The Seventh Sacrament (15 page)

I
T WAS GETTING DARK BY THE TIME FALCONE FINISHED AT
Santa Maria dell’Assunta. Perhaps it was age or his convalescent state. Whatever the reason, Falcone found he had, for the first time, to make a conscious effort to list on a notepad what had to be done in order to make sure all the threads stayed in the head. There were many—some from the present, some from the past. And practical considerations, too. Falcone had sent an officer to his apartment to fetch some personal things for the enforced stay inside the Questura. Then he’d ordered copies of the most important Bramante files to be e-mailed to the Orvieto Questura, printed out, with a covering note he’d dictated, and sent to await the arrival of Emily Deacon at the house of Bruno Messina’s father. Cold cases—and too many aspects of this were cold—required an outside eye. Emily had the analytical mind of a former FBI agent. She also had no personal ties to what had happened fifteen years before.

The one person who wouldn’t be pleased was Nic Costa. Falcone felt he could live with that.

After despatching those commands, he’d made several careful walks around the crypt, thinking about Giorgio Bramante, trying to remember the man, trying to begin to understand why he would return to this place, so close to his family home, to perform such a barbaric act.

Remembering wasn’t easy. What he’d told Messina was true. Bramante had offered them nothing after his arrest, nothing except an immediate admission of guilt and a pair of hands held out for the cuffs. The man never tried to find excuses, never sought some legal loophole to escape the charges.

It was almost as if he were in control throughout. Bramante was the one who’d called the police to the dig on the Aventino when his son went missing. He had readily acceded when Bruno Messina’s father had allowed him the chance to talk to Ludo Torchia alone.

Falcone remembered the aftermath of that decision: the student’s screams, getting louder and more desperate with every passing minute, as Bramante punched and kicked him around the little temporary cell, in a dark, deserted subterranean corner of the Questura, a place where only a man told to sit directly outside would hear. Those sounds would stay with Leo Falcone always, but the memory offered him nothing, no insight, no glimpse into Giorgio Bramante’s head whatsoever.

The man was an intelligent, cultured academic, someone respected internationally, as the support Bramante gained when he came to court demonstrated. Without an apparent second thought he had turned into a brutal animal, ready to bludgeon a fellow human being to death. Why?

Because he believed Ludo Torchia had killed his son. Or, more accurately, that Torchia knew where the seven-year-old Alessio was, possibly still alive, and refused, in spite of the beating, to tell.

Falcone thought of what Peroni said.
Any father would have felt that way.

Falcone had listened to those screams for the best part of an hour. If he’d not intervened, they would have gone on until Torchia died in the cell. It hadn’t been a desperate outburst of fury. Bramante had methodically pummelled Ludo Torchia into oblivion, with a deliberate, savage precision that defied comprehension.

A memory surfaced. After Torchia was pronounced dead, when the Questura was in an almighty panic wondering how to cope, Falcone had found the presence to think about Giorgio Bramante’s physical condition and asked to see his hands. His knuckles were bleeding, the flesh torn off by the force of the blows he’d rained down on Torchia. On a couple of fingers, bone was visible. He’d needed stitches, serious and immediate treatment. Weeks later his lawyers had quite deliberately removed the bandages from his hands for each court appearance, replacing them with skin-coloured plasters, trying to make sure the public never saw another side to the man the papers were lauding, day in day out. The father who did what any father would have done…

“I don’t think so,” Falcone murmured.

“Sir?”

He’d forgotten the woman was still around, seated in a dark corner of the van, awaiting instructions. Rosa Prabakaran had, somewhat to Falcone’s surprise, earned his approval after Teresa Lupo talked her back onto the case. The girl was quick, had a good memory, and didn’t ask stupid questions. In the space of a couple of hours, she’d touched base on several important points, most importantly in liaising with intelligence to see what else could be gleaned from existing records. There was little there. Dino Abati had left Italy a month after Bramante went to jail, abandoning what had been a promising academic career. Perhaps Giorgio Bramante had tracked him down somewhere already, found him in the dark, done what he felt was right in the circumstances. Falcone wondered if they’d ever know.

Focus.

He’d lost count of how many times he’d said that word to a young officer struggling to come to terms with an overload of information, a succession of half-possibilities just visible in the shadows. Now Leo Falcone knew he needed to heed his own advice. He was out of practice. His brain hadn’t worked right since he’d been shot. Everything took time. The delightful presence of Raffaella Arcangelo had clouded his judgement, made him forget what kind of man he was, how much he’d been missing work all along. It was time to put matters right.

He looked at Rosa Prabakaran. “Make sure intelligence keeps looking. They’ve got to have more than this.”

She nodded. “How do we find him?”

It was such an obvious question. The kind you got from beginners. Falcone felt oddly pleased to hear it.

“Probably we don’t. He finds us. Giorgio Bramante is looking for something or someone. That’s the only thing that will make him visible. When he’s not looking, he’s probably untouchable. He’s too clever to have left any obvious tracks. To stay with people he knows.”

He thought about what she’d said earlier.

“If he’s got all that equipment, I rather imagine he’s in a cave somewhere. Bramante knows subterranean Rome better than just about anyone in the city. He could be somewhere different every night and we wouldn’t have a clue.”

