The officer hesitated.
“You think he might be around here?” he asked finally. “After what went on in the Questura last night? What a mess. I don’t envy you cleaning up after that.”
Peroni patted him on the arm and said, very sincerely, “Thanks.”
“Lax,” the young one declared. “Downright lax. That’s what it was.”
The older one rolled his eyes, looked at his colleague, then said, with a sad air of resignation, “You know, I wish you’d keep your mouth shut a little more often. It just leaks out crap day after day.”
“I only said…” The young man was getting red in the face.
“I don’t care what you said. These men asked for our help. If we can give it to them, we do.
“One thing,” the friendly one continued, nodding at his colleague. “He spoke to Bramante. Didn’t you? He walked right up to him, as if the man was a football star or something. Did you get an autograph, huh, Fabiano? Have you washed your hand since he shook it or what?”
Fabiano’s face got a touch redder. “I just told him what I thought. That he ought never have gone to jail for what he did.”
“You mean killed someone?” his colleague demanded. “Doesn’t look like it was that much out of character either, does it?”
“I’m just saying—”
“I don’t want to hear what you have to say. Here…”
He took some money out of his pocket, then threw it at the younger officer.
“Go down the road and buy me a coffee. The usual. One for yourself, if you want it. And two for our friends here.”
“We don’t have time,” Costa said. “But thanks anyway.”
They watched the younger Carabiniere shuffle off across the road, tail between his legs.
“You know what worries me?” the older man said, shaking his head. “If it all happened again — same situation, same people — an idiot like Fabiano there would make exactly the same mistakes. He’d still think you could fix it all with your fists.” He peered into their faces. “Let me tell you two something. Bramante was no hero. I don’t judge people on how they look. I’m not that stupid. But there was something about that one. He let that moron partner of mine suck up to him as if he was God or something. It was… bad.”
Peroni nodded. “Understood.”
“No. Listen. I’m not so good with words. Meeting him felt very creepy. Same with his wife too. I’ve seen what happens when you lose a kid. It’s not easy. But all those years later, still looking as if it happened yesterday…”
Costa hadn’t given Beatrice Bramante much thought. Rosa Prabakaran was keeping an eye on her. If she was involved, she’d surely keep away from her ex-husband from now on.
“Do you think the two of them met? The wife and the husband?” he asked.
“I didn’t see it. They came here on different days. Who’s to know?” He licked his lips. He seemed as if he needed that coffee. And something else too. As if he wanted to say what was on his mind before his colleague returned.
“I’ll tell you one thing, though. It wasn’t just the once. He came back one more time. Five days, a week or so ago. Went in that place over there.”
He pointed along the square, to a small dark door with a sign by it, unreadable from this angle.
“There being…?” Peroni prompted him.
“Where he used to work,” the officer answered, as if it were obvious. “Where all those archaeologists are doing whatever they do. He went in there and next thing we know they were shouting and yelling. We could hear them from here. I was about to go and ask whether someone needed a little help. But then Bramante came out again, face like thunder, and just walked off down the road as if nothing had happened.”
Costa stared at the sign on the walclass="underline" the archaeology department of La Sapienza had a small office here, hidden behind a wall, just like the mansion of the Knights of Malta. When he’d gotten out of prison, Giorgio Bramante had turned down his old job. Yet he’d returned to where he used to work, and he wasn’t a man who did anything without a reason.
“Are they still investigating the site?” Costa asked. “The place where Alessio went missing?”
The Carabinieri officer shook his head.
“Not if they’ve any sense. It’s all cordoned off down there. Whatever happened to it back then left the whole area a death trap. Every time it rains badly, we have a mud slide. Kids mess around in it from time to time. If we find them, they go home with boxed ears. And I mean boxed. I don’t want them coming back.”
Peroni looked at Costa, stared at his shoes, then sighed.
“What’s wrong?” the officer asked.
“I just cleaned them this morning,” the big cop moaned.
It was almost seven before Arturo Messina felt able to leave the Aventino. A lazy orange sun hung over the Tiber. Its mellowing rays turned the river below into a bright still snake of golden water, patterned on both sides by two slow-moving lines of traffic. The squad car, with its siren and blue flashing light, worked its way through them laboriously. Arturo didn’t have the heart to yell at the driver to make better progress.
He cast a final glance back towards the hill. Crowds were gathered on the Lungotevere below, and on the brow too. No one moved much. Even the jackals of the press were beginning to look bored. Messina had been a police officer all his life, worked uniform, plainclothes, everything, before joining the management ladder. The commissario understood that feeling of stasis, of wading through mud, that gripped an investigation when the first buzz of adrenaline and opportunity was lost. There were now only a few hours of light left. The machines had struggled against the patch of ground hanging precipitately beneath the Orange Garden. What initially seemed a simple task had turned into a nightmarish attempt to shift a small mountain of earth and soft stone that kept collapsing in on itself. The amateurish surveyor supplied by the company that brought in the excavators appeared hopelessly out of his depth. Not one of the archaeologists from Bramante’s team was willing to help; they were too infuriated by what was happening. With Giorgio Bramante departed to the Questura, there was no one in the vicinity who could give them an expert opinion on how best to proceed.
So they blundered on, Commissario Messina naively believing the job would become simpler as they progressed. Like scooping out the top of an ants’ nest and peering inside, he’d told Leo Falcone. He was fooling himself. The truth was much more messy. The nest was long dead. The interior was a labyrinth of tunnels and crevices, dangerous, friable, liable to collapse at any moment. One of the excavator drivers had been making noises about quitting because it was too risky to continue. The Army sappers had withdrawn and sat watching the proceedings from the grassy mound by the park, smoking, an expression on their faces that said Amateurs. The machines had already reduced to rubble what, to Messina’s untrained eye, looked like some extensive underground temple, shattering visible artefacts, ploughing the remains, and what seemed to be a plentiful scattering of broken bones back into the red earth. There would, he knew, be a price to pay.
None of which mattered. Only one thing did. Of little Alessio Bramante there wasn’t a sign. Not a shred of clothing, a footprint in the dirt, a distant cry, a faint breath or heartbeat picked up by the sensitive machines Falcone had brought to bear on the job.
Messina stared out at the traffic and told himself, A boy cannot disappear magically of his own accord. Their only hope now was to prise some truth from Ludo Torchia. And soon. Whatever it took.
He sat up front in the car as usual. He didn’t like to think of himself as a superior. He was their leader. The man who showed them the way forward. That was what troops — and police officers were troops of a kind, even if they weren’t Carabinieri — needed.