Peroni, always one to come straight to the point, waited for the control van to circumnavigate the round of traffic at the Colosseum, then asked, “Remind me again. Why exactly didn’t these scum go to jail?”
“Because of the lawyers,” Messina replied scornfully. “They said it wasn’t possible.”
Falcone stroked his silver goatee, then emitted a long, pained sigh.
“It’s important we have this conversation, Commissario, so that both of us are sure where we stand. Unlike you, I was there—”
“And don’t I know it?” Messina interupted, scowling.
Falcone didn’t bat an eyelid. Costa had seen him deal with much worse than this young, overambitious commissario with just a few months in the job.
“Good,” the inspector commented placidly. “Then let me explain. There are two reasons why no charges were pursued against any of Bramante’s students. First, we had no evidence. They provided none. Forensic provided none. We had no body. No clue as to where the child had gone or what had happened to him. Only suspicions, created principally by the unwillingness of the students to do much to help themselves. There was absolutely nothing there on which we could base a prosecution….”
Bruno Messina was a thickset man, with a head of fulsome black hair and an expression that could turn from polite to malevolent in an instant.
“I could have got it out of them,” he said with no small hint of menace.
“That’s what your father believed. But he failed. Then he left the ringleader alone with Giorgio Bramante for an hour in a quiet little cell at the far end of the holding block in the basement we all know so well. Which brings me to the second reason why no one ever faced any charges over Alessio Bramante’s disappearance. I hate to remind you of this, but during that hour Bramante beat the unfortunate youth senseless. Ludo Torchia died in the ambulance, while I watched, on the way to hospital. After that, we were knee-deep in lawyers who made sure that the other suspects could get away without saying a damn thing to anyone because we’d already allowed one of their number to be, in all but name, murdered before our very eyes.”
Falcone gave Messina the kind of look he normally reserved for impudent, uncomprehending juniors.
“Case closed,” the inspector concluded without emotion.
Peroni glowered at him. “I’ve got to say, I remember what was in the newspapers back then. It wasn’t quite that clear-cut. You don’t have kids. I do. If I thought one of mine might be alive, if there was the slightest chance of that, I’d have beaten the living daylights out of those students, too.”
Falcone shrugged. “The significance of that being what exactly?”
Peroni tautened, taken aback by the nonchalant tone in Falcone’s voice. Costa watched Bruno Messina recoil from Peroni’s visible anger, and reminded himself that those relatively new to the Questura still found his partner’s physical presence — the lumpy, scarred face, the corpulent, powerful thug’s body — intimidating.
“That what Bramante did was understandable!” Peroni insisted stubbornly.
“I hate having to repeat myself, but I was there. I walked into that cell because I was sick of hearing the screaming, over and over again. I was the one” — Falcone glowered at Messina — “who made sure it went to a higher authority than your father, Commissario. This wasn’t difficult, since he had, as I recall, decided to attend a management meeting the moment he left Bramante alone with the youth.”
“He was a commissario,” Messina objected. “He was desperate.”
“And I was just the sovrintendente, the junior meant to clean up afterwards. It was quite a mess, too. Look up the photographs. They’ll still be in the records. That cell was covered in blood. I’ve never seen anything like it, before or since. Giorgio Bramante took that student apart. Torchia was barely breathing when I got in there. An hour later he was gone.”
Peroni said again, “Messina thought Bramante’s kid was alive, Leo!”
“It was more than that,” Messina continued. “My father thought that, if you’d not burst in there stopping Bramante when you did, he could have beaten the truth out of that bastard. Perhaps he was right and we could have found the boy. Who knows?”
“No one!” Falcone replied. “Not you. Not me. In situations like that, we deal with certainties, not guesswork. Ludo Torchia was brutally assaulted, in a cell in our own Questura, and he died of that assault. How are we supposed to ignore that? The law’s the law. We don’t pick and choose to whom it applies or when.”
Teresa Lupo raised her large hand in objection. “But if Bramante thought…”
“None of us knows what he was thinking!” Falcone insisted. “I was there when he was interviewed afterwards. I was the one who told him Ludo Torchia was dead. I told him that the doctor in the ambulance said he’d several broken ribs, a punctured lung. It was as bad a beating as I’ve seen in my life, and it was done slowly, deliberately. And Giorgio Bramante? When I told him, he acted as if beating a man to death was just an everyday event. I have no idea what he thought. He scarcely said a word afterwards. Not to us. Not to his wife. To the press. To anyone. Yes, yes, I know what you’re about to say. It was grief. Perhaps. But we still don’t understand what happened, and that’s a fact.”
Messina leaned forward and tapped Falcone on the knee. “I’ll tell you what happened. You made inspector. My father got kicked out of the force. After thirty years. But we’ll leave that to one side for now. Just don’t fool yourself. Those morons were responsible for that boy’s death somehow. Not my father. Not Giorgio Bramante. Ludo Torchia apart, they walked away scot-free. Changed their names, most of them. Grew up and found themselves different lives, mostly in places where no one knew who they were. They thought it was over, like a bad dream that scares the shit out of you at night and just fades away the next morning.”
“As far as they are concerned, it is over,” Falcone replied. “That’s the law.”
Messina pulled a set of folders out of his capacious briefcase.
“Not for Giorgio Bramante it isn’t.”
Bruno Messina seemed to know Bramante’s entire history from the moment he went to jail.
“He helped other prisoners with their work. He taught them to read and write. Counselled them on giving up drugs. The perfect prisoner. After three years he was getting early day release and he didn’t ever go running to the press. There was nothing to suggest he was anything else but an unfortunate man who lost his temper under stress and paid a heavy price for it, in circumstances where most people would feel sympathetic.”
“And?” Falcone asked, interested now.
“There were six students in those caves when Alessio went missing. Torchia died that day. Another, Sandro Vignola, moved to Puglia, then, three years after the case, came back to Rome for the day. We don’t know why. Vignola was never seen again. Of the remaining four…”
He spread out the papers from the files.
“Andrea Guerino. Farmer’s son. Changed his name. Moved to near Verona, where he ran a small fruit farm. Found dead of shotgun wounds out in the fields, June three years ago. The local police say his wife went missing the day before. She turns up alive. Guerino gets half his head blown off, and his wife’s too scared to say a word about where she’s been, who with, anything. The local force put it down to some kind of affair gone wrong and never charge a soul with his death. Raul Bellucci. Fifteen months ago, he was working as a cab driver in Florence, also under an assumed name. He gets a call at home. Someone’s kidnapped his daughter and wants a ransom or the girl’s gone. The idiot doesn’t go to us, of course. I imagine he’s worried we’d find out who he really is. The following day Raul Bellucci’s dead in some industrial park used by hookers on the edge of town. The police” — the venom in Messina’s voice was unmistakable — “decide that, since Bellucci’s throat’s been cut from ear to ear and his genitals have been removed, this is the work of some African gang. Most of the hookers thereabouts are Nigerian.”