The Seventh Sacrament

Book 2 Between Worlds

Pino Gabrielli wasn’t sure he believed in purgatory but at least he knew where it was meant to be. Somewhere between Heaven and Hell, a middle place for tortured souls lurking, waiting for someone living, someone they probably knew, to perform the appropriate feat, flick the right switch, to send them on their way. And somewhere else, too, much closer. On the wall of a side room in his beloved Sacro Cuore del Suffragio, the white neo-Gothic church that had become Gabrielli’s principal pastime since he retired from the architecture department of La Sapienza university almost a decade before.

Not that it was much of a secret anymore. On that chill February morning, with wisps of mist hanging in the icy air over the Tiber, Pino Gabrielli saw there was a visitor already, at 7:20 a.m., ten minutes before he opened the church doors. A man was standing in the doorway beneath the small rose window, stamping his feet against the cold. As Gabrielli cast one last glance at the river, where a lone cormorant skimmed lazily in and out of the grey haze, he wondered what brought someone there at that early hour, a middle-aged nondescript type, not the usual young sensation-seeker by the look of things, though it was difficult to tell since the man was wrapped up tight in a heavy black jacket, with a woollen hat pulled low over his ears.

Gabrielli dodged through the heavy slew of rush-hour traffic, marched up to the church, put on his best welcome smile, and threw a rapid “Buon giorno” in the direction of his visitor. Something got muttered in return; the man sounded Italian at least, though the words came through a thick scarf pulled high up to his nose. Perhaps that explained the early start, and the sensitivity to the cold.

Then, straightaway, the visitor asked the usual question — Is it still there? — and Gabrielli’s spirits fell. In spite of appearances, the man was just another rubbernecker looking for something, anything, to chill the spine.

The warden suppressed a grumble, took out the old key that opened the main door, let the man in, and pointed the way through the nave, half lit by the persistent morning light. He watched him go, then went to his small office, warmed his fingers around a paper cup of cappuccino, and devoured a single cornetto, filled with jam, feeling a little uneasy. He was used to a good hour on his own before anyone came, a time for reading and thinking, wandering around a church he’d come to regard as his own small universe.

Gabrielli picked up a pamphlet and wondered whether to go and offer it to the visitor. The documents were a good twenty years old now and a little musty-smelling from the damp cupboard in the office. When he held one out, people always shook their heads and said no. But it wasn’t the money he wanted. Gabrielli was happy to give them away for free. He’d just feel happier if more people appreciated the church in his charge for what it was, instead of rushing off to see a display that was mostly, he guessed, old junk.

In a city overloaded with the baroque and the classical, Sacro Cuore was a small, bright, sharp-featured beacon of northern neo-Gothic. The church was barely noticed by the masses as they cursed and sighed their way past it in the traffic crawl along the busy riverside road running west from the Castel Sant’Angelo. But Gabrielli knew every inch of the building, every ornate pillar and column, every last curve of the elegant vaulted ceiling, and understood, as both an architect and a lay, semi-enthusiastic churchman, how precious it was.

Those who could speak Italian might read in the guide how a Bolognese architect, Giuseppe Gualandi, had constructed a perfect pocket-size Gothic cathedral on the orders of a French priest keen on giving Rome a Chartres in miniature, though with rather less-expensive stained glass, and in a decidedly urban location. How, too, that same French priest, inspired by a strange incident in the church itself, had set up a small exhibition, just two glass cases on the wall, one large, one small, stocked with a modest collection of exhibits.

For some reason — Gabrielli didn’t know and didn’t much care — this small exhibition had come to be known as Il Piccolo Museo del Purgatorio, The Little Museum of Purgatory. It had existed in the side room, largely unvisited, for decades. But in the modern age, more and more sought targets beyond the customary sights of the Colosseum and St. Peter’s. At some unforeseen point along the years, Sacro Cuore had emerged from dusty obscurity and made its way onto the lists of arcane Roman spectacles exchanged among the knowing. And so Gabrielli’s four days a week as voluntary guardian of Sacro Cuore, once a time for meditation and solitary exploration of the dark corners of Gualandi’s creation, had altered. Now a steady trickle of visitors arrived in ever greater numbers with each passing year, as the curious, mostly young, mostly agnostic, came looking for a sight they hoped would send a shiver down the spine, make them believe, perhaps, that, in a world of pressing and trite routine, where everything was capable of explanation if one merely turned on a computer, something, some whispered cry from elsewhere, existed that said There is more, if you only knew.

