The younger medic looked baffled. “I don’t smoke.”
His companion caught something in Foglia’s expression. “I’ll teach you,” he said, and led him out of the ambulance.
Falcone sat there, silent, lost for words.
Foglia took another look at the monitors. “He’s dying, Leo. There’s nothing anyone can do.”
“So you said.”
“You really think he might have talked to you?”
“I don’t know, Patrizio. This case makes me realise I know very little indeed.”
Foglia stood up. He walked to the equipment cabinet on the wall, reached in, and took out a syringe, then, after checking carefully, an ampoule of some drug.
“If I’m lucky, I may be able to bring him back to consciousness for a minute or so. It would be appreciated if the pathologist made no mention of this in his autopsy. I quite like my job and it’s a sight better than prison.”
He primed the syringe, checking the level very carefully.
“Well?” Foglia said. “Falcone. We don’t have all night. Neither does that boy.”
“What else will it do to him?” Falcone asked.
“He’ll probably die of heart failure within fifteen minutes.”
“No!”
“He’s dead anyway, Leo!”
“I said no, Patrizio. I’ve already arrested one man for murder tonight. Don’t make it two.”
Foglia laughed, without conviction. “I’m a doctor. Doctors make mistakes.”
“Don’t do it. Please. For your own sake.”
“What about that child?”
Falcone tried to argue, but the words weren’t there.
“Exactly,” Foglia went on. “Either way, I’m not going to get to sleep tonight.”
He found a patch of clear skin between the bruises on Torchia’s bare right arm, plumped up the vein with the same professional care he would have used on a patient in the Questura surgery, then slipped the hypodermic deep into the flesh.
It took less than a minute. Almost to the rhythm of the horns outside, the student’s chest jerked. Suddenly his eyes opened. They focused on the ceiling and the bright light overhead.
Falcone moved over to crouch by the surgical stretcher.
“Ludo,” he murmured, and found his throat was dry. His voice sounded distant and foreign. “We need to find the boy.”
Torchia’s swollen, blackened lips moved, shiny with blood and spittle. He said nothing.
“Ludo—” Falcone said.
Torchia sobbed, choked back a liquid, guttural cough, and managed to turn his head in their direction.
Falcone caught a glimpse of his eyes. He looked like a child himself at that moment: alone, scared, confused, in pain.
Then something came back, an unreadable certainty in his face, and Leo Falcone felt, against his own wishes, that he’d been wrong all along. Torchia did know something about the boy, and even now the memory amused him.
“Say something,” Falcone pleaded, and thought they were the feeblest words he’d ever uttered in his life.
Unaware that a fat white planarian, recently dissected in the morgue below, had come to bear his name, Bruno Messina sat in the large leather chair in his office looking like a man at the end of his tether.
“So there’s nothing?” he demanded, half furious, half pleased he was able to launch this accusation in their direction and deflect it from himself.
Costa had to nudge his boss for an answer. Falcone had been staring out the window, into the night, lost in thought, as if recollecting something. Fragments from the old Bramante case kept reentering the conversation they’d had on the way to the Questura, like flotsam released from the depths of some murky sea, surfacing in Falcone’s troubled mind. There had been a moment when Costa wondered whether it would be wiser for the old man to retire from the case altogether, to make way for a younger, more physically sound man. Then, just before the car parked in the secure piazza behind the station, Falcone had taken a call from the intelligence team tracing Bramante’s movements in the city and, in the space of one minute, conducted the kind of intense, rapid-fire interrogation of a junior officer no other man in the Questura could begin to match. The old Leo Falcone was there when needed, Costa realised. He was just distracted, for reasons Costa couldn’t quite comprehend.
The team had stayed at the murder scene by the river for two hours. When they returned to the Questura, Falcone had summoned a meeting of all the senior officers in the case, along with Teresa Lupo and Silvio Di Capua. That had taken more than ninety minutes. It was now just past eight o’clock, a time when shifts change, when stalled investigations risked falling into stasis, indolence, and, eventually, despair.
“Furthermore,” Messina added, “you disobeyed my express orders, Inspector. You left the Questura.”
“I thought I was only a prisoner at night,” Falcone replied, without the slightest hint of guile. “I apologise if there was some misunderstanding.”
“What are we supposed to do, Leo? One more day and all we have to show for it is one more body.”
“That’s not quite fair, sir,” Costa interjected. “We know that Bramante has been trying to find his old maps of underground sites.”
“That narrows it down,” Messina said dryly.
“We know from Bru—” Peroni corrected himself. “We know from the worm we found down by the river that he didn’t keep the last victim there.”
“I say again: that narrows it down.”
“But it does,” Costa objected. “The worm Teresa got out of Toni LaMarca isn’t in any of the databases. That means we know where Bramante didn’t hide LaMarca before he took the body to Ca’ d’Ossi.”
“Tell me something you do know!”
“Of course,” Falcone replied, taking control of the conversation, and shooting Costa a glance that said Mine now. “There are more than one hundred and fifty registered subterranean archaeological sites for which La Sapienza has no planarian records. The university archaeological department has a further forty-three that are not officially registered but were visited by Bramante in the course of his work. That means he could have used any one of them. Or somewhere else entirely.”
“This could take years!”
Falcone laughed. “No. A couple of days at most, I think. We could start now, but in the dark… he’d be gone the moment he heard something. Wherever he is, he knows the place well and we don’t. Besides, we have other work to do.”
Bruno Messina sighed. “Nearly two hundred sites…”
“That’s the total,” Costa interrupted. “It’s coming down all the time. We can rule out some because they’re not close to running water, so it’s highly unlikely there would be a planarian population. Also, we assume he’s in reasonable proximity to the Aventino. This is the area he knows best. He took LaMarca’s body to Ca’ d’Ossi in a stolen car. We found it near the Circus Maximus this afternoon. It has LaMarca’s blood in the trunk. Bramante was running a considerable risk there. An intelligent man would wish to minimise that. He won’t be far away; he’ll think it’s safer for him where he knows the sites. Tomorrow, right after sunrise, we start looking in a radius out from Ca’ d’Ossi.”
Messina exploded. “This is ridiculous! How many searches can you perform a day? Ten? Fifteen? You should have men out there now!”
“I’ve already told you,” Falcone said evenly, “it would be counterproductive in the dark. Besides, Bramante has no one left on his list but me. The others are all dead. I’d like this finished as soon as possible too. But being realistic, there is no rush. If I don’t have him when my time runs out, I hand everything over to Bavetti. He can have the credit. I don’t care. And…” He paused. “…we should not fall into the trap of acting first and thinking afterwards. That’s happened too much in relation to Giorgio Bramante already. It’s almost as if he expects it of us.”