“We thought you were in trouble, sir,” he answered. “And I’m sure I speak for everyone when I say we’re delighted to see we were mistaken.”
Book 4
The Midnight God
Arturo Messina stood on the brow of the hill at the edge of the Orange Garden, gazing out over the river, lost in thought. Next to him, Leo Falcone waited, trying to be the dutiful sovrintendente, struggling to find the right words with which to tell the older man, a well-established commissario, one who carried respect throughout the force, that he might be wrong. Deeply, seriously wrong, in a way that could threaten the entire investigation.
“Sir?” Falcone said quietly in a gap between the loud, throaty roars of the machinery below. Two small mechanical diggers were warming up their engines, awaiting orders, much like him. It was now late afternoon. Five hours had passed since the boy had first been reported missing by his father. Four hours before Messina had put out the call for the six students after listening to Giorgio Bramante’s story. Bramante was their professor. He knew them well and had seen them exiting the underground warren of tunnels when he surfaced to see if his son had somehow escaped the caves without him. In spite of hearing his calls, they had fled down the hill in the direction of the peace camp on the Circus Maximus, trying to lose themselves among three thousand or more people living there in tents, protesting daily about the continuing horrors across the water in what had so recently been Yugoslavia.
Now every officer Messina could muster was on the case: half were hunting for the students, the remainder working with the hundreds of civilians who kept turning up to offer their help in the search for the missing seven-year-old. TV crews and packs of journalists were kept back from the excavation site by the yellow tape cordoning off the small park overlooking the Tiber. A growing crowd of mute bystanders, some of whom looked ready to turn ugly, had joined them. The story about the students had already got out somehow. Blame was already beginning to be apportioned, with a swiftness and certainty that gave Falcone a cold feeling in his stomach. There was a touch of the mob to some of the people lurking around the Aventino just then. Had any of those students happened to emerge in their midst, Falcone knew that he would have to act swiftly to protect them from the public. Rationality and a sense of justice flew out the window in cases like these, depriving a good officer of the cold, detached viewpoint that was necessary in all investigations.
While the father joined — almost led — the hunt for the child, his wife was in a police van inside the cordon, saying little, staring at the outside world with haunted eyes that held little in the way of hope.
And all they had to go on was the fact that, when Alessio went missing, the boy had been deep beneath the dark red earth of this quiet, residential hill, not far from a bunch of students who were probably up to no good. Students his father had heard, gone to track down, telling his son to stay safe where he was, only to return some considerable time later — how long? No one had actually asked — without locating the intruders, to find the boy gone.
In public, Bramante reacted exactly as an individual was expected to in such situations, which gave Falcone pause for thought. Something about the man concerned him. Giorgio Bramante seemed too perfect — distraught to a measured degree, just enough to allow him to benefit from the sympathy of others, but never, not for one moment, sufficient to allow him to lose control.
There was also the question of the wound. The professor had a bright red weal on his right temple, the result, he said, of a fall while stumbling through the caves, searching for his son. Injuries always interested Leo Falcone, and in normal circumstances he would have taken the opportunity to explore this one further. That, however, Arturo Messina expressly forbade. For the commissario, the answer lay with the students. Falcone could not believe they would remain free for long. None had police records, though one, Toni LaMarca, came from a family known for its crime connections. All six were, it seemed, average, ordinary young men who had gone down into the caves beneath the Aventino for reasons the police failed to understand. Messina seemed obsessed with finding out what they were. The same issue intrigued Falcone, too, though not as much as what he regarded as more pertinent questions. What was Giorgio Bramante doing there with his son in the first place? And why did he have a livid red gash on his forehead, one that could just as easily have come from a struggle as a simple accident?
“Say it,” the older man ordered with a barely disguised impatience. “Are you worried this will interfere with the homework for the inspector’s exams or something? I always knew you were an ambitious little bastard, but you could let it drop for now.”
“‘Little’ seems somewhat unfair, sir,” Falcone, who was somewhat taller than the portly Messina, protested dryly.
“Well? What’s on your mind? This is nothing personal, you know. I think you’re an excellent police officer. I just wish you had a spot more humanity. Cases like this… you walk around with that hangdog look of yours as if they don’t even touch you. Shame you screwed up that marriage. Kids do wonders for putting a man in his place.”
“We’re making many assumptions. I wonder if that’s wise.”
Messina’s heavy eyebrows furrowed in disbelief. “I’m stupid now, am I?”
“I didn’t say that at all, sir. I’m merely concerned that we don’t focus simply on the obvious.”
“The reason the obvious is the obvious,” Messina replied testily, “is because it’s what normally gets us results. That may not be fashionable in the inspector’s examination today, but there it is.”
“Sir,” Falcone replied quietly, “we don’t know where the boy may be. We don’t how or why any of this occurred.”
“Students!” Messina bellowed. “Students! Like all those damned anarchists in their tents, fouling up the middle of Rome, doing whatever else they like. Not that I imagine it much concerns you.”
There had been two arrests at the peace camp. They’d had more trouble at religious events. Next to a Roma versus Lazio race, it was nothing.
“I fail to see any relevance with the peace camp—” Falcone started to say.
“Peace camp. Peace camp? What did we find down in those damned caves again? Remind me.”
A dead bird, throat cut, and a few spent joints. It wasn’t pleasant. But it wasn’t a hanging offence either.
“I’m not saying they weren’t doing something wrong down there. I just think it’s a big leap from some juvenile piece of black magic and a little dope to child abduction. Or worse.”
Messina wagged his finger in Falcone’s face. “And there — there! — is exactly where you’re wrong. Remember that I said that when they make you inspector.”
“Sir,” Falcone said, temper rising, “this is not about me.”
“It begins with ‘a little dope’ and the idea you can pitch a tent in the heart of Rome and tell the rest of the world to go screw itself. It ends…” — Messina waved his big hand at the crowds behind the yellow tape — “…out there. With a bunch of people looking to us to clean up a mess we should have prevented in the first place. Good officers know you have to nip this kind of behaviour in the bud. Whatever it takes. You can’t read a bunch of textbooks while the world’s going to rack and ruin.”
“I am merely trying to suggest that there are avenues we haven’t yet explored. Giorgio Bramante—”
“Oh for God’s sake! Not that again. The man agreed to take his son to school, only to find the teachers are having one of those stupid paperwork love-ins the likes of you doubtless think pass as genuine labour. So he took him to work instead. Parents do that, Leo. I did it, and God forgive me the boy’s in the force now, too.”