“If that’s a criticism of my father, Falcone—”
“No, no, no.”
The old inspector looked dissatisfied, with himself more than anyone. When Costa compared him with Peroni, it was hard to believe these two men were around the same age. Gianni had found something over the past eighteen months. A new life — the odd blossoming of love in autumn with Teresa — had revived him, put colour into his battered farmer’s features, a spring into his step. Falcone had been brutally wounded in service, a shock from which he had yet to recover fully, both physically and mentally.
A stray thought entered Costa’s head at that moment: What if he never quite makes it back? How would Falcone, a man whose self-knowledge had a candid, heartless intensity, be able to face that fact?
“This is not about your father,” the inspector told Bruno Messina. “Or me. Or any of us. It’s about Giorgio Bramante and his son. His son more than anything. It’s the same now as it was fourteen years ago. If we could find out what happened to the boy, all of this would end. Had it been Alessio in that hellhole down by the river today, Bramante would walk into this Questura tonight to give himself up. I’m convinced of that.”
“Closure,” Messina said, then nodded sagely, in agreement. “You could be right.”
“Please don’t use that kind of trite cliché around me,” Falcone said immediately, sending a red flush to Messina’s choleric face. “I may not be a parent but I surely understand one thing. When you have lost a child, there’s never closure. It’s a myth, a convenient media fantasy which the rest of us adopt in order to allow ourselves to sleep at night. You’ll be asking me to ‘move on’ next….”
“I may well,” Messina snapped. “Bavetti’s chasing your heels, Leo.”
“Good. I like competition. If we find Alessio, discover what happened to him, Giorgio Bramante will give himself up because he’s lost what’s driving him — his anger, which would seem to be directed solely at me by this stage, though I still fail to understand why. Uncovering the fate of that child will take the sting out of that rage, supplant it with what should have been there in the first place and for some reason never was. The natural response of a father. Grief. Mourning. The kind of grim and bitter acceptance we’ve all seen before.”
Messina snorted. “I didn’t realise psychology was your subject.”
“Neither did I until recently,” Falcone replied. “I wish I’d made this discovery earlier. But there you are. So…” He leaned back in his chair, stretched his long legs, and closed his eyes. “This morning you said we had another forty-eight hours,” Falcone said.
“This morning you held a gun to my head,” Messina replied, offended.
“I’m sorry, Commissario. Genuinely. We haven’t had a good start to this relationship, have we? I imagine, in the circumstances, it’s inevitable. You blame me for what happened fourteen years ago. Come to think of it, so does Giorgio Bramante.”
“I want no more surprises,” Messina emphasised, bristling at the thought. “No more trips outside the Questura. No more wild-goose chases.”
Falcone threw his arms open wide in protest. “As I said! It was a misunderstanding.”
Bruno Messina drew in a deep, agonised breath. “Very well,” he conceded. “You go nowhere. None of you. Not till it’s daylight. If you have nothing come Thursday, this is Bavetti’s case. You three get out of my sight for a while. Everything runs so smoothly without you around. Why is that?”
Falcone struggled to his feet, holding on to the desk for a moment, then letting go, standing unaided. Costa restrained the urge to help him. A point was being made.
“Perhaps you’re just not looking hard enough,” the inspector suggested mildly.
Messina shot him a furious glance. “Don’t push your luck,” he said with menace. “It’s not that great at the moment, is it?”
“A day,” the inspector emphasised. “That’s all I ask. I will bring you Giorgio Bramante. That…” — he clicked his fingers at Costa and Peroni, then pointed at the door — “…is a promise.”
The three of them stood outside the commissario’s office, glad to be out of Messina’s presence.
“How exactly?” Peroni asked.
They didn’t get an answer. Falcone was already stomping down the corridor, not looking back.
They’d turned off the Via Galvani quickly, parked somewhere, maybe, Rosa guessed, in one of the deserted dead-end alleys on the far side of the Monte dei Cocci. There was no escape. Bramante had walked round to the back of the van, punched the butcher hard in the face when he tried to resist, then tied the two of them tightly together with thick, tough climbing rope. Then he’d disappeared, for hours. She’d watched the daylight die in the front windows of the van as night fell, trying to find some way of communicating with the sweating, terrified man to whom she was tethered. It was impossible. Finally, she’d persuaded him to help her kick the walls of the van for long periods on end, and still no one came. Not until Bramante returned, threw open the doors, face furious from the noise, fists flailing at the butcher again.
After that, Bramante got in behind the wheel and drove for no more than ten minutes, uphill — the Aventino, it could be nowhere else — then down a winding road, meeting no traffic, travelling so rapidly his two prisoners rolled helplessly around in the back, tethered, bumping into each other, close enough for her to see the all-consuming fright in her fellow captive’s eyes. The vehicle came to an abrupt halt. The doors flew open. Briefly — all she glimpsed were the distant lights of a tram, the Number 3, she was certain of it — they were outside, before being dragged down a stony path, falling, tumbling on the hard stones and cold damp grass, winding up in some dank passageway drenched in the rank smell of age and sewers.
She’d taken a class trip when she was in schooclass="underline" the catacombs somewhere out on the Appian Way. They smelled like this, the same powerful, pervasive reek, earthy and organic, that had probably hung around for centuries.
Rosa Prabakaran hated being in the catacombs, not that she let this show. It felt as if she were trapped in a grave.
Finally, pushed on by Bramante’s feet and fists, they found themselves in some subterranean chamber. Not large. Not complete either, because part of it was open to the night air, letting in some soft, slow drizzle that curled down from a dark velvet sky in which stars were faintly visible.
There were chambers off this principal vestibule, guarded with iron gates, modern ones designed to keep out intruders.
Bramante unlocked the cell to the right, opened the door, and took out a large clasp knife.
The butcher whimpered and stared in horror at the weapon. Bramante cut through the thick climbing rope with one strong swipe, then propelled the man inside with a vicious kick. The butcher fell to the floor in a pained heap, still whimpering. The door closed behind him with a clatter.
Rosa closed her eyes, found herself wondering what this meant, then immediately fought to stifle the thoughts that rose in her head.
Bramante shoved her into the adjoining chamber, closed the door behind him, locked it. He had a set of keys, she noticed. Several, on a chain, the kind a caretaker would use. Or an archaeologist going back to his old haunts.
He pushed her forward again until they were standing at the end of the room, then he lifted a large electric lantern and turned on the light. A broad sallow beam illuminated what appeared to be a cavernous chamber, with brick walls clinging to the rock and earth. One corner was open to a luminous night sky. Some dim illumination from an artificial bulb joined the light from the stars and an unseen moon there. A man or woman at ground level just might have seen them from the right position, Rosa thought, but it gave her no comfort, since Bramante must have realised this too.