Costa stirred the dregs of his coffee and fought off the urge to buy another. Even if Bramante was a sexual predator, it was difficult to see how that knowledge could help them in their present predicament: finding out what happened to his son. Although it might explain his wife’s habits with knives.
“How long will it take them to work through Leo’s list of sites?” Teresa asked.
“A day, two maybe,” Peroni said. “That is going to be a long and tiresome job.”
“I wouldn’t want to be banged up in some subterranean hellhole with Leo for two days,” she muttered. “He’d drive me crazy. I can push Silvio to narrow it down. Maybe Rosa will come up with something. But we don’t have much time, gentlemen.”
Yet… Costa still struggled with some hidden aspect of the case.
“What if Leo’s not what he really wants?” he suggested. “What if he’s just the route to getting it?”
“You mean Alessio?” Teresa wrinkled her big nose in disbelief.
“Perhaps. I don’t know what I mean. I just feel that, if all he wanted was Leo dead, it would have happened by now. Yesterday or the day before. And also” — of this he was sure — “I think Leo feels the same way too. He’s been fascinated with something — with what’s really driving Bramante. He has been all along, and didn’t want to let us know.”
“Too much talk,” Peroni interjected. “We’re free of Messina. We can do any damn thing we like. So what’s it to be? Back into the hill?”
“Alessio’s not in the hill,” Costa replied. “I don’t think he was ever there, not when they were looking. We would have found him.”
“Then where?” Teresa wanted to know.
“What if Alessio was too scared to return home for some reason?”
They stared at him, dubious.
“Bear with me for a moment,” Nic told them, and outlined his thinking.
Most of the roads from the summit of the Aventino would not have been appealing to Alessio Bramante. The Clivo di Rocca Savella was surely too steep and too enclosed to attract a scared child fleeing his own father. The streets that led to the Via Marmorata in Testaccio would pass too close to his own home for comfort.
There was only one obvious direction: to the Circus Maximus, and the huge crowd gathered there at the time, a sea of people in which a terrified young boy could surely lose himself.
“He’d end up in the peace camp. There was nowhere else for him to go.” Costa glanced at Teresa. “Emily told me you were involved in events like that when you were young. She thought you might even have been there.”
Teresa Lupo blushed under Peroni’s astonished gaze. This was, Costa realised immediately, a part of her past the two of them had never shared.
“I had a rebel streak back then,” she confessed. “I still do. I just disguise it well.”
“Really?” Peroni wondered with a sigh of resignation. “You were there when all this happened?”
She winced. “No. Sorry. I was asked. But at the time, I was in Lido di Jesolo sharing a very small tent with some hairy medical student from Liguria who thought — wrongly, I hasten to add — that he was God’s gift to women.”
Peroni cleared his throat and ordered another coffee.
“Even Lenin had holidays, Gianni,” she continued defensively.
“Not with hairy medical students in a tent,” Peroni grumbled.
“Oh for God’s sake,” she snapped. “I apologise. I had a life before we met. Sorry. We all existed before. Remember? What the hell were you two doing fourteen years ago? It’s OK, Nic. I can answer that in your case. You were at school. And you?” she demanded of Peroni, who watched his macchiato getting made on the silver machine before replying.
“We’d just had our second child. I was like Leo, a sovrintendente waiting to take the inspector’s exams. I got three weeks’ paternity leave, more than I was owed but some people upstairs were in my debt. The weather was beautiful, from May right through to September. I remember it so clearly. I thought…” He grimaced. “I thought life had never been so good and it would all just roll on like that forever.”
Costa recalled that year too. It was then that his father first started making mysterious appointments with physicians, the beginning of a slow, unremarkable personal tragedy that would take more than a decade to unfold.
“It was a beautiful summer,” she agreed. “Unless you happened to be living on the other side of the Adriatic. I stayed in that stupid little tent for two weeks, with some jerk I didn’t even like. You know why? Because I couldn’t face it anymore. Thinking about all the horrors that were going on then. It wasn’t that long since the Berlin Wall fell, and we’d all sat around for a couple of years waiting for the global paradise of happiness and plenty to reveal itself. What did we get? Wars and massacres. A little more madness with every passing day. Just a little local conflict in the Balkans, some small reminder that the world wasn’t the safe, comfortable place we all dreamed it would be. We went from there to here in the blink of an eye, and for the life of me I don’t remember much of what happened in between.” She shook her head. “I went because I was running away. Sorry.”
“No problem. It was a wild hope.”
“Damn right. There must have been thousands of people there!”
“The authorities said two thousand.” Costa had checked that too. “The protesters said ten.”
“The authorities lie. They always do.” She downed the last of her pastry. “Mind you, ten’s a bit much. You really thought I’d remember some child wandering around looking lost? You haven’t been to many demonstrations, have you? They’re full of lost kids, of all ages. It’s just real life, only magnified. Chaos from start to end.”
“I suppose…” Costa said, thinking.
Peroni stared at his new coffee. “So what the hell do we do now?”
Falcone would have achieved more than this. He wouldn’t just have imagined where Alessio might have wandered. He would have looked ahead, trying to work out how this fact might be extracted from the hazy lost world of fourteen years before.
“The newspapers would have taken photos,” Costa said abruptly. “We could try the newspapers’ libraries.”
“Nic,” Peroni groaned, “how long would that take? And how willing do you think they would be to help two off-duty cops and a nosy pathologist?”
“We just gave three of them great stories!” Teresa objected.
“For our own reasons,” Peroni countered. “They’re not stupid. They don’t think we’re doing this out of charity.”
“Vultures,” she spat out, so loudly the waiter gave them a worried glance.
“Vultures perform a useful social function,” Peroni reminded her, but by then Teresa was bouncing up and down on her seat with unbounded excitement, scattering pastry crumbs everywhere as she did so.
“You two really have led sheltered existences! There’s more to the media than a bunch of political cronies in flash suits. What about the radical press? They were surely there.”
Peroni gave her his most condescending look. “You mean longhaired people like that individual you shared a tent with? Teresa. Listen to me, dear heart. The radical press hate us even more than the others.”
“Not,” she disagreed, slyly, “when you’re in the company of a comrade.”
The paper was in a small first-floor office above a pet shop in the Vicolo delle Grotte, a half-minute walk from the Campo dei Fiori, in a part of Rome rapidly being taken over by expatriates and tourists. On the steep internal staircase, Costa, who’d lived nearby a few years back, and found it hard to afford the rent even then, muttered something about this being an expensive home for a weekly publication dedicated to liberating the downtrodden masses.
“You misunderstand the patrician breed of Italian socialist,” Teresa declared, taking the steps two at a time, clearly keen to reacquaint herself with this lost piece of her past. “This is about raising the proletariat up to their standards, not bringing them down to the hoi polloi.”