The Seventh Sacrament (24 page)

Messina glared at them from across the polished desk.

“I’ll remember this, you bastards,” he muttered, furious. “Forty-eight hours, Falcone. After that, it’s not Giorgio Bramante you have to worry about. It’s me.”

T
HEY HAD BREAKFAST IN THE CONSERVATORY: COFFEE
and pastries, and a view out to the Duomo. The weather had changed. Rain clouds had thrown a grey-winged embrace around the hilltop town of Orvieto. There would be no walks today, as Arturo and Pietro had planned. Instead Emily would rest, and think about the case a little. Not too much, though. She still felt tired, a little wrong, and it wasn’t just being disturbed by Nic’s call and the frenzy that followed. She hadn’t gone to bed until three, which was how long it had taken to discover he was safe. Even then she hadn’t slept well. She couldn’t stop thinking of the missing Alessio Bramante, wondering whether Nic’s customary optimism could possibly be correct. Instinct told her the opposite. Instinct was sometimes to be avoided.

Pietro had stayed the night at the villa. He looked a little the worse for wear. So did Raffaella; Emily had retired to a corner with a coffee and a newspaper after a brief conversation with them, an exchange of pleasantries, a question about Emily’s health, a mutual sharing of observations about the predictable nature of men. In spite of the commotion in the Questura, Falcone had never phoned. Nor had he returned Raffaella’s call when, in desperation, she had attempted to reach him around two. Emily had tried to tell her he’d be busy. It hadn’t cut much ice. It hadn’t deserved to.

Then, after Arturo and Pietro had carefully tidied away the cups and plates, Emily retreated to the study, fired up the computer, spent thirty minutes reading the American papers online: the
Washington Post,
the
New York Times.
Familiar pillars she could lean on, established icons that never changed, were always there when you needed them. It wasn’t the news she sought. Emily Deacon had spent more of her life in Italy than in her native America. All the same, she knew she wasn’t fully a part of the country she was coming to regard as her home. She lacked the true Roman’s frank, open, immediate attitude to existence. She didn’t want to face the good and the bad head-on, day in, day out. Sometimes it was best to circumvent the subject, to pretend it didn’t exist. To lie a little, in the hope that sometime soon, tomorrow perhaps, next week, or maybe even never, one could hope to stare the day down without blinking.

And so she read idly, of a world of politics that was now foreign to her, of football games and movie stars, bestsellers she’d never heard of, and corporate scandals that mattered not a jot in Italy. After a while Arturo Messina came in with coffee, which she refused. He sat down in the large, comfy leather chair at the end of the desk, took a sip of his own, and said, very politely, “You’re using too much of my electricity, Emily. Unless you tell me that’s something other than Alessio Bramante you’re hunting on my computer, I will, I swear, turn the damn thing off.”

“I was reading about the New York Mets,” she said, and it was only half a lie. She’d been about to follow up on Nic’s comments about what happened to abducted children, and how they were absorbed by the alien culture in which they found themselves. “But I’m done.”

She leaned back, shut her eyes, and took a deep breath. It would be a long day, with very little to fill it.

“I talked to your Nic last night,” Arturo revealed. “He’s a little concerned about your health. I didn’t realise…” He nodded in the direction of Emily’s stomach. “Congratulations. In my day we had this antiquated habit of getting married first, then bringing the babies along a little later. But I am, of course, part dinosaur, so what do I know?

“It’s the biggest adventure a couple can take together,” he went on. “Whatever it costs. However painful it is at times, and it will be, I can promise you that. Children give you more than you can possibly imagine. They bring you back down to earth, and make you realise that’s the right place to be. When you watch them growing, day by day, you understand we’re all just small and mortal and we’d best make the most of what we have. You realise we’re all just here for a little time, and now you have someone to whom you can pass on a little of yourself before you go. So you lose a few shreds of your arrogance if you’re lucky. You’re not the same person anymore.”

“People tell me that.”

“But you don’t understand yet. None of us ever do. Not till it happens. And then…” A shadow of concern crossed his face. “Then you can’t see the world in any other way,” he continued. “This is, I suspect, a failing in a police officer. Emily, I don’t want to talk about the case if it upsets you. It’s a very serious affair. I’ve asked the local police to put an armed car on the gate here. I don’t want you to feel insecure for any reason. Or unhappy. Just read a book. I’ll fetch something from town if you like. I can probably get you a real American paper.”

She stared at the distant black and white cathedral, shining under the drenching rain. Then she said, “He wouldn’t come here, Arturo. This is about Rome. He’s playing out his final act. He wouldn’t want it anywhere else.”

He laughed. “I can see why Leo sent you the files. I wish I’d had someone like you around all those years ago.”

“You had Leo.”

“I know,” he replied, with obvious regret. “And I was very hard on him. Cruel. I don’t think that’s too strong a word. He brought that out in me. Few people do. But Leo was so damned resolute. As if none of it really touched him. To him, it was just another case. He can be so…infuriating. With that cold, detached manner of his.”

“That’s not the real Leo. He’s a considerate man at heart. He feels the need to suppress that sometimes. I don’t know why.”

Arturo raised one bushy eyebrow. “I‘ll take your word on that. All the same, I owe him an apology. I keep thinking of what happened then. The stupid, bullheaded way I handled everything. I should have listened to him more. But…”

He didn’t finish the sentence.

“But what?”