Most of the thrill-seekers were disappointed. They thought Purgatory and Hell were synonymous and came expecting something out of Hieronymus Bosch: real demons, real pits, places to convince the sceptical that the Devil still roamed the earth attempting to find a crack, between the bus ride home and the TV, through which to work his way into the lives of the innocent. In truth, despite the rumors, there was nothing lurid to see at all in Sacro Cuore. Gabrielli, a man with a taste for foreign fiction, frequently tried to put it this way: the Little Museum was more M. R. James than Stephen King.

All he could show them — discreetly turning away in order to avoid witnessing their disappointment — was what had been here for decades, unchanged: two glass cases and the eleven small items they contained, mundane objects deemed to provide evidence that there were indeed souls in torment, elemental creatures who could, on occasion, penetrate the world of the living and pass along a message.

There was one more item. But, given the chance, Gabrielli always stood with his back to that. The small case at the end of the little room was easily overlooked. It contained the only exhibit of modern origin, a diminutive T-shirt, with the insignia of an elementary school on the chest. It was an unusual decoration for a child’s uniform, one that was beginning to fade now, after fourteen years on the wall, behind the glass of the cabinet, beneath the persistent glare of the fluorescent tubes. Still, it was easy to see what was once represented on the cheap, white cotton: a seven-pointed star outlined in black, set inside a dark blue circle containing curious red symbols in its border, with seven smaller dark stars set at equal points around the outer ring.

For a time Gabrielli had tried to decode this curious image, until something — a nagging sense of overzealous inquisitiveness, perhaps — stopped him. That and the sure knowledge that, whatever the symbol’s origin, it was most certainly not Christian, as befitted any modern school in Rome, even in a secular age.

The characters in the border of the circle were alchemical symbols for the months of the year. The outer stars represented, he had come to believe, the seven planets of the ancients: Mercury, Venus, Jupiter, Mars, Saturn, the Sun, and the Moon. The inner star was the Earth itself perhaps, although he was unable to find any firm reference material to support this idea, and the academic in him, though retired, found this hypothesis difficult. Whatever it represented, the symbol was pre-Christian. Gabrielli felt the inner star signified the soul, the essence of an individual’s being, trying to find its place among the eternal, celestial certainties.

But by the time he had begun poring over that possibility, he had come to realise the object in the case was becoming more than a little discomforting. Everything else here belonged to the long-dead. This, however, was recent. On a few occasions, he’d even met the boy it had belonged to, when his father had taken him into the nearby archaeology department in La Sapienza where he worked and let him roam around the offices, charming everyone he met. Alessio Bramante had been a beautiful child, slender and tall for his age, always curious, if a little shy around his father, a man who dominated even his more senior colleagues. Gabrielli found to his distress that he could still summon up the visual memory of the boy very easily. In his mind Alessio still stood there in his office, quite serious and composed, asking slow, intelligent questions about Gabrielli’s work. He had long shining black hair, lively brown eyes that were forever wide open, and his mother’s looks, a quiet, unhurried beauty of the kind that, centuries ago, had found its way into paintings when the artist sought a face that could silence the most troubled of watchers with a single, calming glance, one that said I know, but that is how things are.

This personal connection changed things, so much that, in the end, Gabrielli stayed away from the last exhibit as much as possible. It was unhealthy to become obsessed by the cast-off garment of Alessio Bramante, a dead schoolchild, victim of a tragedy no one could begin to comprehend. There were times he regretted his own personal involvement in having it placed in the Piccolo Museo in the first place.

And there was another cause for concern too, one that bothered him much more when he cared to think about it.

There was the blood.

Everything else on the wall of the small room in Sacro Cuore was static, frozen in time. Burns or fingerprints or mere accidental stains that only faded with the years, with nothing left to hint that living, breathing human beings had once touched them. Only one other object, the sleeve of the chemise of the Venerable Mother Isabella Fornari, abbess of the Poor Clares in Todi, possessed a bloodstain, now a pale, indistinct dun brown, and that supposedly belonged to the shade of a former Abbot who died in 1731.

Alessio’s T-shirt was of more recent origin. Beatrice Bramante said she had discovered it while searching her son’s room just after his disappearance. Over the lowermost star she found something inexplicable: a red mark, fresh and ragged at the edges, as if it had occurred only minutes before. Nothing could explain the stain’s presence. The garment had been newly washed shortly before the tragedy and left in a cupboard, untouched during the days of torment that had preceded its discovery.

