The Seventh Sacrament nc-5

by David Hewson

  * * *

  He was scarcely conscious when the boy fled. He had barely recovered his senses when she scolded him for his fury and his threats, told him to stay inside, where none of his victims could see him.

  When he came to, he scarcely thought about the fact she’d struck him, that they’d been seen, locked together against the wall, their secret captured, stolen.

  “Alessio,” he groaned, eyes scanning the chamber anxiously.

  It was all so easy.

  “Those stupid students took him,” Judith said quickly. “They’re terrified of you, Giorgio. Leave this to me. I’ll talk to them. They’ll keep quiet. I’ll find Alessio. Stay here. Don’t worry.”

  She could find somewhere to keep the child for a day. Perhaps more. A lesson would be delivered. A bargain would be struck. It was, too, though not the one either of them expected. Giorgio’s fury, and the way it sparked such an unpredictable chain of events, saw to that. But by the time Ludo Torchia was dead, everything had changed. Alessio could not be returned to the world, not without the destruction of everything she possessed. And Giorgio was gone, lost to her, through his own stupid arrogance, turning murderous and suicidal inside his own grief and guilt and overweening self-hatred.

  There was no going back. Not when he asked, that first time in prison, for her help in tracking them down, one by bloody one. Not now, near the end, a conclusion he craved because only in that final act — the sacrifice of himself — would lie peace.

  And in his place, she found another. As Giorgio Bramante grew more bitter, more insane, in jail, his son flourished under her tutelage, from boy to youth to man, ever closer over time until he was hers completely, as she had been his father’s, bound together by the brutal force of her character, an icy devotion that made captives of them all.

  In her mind there was no hiatus in time between then and now, between the blood and sweat in a cave in Puglia and this end, the one he sought, the one she would deliver, in a way he had never expected, beneath the Roman earth. All was continuous, linked, cemented together by the same harsh inevitability born of the sinuous, brute passion that had once joined them.

  She waved the gun at them, the three men in black, the inspector, crouched, helpless, Giorgio, imploring, pathetic, hands outstretched.

  “He failed you,” she told his son, alarmed now, because there were more men arriving. Time was growing short. “He failed me. He is old and useless and wasted. Do it!”

  Judith Turnhouse allowed herself a single glance towards Alessio, tried to force the right emotions onto her face: power, resolution. It was all, in the end, a matter of will.

  “He came here to die,” she said quietly.

  She watched his rifle rise. Giorgio didn’t move. Then, from behind her, came a voice, distantly familiar.

  Judith Turnhouse racked her racing mind to place it.

  * * *

  “She killed Elisabetta.”

  Costa took two steps to place himself in front of Messina and Peroni, just an arm’s length away from the young man who gripped the machine pistol chest-high, ready, as he’d been taught.

  “Alessio?” he said. “Did you hear me? She killed Elisabetta Giordano. She couldn’t risk us finding out. You didn’t know that, did you? Alessio?”

  It was hard for Costa to suppress his shock. The figure in front of him looked so like Giorgio Bramante now: the same bold features, the same dark eyes. But there was a reluctance in the young man, an uncertainty, that his father had surely never felt. Alessio Bramante had been raised by strangers, kidnapped into a world that was utterly foreign to him. Then, when he became old enough, ensnared by the one who’d stolen him in the first place, introduced, while entering a semblance of adulthood, to a slavery that hoped to pass itself off as love.

  Giorgio Bramante fell to his knees. His hands came together in prayer. He stared up at his son, unable to speak, though some wordless plea for forgiveness seemed to shine out from his damp eyes.

  Judith Turnhouse turned the weapon to the rock ceiling and let loose a burst of gunfire. Dust and rock and debris rained down on their heads. Bramante didn’t cower. Nor did Costa.

  “Look at the weak old man!” she snarled. “Shoot him. Shoot him!”

  Bramante’s eyes couldn’t leave his son. His lips moved as if mumbling some unheard prayer.

  Then he said, simply, “Forgive me.”

