The Seventh Sacrament (47 page)

Peroni hit the target spot on. He always did. Costa wondered whether he’d ever be able to work with another officer when the big man finally gave in to temptation and took retirement.

“I agree,” Costa said.

“So what do we do?”

“When we have something we can work with, we go. And make that call on the way out.”

Peroni nodded. “And when will we have something?”

“As soon as we talk to the old man.”

Peroni smiled. He wasn’t slow. He’d picked it up instantly too. He just wanted Costa to make the connection, to take the lead he knew was there already.

“‘You’d think that boy of hers would help,’” he quoted.

“Exactly.”

Finally, something was moving. Costa’s head felt light and clear, the way it did when a case began to open up.

They walked back up the stairs, grateful for what might almost pass for fresh air. As he hit the top step, Costa’s phone rang.

G
IORGIO BRAMANTE TURNED THE FLASHLIGHT ON HIS WATCH
and frowned. Falcone sat on the broken stone wall in his cell, following his movements in the gloom.

“Are you in a hurry, Giorgio?”

“Perhaps they’re happy to let you rot,” Bramante replied without emotion.

“Perhaps,” he agreed.

From what he could work out—Bramante had taken his watch after searching him in the piazza after the taxi had left—Falcone had spent a half day or more trapped in this subterranean prison, locked behind an iron door in a chamber of brick, rock, and earth that appeared to be as old as Rome itself. To his faint surprise he had been treated with a distant respect. No violence, not much in the way of threats. It was as if Bramante’s mind was, in truth, elsewhere, on other matters, and abducting Falcone was merely a step along the way.

He had been given a blanket and some water, left alone for hours, though Falcone had the sense Bramante never strayed far from the site. The man had a mobile phone and a pair of binoculars. Perhaps he simply walked to the distant entrance they’d passed on the way in to see if they were still alone. Perhaps he was waiting….

Now that he was back, he looked as if he would stay for good, perched on the remains of an old, upright fluted column outside the iron gate, unwrapping a supermarket
panino.

“I could use something to eat,” Falcone remarked.

Bramante looked at him, grunted, then broke the sandwich in half and passed it through the bars.

“Is this the last meal for a condemned man?” Falcone wondered. “I’d always pictured something more substantial.”

“You’re a curious bastard, aren’t you?”

“That is,” Falcone replied, nodding, “one of my many failings.”

“You were curious all those years ago.”

“About you, mainly. There was so much that puzzled me.”

“Such as?”

Falcone took a bite of the sandwich. “Why you took Alessio there in the first place.”

Bramante cast him a dark look. “You don’t have children.”

“Enlighten me.”

He looked at his watch again. “A son must grow. He has to learn to be strong. To compete. You can’t protect them from everything. It doesn’t work. One day—it comes, inevitably—you’re not around. And that’s when it happens.”

“What?”

“What people think of as the real world,” Bramante answered wearily.

“So being left alone in a cave, somewhere he was frightened—that would make Alessio stronger?”

Bramante scowled and shook his head. There was something Falcone, to his dismay, still didn’t grasp.

“I never had the courage to think about parenthood,” Bramante confessed. “When I married, it was one of the first things my wife learned about me. You’d think she would have worked that out before. Being a father seems to require something selfless. To raise a child, knowing that, in the end, you must send it on its way. Cut the strings. Let it go. Perhaps I’m too possessive. The few things I love I like to keep.”

The last sentence surprised Falcone. He wondered if Bramante really meant it. He wondered, too, how Raffaella Arcangelo was feeling. It had been a cruel, hard way to say goodbye. But wasn’t that the point?

Then he heard something from above, a loud, high-pitched sound. The screech of a police siren.

“But at the age of seven?” Falcone asked. “He was too young, Giorgio. Even a man like me knows that. You were his father. You, of all people…”

Bramante reached into his jacket pocket and withdrew a black handgun. He pointed it straight through the bars, holding the barrel a hand’s length away from Falcone’s skull.

The inspector took a final bite of the sandwich, finishing it.

“I hate processed cheese,” he commented. “Why do people buy this rubbish?”

“What is it with you, Falcone?” Bramante snapped. “Don’t you know how many men I’ve killed?”

“I’ve a pretty good idea,” the inspector replied. “But you didn’t kill Alessio, even if a part of you feels you did. Yet that is what instils the most guilt in you. Surely you see the irony?”

Bramante didn’t move.

“I had hoped,” Falcone went on, “to find him. Not just for you. For his mother. For us all. When a child goes missing like that, it breaks the natural order somehow. It’s as if someone’s scrawled graffiti on something beautiful. You can fool yourself it doesn’t really matter. But it does. Until someone removes the stain, you never feel quite happy. You never come to terms with what’s happened.”

“And you’re that person? The person who removes the stain?”

“I’m supposed to be. But I failed. I’m sorry.”

“And he’s still dead,” Bramante insisted.

“You don’t know that for sure. I certainly don’t. We searched everywhere. Ludo Torchia never said he was dead. Not to me. Nor to you either, I think. Did Ludo confess? You beat him so hard. I would have expected…”

“Just lies. Lies and nonsense. My son is dead,” Bramante repeated.

“As someone once pointed out, in the long run so are we all.”

Bramante almost laughed. He lowered the gun. “A police inspector who quotes ancient English economists. Who’d have thought it?”

Falcone shrugged. “I
am
the curious sort.”

There was another siren now. Perhaps more than one. Closer.

Falcone took a deep breath, knowing he had to ask, uncertain of the consequences of doing so.

