At the head of the stairs stood a tall, gaunt man with a long, aristocratic face and a head of thinning, wayward grey hair. In his bony hands he held a tray bearing four brimming wineglasses. It was not yet eleven in the morning.
“If they were Carabinieri, I wouldn’t let them on the premises, you know,” he announced in a high-pitched, fluting voice of distinctly upper-class origin. “I still have my principles. I am Lorenzo Lotto. Yes, I know what you’re thinking. Is that the Lorenzo Lotto you read about in the papers all the time? Rich son of that family of wicked oppressors who pollute the Veneto with their factories? It is indeed. The papers should find something better to write about. A man does not choose his own parents.”
He thrust the tray at them.
“I was thinking of the painter,” Costa said.
Lotto’s beady eyes looked him up and down.
“How extraordinary, Teresa,” the man declared. “Trust you to find the one police officer in Rome with half a brain. That Lorenzo died destitute, scribbling numbers on hospital beds for a living, though he was a better man, and a better artist, than Titian. I am a mere revolutionary, a small yet significant cog in the proletarian machine. Drink, boy. Tame that intellect or you’ll be counting paper clips in the Questura for the rest of your life.”
“It’s a little early for us, Lorenzo—” Teresa pointed out.
“Tush, tush. This is from the wicked family’s private estate. You can’t even buy it in the shops. Besides, one should always take alcohol when meeting a former lover. It dulls the senses, and God knows we both need that.”
Teresa blushed.
“This day just gets better and better,” Peroni groaned.
They’d phoned first in order to check what material the newspaper possessed from the nineties. Teresa had sounded hopeful. La Crociata Populare was not, in spite of its name, popular, though the paper remained a crusade on the part of its wealthy owner. But it was meticulous about its forty-year history. And, unlike most of the small left-wing weeklies, it didn’t fill its pages exclusively with columns and columns of dense, unreadable text. Several well-known photographers had begun their careers working for Lorenzo Lotto’s pittance salary, the bare union minimum. Even Pasolini had submitted material from time to time during the paper’s brief heyday in the early seventies.
As Lotto led them through what passed for an editorial floor — a shabby room with four desks, three of them unoccupied — Costa’s hopes began to fall. He’d read La Crociata himself from time to time. The photos were good. And numerous. It would surely take a large library to catalogue all the negatives, contacts, and prints from over the years.
Lotto led them to the corner where the one visible member of staff, a small, timid-seeming young woman, sat in front of a gigantic computer screen, working on what looked like the next issue. A headline screaming about government corruption yelled out from the screen in bright red type.
“Katrina,” Lotto said quietly, “it’s time for you to go clothes shopping.”
Her eyes flashed at him, baffled, a little in awe.
“Here.” Lotto reached into his pocket and pulled out a wad of currency. She took it, smiled, and scampered for the door.
“The redistribution of wealth,” Lotto told them. “I pay them what the unions demand. But they’re my children, really. The only ones I have.”
“Pictures, Lorenzo,” Teresa reminded him.
“I know.”
He punched some keys on the computer, then beckoned them to join him. Costa sat down in Katrina’s chair and looked at the screen. There was something marked “Library” there. He clicked on it and saw an entry form.
“Now what?” he asked.
“The state will be brought down by its ignorance of modern technology,” Lotto remarked. “I could drag in a thirteen-year-old child off the street and he’d know more about this than you.”
Keywords, Costa thought. Clues. You typed them in. Then the stupid computer tried to guess what you meant.
“Every photo that has ever passed through our hands is stored somewhere in there,” Lotto boasted. “Not just the ones we printed. Everything. Forty-three years’ worth. It cost me a fortune. Without it, I doubt even I could keep this place afloat.”
“You’re a picture agency now?” Teresa asked.
“As well as… And why not? Engels was a clerk in Manchester when he was keeping Marx and his family from starving in London. Industry and investment, Teresa. Unfashionable these days, I know…”
Costa typed in peace camp.
What seemed like a million tiny photos appeared on the screen.
“Typical lazy liberal thinking,” Lotto declared. “Dialectical materialism, boy. Ideas will only come from precise material conditions. Not obscure generalities.”
“You sound like my father,” Costa snapped.
“Ah,” Lotto replied, warmly, for the first time. “I thought you were that Costa.”
He bent and whispered in his ear, “Do you have a year?”
“Of course.”
“How about a date?”
“Exactly.”
“Good. Why not try that?”
Costa typed in the exact day.
The screen filled again, with just as many photos.
Lotto leaned over and studied the screen. “We had five different photographers supplying material to us then. Everyone wants their picture in the paper, don’t they?”
“How many?” Costa asked.
“Look at the screen! Eight hundred and twenty-eight photographs. Twenty-three rolls of thirty-six-shot film, including the blanks and the failures, naturally. It costs more to take them out than leave them in. You should think yourself lucky. We’re all digital now. There would be ten times that if you were looking today.”
Costa hit on the thumbnail of the first image. It leapt to fill the screen. They could have been looking at anything. A rock concert. A demonstration. A weekend campground. Just hundreds and hundreds of people, quiet, apparently happy under the sun.
“What about time?” Costa asked.
“Sorry. Film never recorded that.”
“What about,” Teresa asked, “telling it, ‘Find me a young boy in a peculiar T-shirt?’”
“It’s a machine,” Lotto said severely. “Are you going to drink my prosecco or not?”
“Later,” she replied.
He grumbled something inaudible and wandered off. Teresa and Peroni pulled up chairs on either side of Nic and started peering at the scores of thumbnails in front of them.
“If we can scan five a minute, we’re done in under three hours,” Peroni said, and made it sound like good news.
Costa began flicking through the first photographer’s rolls. A good third of the shots digitised by Lotto’s machines were useless: out of focus, accidental. The rest were mainly mundane. A few were simply beautifuclass="underline" sharp, observant, wry pictures of people who didn’t know the camera was there, candid shots still bright with their original summer hues, frozen in time.
After half an hour, with his right hand starting to tire, Costa hit the button and accessed yet another roll. The pictures changed. The light was different, older, more golden, the kind that fell on Rome as the day was coming to a close.
He clicked through five more frames, then stopped. For a moment, none of them spoke.
The child stood centre frame, and for once this was a subject that did look into the camera. He still wore the T-shirt they’d come to associate with this case, the seven-pointed star of the Scuola Elementare di Santa Cecilia. This was Alessio Bramante, sometime during the early evening of that fateful day, when every police officer in Rome, state and Carabinieri, was looking for him.