“I understand that…”
“No. You don’t. You can’t.”
“Bramante didn’t take his son to work. He took him underground, into an excavation few people knew about, one that he believed was entirely empty.”
“My boy would have loved that when he was seven.”
“So why did he leave him there?”
Messina sighed. “If there’s a burglar in your house, do you invite your son along to watch you deal with him? Well?”
“We need to interview Giorgio Bramante properly. In the Questura. We need to go through what happened minute by minute. He has that injury. Also…”
Falcone paused, knowing that he was on the verge of being led by his imagination, not good reasoning. Nevertheless, this seemed important, and he was determined Arturo Messina should know. Watching Bramante join the search parties for Alessio that afternoon, Falcone felt sure that the man was looking for someone other than a minor. It was as simple as a question of posture. Children were smaller. However illogical, at close to medium quarters, one tended to adjust one’s gaze accordingly. Giorgio Bramante’s eye level was horizontal, always, as if seeking an adult, or someone on the horizon, neither of which made sense for a seven-year-old boy.
Messina’s dark eyes opened wide with astonishment as Falcone elaborated. “You expect me to pull the boy’s father in for questioning because there’s something you don’t like about the angle of his head? Are you mad? What do you think they’d make of that? Them and the media?” He beckoned towards the crowd.
“I don’t care what they think,” Falcone insisted. “Do you? There’s the question of the wound, his behaviour, and the holes in his story. Those, to my mind, are sufficient.”
“This is ridiculous. Take it from me, Leo. I’m a father too. The way he’s behaving is exactly the way any of us would in the circumstances. He couldn’t be more cooperative, for God’s sake. How the hell would we have found our way around those caves without him? When we have those students, when we know what’s happened to the kid… then you can sit down and go through your stupid procedures. Now tell me how we can find that boy.”
“The injury—”
“You’ve been in those caves! It’s a death trap down there! Are you honestly surprised a man should stumble in them? Do you think all the world is as perfect as you?”
Falcone had no good answer. “I agree,” he replied evenly, “that it is dangerous down there. That affects our efforts to find the boy too. We’ve gone as far as we dare. It’s treacherous. There are tunnels the military don’t feel happy entering. We’ve brought in some equipment they use during earthquakes to locate people who are trapped. Nothing. We need to pursue all possible options.”
Messina scowled. “He could be unconscious, Leo. I know that’s inconvenient but it’s a fact.”
“They tell me he would still show up through thermal imaging if he was unconscious. Given the short time that’s elapsed, he’d show up even if he was dead. If he’s anywhere we could hope to reach, that is.”
“Oh no,” Messina said quietly, miserably, half to himself, eyes on the ground, detached from everything at that moment, even the case ahead of them.
Falcone felt briefly embarrassed. There was something in Messina’s expression he didn’t — couldn’t — share. A man who had no experience of fatherhood could imagine the loss of a child, sympathise with it, feel anger, become determined to put the wrong right. But there was an expression in Messina’s face that Falcone could only guess at. A sentiment that seemed to say This is a part of me that’s damaged — perhaps irrevocably.
“Don’t let him be dead, Leo,” Messina moaned, and for the first time seemed, in Leo Falcone’s eyes, a man beginning to show his age.
“Like father, like son,” Falcone murmured as the three of them shuffled into Bruno Messina’s office. They were in the quarters on the sixth floor. From Messina’s corner room, there should have been a good view of the cobbled piazza below. All they saw now was a smear of brown stone. The rain was coming down in vertical stripes. The forecast was for a period of unsettled weather lasting days: sudden storms and heavy downpours broken by outbreaks of brief bright sun. Spring was arriving in Rome, and it was a time of extremes.
Messina sat in a leather chair behind his large, well-polished desk trying to look like a man in control. It was an act he needed. The Questura was teeming with officers. Local, pulled in from leave. Strangers, too, since Messina had demanded an external inquiry into the security lapses that had allowed the attack on Falcone, wisely choosing to endure the pain of outside scrutiny before it was forced upon him. No one yet seemed much minded to blame Leo Falcone or those close to him. How could they? But the low, idle chatter had begun. Scapegoats would be sought for the disaster of the night before.
The commissario had suspended the civilian security officer who had failed to spot that the ID used by Bramante to pose as a cleaner actually belonged to a woman, one whose handbag had been stolen while shopping in San Giovanni a week before and was now on vacation in Capri, a fact that would have been obvious from the personal diary that had disappeared along with the rest of her belongings. The rookie agente ambushed by Bramante when he abducted Dino Abati was now at home recovering from a bad beating, and scared witless, Costa suspected, about what would happen when the inquiry came round to him. Messina was acting with a swift, ruthless ferocity because he understood that his own position, as a commissario only nine months into the job, was damaged. That had led him to put some distance between himself and Falcone as head of the investigation, hoping perhaps to shift the blame onto his subordinate should the sky begin to fall.
The effect was not as Messina had planned. The word that was on everyone’s lips that morning was “sloppy.” The media were enjoying a field day about a murder that had happened in the heart of the centro storico’s principal Questura. Politicians, never slow to seize an opportunity to deflect criticism from their own lapses, were getting in on the act. What had occurred, rumors inside and out of the force were beginning to say, had taken place because the juniors, Messina in particular, were now in charge. They had lax standards when it came to matters of general routine. They put paperwork and procedural issues ahead of the mundane considerations of old-style policing. No one, it was whispered, had ever accused Falcone of such lapses of attention. Nor would they now throw that accusation in the direction of the fast-recovering individual who was marching around his old haunt like a man who’d rediscovered the fire in his belly.
Messina looked as if he couldn’t wait to stamp that fire into ashes. The commissario watched the three of them — Falcone, Costa, and Peroni — take their seats, then stated, “I’ve brought in someone else to run this case, Falcone. Don’t argue. We can’t have a man heading an inquiry into his own attempted murder. The same goes for you two. There’s a young inspector I want to try out. Bavetti. You’ll give him every assistance—”
“You’re making a mistake,” Falcone said without emotion.
“I’m not sure I want to hear that from you.”
“You will, nevertheless,” the inspector went on. “I kept quiet for too long when a Messina was screwing up once before. I’m not doing it twice.”
“Dammit, Falcone! I won’t be spoken to like that. You listen to me.”
“No!” the inspector yelled. “You listen. I’m the one Giorgio Bramante came looking for last night, aren’t I? These two and their women got their photos taken by that man. Doesn’t that give us some rights?”