  The woman cursed. Her weapon swung towards the figure on the ground. Gunfire ripped the cave, shells flying off the walls, ricocheting around them. Bramante’s torso shook in a bloody spasm as the shells tore at him.

  Costa had nearly reached her when Alessio fired. The raking line of gunfire ripped her body, lifting it on unseen hands, pitching her across the dismal chamber, onto the bare rock floor where she lay in a messy heap, a motionless, broken sack of humanity, when the weapon at last fell silent.

  A strange quiet descended on the cave. From the outside world came the sound of more men approaching. Lights flickered down the corridor, voices, some kind of reality.

  Peroni was on Alessio Bramante in an instant, wrenching the gun from his hands. It was scarcely necessary.

  Costa bent down to the woman. Judith Turnhouse stared at the dusty ceiling with dead eyes, a bloody gash the size of a child’s fist in her forehead. He straightened and went to Bramante. And to Alessio, down on his knees, grasping Giorgio’s hand.

  * * *

  A warm June day, in a world halfway between the living and the dead. Giorgio Bramante is the one crouching at the door of the mansion of the Cavalieri di Malta, eyes tight against the keyhole, straining to see down the avenue of cypresses, to gaze out over the Tiber, on to Michelangelo’s great dome, pale, magnificent, shimmering in the morning mist, a perennial ghost, always present, sometimes invisible.

  He takes a deep breath. This is difficult, painful.

  “Can you see it?” asks a voice that seems to come from everywhere: above, below, inside. A voice that is familiar, no longer lost in the dark bitter depths of spent memories. A voice that is warm and near and comforting.

  “Are you Alessio?” he asks, not recognising the cracked tones of his own voice.

  “I am,” the voice replies.

  Giorgio coughs. A warm salty liquid rises in his throat. A hand, strong, soft, grips his. He can discern little but shadows now, misty in the real world.

  “I was a poor father,” he gasps, voice breaking, and tries to look beyond the pool of darkness spreading like an inky cloud through the dusty, miasmic air.

  A distant shape is swimming in the mist ahead, beginning to take familiar form. He cannot see it fully yet. He feels no pain or any other sensation save the comfort of a young man’s warm fingers gripping his.

  “Are you truly Alessio?”

  “I told you. Can you see it?”

  “Yes,” Giorgio Bramante says, unsure whether he speaks these words or simply thinks them, “I see it. I see it. I see… ”

  Out of the darkness it grows, a vision across the river, beyond the trees, white and glorious, beckoning, filling him with joy and dread, racing to fill his fading sight.

  Epilogue

  She lay in the bright white room in the hospital in Orvieto feeling a constant, deep ache in her side, the strange, nagging hurt of something missing. It was some time since she’d recovered consciousness from the operation. Every fifteen minutes a nurse visited to check her condition, measuring her blood pressure, placing an electronic thermometer in her ear. On the stroke of the hour, marked by the booming cathedral clock, the doctor — Anna, she could think of her by no other name now — entered alone, closing the door behind her, then walking to the window to scold the children in the street. There was a group of them playing football, even at this late hour, shouting happily as they kicked the ball from wall to wall, the way children must have done here for generations, and would for generations to come.

  Anna seemed younger than when they’d first met that morning. Perhaps the operation had lifted someth
ing from her own shoulders. Perhaps it was simply the performance of medicine, the act of delivering some kind of remedy for a physical imperfection, that was a reward in itself.

  They went through the post-op conversation. She didn’t feel too bad at all. What was worst was the sense of guilt, of shameful relief. It felt as if something bad that lurked inside her had now been excised. Something that would, in a different set of circumstances, have become a child, one she and Nic had longed for. The juxtaposition of these two opposites would be difficult to shake from her head.

  Then came the details. She’d scarcely listened when the doctor had outlined the possibilities before. Now, there was no dismissing them. They’d performed a procedure called a salpingectomy, the removal of one of her Fallopian tubes by laparoscopy. The remaining tube was unharmed. Her chances of a successful pregnancy in the future were now reduced to somewhere above forty percent.

