surely, no longer needed. Then he ordered Peccia to assemble his team. The man grunted and stalked off to one of the dark blue vans, all bristling with antennae, from which his unit operated. He returned with four individuals, each dressed entirely in black, each carrying the same stubby, deadly-looking military machine pistol Messina had seen before.

  They were all about the same height: all young, alert, dispassionate. They didn’t appear much like police officers. More like soldiers ready for battle.

  “We have no idea what you’ll meet down there,” Messina told them. “Inspector Falcone may be alive or dead. If the former, I wish him to stay that way.”

  “We negotiate?” one asked.

  “You see if that’s an option, by all means,” Peccia declared.

  Messina shook his head. “This man is not going to negotiate. If he says he is, it will be a ploy. He kidnapped Falcone in order to kill him. Just as he’s killed the others.”

  “People change when they’re cornered,” Peccia told his men.

  “Giorgio Bramante does not change. You order him to lay down his weapons and hand himself over. If he doesn’t comply, you act accordingly. Do I make myself clear?”

  The men nodded. One of them glowered at the woman, an expression of bafflement and aggression on his face.

  “Who’s the civilian?” he asked.

  “My name is Professor Judith Turnhouse,” she said. She held out her hand. He didn’t take it. “I’m an archaeologist. I think I can help you find him…”

  Peccia’s team glanced at one another. The leader grimaced, then retrieved a black hood from his pocket and pulled it over his head. “We can find him ourselves,” he muttered.

  “That,” Messina said firmly, “I very much doubt. Professor?”

  Judith Turnhouse spread out the map. Her thin, nimble fingers worked their way across its surface, following each line, travelling across the maze, tracing each chamber, each passage, every last dead end.

  * * *

  It took Alessio five minutes to get his bearings. The string was where he remembered it, left on the floor, just at the point where the one he now knew as Andrea — big, stupid, but strong — had grabbed him in the dark.

  They went quiet when he found it. They were all grateful, even Torchia. All games, all the rituals, had to come to an end, one way or another.

  He couldn’t begin to imagine what Giorgio Bramante would say if he found out what they’d done. Alessio had seen his father’s fury in full flight only occasionally, and each time it had left him chilled and shaking. Once he’d witnessed him beating his mother, an act that was too much, one that made him intervene, small fists flying, miniature mimics of his father’s, struggling to separate them. Women were weak and needing of protection. That was something the young Alessio Bramante never doubted. What his family required — all three of them — was to become closer, to wind themselves into each other’s lives, so tightly nothing could come between them again, ever. What was needed, it occurred to him, was a sacrament.

  And fate, or perhaps some destiny he himself had found in this labyrinth, had provided one: six stupid students who thought they could get away with trespass, dreamed they could sneak into some secret, holy place, desecrate it with their clumsy rites, then walk out, free, untouched.

  Smiling to himself, confident, he went on running the string through his fingers as they walked slowly up the corridor. There was no light yet. But if he continued for a minute or more, it would be there, surely. The sun. Escape. Freedom for the interlopers. The six of them would be like the cowards rescued by Theseus, ungrateful for their release, unworthy of saving.

  He caught his breath. This was such a momentous decision, one he knew would shape the rest of his life. Should he let Ludo and his fellow students flee out into the bright, burning day, unseen by Giorgio, unscathed? Or deliver them, unknowing, into his father’s hands and final judgement?

  Alessio stopped. Dino Abati, who was following closely, as if he were still some kind of protector, bumped into him.

  “Can you see it?” Dino asked. “The entrance?”

  “Not yet,” Alessio replied, and, secretly, tugged hard on the string, felt it give some distance ahead, fall down to the ground, like a feather descending against his bare legs on its way to the rocky ground.

  One more tug. He let go with his fingers. It was gone.

  Seven doors, seven corridors, and a bewildering web of interlocking passageways between. Some that led to Paradise. Some that led to Hell. Life was a set of choices, good and bad, easy and difficult. It was impossible to avoid them.

  By the light of Dino’s flashlight, he could see a doorway he’d noticed when he’d fled, laughing, from the entrance chamber which must now lay fewer than thirty metres in front of them.

  He thought he could sense his father’s presence in this area, could hear — and perhaps this was an illusion — Giorgio’s breathing, heavy and anxious in the dark, multiplied, echoing from the walls.

  Perhaps he’d been lost longer than he thought. Perhaps after all this time, Giorgio was getting restive, with anger to follow soon after.

  Either I take the prize or they do, Alessio thought.

  “This way,” he said, and veered left, into the square stone doorway.

  Alessio Bramante didn’t need to look back. His father’s students were sheep. Desperate sheep. They would follow, even a child, one whose courage shook inside him, trembling like a leaf in the strong winds of autumn, clinging to the branch, wondering how long its tenure on life might last.

  * * *

  Emilio Furillo lived by the belief that switching from front-line police duty to running the Questura’s information system was a solid, safe career move, one that saved him from dealing with both the fists of angry drunks on the street and the fury of dissatisfied superiors in the office. Now he stared at the jabbing finger of Teresa Lupo and wondered whether it was time to reassess that decision.