The mother had approached Gabielli and asked if it would be appropriate for the item to be added to the collection of the Little Museum, contemporary proof that those departed in tragedy could still send a message to the living.

There had been doubts. Gabrielli believed the shirt should have been sent to the police. Others deemed that the plight of the boy’s father now made that inappropriate. The priest at the time had little affection for the odd assortment of curios he had inherited. Yet even the priest relented when faced with Beatrice Bramante, a woman who was both distraught and utterly determined. Then there was the unavoidable truth: a bloodstain had appeared on a seven-year-old’s white T-shirt while it was folded, clean and neat, in a cupboard in his home. All at a time when the child was gone from sight, presumed, by everyone, to be dead.

So they had relented, and before long come to regret it. Three years after the T-shirt had gone on the wall of the Little Museum, it had acquired another bloodstain. Then, in subsequent years, two more. Each was sufficiently modest to prevent it attracting those unfamiliar with the object. The fact was acknowledged quietly by those more observant among the church hierarchy, the case withdrawn from view until the newest stain faded, losing its freshness, then returned to the wall. Its metamorphosis was never mentioned again, for fear of unwanted publicity.

Gabrielli, who had been a party to this subterfuge, always knew a reckoning would come. If one accepted the premise of Purgatory, it was clear what was happening. The stains were a message. They would continue until someone listened, someone saw fit to act. The rational part of his mind told him this was impossible, ludicrous. Wherever the ghost of the hapless Alessio — just repeating the name to himself brought back a memory of the boy, stiff and upright in his office, asking intelligent questions about Bernini and his legacy in Rome — had gone, it could not be capable of making its mark on a simple object in a glass case on the wall of a curious church by the side of the noisy and traffic-choked Lungotevere Prati. The mundane and the unworldly were not supposed to meet like this.

For some reason these thoughts haunted Gabrielli more than usual as the warden sipped his coffee and picked at the pastry. He knew why, too. It was the man next door, wrapped up tight in his coat and hat and scarf, yet — and Gabrielli knew this was ridiculous — familiar somehow. There was also his eagerness to be in that confounded room. The visitor hadn’t even asked a single question, it now occurred to him, except: Is it still there?

It was almost as if he’d been here before, and that was another thought that Gabrielli found disturbing.

Reluctantly — a part of him was coming to hate that little room — he got up and, with all the speed a sixty-seven-year-old man could muster, crossed the passage and stood by the door to the familiar place. The too-bright lights of the passageway dazzled him. At first he fooled himself that the visitor was gone, without a word of thanks or so much as a departing footstep. There wasn’t a human sound from anywhere, save for his own laboured breathing, the gift of a lifetime’s addiction to strong cigarettes. All Pino Gabrielli could hear was the repetitive, mechanical roar of the traffic, a constant tide of sound so familiar and predictable he rarely noticed it, though today it seemed louder than ever, seemed to enter his head and rebound inside his rising imagination.

Then he stepped into the narrow, claustrophobic room, knowing as he did so that he entered a place that was wrong, out of kilter with the world he liked to inhabit.

He didn’t believe in Purgatory. Not really. But at that moment, with his heart beating a compound rhythm deep beneath his tight waistcoat, his throat dry with fear, Pino Gabrielli was aware that even a man like him, a former professor of architecture, well read, well travelled, with an open, inquisitive mind, sometimes knew very little at all.

The figure in black was busy in the pool of hard shadow at the far wall where Alessio Bramante’s T-shirt was kept. The item was no longer in its case but pinned to the old pale plaster by the intruder’s left hand. His right fist held some kind of grubby cloth, dripping with a dark viscous liquid. Gabrielli watched, unable to move, as the man stabbed at the boy’s shirt four times, enlarging each old stain with a new one that was bright and shiny with fresh blood. Finally he added an extra mark, a thick, sanguineous blotch on a previously unblemished star to the upper left.

One more message, the petrified warden thought, to add to four that had already gone unheard.

Perhaps Gabrielli uttered some noise. Perhaps it was simply his labored breathing. He became aware that his presence was known. The man placed the shirt back in its case with slow, ponderous care, and pushed the glass back into position, leaving gory, sticky marks on the surface. Then he dragged off his heavy woollen hat and turned round.

“You…” Gabrielli murmured, astonished by what he saw.