“You mean there’s nothing we can do? Except wait?”

“Not at all! We work harder to understand the information we have. We see what else we can find out there. We cover all the proper bases. But to be honest, I don’t see routine trapping a man like that. Routine works for ordinary criminals. Giorgio Bramante is anything but ordinary. The one consolation is that, as far as we know, there’s no one else in the city on his hit list.”

“Except you,” she said, then remembered to add, “sir.”

“So it would seem,” he agreed with a polite nod of the head.

D
INO ABATI WAS CONSCIOUS AGAIN, LEANING AGAINST
the altarpiece, looking a little woozy. He pressed a handkerchief to his head. There wasn’t too much blood there, just a couple of trickles working down from his scalp, matting his red hair against the pale skin of his forehead. He’d survive. Maybe, Torchia thought, he’d learn. That’s what it was all about. The cult. The rituals that happened here. Men learned what it took to make them good in the eyes of their peers, to prepare them for the rigours of life. Obedience. Duty. Self-sacrifice. But obedience above all. That came easy to some people. No one else in the temple had dared challenge him when he attacked Abati. No one questioned anymore why they were here.

Not after he had told them, quite simply, but with a firmness that couldn’t be misinterpreted, “We find the bird. We kill it. We swear on its blood we never tell anyone else about what happened. Then it’s done. We don’t mention this again to anyone. Ever. Understood?”

Andrea Guerino and Raul Bellucci were still out there, somewhere in the warren of corridors, trying to do his bidding. Abati would cause no more trouble. Sandro Vignola was back on his knees peering at the inscriptions on the stonework, openmouthed, looking idiotic, still aghast at what they’d found: an underground shrine to a long-lost god, one despoiled by Constantine’s Christians at the moment of their victory.

And then there was that other voice.

“How are you going to kill the bird?” LaMarca asked.

Torchia had researched that, just to make sure. This was a ritual, for him, even if the rest were just going along with what he wanted, out of fear, out of survival. Rituals had to be enacted correctly, with precision. Otherwise they could rebound on those who performed them. Make the god angry, not satisfied.

“I hold it over the altar and cut its throat.” He pulled out the penknife from his pocket. “With this.”

LaMarca’s eyes glistened under the light of the big lantern Abati had brought and placed on the ground, scattering its weak rays in all directions.

“We visited this farm in Sicily once. Out in the middle of nowhere. And one day I see this kid in the farmyard. No more than six or seven. They sent him out to get a chicken. He just chases one, picks it up by the legs”—LaMarca was mimicking the actions now, stooping and waving his arm—“and he’s swinging it like this. Around and around. Like it’s a toy. And you know what happens in the end?”

“Tell me.”

“The fucking head comes clean off! I’m not kidding you…. He swung it so hard.”

Toni LaMarca couldn’t handle drink or dope. He was utterly stoned, a fact Torchia registered in case it came in useful.

“One moment the chicken’s going round and round, squawking like it’s furious or something. Next, the head flies straight off and there’s nothing there but a neck and it’s…” Something clouded over his face for a moment, some forgotten image that had been prodded out of its slumber by the drug. “…pumping blood. Like a little fountain. Pumping away. Not for long. We had it for supper.
They
had it. I didn’t feel so hungry.”

Dino Abati took away the cloth from his head and said, “These caves are dangerous. We shouldn’t be here.”

“When…the…chicken’s…dead…” Toni LaMarca said with the slow, difficult precision of the stoned, prodding Abati with his foot, then he began to giggle stupidly.

“Don’t touch me, Toni,” Abati said calmly.

LaMarca backed away.

“We’ll go,” Torchia repeated, “when we’re done.”

Abati shook his head and went back to dabbing it with the handkerchief. “If Giorgio hears of this…”

“Leave Giorgio out of it,” Torchia snapped.

He thought he could hear footsteps coming down the corridor outside now, approaching. Something about the nature of the sound made him uneasy. The others fell quiet too.

“Ludo…” Abati was beginning to say.

Then Bellucci marched in, grinning like a moron. He had the black cockerel in his arms, cuddling it like a pet. The bird turned its neck with a mechanical precision and let out a low, puzzled complaint.

Andrea Guerino was behind Bellucci, pushing a small child, a young boy Ludo Torchia recognised, though it took him a moment to remember how. It was the party the previous Christmas, when students were invited to meet staff and their families, in a garishly decorated room—he didn’t believe Giorgio could be part of such crass Christian foolishness—in the building in the Piazza dei Cavalieri di Malta.

The young Alessio Bramante had been there, staring at them all resentfully, as if there were something in their age he envied.

“Jesus Christ,” Abati murmured, and clawed his way to his feet. “That’s it, Ludo. Time to go and meet the man.”

“What are you doing here?” the boy yelled at them angrily, struggling to get out of the strong arms that held him tight. “This is a secret. When my father finds out—”

Guerino seized his long hair and pulled it until he stopped yammering.

“Where’s your father, Alessio?” Torchia asked the boy.

“Here.” An odd expression crossed his face. Furtive. Some memory had stirred, some idea in the child’s head had brought the blood to his cheeks. “Somewhere. Don’t you know that?”