  “You won’t appreciate this yet,” Anna continued, “but you were very lucky. Had you not come to us when you did, it could have become extremely serious indeed. A few years ago this would have been a major abdominal operation, with considerable risk. We get a little better each year. Now, it is up to you.”

  “To do what?” she asked, puzzled.

  “To learn to deal with what has happened. You’ve lost a child, and the fact it was an unborn one, with no possible hope of survival, does not make it any less difficult to bear. That is how we are made. It is part of the process of trying to be a parent. Being a strong, young, intelligent woman, you will tell yourself this is really nothing at all. Just one of life’s mishaps. You will merely leave here, put it in the past, go back to your young man and start all over again. Which you will, I feel sure. But you will also feel anxiety and resentment and bewilderment that such a cruel thing could happen, to you of all people. That’s natural, Emily. Feel free to come here and talk to me if it helps. Any time. Orvieto isn’t far from Rome. You can always phone.”

  Emily smiled. There was something in the older woman’s manner — a simple, unspoken sentence, “I understand” — that made her feel a little better already.

  “You’re getting married in the summer,” Anna added. “That would be a good time to start thinking of trying again. Here’s a suggestion from a stuffy, old-fashioned, rural Catholic. Life is a journey, not a race, Emily. Be patient. Be a rebel for your generation. Try bearing a child in wedlock. I suggest you discuss this with your uncle. He can’t wait to come in. If that’s all right with you.”

  Emily shook her head. “My uncle?”

  Anna’s bright eyes flared with sudden outrage. “I knew that old goat lied! Messina swore you were his niece! The daughter of some American relative of his. How else do you think you got a private room?”

  “Ah,” Emily said quietly. “My uncle. I’d love to see him.”

  * * *

  It was inevitable that, after the brief medical formalities — he already appeared to understand as much about her condition as she did — the conversation would turn inexorably to what had happened in Rome.

  Arturo Messina explained what he knew — which seemed considerable — with the precise, composed directness she expected of a man of his background and experience. When he was done, he turned his face away from her and stared into the street outside, now dark, with just a single lamp to illuminate the old walls of the convent opposite, the night punctuated again by the continuing echo of ball against brick, and the distant laughter of the young.

  “A woman’s anger is different from a man’s,” Arturo said. “We find ourselves gripped by a sudden, cataclysmic fury. With a woman, anger lasts. Had I discovered what had happened to that boy when I should have, none of this would have occurred.”

  She reached out and took his hand. He looked weary and old.

  “You could say that about so many things, Arturo. If Bramante had been a better father, if he’d been capable of controlling his temper and his weaknesses. If this woman had come to her senses over the years, instead of letting her hatred grow alongside his.”

  “None of these would have mattered if I’d found him,” he said immediately.

  “No. But we’re not perfect, none of us. You did what you thought best. What else could you do?”

  He nodded and said nothing, although she could sense his dissatisfaction.

  “And Alessio?” she asked. “What will happen to him?”

  He shrugged, as if there were few options to be considered. “The lawyers will run up some tidy bills about that. The charge, I imagine, will be an accessory to attempted suicide. The woman’s death could be construed as self-defence. He had nothing to do with the other killings, or so he says, and Leo seems to believe him, so it must be true.”

  Arturo paused and looked down at her.

  “What about the boy Giorgio first killed? Ludo Torchia?”

  He grimaced. “Torchia was no boy.”

  “Then why didn’t he tell you the truth? It would have been so simple….”

  Arturo Messina laughed and squeezed her hand. “You know, you really do belong in a police force somewhere,” he observed. “You tell me.”

  She considered the possibilities.

  “Because he was just a boy. What Ludo was looking for was adulthood, and he believed the only way to find it was through some ritual. Any ritual. It was simply that Giorgio provided a convenient one. A ritual that bound them together, in some kind of implicit secrecy Torchia felt he couldn’t break. Not even in circumstances like those.”