Pino Gabrielli closed his eyes, felt his bladder go weak, his mind go blank, ashamed that, in extremis, he found it impossible to pray.

When he recovered the courage to look around him again, he was alone. Gabrielli stumbled to the nave and fell into a hard wooden pew there, trembling.

Sacro Cuore was dear to him. He knew the rules, the protocols that bound its governance, and that of any church in Rome. By rights he should have called the priest and members of the parochial council before anyone. Just as he had done before.

And still the messages kept coming, this time with the messenger.

Enough was enough. With a shaking hand, Pino Gabrielli withdrew his phone from his pocket, waited for his fingers to stop shaking, wondering whom to dial in such circumstances — 112 for the Carabinieri? Or 113 for the police? There was no easy number for God. That was why men built churches in the first place.

He tried not to think about the face of the man he’d seen. Someone he had once known, almost to the point of friendship. Someone who now had cold black eyes and skin that had the dry, desiccated pallor of a corpse.

The Carabinieri were more Gabrielli’s kind. Middle-class. Well dressed. Polite. More sophisticated.

Only half understanding why, he wandered back into the little room as he struggled with his phone, smelling the blood, dimly aware there was something else, something he should have seen. His shuddering finger fought for the buttons, fell all over the place and got the wrong ones anyway. Perhaps, he thought, it was just fate. Most things were.

Too late, he heard a hard female voice on the line, demanding an answer.

Pino Gabrielli looked at the Little Museum of Purgatory, properly this time, not fearful for his life because of some dark familiar stranger who stank of blood.

His intuition had been right. There was something new. A direct message, written in a way he’d never forget.

It was a moment before Gabrielli could speak. And when he did, only a single word escaped his lips.

“Bramante…” he murmured, unable to take his eyes off the line of bloody writing on the wall, a crooked, continuous script, with deliberate lettering, the handiwork of someone or something determined to make a point, in just a few words.

Ca’ d’Ossi.

The House of Bones.

Pino Gabrielli wasn’t the only church warden in Rome to receive a surprise that morning. Half an hour after Pino opened the doors of the small white church in Prati, Ornella Di Benedetto found herself facing the padlocked chains on the shuttered, abandoned wreck that was once Santa Maria dell’Assunta, wondering what looked different. The logical answer — that someone had gone inside — seemed too absurd for words.

Rome had many churches. Too many to cater to a population that grew more secular by the year. Santa Maria dell’Assunta, set on the southeastern side of the Aventino hill, not far from the Piazza Albania, had little to keep it in business. The historians said it stood on the site of one of the oldest churches in Rome, dating back to the earliest times, when Christianity was one religion among many, sometimes persecuted, sometimes tolerated, occasionally encouraged. Not a trace remained of the original church. Over the centuries, it had been rebuilt on at least five occasions, burned to the ground more than once, then, in the sixteenth century, handed over to an order of Capuchin monks. The tiny, unremarkable building that survived lasted a further three centuries as a consecrated property, then, under Napoleon’s anti-clerical hand, fell into disuse, and was later converted into municipal offices. At the beginning of the twentieth century, it became, briefly, a private residence occupied by an elderly British writer of arcane and macabre tastes. After his death it slid steadily into ruin, maintained only by a small grant from the city and a local diocese still somewhat guilty over its abandonment. The mishmash of architectural styles and the absence of a single important painting or sculpture meant that the middle-aged woman who kept an eye on the place was, for months on end, the only person to set foot beyond its dusty, rotting oak doors, in the narrow cul-de-sac just a few metres from the bustle of the Viale Aventino.

Even so, Santa Maria dell’Assunta had one esoteric feature, hidden away in a crypt reachable only through a narrow, damp, and winding corridor cut into the hill’s soft rock. The same Capuchin monks who had maintained the church for a while continued to own a greater property in Rome, Santa Maria della Concezione in the Via Veneto, just a little way up from the American Embassy. Here they had created a curiosity too: a crypt much larger than that of Santa Maria dell’Assunta, decorated — there was no other way to put it — with the bones of some four thousand of their fellows, deposited there until the late nineteenth century, when the practice was deemed a little too grisly for modern tastes.

Ornella Di Benedetto knew that place well and had compared it in detail with the one in her own charge, hoping one day to be able to impress visitors with her erudition. The charnel house in the Via Veneto was undoubtedly impressive. She wished her own dead monks had provided a similar quotable motto for the inscription over their tomb on the Aventino.

