Judith Turnhouse allowed herself a single glance towards Alessio, tried to force the right emotions onto her face: power, resolution. It was all, in the end, a matter of will.
“He came here to die,” she said quietly.
She watched his rifle rise. Giorgio didn’t move. Then, from behind her, came a voice, distantly familiar.
Judith Turnhouse racked her racing mind to place it.
“She killed Elisabetta.”
Costa took two steps to place himself in front of Messina and Peroni, just an arm’s length away from the young man who gripped the machine pistol chest-high, ready, as he’d been taught.
“Alessio?” he said. “Did you hear me? She killed Elisabetta Giordano. She couldn’t risk us finding out. You didn’t know that, did you? Alessio?”
It was hard for Costa to suppress his shock. The figure in front of him looked so like Giorgio Bramante now: the same bold features, the same dark eyes. But there was a reluctance in the young man, an uncertainty, that his father had surely never felt. Alessio Bramante had been raised by strangers, kidnapped into a world that was utterly foreign to him. Then, when he became old enough, ensnared by the one who’d stolen him in the first place, introduced, while entering a semblance of adulthood, to a slavery that hoped to pass itself off as love.
Giorgio Bramante fell to his knees. His hands came together in prayer. He stared up at his son, unable to speak, though some wordless plea for forgiveness seemed to shine out from his damp eyes.
Judith Turnhouse turned the weapon to the rock ceiling and let loose a burst of gunfire. Dust and rock and debris rained down on their heads. Bramante didn’t cower. Nor did Costa.
“Look at the weak old man!” she snarled. “Shoot him. Shoot him!”
Bramante’s eyes couldn’t leave his son. His lips moved as if mumbling some unheard prayer.
Then he said, simply, “Forgive me.”
The woman cursed. Her weapon swung towards the figure on the ground. Gunfire ripped the cave, shells flying off the walls, ricocheting around them. Bramante’s torso shook in a bloody spasm as the shells tore at him.
Costa had nearly reached her when Alessio fired. The raking line of gunfire ripped her body, lifting it on unseen hands, pitching her across the dismal chamber, onto the bare rock floor where she lay in a messy heap, a motionless, broken sack of humanity, when the weapon at last fell silent.
A strange quiet descended on the cave. From the outside world came the sound of more men approaching. Lights flickered down the corridor, voices, some kind of reality.
Peroni was on Alessio Bramante in an instant, wrenching the gun from his hands. It was scarcely necessary.
Costa bent down to the woman. Judith Turnhouse stared at the dusty ceiling with dead eyes, a bloody gash the size of a child’s fist in her forehead. He straightened and went to Bramante. And to Alessio, down on his knees, grasping Giorgio’s hand.
A warm June day, in a world halfway between the living and the dead. Giorgio Bramante is the one crouching at the door of the mansion of the Cavalieri di Malta, eyes tight against the keyhole, straining to see down the avenue of cypresses, to gaze out over the Tiber, on to Michelangelo’s great dome, pale, magnificent, shimmering in the morning mist, a perennial ghost, always present, sometimes invisible.
He takes a deep breath. This is difficult, painful.
“Can you see it?” asks a voice that seems to come from everywhere: above, below, inside. A voice that is familiar, no longer lost in the dark bitter depths of spent memories. A voice that is warm and near and comforting.
“Are you Alessio?” he asks, not recognising the cracked tones of his own voice.
“I am,” the voice replies.
Giorgio coughs. A warm salty liquid rises in his throat. A hand, strong, soft, grips his. He can discern little but shadows now, misty in the real world.
“I was a poor father,” he gasps, voice breaking, and tries to look beyond the pool of darkness spreading like an inky cloud through the dusty, miasmic air.
A distant shape is swimming in the mist ahead, beginning to take familiar form. He cannot see it fully yet. He feels no pain or any other sensation save the comfort of a young man’s warm fingers gripping his.
“Are you truly Alessio?”
“I told you. Can you see it?”
“Yes,” Giorgio Bramante says, unsure whether he speaks these words or simply thinks them, “I see it. I see it. I see… ”
Out of the darkness it grows, a vision across the river, beyond the trees, white and glorious, beckoning, filling him with joy and dread, racing to fill his fading sight.
Epilogue
She lay in the bright white room in the hospital in Orvieto feeling a constant, deep ache in her side, the strange, nagging hurt of something missing. It was some time since she’d recovered consciousness from the operation. Every fifteen minutes a nurse visited to check her condition, measuring her blood pressure, placing an electronic thermometer in her ear. On the stroke of the hour, marked by the booming cathedral clock, the doctor — Anna, she could think of her by no other name now — entered alone, closing the door behind her, then walking to the window to scold the children in the street. There was a group of them playing football, even at this late hour, shouting happily as they kicked the ball from wall to wall, the way children must have done here for generations, and would for generations to come.
Anna seemed younger than when they’d first met that morning. Perhaps the operation had lifted something from her own shoulders. Perhaps it was simply the performance of medicine, the act of delivering some kind of remedy for a physical imperfection, that was a reward in itself.
They went through the post-op conversation. She didn’t feel too bad at all. What was worst was the sense of guilt, of shameful relief. It felt as if something bad that lurked inside her had now been excised. Something that would, in a different set of circumstances, have become a child, one she and Nic had longed for. The juxtaposition of these two opposites would be difficult to shake from her head.
Then came the details. She’d scarcely listened when the doctor had outlined the possibilities before. Now, there was no dismissing them. They’d performed a procedure called a salpingectomy, the removal of one of her Fallopian tubes by laparoscopy. The remaining tube was unharmed. Her chances of a successful pregnancy in the future were now reduced to somewhere above forty percent.
“You won’t appreciate this yet,” Anna continued, “but you were very lucky. Had you not come to us when you did, it could have become extremely serious indeed. A few years ago this would have been a major abdominal operation, with considerable risk. We get a little better each year. Now, it is up to you.”
“To do what?” she asked, puzzled.
“To learn to deal with what has happened. You’ve lost a child, and the fact it was an unborn one, with no possible hope of survival, does not make it any less difficult to bear. That is how we are made. It is part of the process of trying to be a parent. Being a strong, young, intelligent woman, you will tell yourself this is really nothing at all. Just one of life’s mishaps. You will merely leave here, put it in the past, go back to your young man and start all over again. Which you will, I feel sure. But you will also feel anxiety and resentment and bewilderment that such a cruel thing could happen, to you of all people. That’s natural, Emily. Feel free to come here and talk to me if it helps. Any time. Orvieto isn’t far from Rome. You can always phone.”