  “It seems,” he said, in a hurt tone of voice, when she finally allowed him to speak, “extraordinarily cruel that you should use a personal confidence in order to seize preferential access to the filing system. And through a third party, too.”

  Three months before, he’d quietly approached Teresa about some problems he’d been experiencing in his marital life, anxious to know if a particular drug might perhaps offer a remedy. He’d managed to thrust most of this to the back of his mind until Silvio Di Capua, Lupo’s chief morgue monkey, came in grinning that morning with an unsubtle reminder accompanied by a demand to leapfrog the data queue.

  “What?” the pathologist barked, glowering at him now.

  “I thought there was such a thing as doctor-patient privilege—”

  “I am not your doctor. You are not my patient. What you are is someone who cam
e to me looking for a place to score cheap Viagra. But that’s not why I’m here. You have the names. That thing in front of you is the computer. Try getting them up for me, if you’ll pardon the expression.”

  Di Capua’s request went against all established procedure. The system was there for the Questura, not the morgue.

  “This is quite untoward…” Emilio grumbled.

  “Oh for God’s sake! Don’t you know what’s going on out there? Leo Falcone’s been snatched by that murderous animal he put away years ago. I’m trying to help.”

  “That,” he snapped, “is the job of the police.”

  “The names,” she insisted. “Just look…”

  It got worse. Two other people he very much didn’t want to see walked in.

  “I heard about you,” Emilio told Costa and Peroni. “After she smacked the commissario this morning, you two walked out. Result? You are off duty. Everyone here knows that. Good day.”

  “This is important—” Costa began to say.

  “Everything’s important!”

  “Also,” Teresa Lupo objected, “I was here first.”

  The two men pulled up chairs and didn’t look ready to leave. Emilio Furillo wondered, for a moment, whether he really could call the desk downstairs and insist this trio be ejected from his office.

  “We think we can identify him,” Peroni told him. “Does that get us up the line?”

  Teresa squirmed on her chair, obviously reluctant to let go of her position, but interested, too.

  “You have a name for Alessio now?” she asked Costa and Peroni.

  “Not exactly,” Costa volunteered. “But we know what happened to him.” He paused. “Alessio joined the police. He became a cadet. That would be four years ago. One of the neighbours saw him in uniform.”

  She gaped at them, momentarily lost for words.

  “The police?” she repeated. “As in you people?”

  “As in us,” Peroni agreed solemnly.

  “Emilio,” Teresa Lupo said. “Kindly put me on hold. Call up all the cadets from four years ago who had a home address in Flaminio.”

  “This is not…” he began.

  She was glaring at him malevolently. “Of course,” she added, “if you’re too busy, my friends and I could always retire to the canteen for a little chat.”

  Furillo muttered furiously under his breath, dashed something into the keyboard, and turned the screen for them to see.

  There were sixty-seven cadet recruits with city addresses that year. The only one from Flaminio was female.

  “Satisfied?” he demanded.

  They studied the names and addresses on the screen. The two men deflated visibly. Teresa Lupo nodded and said nothing.

  “What about the rest of Italy?” Costa asked.

  “How much time do you have? There are over eighteen hundred names there.”

  Emilio smiled then. This felt good.

  “Any more questions?” he asked.

  “Where are those damned searches I asked for on my woman?” Teresa Lupo slapped her plump fist on the desk. “Where are the—”

  He hit the right keys.

  “Here,” he replied. “I did them earlier. I just wanted to hear you ask nicely. I’m still waiting.”

  Then he ran down a summary of what he’d found. There was not a thing whatsoever, Furillo reported, to connect Elisabetta and the late Bernardo Giordano with Teresa’s other woman.

  “That’s the late Elisabetta, by the way.” Peroni shook his head. “We just passed the case on to what few detectives are still left working upstairs. Who the hell is ‘her other woman’?”

  “However…” Furillo continued, only to find himself ignored completely.

  “The woman I found in Lorenzo’s pictures after you left,” Teresa Lupo explained to Costa and Peroni, interrupting. “She was with Alessio in the peace camp before he met the Giordanos. My guess is that she’s the one who brought Alessio to them. She was a member of their weird little group of Trotskyite tree-huggers. Lorenzo checked.”

  Costa and Peroni glanced at each other.

  “What woman?” Peroni demanded.

  There was that infuriating know-it-all smirk on her face again, and from the look on the faces of the two men, it got to them as much as it did to Emilio Furillo.

  “The name I was asked to check,” Furillo interjected, “was Judith Turnhouse, if that’s any help.”

  “Thanks,” the pathologist spat at him. “Spoil all my surprises!”

  Costa shook his head, baffled. “You’re saying that Judith Turnhouse took Alessio to the peace camp that evening?”

  “I’m saying more than that. I looked her up in the phone book. She lives in some tiny studio apartment at the back of Termini. Cruddy place for a university academic, don’t you think?”

