Costa found the corridor, found the light switch, dashed it up and down, knowing it was futile. Giorgio Bramante had worked some trick with the central fuse box, blacking out the entire floor somehow. If Costa were to believe the front desk, Bramante had been in the building little more than thirty minutes, accompanied only by an inexperienced cadet. Not long. It was as if he knew the place already.
Then he remembered what Falcone had said. Bramante was an intelligent, capable man, one used to being underground in the dark, at home in a foreign world where most would be lost, happy inventing a strategy as he went along. One who stored what he saw and held it for use later.
There were interview rooms on this floor, just a two-minute walk from where Falcone, Peroni, and Teresa were now sleeping, down through the Questura’s old narrow corridors to the cell in the basement where Ludo Torchia had been beaten to a pulp. Bramante could be working from memory, with a set plan in mind, one that had been developed and honed over the years he’d spent in jail.
He played his hand in the least expected places, always. And when it came to Leo Falcone, he could simply pretend to be someone else, someone who was threatened, not a threat. Someone who could talk their way inside the Questura after midnight, when everyone was a little sleepy, and too tired to ask good questions, because all of Rome, if not Italy, had watched TV, read the newspapers, knew full well that Leo Falcone was searching for a man of that name.
Then Bramante could wait for the moment he found himself alone with a rookie cop, one he could pull into a corner, beat the truth out of, quickly, before anyone else in the slumbering Questura woke up to what was happening.
That truth being: Leo Falcone was still in the building, fast asleep somewhere upstairs, believing that here, of all places, he was safe from everything.
The plan had a bleak simplicity that made Costa feel stupid for not having anticipated it.
Sorting through the possibilities as he carefully made his way through the unfamiliar darkness, Costa was aware how obvious the situation now was.
He stepped out into the centre of the corridor — as much as he could guess its location — and began to make his silent way behind the figure he’d seen slipping past the doorway, bound for the rooms that lay somewhere ahead in the dark. The gun lay loose in his fingers. Teresa and Peroni would be safe, but a part of his head was already beginning to calculate what Leo Falcone’s unanswered phone line signified.
A sound came to him through the pitch-black space ahead; someone walking, slowly, with more noise than Costa could have hoped for. Then the movement shifted direction, position too, flitting through the blackness with an infuriating uncertainty, not left, not right, somewhere Nic couldn’t quite pinpoint before there was silence again.
Costa was trying to analyse what had happened when something made him jump, the sweat running electric on his fingers as they gripped the weapon in his hand.
A man was breathing, heavily, the awkward, arrhythmic wheezings of an individual in stress, no more than a metre or two from where he stood.
Giorgio Bramante was only human, Costa reminded himself. A killer. A father who’d lost his only son. Criminal and victim in the same skin.
“Give it up, Giorgio,” he said in a loud, clear voice, trying to pinpoint the source of the sound, wondering if he was close enough to reach out and touch the man, incapacitate him with a sudden burst of violence that just might stay him until help arrived. “Don’t move. Don’t even think you’ve got somewhere to go.”
That uncanny sense of confusion returned through the silent gloom, and with it the realisation that this unreadable world was not a place where anything possessed solidity or certainty. Finally, he caught the tail end of some low, throaty laughter, and the sense that Bramante had changed position, with an astonishing speed, in absolute silence, the moment he’d realised how close they were.
“You’re up late for one so young, Mr. Costa. Are you feeling tired? I’m not. I like this time of night.”
Hearing his own name sent a chill up Nic Costa’s spine.
There was a commotion from somewhere beyond where Bramante had to be. It was Peroni, bellowing in a loud, threatening voice. Costa waited for the fury to subside, then shouted, “Stay inside, Gianni! I’ve got a gun. This is covered. There’s backup on the way.”
Somewhere.
There were angry noises still from the distant door, Peroni’s and Teresa’s voices in conflict. He could imagine that argument: common sense clashing with instinct. He didn’t need that distraction right now.
“That’s a pretty girlfriend you have. Nice house, too, out there on the Appian Way. Does a police salary really pay for that?”
“No.” The more Bramante talked, the easier it was to find his position, to keep him stalled. “It was my father’s.”
Bramante didn’t answer straightaway. When the voice came back again, it was different in tone. Less amused. Less human, somehow.
“I wanted Alessio to have that house of ours on the Aventino,” Bramante said without a trace of emotion. “By that time I’d probably have paid it off.”
“I’m sorry. What happened was a tragedy.” There were men outside on the staircase. Costa could hear the babble of their confused voices, and the low, mutual tremor of indecision. “We’ll find out what happened. I promise you.”
“What use is that, in God’s name?”
“I thought it’s what you’d want.”
“I wanted that girlfriend of yours,” the voice said, floating casually out of the dark, almost relaxed again. He’d moved again. “She’d have been good for bargaining.” Another dry, soulless laugh. “And the rest.”
Costa didn’t rise to the bait. He wondered what exactly Bramante hoped to achieve by taunting him like this. “Is that what prison does to you?”
That brittle sound of amusement again. This time more distant.
“Oh yes. It brings out the man inside.”
Bramante was moving to where the corridor opened up to a larger area outside the emergency quarters, a place used for briefings and meetings during training sessions. The bunk rooms were on one side, high blacked-out windows on the other. Costa followed, trying to picture this part of the Questura more accurately in his head. The station was so familiar he thought he knew every last corner. But memory meant nothing without some visual prompts. He’d never expected to have to feel his way around like a blind man, struggling to draw a map out of senses that had nothing to do with vision — hearing, touch, smell. Talents Bramante had surely perfected, in all that time underground.
There were a few desks here. A collection of foldaway chairs. Four, five doors, perhaps six, two to the accommodation rooms, the rest for smaller meeting places.
Try as he might, he couldn’t remember which door was which, or how the seats and tables had been left that evening. Bramante could have walked through in the light, checking out everything before returning to the stairwell, where, Costa assumed, the fuse boxes were situated, and pitching the entire floor into darkness.
Then, from behind, he heard a burst of noise: men’s voices, angry shouts, the clash of metal on metal. Backup wasn’t going to be as easy, he realised. Costa could picture the fire door more clearly than anything else on the floor. It stood, a huge green hunk of iron, atop the staircase, rarely used except in drills. Once someone closed it and threw down the huge clasp, the entire floor was sealed. Bramante had found the time to do that somehow, and now the backup men were hammering away against solid steel, screaming at each other to come up with a solution. The building that housed the Questura was, in parts, three hundred years old. They’d never got around to installing an elevator in this section. It had never seemed necessary.