The Seventh Sacrament (35 page)

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.

U
NAWARE 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.

T
HEY’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.