Quello che voi siete noi eravamo, quello che noi siamo voi sarete, read the famous epitaph.

What you are we were, what we are you will be.

But her smaller version was, Ornella felt, more tasteful, more in keeping with the original purpose. It had none of the theatrical touches of Concezione: skeletons still in their monastic robes, cowls drawn around their skulls, patterns of vertebrae and jawbones arranged like some ghastly frieze, mocking the spectator, seeming, to her, to deny that anything of value existed in their worldly lives.

Santa Maria dell’Assunta was, simply, an underground public tomb, a place where a hundred monks — no more, no less — decided that their remains should stay visible for anyone who wished to see them. After a suitable time in the Capuchin cemetery in San Giovanni — she had researched this thoroughly for her imaginary visitors — they would be exhumed and taken to the crypt. There each corpse was arrayed tidily on the bare earth, five rows, twenty in each, skeletal arms neatly folded over skeletal chests, patiently awaiting resurrection.

The late English writer had installed some weak electrical lighting so that his visitors could enjoy the spectacle. Rumour had it that his will had demanded he be laid among them, too, an idea the city authorities quashed on health grounds, though only when he was in no condition to object. The man had lived in Venice for several years, in a small palazzo adjoining the Ca’ d’Oro on the Grand Canal, before moving to Rome. That had, apparently, been his inspiration for giving the place the nickname by which it continued to be known in the neighbourhood: Ca’ d’Ossi. Not that “the House of Bones” was a sobriquet Ornella would ever use.

The Capuchins of Santa Maria dell’Assunta had, she firmly believed, bequeathed to future generations a humane and instructive exhibition, with none of the tourist-seeking histrionics of the larger place on the Via Veneto. It deserved to be better known, and perhaps receive a little restoration money, some of which would, naturally, find its way into the pocket of its lone custodian over the years.

Nor — and she’d had to explain this point repeatedly to friends and relatives — had Santa Maria dell’Assunta ever scared her. Death, for Ornella Di Benedetto, was an ordinary, unremarkable figure who walked through the world like everyone else, trying to get on with the job Fate had given him. Some days, she imagined, he would hop onto the Number 3 tram that ran through Testaccio across the river to Trastevere, and back into the city in the opposite direction, studying the faces of his fellow travellers, trying to decide which among them was deserving of another journey altogether. Then, when his work was done, he would sit by the Tiber for a while, letting the traffic roar drown out his thoughts.

Ornella Di Benedetto was never in fear of the corpses in her care, which made it all the more inexplicable that she was reluctant to enter the church that morning. The padlock and chain had been broken. It had happened before, a long time ago. Some youngsters had entered the building, looking for somewhere to sleep, something to steal. They would be disappointed on both counts. The place was cold and fusty, populated by rats, for which she left poison. Not an item of value remained, not even decent furniture. In the small nave, which the Englishman had used as a general hall and dining room, only a few worthless pews and a shattered pulpit still stood.

Another time, twenty years ago, a drunk had found his way into the cellar, turned on the lights, then run out into the street screaming. That amused her. It had been exactly what the idiot deserved.

No serious criminal would give Santa Maria dell’Assunta a second look. No thrill-seeking teenager could possibly think it was worth breaking into; there were much more atmospheric underground caverns scattered throughout Rome if that was what they wanted.

Still, she hesitated there for a good two minutes, the bag with fresh rat poison in it hanging on her arm. It was absurd.

With a brief curse at her own timidity, Ornella Di Benedetto threw the shattered chain and padlock out of the way, mentally making a note that she would have to charge someone, city or diocese, for a replacement, and pulled open the oak door.

The lights were still on in the internal portico. She turned them off, then walked into the diminutive nave, where a thin winter sun was streaming through the cracked stained glass on the western end of the building.

To her dismay, the door to the crypt was open. There was a light in there, too, the familiar weak yellow haze creeping up from the underground cavern.

The sight made her furious. She hated waste. Electricity was more expensive than ever.

She walked to the door and reached for the switch, averting her gaze from the corridor, not through fear but practicality. She needed to try to understand what had happened. To work out whether it was worth calling the police.

It was possible, just, that someone was still down there, hidden with her familiar skeletons, up to no good. That thought hadn’t occurred to her until her fingers touched the old damp powdery plaster of the corridor wall.