  Arturo nodded.

  “Especially in circumstances like that, don’t you think?” Emily continued. “When is a warrior most tested? In extremis. It makes no sense, not in our world. But it’s not for us to appreciate what they believe. All that matters is that it was real to those concerned. Ludo was terribly flawed. I imagine little else was real to him. He told Giorgio the truth. That he’d no idea what had happened to Alessio. Giorgio didn’t believe him. And so he killed him.”

  Arturo Messina’s face fell. “Nor did I.”

  “At least Leo wasn’t hurt,” she said, hunting for some news with which to console him.

  “More by luck than anything. I don’t imagine Bramante much cared whether Leo was harmed or not. He simply wished to enrage the police sufficiently to engineer the end he wanted, once his labours — if I may describe them that way — were complete.” He shook his head. “Lord knows, he tried hard to drive my son to want him dead. Entering the Questura like that. Abducting Leo. Doing what he did to that poor young policewoman.”

  “They were insane. The Turnhouse woman and Bramante.”

  “He was, perhaps,” he replied. “If you count being simultaneously homicidal and suicidal as madness, and there I’m not sure. In his own mind, I imagine Giorgio felt himself to be as sane as the rest of us. As to the woman… no. She wished to inflict upon the man who had failed her the greatest pain imaginable. After all, she could have discouraged him in this pointless cycle of revenge when he was in jail, instead of becoming his accomplice. She certainly understood that if you condition a child, if you make it think there is only one possible view of the world, the one which you present to it, then the poor soul will do anything. Anything. Even murder its own father. You asked why Alessio would believe these stories. Because they came from her. And because they were the only stories he had.”

  “But she was wrong, Arturo,” Emily pointed out. “In the end, he wouldn’t kill his father.”

  He leaned over to the bed and peered into her face. “That is true. Nevertheless, I should tell you something. I was a good police officer for many a year, and a poor commissario only once. Judith Turnhouse did not simply want Alessio to shoot his father. She wanted Giorgio to understand two things before he died. That his son still lived and would bring about his own end. And that she had taken him. Both as a child and as a man. As a lover, if one can call it that. Perhaps she treated Alessio the way Giorgio had once treated her. Need I say more?”

  “But…” she sta
rted to object, and found she lacked the words.

  “We call this insanity only because we’re afraid to see it for what it truly is,” Arturo insisted. “A perversion, a monstrous perversion, of the emotions we all feel and desperately hope to suppress. Loss and rejection. Hatred and revenge. She was obsessive, cunning, and fixated. But she was not insane. We should not allow ourselves the comfort of thinking that.”

  Arturo eyed the clock on the wall. “Your young man will be here very soon, I think. I would have brought flowers but I didn’t want to steal his thunder. He will feel guilty. He will believe he neglected you at a time when you most needed him.”

  “That’s not true,” she answered. “I never told Nic what was happening here. I didn’t want to distract him. Anyway, there was nothing he could do. And plenty he could — and did — achieve in Rome.”

  Arturo Messina seemed to approve of that answer.

  “Listen to an old man,” he told her. “We are human. We are designed to think with the head and with the heart. Ignore one and the other will fail you, too. Talk to Nic, my dear. Listen to him. Make sure he does the same with you. It is at moments like these that families go wrong. I speak from experience. The fissures, the doubts, the guilty unspoken fears… these enter our lives unseen only to surface years later, like old wounds we thought we’d forgotten. Be wary, my young friend. Both of you. Once you allow these creatures to breathe, they can be hard to smother. After a time… impossible perhaps. Raffaella Arcangelo and Leo Falcone must be thinking these same thoughts themselves. She is determined to see him, you know. However embarrassed he might be over that stupid phone call.”

  “Of course she wants to see him. She loves him!”

  “Well, love isn’t everything,” he grumbled. “Giorgio loved Alessio. That didn’t make him a good father. Without a little more — work, application, intent — it is insufficient. Leo and that poor woman. I don’t know…”