She remembered Teresa Lupo’s advice: Either look or don’t look. Just don’t half look.
The reason she had assumed this was Giorgio Bramante was simple: the man and the woman treated each other with a casual, intimate familiarity.
The butcher reached out and lightly brushed Beatrice Bramante’s cheek once more. Then she walked off, out under the market’s iron roof, covering her head against the rain, striding back towards her apartment, eyes on the sidewalk.
Beatrice is not alone, Rosa Prabakaran decided. She has a lover. One who worked with Giorgio. And surely must have known him.
This was valuable, she thought. In a different light, Leo Falcone would be grateful for it. Yet she was immediately aware that he would see instantly she had come to possess the intelligence through what he would view as illicit means, in direct contradiction to the orders he’d issued.
Of itself the knowledge was useless, of such limited value that its revelation could serve only to reveal her duplicity.
“I need more,” she whispered.
When the market closed, she followed him back to where, she assumed, he lived. It was in a block near the old slaughterhouse, a massive complex now being turned over to the arts, not far from the Monti dei Cocci, the small hill of Imperial-era pottery shards that was Testaccio’s one tourist attraction. At night, half of Rome came here for the restaurants and the clubs. In the day, however, it was deserted. Only a handful of visitors were heading for the arts exhibition. Rosa studied the gates of the old slaughterhouse. They’d left the huge original headstone over the building: a winged man wrestling a complaining bull to the earth by the ring through its nose. And beneath both of them a sea of carved bones, animal and human, all grimy stone after years of exposure to the weather.
Lost for what to do next, she hid from the rain in a tiny café opposite. After a while her mobile phone rang. She cursed the intrusion as an unfamiliar, unexpected voice came on the line.
It was hot that night in the basement of the Questura. Falcone was left alone outside the cell, a punishment for defying Messina over the progress of the investigation. His penance was to listen to a young man being beaten to the brink of death, a point from which there would be no return.
He had sat there for so long, racking his brains for some possible solution, some excuse which would allow him to contravene Messina’s direct orders and enter that dreadful room. There was only one, and he’d known it from the outset. What was happening was wrong. Nothing could justify it, not the mysterious disappearance of a child, nor the likelihood that Ludo Torchia was involved in it. Wrong was wrong, and any police officer who tried to run away from that simple fact would surely, one day, pay the price.
When he could take no more — Bramante was left alone in the cell with Torchia for fifty minutes, Falcone was to learn later, though it seemed much longer — Falcone threw open the door, began to say something, and found the words failed in his mouth. This was a sight he knew would never fully fade from his memory.
Giorgio Bramante stood over his victim, still furious, still wanting to go on, hate and a lust for some kind of vengeance blazing in his eyes.
“I’m not done yet,” this learned, respected college professor yelled. “Didn’t you hear your orders, you fool? I’m not done yet.”
“There,” Falcone told him, “you are wrong.”
Then he picked up the phone to the front desk, ordered the duty medic to come immediately, and called for an ambulance. After which he dialled the central complaints bureau. He described, tersely, the situation as he saw it: an act of outright brutality warranting a criminal investigation had happened in the heart of the Questura. When he heard the hesitation on the line, he made it clear that, should the authorities decide to play deaf, he would take the matter higher and higher until someone, somewhere, would listen. There was no going back.
He put down the handset. Giorgio Bramante was glaring at him with such hatred that, for a moment, Falcone feared for his own safety.
Even for Giorgio Bramante, used to hardship, the weather was bitter. After he’d fled the Questura, surprised at how easily he’d avoided capture, he trudged for two hours along deserted roads which still followed the route of the old Imperial highways, finally passing the Porta San Sebastiano around three a.m., and walking until he found what was once the Via Latina. There he planned to spend the rest of the night, and much of the coming day, dry, if not warm, in the depths of a set of closed caverns, not far from the Ad Decimum catacombs, ten Roman miles from the city, close to what, centuries ago, would once have been a military encampment.
This was the most remote of his several potential hiding places. There were ones much closer to the centro storico — caverns and remains of underground streets that had never been mapped, known only to a handful of scholars. He could live hidden away like this for months undetected.
Circumstances forced him to wait, to be patient. There was only a little more to be done now, but this was the most important of all. So he sat, in the cold, bleak cavern, thinking about the day, and what knowledge he had come to possess of this place over the years.
The present site had been discovered by a local farmer trying to break up the soil for vines. The family had kept the find secret for a decade, hoping there was some hidden treasure in its subterranean web of tunnels. All they uncovered were tombs and bones, niches hacked into the stone, row upon row, tunnel upon tunnel. And, on the final, lowest level, the temple, which they scarcely looked at once they realised there was nothing glittering among its stones.
In late Imperial times this had been a modest agrarian community, probably no more than a few farms and a small army barracks for the men guarding the gatehouses and tax collection points of the Appian Way. This temple had none of the grandeur of the great altar hidden deep within the Aventino. Here, Mithras and the bull were crudely carved. The scorpion squeezing at the beast’s groin was scarcely recognisable. The place was a mere remnant of the old religion, one that the archaeologists, once they learned of it, decided to overlook in favour of the more obvious Christian symbols that had followed: the insignia of the Cross, the legends carved into the walls that hinted someone, perhaps a saint, had rested here briefly after martyrdom.
On the first Sunday of each month, a local archaeological society led a gaggle of visitors down through the simple modern concrete entry cabin on the surface, taking thrill-seeking tourists beneath the earth to see the skeletons and what remained of the ancient funereal decorations. No one spoke of Mithras. The religion that had once been Christianity’s principal rival — though Bramante doubted any of the men who had worshipped here would have seen it that way — was now a myth to amuse children. A fairy story, a fable to file alongside Aesop.
That worked to his advantage. The site, situated half a kilometre along a narrow, now unused farm track, in a field abandoned by a farmer who’d found more profit in subsidies for growing nothing than planting young grapes, was remote. The archaeologists wouldn’t be back for another two weeks. He had privacy and security. And, thanks to thoughtful city authorities, electricity too, since a single cable feeding electric lights ran through virtually the entire network of caverns, stopping short only of the Mithraeum, which no one wanted to see.
The previous day had exhausted him. He’d slept for eight straight dreamless hours before waking. Now he sat on the first level, by a series of niches, under the dim illumination of the bulbs and the grey light of day slipping down a slender ventilation shaft. In this sector all but one of the graves was empty. In the last alcove lay a female skeleton, carefully posed for the visitors, a real human being, someone who had walked and breathed in the fields above some seventeen hundred or more years before, her remains now arranged for the curious, like a waxworks dummy from a travelling circus.