But why would anyone break into an empty, deconsecrated church for anything but some idiotic amusement? It was ridiculous, she reminded herself, but then became aware of the smell, elusive at first, but soon familiar. It was the smell of the market in Testaccio, the local one off Mastro Giorgio, where every morning she bought the day’s food: salad and vegetables, and a little meat from one of the many stalls with their vivid red displays of pork and beef, chickens and lamb. Even, in one seldom-visited corner, horse, which only the old people ate these days.

So she didn’t turn off the lights. Something about the smell made that impossible. Instead, Ornella Di Benedetto took three steps down the narrow, worn stone stairs, just far enough to see into the crypt, with its serried rows of grey, tidy bones.

And something else among them, too. Something gleaming under the bulbs, a half-familiar shape transformed somehow, metamorphosed into the source of that rank, permeating stench that wouldn’t quit her nostrils.

When she finally reached the street, babbling like a madwoman, trying to catch the attention of passersby who ignored her shrieking implications, she’d no idea how long she’d spent in that place, or what, in truth, she’d done there.

They stared at her. All of them. Every shopper in the market. Every stallholder. Everyone.

I am not insane, Ornella wanted to scream at them. I am not!

Even though she couldn’t recall how she had made her way from the Piazza Albania into Testaccio in order to find the market, or how long it had taken. An hour at least, or so it seemed from the market clock, which now stood at five past eleven. Somewhere along the way, she thought, she’d sat down and passed out for a while, like some neighbourhood drunk, stunned by cheap grappa.

Her eyes worked their way across the hall, to the lines of butchers’ stalls where the meat hung fresh and livid on the hook, scarlet flesh, waxy white fat, veins and organs, limbs and carcasses, entrails and the occasional small pig’s head.

Since she was a child, this market had been a place of delight. The aroma of flowers mingled with the fresh salt tang of the fish stalls. Oranges from Sicily next to stands selling fresh white buffalo mozzarella at prices even ordinary people could afford.

She’d never really thought about the meat stalls until then, when the sight and the stench of the crypt came back to her. Ornella Di Benedetto turned her head away from the butchers’ stands, tried to stop the fleshy, organic stink of them creeping into her mouth and nostrils, breathed deeply once, gasping down a lungful of the market’s now vile and rotting aroma, wondering whether she was about to be sick.

It was an unconscionable time before anyone listened, and that was the closest human being she could think of who knew her: the kindly young girl in the market’s vegetable stall. She listened to Ornella’s ragged, incoherent story, then sat her down with a stiff caffè corretto before calling the police.

When Ornetta looked up, still desperately queasy, she found a dark-skinned woman staring thoughtfully into her face, her eyes full of concern and curiosity.

“My name is Rosa Prabakaran,” the woman said. “I’m a police officer.”

“The church…” she murmured, wondering where to begin.

The young policewoman nodded, confidently, in a way that made Ornella Di Benedetto feel a little better.

“We know, signora,” she said, glancing around the hall, not looking too hard at the meat stands either. “I just came from there. Shall we go somewhere else? Now? Please?”

It had been a good winter, the best Nic Costa could remember in years. There were just two cases left of the vino novello they’d made the previous autumn. Costa was surprised to find that the modest homegrown vintage, the first the little estate had produced since the death of his father, met with Leo Falcone’s approval too. Either the wine was good or the old inspector was mellowing as he adjusted to an unaccustomed frailty.

Or both. The world was, Costa had come to realise over the past few months, occasionally ripe with surprises.

That lunchtime they’d taken a few bottles over to the new home Falcone was sharing with Raffaella Arcangelo, a ground-floor apartment in a quiet backstreet in Monti, rented on a temporary basis until the inspector became more mobile. The injuries Falcone had suffered the previous summer were slow to heal, and he was slow to adapt to them. The meal was, they knew without saying, a kind of staging point for them all — Costa and Emily Deacon, Gianni Peroni and the pathologist Teresa Lupo, Leo Falcone and Raffaella — a way of setting the past aside and fixing some kind of firm commitment for the future.

The previous twelve months had been hard and decisive. Their last investigation as a team, exiled to Venice, had almost resulted in Falcone’s death. Nic’s partner Peroni and Teresa had emerged unscathed, perhaps stronger than ever once the dust settled. While Teresa returned to the police morgue, Peroni became a plainclothes agente again, walking the streets of Rome, on this occasion in charge of a new recruit, a woman who, as the ugly cop was only too keen to tell anyone in earshot, drove him to distraction with her boundless enthusiasm and naïveté.

