They had to be somewhere central yet sufficiently deserted to avoid detection. Rosa racked her brain to imagine such a place in the heart of Rome. There were, when she came to think of it, scores. Possibly hundreds. Abandoned excavations, old archaeological finds that never brought in sufficient tourists to keep them open. The city was a honeycomb of ancient sites, some on the surface, many more below the earth. Giorgio Bramante doubtless knew them all.
One large, strong hand curled round her to lie flat on her stomach. His face crept close to hers, his breath, hot and anxious, panted in her ear.
Then the blade rose in his other hand, flashed past her eyes to prick her cheek. She felt the sharp edge of the chill metal against her skin. The knife tip found the corner of her gag, lifted it, sliced through fabric. The material fell away and she found herself choking, too terrified to say anything, aware he still had the rope in his hand, aware, too, that Bramante was an intelligent man, a man who would never have returned to her the power of speech if it could have been of any possible use.
“Do you know what this place is, Rosa?” he whispered.
“Don’t call me that,” she said, once the choking ended, struggling to adopt a quiet, firm tone, one that didn’t expose the fear she felt.
Bramante released his grip on her, just a little.
“A woman with self-respect,” he observed. “That’s important. So. Let’s try this again. Do you know what this place is, Agente Prabakaran?”
“Some…” She shivered, cold in the flimsy, stupid clothes she’d chosen.
He was hard. She could feel the anxious pressure as he held her close.
“…temple.”
“A-plus,” he said, and, thankfully, released his grip, just a little.
Giorgio Bramante pulled a flashlight out of his jacket and played the beam on the object in front of them. It was an altar, perhaps five metres long and two high. Its stone surface was still flat and level.
Like a table. Or a hard rock bed.
Something was carved on it.
“Do you see it?” Bramante asked, pushing her forward, and there was an unfathomable bitter note, tinged with sadness, in the words.
Carved into the face of the altar was the long, muscular shape of a creature. It was being wrestled to the ground by a burly figure who wore a winged helmet and held a short, stabbing sword tight in his hand. The animal’s face was contorted: bulging eyes, flared nostrils — it was a living thing struggling for life. Bells rang in her head. It was like the statues on the old Testaccio slaughterhouse, a man overpowering a colossal bull, intent on slaughter. Only here, there was more to the image. A dog was licking the blood that ran from the beast’s throat. A scorpion was pulling hungrily on its taut penis. This was a freak scene from a vivid nightmare.
“It’s insane,” she murmured, and closed her eyes because he was roaring again, like a beast himself, pulling her into him, dragging her head close into his body until his mouth was in her hair, his torso locked tight against the curves of her back.
“A man is either Mithras or the bull,” Giorgio Bramante said quietly. “The giver or the gift. After which he is nothing.”
She caught a glimpse of his face and regretted it immediately. His eyes were dead. Or absent of humanity. She wasn’t sure which.
He leaned even closer, pressing so hard now that it hurt, and whispered eagerly, “I spent so long in prison. No women. No pleasure. No comfort…”
Rosa closed her eyes and tried to remember what they told every woman in the force about a situation like this. Only one word remained clear in her head.
Survive.
Whatever drug Foglia had given Ludo Torchia seemed to race through the student’s blood system, like some deadly spike of adrenaline. The young man lay there taut, bloodied, eyes wide open, acutely alert, taking in their faces, taking in the din of the traffic outside: horns and angry human voices, an ordinary evening in the Via Labicana, such mundane noises to accompany the end of a human life.
Falcone was astonished to find those sounds were still there, fourteen years after the event, so real he could hear them. And Ludo Torchia’s face too: shock mixed with something not akin to amusement. The face of a guilty man. A guilty man who was in no mood to be helpful in his dying moments.
“Say something.”
Falcone mouthed the same words now, alone in his office, trying to marshal his thoughts in the way he used to with such fluent ease. It was all getting harder and it wasn’t just his injuries. He was old. Even before the gunshot wound in Venice, he’d passed some invisible point in his life, a moment of profound change, when all his past skills simply solidified inside him and stayed there, clinging on, hoping to defy the years. Even if they found Bramante the following day, Messina still wanted him gone. There would, he now knew, be no new talents, no fresh challenges. The time was approaching when he would have to pass on the reins to a new generation. Nic Costa one day, or so he hoped. Barring some kind of a miracle, only the sidelines waited for Leo Falcone: administration or some other corner of bureaucracy before the inevitable retirement. This part of his life was coming to a close, and he had no idea what could possibly replace it.
Or how he could even begin to approach it without putting the present case into some kind of compartment he could label “solved.” He’d snapped at Messina over the grim word “closure,” unfairly perhaps, because a part of Falcone did want this issue finished, for good. Not just with Bramante back in prison, but with the fate of the boy uncovered too. He believed, with every instinct thirty years of police work had given him, that the two were inseparable.
His mind wandered back fourteen years to the ambulance again. Everything in those last moments was so hazy. It had been hard to catch Torchia’s final, murmured words.
Reluctantly, because he knew the pain it would cause, he took out his personal address book and found Foglia’s number. The doctor had retired from the Questura six months after the Bramante case. Both men knew why, though they had never discussed the matter. Falcone knew Foglia would never be able to live with the consequences of what he’d done that day, perhaps all the more because those actions had never been brought to the light of day. Teresa Lupo’s predecessor in the morgue had quietly overlooked whatever substances he had found in Torchia’s blood — an act of deliberate negligence which Falcone knew he could never expect from Teresa. So the best Questura doctor Falcone ever worked with had taken early retirement and, when his children left home for university, departed his native Rome to live on Sant’Antioco, a little-visited island on the west coast of Sardinia, a place that seemed, to Falcone, to say Don’t visit.
All the same, he did visit, some five or six years before, spending a few quiet days watching the sea from the Foglias’ large, modern villa above a modest holiday resort, passing pleasantries, never talking about work.
It was enough.
Falcone dialled the number, waited, then heard Foglia’s familiar voice. After the excuses and brief exchanges of news, his old friend took a deep breath and announced, “I know why you’re calling, Leo. You don’t need to beat around the bush.”
The Bramante case had made big headlines fourteen years ago. It was back in them now, louder than ever.
“If I had any alternative, Patrizio….”
“My God, you must be desperate, if you need the likes of me.”
“I just…”