“They won’t mind. That’s why they’re there.”
“No,” she said firmly. “They’re there to treat sick people. I’ll see a doctor in the morning, just to reassure us both. I really have no reason to think there’s anything wrong. I just feel a little out of sorts. That’s all.”
He knew her well enough by now not to argue.
“When will I see you?” she asked.
“Messina’s given us one more day. After that, if Bramante is still out there, Falcone hands the investigation over to Bavetti. We’ll be gone from the Questura, all three of us. We don’t meet Messina’s approval. He doesn’t sound much like his father.”
“No,” she replied, and he could hear the sadness in her voice. “There’s some distance between those two and I don’t really understand why. Fathers and sons. I thought it was supposed to be some special kind of bond women were meant to envy. They don’t seem to have a relationship at all.”
Costa thought of his own family, the constant, abrasive difficulties he’d experienced with his father, almost till the end, when he was in a wheelchair, stricken too, and when their mutual frailty brought about some painful, redemptive reconciliation that still pricked like an awkward needle when the memories flooded back. So much time wasted on stupid arguments, on both sides. Marco Costa had never made life easy for anyone, himself and his own flesh and blood least of all.
“Just one more myth,” he murmured.
She waited for a moment, then said, “No, it’s not. I never knew your father, Nic. I really wish I had. Even so, I see someone else in your eyes from time to time and I know it has to be him. You two had something between you that never existed for me with my own dad. Or my mom either. And it’s not just you. I’ve noticed this before. It’s men. I think…”
Another, longer pause, one that told him she wasn’t sure she ought to say this.
“You think what?” he said.
“I think, in a way, once you become fathers, you feel guilty if you feel you’re just living in the moment. When a man has a son, he develops some sense of duty that tells him the day will come when he’ll pass on the torch. One generation to the next. And that’s what’s driving all of you crazy about this case. Not the missing kid, or rather not just the missing kid. You see a world where that all got taken away. Some kind of sacred bond that’s been broken. Even Leo…”
“Leo doesn’t have children!”
“Neither do you. But you both had fathers. Have you ever heard Leo mention his?”
“No.”
Costa’s gaze wandered to the glass-fronted office across the room where Falcone was still working, pale-faced. It was past eleven. The inspector looked as if he would go on for hours.
“If you want to discuss the case,” she went on, “call me, Nic. It doesn’t bother me, really.”
“I don’t have anything left to tell you. We think we can start to narrow down tomorrow where he’s hiding. It’s just a standard operation: search the possibilities, eliminate what we can, until we find something. As far as Alessio’s concerned…”
The shadow of the lost boy hovered behind everything like a ghost. Without telling anyone, Costa had, during his break earlier that evening, driven over to the little church of Sacro Cuore in Prati, talked to the church warden there, a good man who was a little scared and greatly puzzled by what had happened. Costa had spoken with the plainclothes officer on surveillance outside on Falcone’s orders, satisfied himself that the likelihood was that Bramante had never been near the place that day. Then he’d returned to the church, gone into the little room, with the strange, unworldly name — Il Piccolo Museo del Purgatorio — studied the items on the wall, the bloodstained T-shirt in particular, and tried to imagine what all this meant to Giorgio Bramante.
Plain screws fastened the glass to the case on the wall. They would be easy to remove. What eluded Costa was the reason to do so: it was a public act with a private meaning.
Bramante blamed Ludo Torchia and the other students for Alessio’s fate. That much was clear. But an intelligent man couldn’t fool himself either. He was the father. He carried the responsibility for his young son. He had brought the boy to that place. He bore his share of the blame, too, blame that had somehow transmuted, in his wife’s head, into an act of self-mutilation: cutting her own flesh to stain a garment belonging to her missing son, placing it on the wall of this dusty place that reeked of emptiness and cold damp stone. Was this act — Bramante placing a mark of each of his victims on the missing child’s shirt — some way in which he hoped to make amends?
“Perhaps you’re right, Nic. I tried to disregard what you said because it seemed so you.”
“Right about what?”
The memory of Santo Cuore bothered him for some reason that remained out of reach.
“That Alessio didn’t die in that hill. If he had, someone, surely, would have found something.”
But that idea, which he’d come to dismiss himself, now raised so many unanswerable questions.
“Someone would have known, Emily. And he would have come forward.”
“There was the peace camp at the Circus Maximus. You found out about that.”
“True… but that was fourteen years ago. I’ve no idea how we could investigate that today.”
“Quite…” He heard a deep breath on the line. “Have you talked to Teresa about this?”
“No,” he replied, baffled. “Why should I?”
“Women have conversations with each other that men avoid. All you see is the present. Teresa has an interesting past, too.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning she was a student firebrand back when she was young. Does that surprise you?”
Not for a moment, he realised. And it would never have occurred to him, either. Emily was right: all he saw was the woman he’d come to know and admire over the last few years. He’d no idea of the journey that had brought her there.
“I can imagine that. You think she’d know about this demonstration?”
“Look at the newspaper cuttings. If you were young, radical, and living in Rome back then, it’s difficult to see how she could have avoided that camp. She would have been around the same age as the one who died. Torchia, wasn’t that his name?”
“She would,” he agreed, although the very idea seemed alien and improbable.
“Another thing struck me. It’s absolutely clear these students were doing something weird down there. You found that rooster. They’d sacrificed that, right?”
“There was a dead bird. They’d been messing around. I’m just guessing about what happened to that cockerel. Because of what happened to Torchia, none of them gave a statement.”
“They weren’t there for a class assignment, that’s for sure. So let’s say it was some kind of ritual…”
“Let’s say.”
“Where do you think they got the idea?” she asked. “Everything those kids knew about Mithraism they learned from Giorgio Bramante.”
This conversation was beginning to depress him. He could hear tension, excitement, in her voice, the same emotion he’d heard when they’d worked together officially, just once, on the same case.
“What idea?”
“Nic, no one understands much about Mithraism, but what we do know suggests it was an organised, highly ritualistic cult that demanded a gift from its followers if they wanted to rise through the ranks.”
“Seven orders, seven sacraments,” he said, recalling what Teresa had told them.
“Precisely. And it’s not unreasonable to think that the higher you rose, the more you had to offer. It’s like the hierarchical structure in the Masons or some modern cults. Or the FBI, for that matter.”