Costa had pulled the best prize of all out of the bag: a winter spent organising security for a vast art exhibition set around the works of Caravaggio, one that had played to full audiences in the Palazzo Ruspoli from its opening in November to its much-mourned closure two weeks before. There had been some last work to be done, most important of all a final round of security meetings for the return shipping of exhibits, and one long trip to London to liaise with the National Gallery. Then finally, two days before, nothing. No meetings. No deadlines. No phone calls. Only the realisation that this extraordinary period of his life, one which had opened up so many new avenues, was now over. After a week’s holiday he, too, would be back on the job, an agente working the centro storico of Rome, uncertain of his future. No one had told him if he’d be reunited with Peroni. No one had hinted when Falcone might be back in harness. Only one piece of advice had been handed down to Costa from on high by Commissario Messina. It was time, Messina said one evening on his way out, for a man of Costa’s age to start thinking about his future. The exams for promotion were being scheduled. Soon, Nic ought to consider trying to take one step up the ladder, from agente to sovrintendente.

Emily had looked at him sceptically when he passed on this information and said, simply, “I’m not sure I can imagine you as a sergeant, Nic. You’re either up there with Falcone or out on the street with Gianni. Although I suppose we could use the money….”

There were always decisions to be made, ones that conflicted with his own personal desires in the perpetual dilemma faced by any police officer with enthusiasm, ambition, and a conscience. How much of a man’s life was owed to his profession? And how much to those he loved?

Costa had found the answer to those questions eight weeks before, when Emily had joined him in an expensive restaurant in London, after his final meeting at the Gallery in Trafalgar Square. She had been living in his house on the outskirts of Rome for a year now. Come summer, she would possess sufficient qualifications to seek work as a junior architect.

When he looked into her face that night in the West End, over some of the most costly bad food he’d ever eaten, Nic Costa knew, finally. For once, he wasn’t hesitant. Too many times she’d reprimanded him with an amused look and the teasing words “Are you sure you’re Italian?”

Sometime that summer, in July possibly, or the early part of August, depending on how many relatives of Emily’s wanted to make the journey from the U.S., there would be a wedding, a civil affair, followed by a reception on the grounds of the house on the Via Appia. Sometime in late August — around the twenty-fourth if the doctors were right — they would have a child. Emily was now seven or eight weeks pregnant, enough for them to tell others of their plans. And when they were parents, Nic Costa promised himself, life would surely begin in earnest, something he was about to say to the four of them gathered in Leo Falcone’s living room, after he and Emily had made their two announcements, only to find his words drowned out in the clamour of noise around them.

Falcone hobbled off to the kitchen talking excitedly of the bottle of vintage champagne — real champagne, not just good prosecco — he’d been keeping for such an occasion. Raffaella was busy fussing over Falcone, while hunting for even more food to pile on the table. Teresa Lupo was piling kisses on the pair of them, looking worryingly close to tears or hysteria or both, before dashing to help Raffaella with the glasses.

And Gianni Peroni just stood there, a big smirk over his battered face, one aimed in the disappearing Teresa’s direction, saying I told you so.

Emily, a little amazed by the histrionics, leaned her head onto Costa’s shoulder, and whispered, “Haven’t they had any weddings in this country for a while?”

“It seems not,” he answered softly, and then, theatrically, took her in his arms and kissed her.

She broke away, laughing, as they were both confronted by a forest of waving arms bearing glasses and plates of food.

“Is it going to be like this forever from now on?” she asked, avoiding the wine, reaching for a glass of mineral water instead.

“Forever,” Gianni Peroni declared, and began to make a toast so eloquent, touching, and funny that Costa found it hard to believe he hadn’t rehearsed it many times before.

There was an entire community of cafés in the Via Degli Zingari, the narrow street round the corner that wound down the hill towards the Forum. When Falcone’s bottle of champagne was done he suggested a walk for some proper coffee. That bachelor habit had yet to disappear; the inspector still resolutely refused to believe it was possible to make a decent macchiato at home.

Half an hour later they were ambling towards Falcone’s preferred destination, enjoying the meagre warmth that had arrived with the disappearance of the morning murk. The wedding arrangements and the pregnancy had been dealt with, in a flurry of frantic questions, hugs, and no small amount of tears on Teresa’s part. Then, as so often happened with such dramatic personal news, they’d found the need to move on to other matters. For Costa, it didn’t get much better than this. Emily, friends, Rome, his home city, a few days of holiday. And both Peroni and Teresa in garrulous, postprandial mood, she reminiscing about work, Peroni fixated with its avoidance.

