She stared up at him. He saw. The hood came down. It wasn’t the face from the photographs in the files, she realised. Not quite. Giorgio Bramante, in the flesh, had only a passing resemblance to the man Rosa thought she would see. He was greyer, more sallow-faced, with the complexion of someone dying from the inside out of some cruel disease, like a cancer gnawing away relentlessly. Except for the eyes, which blazed at her.
The eyes were happy. Hungry. Amused.
Costa listened. He’d thought he was getting blasé about this kind of detail. He was wrong. What had happened to Giorgio Bramante’s former student, Sandro Vignola, if Teresa was right — and it was difficult to see how she could be mistaken — was as vicious and heartless as anything Bramante had done to his other victims. Perhaps more so. And that made Costa ask himself: Was this different somehow?
There was much work to be done on the remains. They had suffered badly from animal attack and substantial decomposition in the airless, damp enclosure of the drain. This would take days to complete back in the morgue, and require outside assistance, possibly from a private lab or that of the Carabinieri. But two facts were clear already. Vignola had been gagged. The cloth that had been tied round his mouth to prevent him calling for help was still in place. And he’d been hobbled, hand and foot, so that he could scarcely crawl.
“Hobbled with what?” Falcone asked.
Teresa shouted to one of the morgue monkeys. He came out with a strong nylon tie, with a buckle on one end. It stank.
“I’m only guessing here,” she told them, “but I’d put money on the fact this is the same kind of hobble they use in a slaughterhouse. Remember, Bramante was working in one while he was in jail? He could have stolen a couple when he came out for the weekend. Also…” — she looked at Peroni as if to say Sorry — “…just to make sure, he broke both of the victim’s ankles. He did it after the hobble went on, so perhaps he was worried his original plan wouldn’t work.”
“This plan being?” Peroni asked.
“He crippled Sandro Vignola and put him in the drain. Then he capped the end of it with bricks. It wouldn’t take long. Not if he knew what he was doing. I asked her earlier…” She nodded at Judith Turnhouse, still sitting under the awning, now talking quietly, calmly, to a policewoman. “One of Bramante’s many specialities as an archaeologist was apparently the early uses of brick and concrete,” Teresa reported. “They knew an awful lot about that, even two thousand years ago. They knew the right mortar to make for a situation where there was damp. They knew what kind of material to choose so that it didn’t fall down after a couple of years. That’s what he did here. He bound Sandro Vignola. He made sure he couldn’t utter a sound. Then he walled him up in there and left him to die.”
Peroni muttered something indistinguishable.
“I imagine,” Teresa added, “that we’ll find the cause of death was starvation. I couldn’t see any obvious wounds apart from the broken ankles. Here’s another thing I learned from her too…” Teresa nodded at Judith Turnhouse and, for a moment, looked pleased with herself. “Walling people up and leaving them to die was one way some Roman cults treated those they believed had betrayed them.”
“You mean Bramante’s taunting them with their own rituals?” Costa asked.
“I don’t know what I mean,” she replied. “All I know is this. Geek boy over there” — she flicked a thumb at Di Capua — “did a little research on the Web before this lot came in. Everything to do with Mithras happens in sevens. There were six kids and Giorgio. There were seven different levels of rank in the temple, wet-behind-the-ears beginner to god. Does that mean anything? Who knows? But here’s a fact Silvio did find. Every level had a sacrament. Which, before you jump to conclusions, could just mean a gift to the god. An offering. Or it could be a sacrifice, too. They killed a lot of animals back then, and not necessarily for food either. Or the sacrament could be some kind of ordeal. One of which was being left alone in some dark, deserted cave, wondering whether anyone was ever going to come back and let you out.”
They took this in, still bewildered.
“Seven stages, seven sacraments,” Teresa said firmly. “By my reckoning, our killer’s still one short.”
“I’m not much interested in ancient history, Doctor.” Falcone said it severely.
“Bramante is,” Costa reminded him. “Ancient history was his life. His obsession. Just as much as being a father. Perhaps the two weren’t separate. Didn’t he say you were number seven?”
Falcone stared at him. Once Costa would have felt awed by the older man’s presence. Once he would have been too scared to correct him like that. But Falcone had changed. So had he. And now the inspector was regarding him with a curious expression, one that bore no animosity and possessed, instead, something not far from… approval.
“A complex case doesn’t necessarily demand complex solutions,” Falcone declared. “So this killing happened, what…”
“Eleven years ago.” Teresa shrugged. “That’s when Sandro Vignola disappeared, isn’t it? I’m amazed we’ve got as much to work on as we have, what with the rats and the water.”
Falcone scowled. “And there’s absolutely nothing here that’s going to be of any use to us today? No forensic? Nothing? We know this was Bramante’s work. He’s hardly likely to deny it when we find him.”
The three men stared at each other miserably.
Teresa Lupo clicked her fingers at Silvio Di Capua.
“If you people are going to ask me a question,” she said, “it would be polite to wait for an answer before you dive into your own personal pits of gloom. Show them, Silvio.”
Di Capua bent down. There was a transparent plastic case in his hand. Inside it wriggled a large, pale, corpulent worm, of a kind Costa had never seen in his life, and would feel happy never to encounter again.
“Planarian,” Di Capua said firmly, as if it meant something, and pointed towards the drain.
Teresa rapped her fat fingers on the box and beamed at the thing when it moved.
“It’s a worm,” Peroni observed.
“No,” she corrected him. “Silvio is right. It’s a planarian. Our friend in Ca’ d’Ossi had one too. That planarian didn’t come from there. It didn’t come from the slaughterhouse. It came from the underground place where Giorgio stored him before moving him in with all those other dead people.”
“It’s a worm,” Falcone said.
The Lupo forefinger waved at them, like the wagging, warning digit of a schoolteacher about to deliver up a secret.
“A very special worm,” she said. “I’ve decided to call him… Bruno. What do you think?”
The ambulance fought through the busy city streets, rocking violently across the cobblestones of the centro storico, battling the traffic to find the hospital at San Giovanni. The police doctor, Patrizio Foglia, sat next to his patient, ignoring the two medics, who seemed to be working on Ludo Torchia out of duty rather than conviction.
Falcone took the bench opposite, held on tight for the ride, and didn’t shrink from the man’s severe gaze.
“This was not my doing, Patrizio,” he said. “Save your anger for someone else.”
“You mean these things simply happen in our own Questura and no one notices? What the hell is going on, Leo?”
“There’s a child missing,” Falcone replied, and found himself depressed to discover how much he sounded like Arturo Messina. “In cases like this, people change. Giorgio Bramante is a highly respected man. Who was to know?”