The Seventh Sacrament (16 page)

He was angry and confused, uncertain of himself, disturbed at being lost in these caves. But he wasn’t frightened.

“I know what this is,” he added. “It’s a…game.”

Then he jerked his hands out of his pockets. An object fell to the floor. Ludo Torchia reached down and picked up a pair of toy glasses. The kid didn’t complain. Torchia looked through them for a moment, saw the room, the people in it, multiplied many times over. There was something unnerving about the sight. He stuffed the glasses into his pocket.

“It’s just a game,” Torchia agreed. “But a very important one.”

They were all quiet, even Dino Abati. The scent of opportunity was in the air, and even the most stupid of them surely understood that. Each knew what would happen if Bramante found them there. Suspension. Expulsion. Disgrace. The end of their time at university.

“So what do we do now?” Dino Abati demanded.

Torchia picked up one of the flashlights and walked to the door. To the left the corridor ran slightly downhill, working its way further into the rock, further beneath the earth. A labyrinth lay ahead of them, a spidery maze of possibilities among the narrow channels cut into the soft stone. Very few of them, it occurred to Torchia, explored.

Alessio Bramante was by his side for some reason.

“Now we play,” Torchia answered.

He grasped the boy’s hand and tugged him down the corridor, down towards the darkness.

F
ALCONE TOLD ROSA PRABAKARAN TO FIND A DRIVER.

“I don’t know drivers,” she confessed.

“See that big sovrintendente from uniform? The one looking as if he’s ready to sneak off for a cigarette?”

“Taccone,” she said. “I think.”

“Taccone. You’re right. I thought you didn’t know any drivers.”

“Sometimes I seem to know more than I remember at first.”

“I sympathise,” he said dryly.

“Sorry. You’ve got more reason. They said you nearly died.”

“They say all kinds of things about me. Tell Taccone to bring the car round. We’re paying someone a visit.”

“Who?”

“Someone you’ve met already. Someone I last met years ago. Beatrice Bramante.”

He saw the expression of concern on Rosa’s face.

“Don’t worry,” Falcone told her. “I’ll try to be gentle.”

BEATRICE BRAMANTE
lived in one of the big tenement blocks in Mastro Giorgio, five minutes away. These apartments were part of the area’s history, built about a century before, tiny homes set around central courtyards joined by hanging walkways, several hundred little boxes in which the population of an urban hamlet lived cheek by jowl. In the old days, when Testaccio was one of the poorest neighbourhoods of Rome, the homes were so crowded some people slept permanently on the walkways. The area had come up in the world over the years, a little anyway. There were no bodies on makeshift mattresses anymore. Some of the properties were even in private ownership, and fetching rising prices on the extortionate Roman housing market. But most remained rented, home to a mixed population of locals, immigrants, and students, all looking for a cheap place to stay.

Falcone tried to recall the Bramantes’ house on the Aventino. It was a substantial family villa, a little worn at the edges. But the property must have been worth a fortune even then, with its position on the hill, looking back towards the Circus Maximus, a sizable garden, and an isolated aspect, a good fifty metres away from adjoining houses on both sides.

As his finger hovered over the bell on the door of the tiny apartment, he realised how much Beatrice Bramante had come down in the world. Her son’s disappearance—the logical, police inspector’s part of Falcone’s mind refused to use the label “death” without firm proof—was like every case involving a lost child he’d ever dealt with. The ripples, the effects, the subsidiary tragedies, took years to become wholly visible. Entire lifetimes, perhaps. Sometimes, Falcone thought, perhaps even years weren’t long enough to reveal the whole story, the full catalogue of pain and darkness.

The door opened. For a moment, he didn’t recognise the face there. She’d aged considerably. Beatrice Bramante’s hair was as long as ever, but it was no longer dark and glossy. Entirely grey, it hung lank and loose around her shoulders. She wore a threadbare blue cardigan pulled tight around her skinny frame, with long sleeves clutched into her palms. The long, intelligent, attractive face he remembered was now lined. Bitterness had taken the place of the grief-stricken bewilderment he remembered from a decade ago.

It took her a moment to realise who he was. Then an unmistakable flame of hatred sparked in her dark eyes.

“What do you want?” she asked through gritted teeth. Her eyes flicked over Rosa and Taccone. “I have nothing to say to you, Falcone. Nothing at all.”

“Your husband—”

“My former husband!”

He nodded. “Your former husband killed someone yesterday. We’re coming to believe he’s killed before. This morning I think he may have made an attempt to murder me.”

“None of this is my business. None…”

“Signora,” Rosa Prabakaran said suddenly, “I’m sorry. This is all my fault. I should never have come here on my own this morning. It was wrong of me. Please. You must say what you have to say in the presence of these officers. Then we will go, I promise you.”

The woman didn’t move. She stood there, a stiff, furious figure. Leo Falcone glanced behind her. The little room seemed full of canvases, large and small, on the walls, parked against cupboards, everywhere.

“You still paint?” he observed. “I should have expected that.”

There was just one subject on every canvas he could see. A pretty young face with bright, shining eyes staring out from the painting, challenging everything he saw, asking some question the viewer could only guess at.

“I have to find Giorgio before he can do more harm,” Falcone added. “I would like to put Alessio’s case to rest for good too. We couldn’t do that before. There was too much…”—he hunted for the word—“…noise. Much of it regrettable. Now I’d like to find out what happened to him, once and for all. With your permission…”

She said something Falcone couldn’t catch, though perhaps it was simply a mumbled curse. Then she swung the door wide, with what seemed to him a marked unwillingness.