  Costa remembered the clothes Turnhouse had worn the first time they interviewed her. Cheap clothes. Academics of her stature weren’t badly paid. The money had to be going somewhere.

  “Via Tiziano, 117a,” Furillo said, pointing at the screen, and getting ignored all round.

  “In one of those photos,” Teresa continued, “Judith Turnhouse seems to be passing the Giordanos money. What if she didn’t just take the boy there? What if all these years she was his fairy godmother or something? Paying for his keep out of her own salary?” She paused. “Elisabetta dead too?” she asked.

  “Elisabetta was murdered in her bed,” Peroni replied. “Three nights ago. All the rest of this is… speculation.”

  “Dammit, Gianni!” Teresa pulled out the prints she’d had made from Lorenzo’s machine. “Look at these. Tell me this isn’t her.”

  Peroni and Costa leaned over and examined the photos.

  “It’s her,” Peroni agreed instantly. “But what does that mean? She’s out with Messina now, trying to help him track down Bramante and Leo. It doesn’t make sense.”

  “Signora Turnhouse…” Furillo began.

  “She was protecting Alessio from his father!” Teresa Lupo waved her heavy arms in the air. “What else could it be?”

  “From what exactly?” Peroni asked. “And why? And for all these years?”

  “Enough! Enough!”

  Emilio Furillo never shouted. A raised voice always seemed, to him, an admission of defeat. But there were times…

  They stared at him.

  “Emilio?” the pathologist asked.

  “I told you there was no connection between this Signora Turnhouse and the Giordanos. None that I could see. That does not mean,” he continued, “that I found nothing.”

  “Out with it,” Teresa ordered.

  “Some years ago this woman was stopped for speeding outside Verona. I have the full report on the system….”

  “Summarise it,” Peroni said.

  “She received a spot fine. However, there was a man in the passenger seat. He was forced to show his papers. Normally this wouldn’t be a matter of record, of course….”

  They waited.

  “But on this occasion,” Furillo continued smugly, “it was. The man was a prisoner out on weekend leave.”

  Teresa blinked at him, openmouthed, like a freshly landed tuna.

  “It was Giorgio Bramante,” Furillo announced. “To save you some time, I checked these dates against the incidents on the list Falcone circulated. This was the very weekend the farmer, Andrea Guerino, disappeared. He was later found murdered. Not far from Verona. Make of it what you will.”

  “Judith Turnhouse was helping Giorgio?” Peroni asked, amazed. “And supporting his son?”

  Costa’s mind kept returning to that first meeting with the American academic, and how it had come about. Everything had seemed so easy.

  “The reason we spoke to her was because she and Giorgio had a very loud, very public argument, with the Carabinieri within earshot outside,” he pointed out. “Those officers were always there. Bramante and Turnhouse must have known someone would have made the connection. Someone would come, and then she could t
ake us to the body Giorgio had left down by the river. He wants his victims seen. Not hidden away forever.”

  Peroni nodded, catching on instantly. “She told us she would have called if we hadn’t arrived,” he pointed out. “I’m sure that was the truth. So we’ve just been picking up the crumbs this pair have been dropping for us all along. Where does Alessio fit in?”

  “Tiziano—” Furillo began.

  “And now,” the young detective went on, “she’s leading Messina directly to Bramante.”

  “Why?” Peroni demanded.

  “Because it’s what Bramante wants,” Costa replied immediately. “She pointed us to the fact he was looking for those underground maps. That’s what Messina is using right now. This is…”

  It was clear in his head. He just lacked the precise words.

  “…a kind of performance. His last act. Leo is his finale. Giorgio Bramante wants to be found. The man needs an audience.”

  He glanced at his partner.

  “Giorgio Bramante never killed Elisabetta Giordano. He never even knew she existed. But if Judith Turnhouse has been playing both sides… Paying the woman for years. Perhaps even after Alessio left home. She had a reason to keep Elisabetta quiet. The best there was. It could have destroyed everything.”

  Costa spoke with authority and a rapid, quick intelligence, Furillo thought. His demeanour reminded the older man of Falcone himself.

  “We’ve got to let Messina know,” the young agente added, reaching for a phone. “Now…”

  Furillo raised a finger. “Hostage situation. The commissario has called a radio silence for everyone except the control room. And I would seriously advise you three not to show your faces there at the moment. As I was saying, Tiziano—”

  “Alessio would be an agente by now,” Teresa Lupo interrupted. “A fully formed one, newly emerged from the cocoon. So where is he?”

  “Tiziano!” Furillo yelled. “Are you people listening to me or am I some kind of computer peripheral here?”

  Teresa Lupo reached over and patted his right hand. “Emilio,” she said sweetly. “You’re never peripheral. Not to me. We’re just a little… stumped.”

  “God, I wish I had that on camera,” Furillo sighed. “Judith Turnhouse lives at 117a Tiziano. If you look here—” he pointed at the screen — “you will see that one of the recruits from four years ago, Filippo Battista, gave the very same address in his recruitment forms. Perhaps he is a lodger. I don’t know. However, he is now attached to—”