“When you and Ludo had sex in the cell…was that the first time? The only time?”

Giorgio Bramante blinked, unmoved by the question, thinking carefully of an answer. “I expected to be asked that fourteen years ago. Not now,” he said eventually.

Falcone shrugged. “Pathologists are fallible too. This particular one decided to save you the embarrassment. He felt some sympathy towards you, I imagine. So many people did.”

“But not you?” Bramante asked in a cold voice.

“No,” Falcone agreed. “Not on the information I saw presented to me. Was I wrong? Was that the first time?”

“The second, I believe,” Bramante said. “Or third. I forget. A lot of students passed through my classes. Opportunities arise, on both sides. They meant nothing. To me anyway.”

“Except,” Falcone pointed out, “he didn’t meet his side of the bargain.”

The man’s face darkened. “He laughed in my face. He said he still didn’t know. Or care.”

Falcone nodded. “Which is what he told us.”

“It
doesn’t
matter!”

“I—”

Bramante rattled the gun against the iron bars to silence him. Then he unlocked the door and waved the weapon towards the chamber. Falcone understood immediately. There was a reason Bramante had returned when he did. He knew they were approaching. Perhaps there’d been a call, from a person on the outside. Perhaps…

Falcone thought of the ritual and the mysteries, the ideas Giorgio Bramante—and Ludo Torchia—had played with all those years ago. Powerful as they were, they remained myths. He was still convinced that what took Alessio Bramante from the world was something both more mundane and more terrible.

Slowly he shuffled out of the cell, then, when he was beyond the bars, placed his hand against the wall to steady himself. Instantly, with a surge of revulsion, he snatched it away. Something was there: a fat white worm, the size of a little finger, was working its way up the damp green stone, almost luminous in the darkness.

Falcone turned to look Bramante directly in the face. “What if I could still find him?”

Bramante hesitated. Just for a moment. Just enough for Falcone to see that somewhere, buried deep inside the dark tangle of hate and confusion that was Giorgio Bramante, a flicker of hope, of belief, still existed.

“It’s too late.”

Bramante was edging him forward, towards something emerging out of the murk.

Falcone’s eyes fell on the far end of the chamber, a place partly illuminated by wan, grey daylight falling through what he took to be a gap in the earth above.

Something stood there that had not been visible in the dark when he arrived. It was low and long, the colour of good marble. A ceremonial slab of some kind. An altar, Falcone realised.

“Keep moving,” Bramante, the old Bramante again, snarled, propelling him forward with the barrel of the gun.

Falcone took a few stumbling steps of his own volition. A smooth white stone slab stood at waist height in front of him. On the perfect marble surface—Istrian, he thought—was a pattern picked out in dark red.

Leo Falcone had seen sufficient crime scenes to recognise this pattern. These were classic blood spatters, fresh too, he thought.

“Agente Prabakaran,” he muttered. “We had an arrangement—”

“She’s safe,” Bramante insisted. “Safe and busy cursing my name no doubt. With good reason. I’ve no complaints.”

Bramante ran his hand across bloodstains, sweeping his fingers through the dust and blood.

“I had another to deal with. He wasn’t someone you’ll miss.”

“Seven rituals, seven sacraments,” Falcone murmured quietly, almost as an afterthought. “Aren’t you there already?”

“Not with those who count,” Bramante answered, reaching beneath the altar to withdraw a coil of rope that was stored there, then something else. A long, slender knife. Something ceremonial, Falcone thought. Something, he realised, looking at the discoloured blade, that had been used recently.

N
IC
?”

She simply spoke his name into the phone and received, in return, such a torrent of words they silenced her immediately. Emily Deacon recognised this in Costa now. It was the momentum of the case gripping him. In this instance, a case that had far more personal resonance than most.

There was little she could do but listen. And think. Arturo had exercised his influence. She had a private hospital room overlooking a narrow lane leading up to the Duomo, with an attentive nurse who’d already apologised for the fact that there would now be nothing to eat until the following day. Arturo sat outside alone. Raffaella had appeared briefly to explain her rapid return to Rome, chasing a shadow.

And Nic was so wrapped up in what was happening in Rome, so engrossed in the hunt to unravel the fate of the man who’d become a surrogate father to him over the years. Emily envied him. That kind of activity had always made her feel alive when she worked in law enforcement. You disappeared inside the case. It was one reason you did the job.

There was news too. Not of Leo, but of someone who might prove the key to finding him. She listened intently and found herself asking, in spite of herself, “He’s
alive
?”

It seemed so improbable. Disturbing, too, from the brief details Nic outlined.

Alessio Bramante had, for reasons which remained unclear, apparently walked from the Aventino to the peace camp on the Circus Maximus, met an odd couple from one of the left-wing groups there, and, it seemed, had not simply left with them, but been brought up almost as an adopted child until leaving home sometime during his mid-teens, perhaps four or five years ago.

She recalled what Nic had said about abducted children. How they assimilated to the environment in which they found themselves. All of this was, she now realised with a brief shock of alarm, quite understandable. Normality, to a child, was the situation he or she faced in everyday life. If Alessio Bramante didn’t return to his real home within weeks, he would, surely, be lost forever. He was seven when he disappeared. What memories he had of his life with Giorgio and Beatrice Bramante would be entirely coloured by the picture of the world painted by those who had replaced them. It was possible, she thought, with a growing dismay, to take a child and, with sufficient will, turn it into an entirely different creature. History was full of dictators who had created their own armies of admirers from the schoolroom.