Alessio Bramante let the hood fall to the floor, then took up the gun again, angling the firearm — casually, with uncertainty? Falcone couldn’t decide — towards the figure in front of the altar.
“See him, Giorgio!” Judith Turnhouse demanded, her voice anxious and excited, her flashlight shining into the face of the young man in front of him. “See!”
Bramante watched as her hands fell on the young man’s dark head, caressed his full black hair, fell down his body, reached towards his groin, lips on his young neck, damp, hungry, a gesture to which he submitted.
“He has your eyes,” she murmured. “Your lips. Your face.” She smiled, teeth a glimmer of brightness in the gloom. “Everything. I raised him to be you and not you. I raised him to be mine, and you never even guessed.”
The boy — Falcone could think of him as nothing else — uttered the faintest breath of an objection. She ignored it.
“Alessio?” Bramante asked, his voice a croak, his hands outstretched, face creased with shock and bewilderment. “Son?”
The shape in black recoiled, waving the weapon.
“Don’t call me that! Don’t you dare call me that!”
A chill entered Leo Falcone’s blood. A terrible thought began to dawn in his imagination when he heard that dreadful sound.
The voice was wrong, too high, almost falsetto, marked with unimaginable pain and burden, breaking with some inner fury struggling to escape from inside his chest.
Judith Turnhouse’s caress turned to a grip. Rigid and determined, her fingers tore into the head of fine black hair, twisted his face to hers.
She grabbed the weapon in the young man’s hands, thrust it hard against his chest, and said…
“Remember.”
A seven-year-old child stands stiffly erect, feet frozen to the cold red earth, icy sweat trickling down his spine, motionless like a living statue erected in a chamber half-lit by flashlights, a bare room, with no ceremony, no decoration, nothing of age about it at all.
A mundane place, a side room, an afterthought in a hidden maze of wonders. A place to hide. A place to flee for furtive, shameful reasons.
He can’t speak. Creatures tread wildly at the back of his mind, primeval figures that have lurked there since his earliest days of remembering, waiting for the moment to emerge.
These primitive beasts tear his dreams to shreds. Ambitions shrivel to become bitter, sere fragments of a lost world.
Dreams…
… that he would deliver a gift, a sacrament, to his father…. that inside this precious offering would be something to heal them all — mother, father, son. To fire the rough, malleable, formless clay of their fragile family, set it firm, young to old, old to young, a bond that was natural, would last a lifetime, until the torch got handed on, as it always would, one black day when a life was extinguished, its only remaining flame the memories burning in the head of the one who remained.
All these intimate emotions, all of a child’s deepest, most private aspirations, expire at this instant, in this half-lit nothing of a place.
Nor is this small death a solitary affair. Others bear witness and add to the shame.
Behind him, the child Alessio Bramante hears them.
Sheep.
Terrified sheep, giggling in fear, and, in Ludo Torchia’s knowing voice, some threat, some dark knowledge there too. Like the boy, these six understand that what they see now will mark them forever, slither into their lives, bringing with it the poison of a memory that can never be smothered.
Nothing, from this moment forward, will be the same, the child realizes. He is unable to take his eyes off what he sees, unable to believe that it continues, even though his father…
Giorgio, Giorgio, Giorgio… knows someone is there, has acknowledged the presence of these seven with a single backwards glance over his shoulder, eyes rolling wildly like a beast’s, before returning to wrestle the human body pinned to the wall.
The two figures are crushed against each other on the pale grey stone, upright, half naked, locked together like two creatures fighting to become one.
His father…
Giorgio… impales her from behind with all his strength, his back moving, pumping with a fast, relentless rhythm, his eyes, in the brief seconds they are visible, those of some crazed animal. A bull in agony, fighting for release.
Her face, half turned, glancing backwards from the rock, racked with a mix of ecstasy and pain, is familiar. A student from the class. Alessio remembers. That bright May day when he was left alone in the Palatino, for an hour, possibly more, wondering whether he would be claimed by Livia’s ghost.
The woman was there afterwards, when Giorgio came to retrieve him, smiling in a strange, distanced way, he’d thought at the time. Like him: a little scared, yet excited too.
A detail rises in his mind: there was sweat on her brow then too.
And, in the cave’s shadows, her bright crazed eyes are on them, some shame in her face, which is bruised a little, blood at the corner of her mouth, growing, like a bubble of life, forced out of her by the brutal repetition of his lunging.
She screams.
No, no, no, no, no.
Infuriated, unfinished, Giorgio breaks free, turns to face them, a taut, bare figure of skin and hair, familiar yet foreign, screaming, his features contorted into an image from a nightmare, a demon, risen from the depths.
The child gapes at his father, wide-eyed, astonished by this sudden, physical presence he must witness, is unable to avoid. He recognises this anger too. It is the same fury he, and his mother, have faced at home, in the seemingly perfect house overlooking the Circus Maximus. It is the violent rage that stems from any intrusion into his father’s private world: of work, of books, of concentration, of himself.
There is an animal inside the man, a bull beneath the skin. There always was. There always would be.
Wide-eyed, furious, he stares at their nakedness, remembering the rumours in school, through whispers and the small legends that children pass to their peers. Of that moment when the low, crude act between two people surpasses reason and something old rises in the blood.
It is the fury of the Minotaur, cornered in his labyrinth, of the false god, faced with his lies.
Of Pater betraying his charges.
The rage encompasses them all. The six sheep, who cower behind him, swearing they will never tell, never, though Ludo Torchia’s voice is surely absent from these imprecations. The woman, who has picked up her torn clothing from the ground to clutch it to herself.
In the man, more than any.
And the boy… … the boy, she calls, wild eyes staring at him, some sign of sympathy, some mutual shard of pain there that stops him hating her in an instant.
Nothing halts the man in his wrath, fists flailing, filling the air with menace. He is, the child understands, an elemental creature interrupted in some ancient private ceremony destined for the dark, and now doubly damned since it was both exposed and incomplete, like a sacrifice spoiled, a ritual ruined.