“Thank you,” Falcone said, and beckoned Rosa Prabakaran to go in first.

B
EATRICE BRAMANTE EXCUSED HERSELF AND WENT TO
the bathroom. Falcone, Rosa Prabakaran, and Taccone sat tightly together on the small, hard sofa next to a tiny dining table. They could see into the adjoining bedroom and the dark open courtyard beyond. The entire apartment was smaller than the living room Falcone recalled from the Bramante house on the Aventino.

“You never mentioned the paintings, Agente,” he said quietly, trying to stifle the note of reproach in his voice.

“They weren’t here,” Rosa replied, unable to take her eyes off the single face in front of them, multiplied over and over again, always with that same querulous expression.

“No,” she corrected herself. “They were here. I saw some things piled up in the corner. But they weren’t out like this. I guess my visit brought back some memories.”

Falcone sighed, exasperated at the way the young were so anxious to make up their minds. Then Beatrice Bramante returned. Carefully, with more tact than he would have possessed a decade before, he led her through all the points she’d covered that morning with the overzealous Rosa. The woman answered each question without hesitation, unemotionally, with the same kind of matter-of-fact attitude her husband had adopted after Alessio’s disappearance. Falcone reminded himself that at the time they had appeared to be a close couple.

“What do you do these days?” he asked.

“I work part-time at a kindergarten. I paint a little. Just for me. Not for anyone else.”

He looked around the apartment. “I’m sorry. I have to ask. Why are you living here? Why not the Aventino?”

“Lawyers cost,” she replied flatly.

“But Giorgio pleaded guilty. There was no trial.”

“That was his choice. I tried to persuade him to argue. I spent most of the money I had on lawyers who thought they could change his mind. We had a lot of debt on that place anyway. Besides, with him gone, with Alessio gone…”—the dark eyes shone accusingly at him from underneath the silver mess of hair—“it wasn’t a home for a single woman.”

Falcone nodded. “And you divorced. Do you mind my asking…was that Giorgio’s idea or yours?”

“I mind, but if it’ll get you out of here more quickly, you can have your answer. It was Giorgio’s. I used to visit him in prison, once a week, every Friday. It didn’t seem to make much difference to him. One day, after a year or so, he told me he wanted a divorce.”

“And you agreed?” Rosa asked, leaning forward a little.

“You don’t know Giorgio,” Beatrice answered, gripping the sleeves of her cardigan tightly. “When his mind’s made up…”

Falcone’s eyes were fixed on the paintings that crowded the room. Some, it seemed to him, were recent. One, of the boy in his school uniform, seemed to be painted from life. Unlike the rest, it had no tragedy welling up beneath a sea of frozen, frenzied oils.

“You have some more paintings of Alessio,” he said, and it wasn’t a question.

Her face tightened with anxiety. “I do?”

“Well, you seem to prefer the one subject. Do you mind…?”

He walked into the tiny bedroom. It was a shambles. More canvases were propped beneath the window, face to the wall. He turned over the first three, then stopped. The first few were of Alessio. But as he would have been. When he was ten or twelve. But this one was different. In this painting, he was almost a man, with an expression on his face that was serious, almost cold. The same look Falcone had seen in his father.

One curious point struck him. In all of the works, including the adult one, Alessio was wearing a T-shirt like the kind found in the Piccolo Museo, one bearing the same logo: a seven-pointed star.

Falcone returned to the sofa. Beatrice hadn’t moved.

“I never had children, never even thought about it, to be honest,” he admitted. “It’s only natural in the circumstances to want to imagine how they would grow up.”

“Natural?” She echoed his words with a hard, sarcastic edge.

“What’s that symbol? The one with the stars. It seems important to you.”

She shrugged. “Not really. Giorgio had me design it for the school. The stars come from Mithraism. Giorgio was a little…obsessed with his work sometimes. It spilled over into the rest of our lives.”

“Was he unfaithful?” Falcone asked abruptly, aware of the young policewoman’s sharp intake of breath next to him.

Beatrice Bramante stared at her hands. Then she shook her head, saying nothing.

“Were you?” Falcone pressed.

Again, she was silent.

“I’m sorry,” Falcone said, after a moment. “These are standard questions. We should have asked them years ago, but somehow the occasion never arose.”

She stared up at him, her face creased with hate. “So why ask them now? Do you enjoy torturing me?”

“I’m just trying to understand.”

“We were an ordinary family until that day. No affairs. No secrets.”

“And yet Giorgio took Alessio down into that place,” he replied. “You didn’t know he’d done that. I know you never said that to us at the time. And I didn’t pursue it. You had enough to deal with. But you didn’t know. It was obvious you didn’t understand either. At least, that’s what I thought.”

“What is it you want from me? I ask myself that question every day. Every morning. Every night. What if I’d taken him to school instead? What if he’d been sick? Or gone in a different direction? When you lose a child, Falcone, a part of you never stops playing that awful game.”

The big sovrintendente shuffled next to Rosa, glanced at Falcone as if wondering whether he was allowed to intervene, then spoke anyway.

“And what if they’d turned the wrong corner and found some idiot drunk coming up the street, with his car on the wrong side of the road?” Taccone asked. “We’re police, signora. We hear people going through that kind of agony every day. It’s understandable. But it’s pointless too.”