“So we allow parents to carry out their own interviews now, do we? If you can call it that.”
Falcone shrugged. “If they’re parents like Bramante. Reputable, middle-class citizens who could, I imagine, make a phone call to the right person if they wanted. This was not my decision. I opposed it as vigorously as I was able. But I am a mere sovrintendente around here. I was overruled. I regret that deeply. In the end, I disobeyed Messina and stopped this when I was able.”
Torchia wasn’t moving. Falcone didn’t know a lot about medicine. Nor did he want to know much. What he saw were all the usual totems he associated with a life about to faiclass="underline" oxygen and syringes, masks and mechanisms, crude toys waging a useless battle against the inevitable.
“You could have stopped it in the first place,” Foglia said with a scowl.
“Probably not. Messina would simply have dismissed me and put someone in there who would have done nothing.”
“You could have told them upstairs!”
He tried to smile. “Messina was upstairs. Please. We’ve been friends for so many years. Don’t imagine these things didn’t run through my head.”
Foglia seemed to have given up on the injured man, judging by the way he allowed the medics to do everything. This surprised Falcone. He was a good doctor. A good man. They had been friends for many years.
“Is there nothing you can do?”
He grunted at that. “As one of my illustrious forebears once said, ‘I cannot cure death.’”
“Perhaps Messina and his kind have a point,” Falcone replied idly, thinking aloud as much for his own benefit as anyone else’s. They were in the wide straight line of the Via Labicana now, a medieval pope’s highway to the great church of San Giovanni in Laterano at the summit of the hill ahead. The hospital wasn’t much further. This part of Ludo Torchia’s journey was coming to an end.
“What?” Foglia replied, his voice high-pitched with disbelief. “Beating a man to death has a point?”
“Not for me but, as I am constantly reminded, I’m no parent. You, Patrizio, are.”
They were lovely kids, two girls, twins, fast approaching the age at which they’d go to college. Foglia and his wife would, Leo knew, be heartbroken when they left home.
“Imagine this was Elena or Anna,” he went on. “Imagine you knew that she’s still alive somewhere, but she won’t be for much longer. She’s underground. Trapped. Frightened. Unable to do anything to help herself. And this… individual can tell you where she is. Possibly.”
There was a sudden chill in the ambulance. Falcone ignored it.
“Put yourself in that situation, Patrizio,” he went on. “You don’t want vengeance. You don’t care about anything but your child. If this man speaks, she may live. If he remains silent, she will surely die.”
Foglia wriggled on his chair.
“What would you do in the circumstances?” Falcone demanded. “Rattle off a suitable section of the Hippocratic Oath, then walk out of the room and start phoning around for estimates for the funeral? Not that you can be certain there will be one, naturally, because the odds are we’ll never find a body. That you will never know what happened to your own flesh and blood. You will go to your grave with that big black hole inside you till the end….”
“Enough!” Foglia yelled. “Enough!”
The ambulance lurched to a complete halt. A trumpet voluntary of car horns rose in harmonic unison and filled the air with their angry cries, like some crazed ironic fanfare for the dying man on the stretcher.
The older medic, a man in his forties, who was watching the oxygen machine like a hawk, took hold of the tube running to Torchia’s mask, waited for the commotion outside to lessen, then said, “I’d beat it out of him. Without a second thought. If I thought it would help right now, I’d squeeze this oxygen supply until the bastard came clean. What else can you do?”
“And if he’s innocent?” Falcone asked.
“If he’s innocent,” the medic answered straightaway, “he’d say so, wouldn’t he?”
Not always, Falcone thought. Sometimes, in the middle of an investigation, logic and rational behaviour went missing. In sensational cases it was by no means uncommon for some troubled individual to walk into the Questura and confess to a crime he had never committed. Some strange, inner guilt drove men to the most curious and damaging of acts on occasion. Maybe Torchia was culpable of something dark and heinous he didn’t wish to share with a couple of police officers. That didn’t guarantee it had to do with the disappearance of Alessio Bramante.
“We can do what we’re paid to do,” Falcone replied. “We can try to find out what has happened, to sort some facts from the mist. That sounds a little feeble, I know, but sometimes it’s all we have. Besides, someone tried to beat the truth out of him and look at the outcome. He didn’t say a single helpful word. We still don’t know where the boy is. Which means…”
What? He still wasn’t sure.
“Perhaps he is genuinely innocent,” he continued. “That he was just in the wrong place at the wrong time, though I doubt that. Or he wanted Bramante to do what he did for some reason. It gave him some satisfaction.”
Foglia shook his head. “What possible motive could he have for that?”
Falcone felt a little ashamed. It had been wrong of him to personalise the case in the way he had, to put that cruel picture inside Foglia’s head. It had disturbed his old friend, who was now red-faced, exasperated, and confused.
“I don’t know. I honestly don’t, Patrizio. And I wish I did.” He hesitated. “Is there any chance he’ll live?”
Both of them, the doctor and the older medic, shook their heads.
“Will he regain consciousness?” Falcone asked. “I was clinging to some faint hope he might tell a stranger something he wouldn’t disclose to Giorgio Bramante. If there was a personal reason behind this we don’t understand, perhaps I’d have a chance—”
“He’s not coming back,” the medic muttered, then gingerly opened the door and peered outside. The driver stood there, lighting a cigarette. He stared back at them, guilty at first, then smiled, the quick, cheeky Roman smile everyone used when they were caught. There was an accident in the road ahead, the driver explained. They were stuck in solid traffic. It would be some time — perhaps more than fifteen minutes — before they got to the hospital.
The medic swore, slammed the door, and tugged his colleague’s arm. The other one was a thin, unremarkable young man with a head of long blond hair. He was still watching the dials and the screens, a little nervous, as if he hadn’t seen many deaths before.
“Don’t waste your time,” the older man told him. “I’d put money on him being gone by the time we get moving again. Isn’t that right?”
The doctor stared at the monitors attached to Ludo Torchia, whose breathing seemed shallow and faint.
“I believe so,” he replied. “Leo, you should have stayed in the Questura.” He said this with some faint note of reproof. “You have some of the other students, don’t you?”
“We have,” Falcone agreed. Probably all of them by now. As he’d expected, they weren’t good at hiding.
“Then they can tell you,” the doctor suggested.
Falcone shook his head and looked at the motionless figure. “Not after this. They’re surrounded by lawyers. They don’t need to say a thing. Why should they? We’ve allowed one of them to be beaten almost to death in our own interview room. They can stay silent for as long as they like. We can’t even use it against them.”
“I need a cigarette,” the older medic complained. “We’re not going to be moving for a while.”
“As a doctor,” Foglia murmured, “I shouldn’t say this. But go and have one. Both of you.”