“I told you! I was a father too. Like Bramante. Leo wasn’t. He and I were two human beings looking at the same facts from very different parts of the universe. All I could think of was Alessio Bramante, somewhere inside that blasted hill. Hurt perhaps. Unconscious. Capable of being rescued, and that is what any father would hope to do in those circumstances. It’s something genetic that leaps out from under your skin. Save the child. Always save the child, and ask questions later. Everything else was just a side issue. Leo has this insufferable ability to detach himself from the emotional side of a case. I resented that.”

He dashed back the last of his coffee.

“And I envied it, to be honest,” he added. “Leo was right. I was wrong. I knew that back then but I was too stubborn to admit it. We should have been asking a lot more while we were trying to find Alessio. But Giorgio Bramante was a good man, a well-connected, middle-class university professor. And they were a bunch of grubby, dope-smoking students. It all seemed so obvious. I was a fool.”

Emily reached over and touched his hand. Something seemed to stir inside her at that moment. A warm feeling below the pit of her stomach. It was impossible to tell whether the sensation was good or bad, pleasure or pain.

“Arturo, we don’t know what happened. Perhaps those students did kill Alessio. Accidentally, maybe. Those caves were dangerous. Perhaps the child simply escaped them and fell down some hole. And they were too frightened to admit their part in it all. Or…”

Nic’s idea wouldn’t leave her, and it wasn’t just because its very substance was so typical of his character, such a telling reminder of why she loved him.

“…or perhaps he’s still alive.”

He glanced at her, then his eyes meandered to the window, but not before she detected the sadness in them.

“He’s not alive, Emily. Don’t fool yourself.”

“We don’t know,” she insisted. “We’re in the dark about so many things. Why the boy was there in the first place. Why Bramante left him. The truth is we don’t understand much of anything about that man.”

“That’s true.” Arturo admitted it miserably.

“Even now,” she went on. “Where the hell is he? He must have access to equipment. To money. To the news. But I can’t believe he’s holed up in some apartment somewhere. It would be too dangerous, and Giorgio Bramante isn’t a man who’ll take unnecessary risks. Not when he thinks he’s got unfinished business.”

He brightened immediately.

“Come, come. It’s obvious where Giorgio is.”

“It is?”

“Of course! He spent most of his life in the Rome the rest of us never see. Underground. Have you never been there?”

“Only once. I went to Nero’s Golden House. It made me claustrophobic.”

“Ha! Let an old policeman tell you something. The Domus Aurea is just one tiny fraction of what’s left. There’s an entire underground city down there, almost as big as it was in Caesar’s day. There are houses and temples, entire streets. Some of them have been excavated. Some of them were just never fully filled with earth for some reason. I talked to a couple of the cavers Leo called in. They hero-worshipped Giorgio. The man had been to places the rest of them could only dream about. Half of them unmapped. That’s where he is, Emily. Not that it does us any good now, does it? If we wanted to find Giorgio today, the best person to ask would be…Giorgio! Wonderful.”

She thought about this, and the stirring in her stomach ceased. She asked, “I imagine you never put much store in forensic evidence, did you?”

“Not unless I was really desperate,” he admitted. “That’s all they think of these days, isn’t it? Sitting around waiting for some civilian in a white coat to stare at a test tube, then point at a suspect lineup and say, ‘That one.’ Use science if you have to. But crimes are committed by people. If you want answers, ask a human being. Not a computer.”

“I have a pathologist friend you should meet. She half agrees with you.”

“She does?”

“I said ‘half.’ Now may I make a call?”

Arturo Messina passed over the handset, then, out of idle curiosity, plugged in the conference phone too.

He listened to the brief, lucid, and highly pointed conversation that followed. Then he observed, “I would like to meet this Dr. Lupo sometime, Emily. You should rest now. We men here must think about lunch.”

T
HE PREVAILING WIND HAD CHANGED DIRECTION OVERNIGHT
. Now it was a strong, blustery westerly drawing moisture and a bone-chilling cold from the grey, flat waters of the Mediterranean before rolling over the airport and the flat lands of the estuarial Tiber to form a heavy black blanket of cloud which killed the light, casting the city in a monotone shade of grey.

They were standing in the Piazza dei Cavalieri di Malta, shivering, wondering where to begin. Get nosy, Falcone had said. It was, for him, an exceptionally vague command.

Peroni was crouching down, peering through the keyhole.

“I can’t see a thing,” he complained. “Are you sure about this? It’s not just one of your tricks?”

“What tricks?” Costa demanded, pushing him out of the way to look for himself.

The avenue of cypresses was there as he remembered, and the gravel path, now shiny with rain. His own father had showed him this small secret when Costa was no more than a boy. That day, the sun had been shining. He could still recall St. Peter’s standing proud and grand across the river, set perfectly at the centre of the frame made by the trees and the path under a sky the blue of a thrush’s egg. But today all he saw after the dark green lines of foliage was a shapeless mass of cloud, deep swirls of grey obscuring everything they consumed. From the corner behind them, which led off in the direction of the Circus Maximus, came a sound that reminded him of why they were there. The noise of happy young voices rose above the high wall keeping the school from the public, a vibrant clamour of life protected from the harshness of the world by Piranesi’s tall, white defences, like the ramparts of some small, fairy-tale castle.

“I’m sure,” Costa told Peroni, and took his head away from the door. The two Carabinieri who were always stationed here, for some bizarre reason deputed to guard the mansion of the Knights of Malta, were watching them, interested.