He caught his breath. This was such a momentous decision, one he knew would shape the rest of his life. Should he let Ludo and his fellow students flee out into the bright, burning day, unseen by Giorgio, unscathed? Or deliver them, unknowing, into his father’s hands and final judgement?
Alessio stopped. Dino Abati, who was following closely, as if he were still some kind of protector, bumped into him.
“Can you see it?” Dino asked. “The entrance?”
“Not yet,” Alessio replied, and, secretly, tugged hard on the string, felt it give some distance ahead, fall down to the ground, like a feather descending against his bare legs on its way to the rocky ground.
One more tug. He let go with his fingers. It was gone.
Seven doors, seven corridors, and a bewildering web of interlocking passageways between. Some that led to Paradise. Some that led to Hell. Life was a set of choices, good and bad, easy and difficult. It was impossible to avoid them.
By the light of Dino’s flashlight, he could see a doorway he’d noticed when he’d fled, laughing, from the entrance chamber which must now lay fewer than thirty metres in front of them.
He thought he could sense his father’s presence in this area, could hear — and perhaps this was an illusion — Giorgio’s breathing, heavy and anxious in the dark, multiplied, echoing from the walls.
Perhaps he’d been lost longer than he thought. Perhaps after all this time, Giorgio was getting restive, with anger to follow soon after.
Either I take the prize or they do, Alessio thought.
“This way,” he said, and veered left, into the square stone doorway.
Alessio Bramante didn’t need to look back. His father’s students were sheep. Desperate sheep. They would follow, even a child, one whose courage shook inside him, trembling like a leaf in the strong winds of autumn, clinging to the branch, wondering how long its tenure on life might last.
Emilio Furillo lived by the belief that switching from front-line police duty to running the Questura’s information system was a solid, safe career move, one that saved him from dealing with both the fists of angry drunks on the street and the fury of dissatisfied superiors in the office. Now he stared at the jabbing finger of Teresa Lupo and wondered whether it was time to reassess that decision.
“It seems,” he said, in a hurt tone of voice, when she finally allowed him to speak, “extraordinarily cruel that you should use a personal confidence in order to seize preferential access to the filing system. And through a third party, too.”
Three months before, he’d quietly approached Teresa about some problems he’d been experiencing in his marital life, anxious to know if a particular drug might perhaps offer a remedy. He’d managed to thrust most of this to the back of his mind until Silvio Di Capua, Lupo’s chief morgue monkey, came in grinning that morning with an unsubtle reminder accompanied by a demand to leapfrog the data queue.
“What?” the pathologist barked, glowering at him now.
“I thought there was such a thing as doctor-patient privilege—”
“I am not your doctor. You are not my patient. What you are is someone who came to me looking for a place to score cheap Viagra. But that’s not why I’m here. You have the names. That thing in front of you is the computer. Try getting them up for me, if you’ll pardon the expression.”
Di Capua’s request went against all established procedure. The system was there for the Questura, not the morgue.
“This is quite untoward…” Emilio grumbled.
“Oh for God’s sake! Don’t you know what’s going on out there? Leo Falcone’s been snatched by that murderous animal he put away years ago. I’m trying to help.”
“That,” he snapped, “is the job of the police.”
“The names,” she insisted. “Just look…”
It got worse. Two other people he very much didn’t want to see walked in.
“I heard about you,” Emilio told Costa and Peroni. “After she smacked the commissario this morning, you two walked out. Result? You are off duty. Everyone here knows that. Good day.”
“This is important—” Costa began to say.
“Everything’s important!”
“Also,” Teresa Lupo objected, “I was here first.”
The two men pulled up chairs and didn’t look ready to leave. Emilio Furillo wondered, for a moment, whether he really could call the desk downstairs and insist this trio be ejected from his office.
“We think we can identify him,” Peroni told him. “Does that get us up the line?”
Teresa squirmed on her chair, obviously reluctant to let go of her position, but interested, too.
“You have a name for Alessio now?” she asked Costa and Peroni.
“Not exactly,” Costa volunteered. “But we know what happened to him.” He paused. “Alessio joined the police. He became a cadet. That would be four years ago. One of the neighbours saw him in uniform.”
She gaped at them, momentarily lost for words.
“The police?” she repeated. “As in you people?”
“As in us,” Peroni agreed solemnly.
“Emilio,” Teresa Lupo said. “Kindly put me on hold. Call up all the cadets from four years ago who had a home address in Flaminio.”
“This is not…” he began.
She was glaring at him malevolently. “Of course,” she added, “if you’re too busy, my friends and I could always retire to the canteen for a little chat.”
Furillo muttered furiously under his breath, dashed something into the keyboard, and turned the screen for them to see.
There were sixty-seven cadet recruits with city addresses that year. The only one from Flaminio was female.
“Satisfied?” he demanded.
They studied the names and addresses on the screen. The two men deflated visibly. Teresa Lupo nodded and said nothing.
“What about the rest of Italy?” Costa asked.
“How much time do you have? There are over eighteen hundred names there.”
Emilio smiled then. This felt good.
“Any more questions?” he asked.
“Where are those damned searches I asked for on my woman?” Teresa Lupo slapped her plump fist on the desk. “Where are the—”
He hit the right keys.
“Here,” he replied. “I did them earlier. I just wanted to hear you ask nicely. I’m still waiting.”
Then he ran down a summary of what he’d found. There was not a thing whatsoever, Furillo reported, to connect Elisabetta and the late Bernardo Giordano with Teresa’s other woman.
“That’s the late Elisabetta, by the way.” Peroni shook his head. “We just passed the case on to what few detectives are still left working upstairs. Who the hell is ‘her other woman’?”
“However…” Furillo continued, only to find himself ignored completely.
“The woman I found in Lorenzo’s pictures after you left,” Teresa Lupo explained to Costa and Peroni, interrupting. “She was with Alessio in the peace camp before he met the Giordanos. My guess is that she’s the one who brought Alessio to them. She was a member of their weird little group of Trotskyite tree-huggers. Lorenzo checked.”
Costa and Peroni glanced at each other.
“What woman?” Peroni demanded.
There was that infuriating know-it-all smirk on her face again, and from the look on the faces of the two men, it got to them as much as it did to Emilio Furillo.