After that, nothing. The dark engulfed them. Ludo Torchia started swearing, started going crazy again, yelling for something to cut through the shadows ahead.
There was nothing left. No batteries that worked. Just two matches, which Toni LaMarca lit in swift succession, only to see them extinguished by some unseen draught of air, swirling at them from a direction he couldn’t discern.
Torchia was getting violent now. Alessio recognised the tone in his voice: fear and fury in equal quantities. They were arguing with each other, the fragile bond of mutual preservation that had kept them together shattering in this all-consuming darkness.
He was scared, too. What confidence the beam from the flashlight had imprinted on his mind was gone. Alessio Bramante couldn’t hide from the knowledge that he was lost deep in the stone maw of some ancient hill, with men he didn’t like, at least one of whom wished to harm him.
But the worst lay in his imagination. At that moment he could feel the tons and tons of rock and dead red earth weighing down over his head, pressing in on him from all sides, racing down his small, constricted throat to steal the air from his lungs.
The grave was like this, he thought. And this was a grave, too, for many before him.
When he tried to shout — Daddy! Daddy! — he could scarcely hear his own voice. Just the mocking sound of Ludo Torchia somewhere behind him, a malevolent, hateful presence, rising from the rocky intestines of the Aventino, intent on harm.
“Daddy Daddy!” Ludo yelled mockingly. “Where is Daddy now, little boy? Where are we…?”
Lost, Alessio wanted to say. Lost and adrift in the lair of the beast, stalked by the Minotaur, which was never a real monster — Alessio Bramante had finally come to understand this — but a malformation that lay inside a man waiting for the catalyst for its birth to emerge.
All hope of victory, of delivering all six of them like a prize, had vanished. In his small, trembling frame, bravado had given way to terror. He wanted to see his father. He needed to feel that strong hand grip his, to be led out into the light and safety, the way only a father could.
How long had he been abandoned?
They could have been in the caves ten minutes or an hour. It was impossible to say. All he knew was that he’d never heard his father’s voice. Not once. He’d never once heard him call, trying to bring this game to a close.
You don’t care, Alessio Bramante accused his father, whispering under his breath. You never cared. Not about anything except yourself.
An image came into his head. Giorgio and his mother arguing, sending him out of the room when the fighting grew too loud. And, after that, crouching by the door, an illicit spy, wondering what would come next.
The noises rose in his head. He’d known they would, all along. This was what violence sounded like. Now he heard it twice over: in his memory, and in the mêlée growing behind him, an angry swell of fists and feet, struggling to follow, to find him and exact some kind of brutal, unthinking revenge, because that is what frightened men did when they could think of nothing else; that was the natural solution.
The sounds came from somewhere else too. In the darkness ahead.
A hand clutched his shoulder. He shook in abject fear.
“Alessio…”
The voice was taut but not unfriendly. Alessio recognised it. Dino: the weak one.
“There’s air coming into this tunnel,” Dino said. “It’s a way out. Just run towards it. Quickly!”
Alessio didn’t wait. He knew the sounds they were making too welclass="underline" the animal grunts of brute survival, of human beings in terror for their lives.
Alessio Bramante breathed in the dank draught scarcely discernible in the blackness, tried to imagine the direction from which it came, then ran, ran wildly, not fearing the rocks or the sharp corners in this hidden labyrinth, knowing that there was only a single hope of safety, and that hope lay outside, in the light, under the bright, forgiving sun, and the familiar streets that could take him home, to his mother, cowering as she imagined the fury of Giorgio Bramante’s return.
Pater.
The word slipped from his hidden memory and entered his head. This was what Giorgio had hoped to be, and failed. A real Pater guarded his children. A Pater tested his children, watching from the shadows, always ready to intervene when needed.
You left me, the child thought, with bitterness, and stumbled ahead, feeling the current of stale air grow stronger, smelling a hint of freshness inside it. Even something sweet, like orange blossom, the fresh, fragrant scent of life, began to drift from the living world into this bleak, cold tomb.
Then those sounds that had raged in his head became real, formed in front of him.
He stopped. Someone bumped into him. Dino’s low, urgent undertone returned.
“Move!”
He let Dino’s arm propel him forward, stopped again, checking himself. There were two voices ahead, though the noises they made weren’t familiar, words he could understand and interpret, just an incomprehensible babble of heat and emotion and some hard, animal savagery he’d never understood.
Pushed again, he lurched forward, seeing light now, the pale, weak illumination of real electricity. It took no more than three steps to enter the chamber. The six followed, stumbling into one another, stumbling into him, a sea of discordant, confused voices, falling into silence. Seeing, like him.
Seeing.
No one spoke. No one dared.
Alessio Bramante stared wide-eyed at the sight that lay in front of him, looking like some crazed living painting, two bodies tight against the wall, moving in a strange, inhuman fashion. He held his breath, refusing to allow his lungs to move, wondering whether, if he tried hard enough, he could freeze this scene out of his life altogether, wind back time to the point that morning where he was peering through the keyhole of the mansion of the Knights of Malta, seeing, through the stupid fly-eye glasses, myriad worlds, none of which contained the comfort of the dome of St. Peter’s, great and grand on its throne across the Tiber.
It didn’t work and he knew why. That was a child’s game. And from now on he would not be — could not be — a child.
Sometimes, he realised, the Minotaur didn’t need to hunt its prey at all. Its victims came willingly, like gifts, like sacraments, delivering themselves into the lair of the beast.
“Talk to me, Nic,” Teresa Lupo ordered. “Play leo. I’m struggling here.”
Costa had done his best to race the unmarked red Fiat, siren screaming, a pulsing police light hastily attached to the roof, from the Questura, through the Forum, past the Colosseum, to the site at the Circus Maximus. The traffic was as bad as he’d ever seen it: gridlocked in every direction, angry, unmoving. For most of the way, Costa had been driving on the broad sidewalks, sending pedestrians scattering. At the Colosseum, he’d abandoned the road completely.
Then the options ran out. There was only road from this stretch on, and it was an intemperate line of stationary metal, pumping foul fumes into the heavy, damp spring air. Costa’s head felt ready to burst. There was too much information in there for one man to absorb, and a nagging, subterranean sensation of guilt, too: Emily had gone to hospital. Costa was aware, soon after his conversation with her ended, that it had been entirely one-sided. He’d scarcely asked about her at all. The hunt for Leo Falcone had caught fire. For him, there seemed nothing else in the world at that moment. And this, he understood all along, was an illusion. Whatever happened to Leo — or had happened already — there would be a tomorrow, a future for Emily and him to share. He didn’t understand how that could have slipped to the back of his consciousness so easily, as if this cruel and stupid amnesia came naturally, a gift of the genes.