After one brief and inconclusive argument, the pathologist caught up with them, fat arms pumping with delight, pointed across the square, towards the Via dei Serpenti, tugged on Emily’s shirtsleeve, and exclaimed, in her gruff Roman tones, “Look! Look! I had this wonderful customer down there once. Some dreadful accountant skewered with a sword. It was—”

“It was horrible,” Peroni complained.

“Oh,” Teresa retorted, brightly surprised. “We’re getting discriminating in our old age, are we? I suppose this new female companion of yours puts these crazy notions into your head.”

“Don’t rub it in….”

This wasn’t a popular subject between them.

“Who is she?” Emily asked, unwisely.

“Indian girl,” Teresa said tersely. “Quite pretty too. God knows why she’s in the police.”

The big man grumbled, “Rosa — which does not sound a very Indian name to me at all — was born in some public housing block in Monte Sacro. As I have told you a million times, being of Indian extraction and being Indian aren’t the same thing.”

Teresa didn’t look convinced.

“Of course she’s Indian. Her dad’s from Cochin. He sells umbrellas and lighters and all that junk on some street stall in Tritone. So what? She’s got India in her genes. You can tell that just from talking to her. She doesn’t get mad about anything, not on the surface anyway. I guess it’s karma or whatever.”

Peroni waved a finger in her direction. “She’s a Catholic, for God’s sake!”

“That doesn’t make her an Italian,” Costa interjected. “Not even an honorary one, these days.”

“Quite,” Teresa went on. “And her old man’s a Catholic too. He was one back in India long before he came here. Did you know that?”

Peroni muttered a low curse. Then, grumpily, “No…”

“You should talk to her more,” the pathologist went on. “Rosa is a sweet, serious, responsible human being. Which brings me back to my original point. Why the hell is she in the police? What’s going to happen if she’s left hanging around people like you for long? You, with all these special talents? I mean it.” This last point was aimed at Emily. “I’ve worked in that morgue for a decade and when they’re gone it can be just plain boring. You miss the quality customers. No rubbish from these boys. No time-wasting. Just…” — Teresa sighed, a beatific expression on her face — “…the goods.”

Peroni shook his head and sighed. “Goods like that I can do without.”

“Goods like that put food and drink on our tables, Gianni. Someone’s got to deal with them. Unless you were thinking of moving over to traffic,” she added slyly. “Or still fantasising about… what was it?”

“OK, OK,” he conceded. “We don’t need to be reminded.”

“Pig farming,” Teresa persisted. “Back home in Tuscany. With me working as a local doctor. Stitching up the bucolics after their Saturday night fights. Ministering to fat pregnant housewives.” She slapped him on the arm, quite hard. “What were you thinking?”

“What were we thinking?” he asked quietly.

“Running away,” she answered, serious in an instant. “Believing you can just dump your problems in the gutter and walk on to some new place and forget about them. I’ve been doing that most of my life. In the end it gets downright tedious. What’s more, the little bastards have a habit of picking themselves out of the gutter and following you, whining, ‘Look at me! Look at me!’”

“I would have made a good pig farmer! A great one.”

“You would,” she assured him, full of genuine sympathy. “Until the moment you had to drive them off to the slaughterhouse. What then, my Tuscan hulk? Would you sit outside munching on your panino and porchetta, listening to the squeals?”

Peroni didn’t reply. He just looked at the cobbled sidewalk, worn down by generations of feet.

Then Teresa stopped, aware that someone was missing.

“I didn’t realise Leo was walking so slowly,” she said. “He’s not as bad as that, is he?”

They’d turned a corner a little way back. When Costa looked behind, there wasn’t a soul in the street. Something was wrong. Leo was making slow but steady progress in his return to health. Soon, Costa thought, he’d be back on the job, forcing their new boss, Commissario Messina, to make a tough decision. Did he put the team back together, or keep them apart?

“Nic…?” Emily said softly, a note of concern in her voice.

He was turning to retrace his steps, Peroni starting to follow, when, from somewhere close by came the familiar wail of a police siren, followed by another, then a third, and the honking of angry horns.

“I think…” Teresa began to say, then stopped.

Nearby, someone was screaming and, in that curious way the human mind worked, Nic Costa understood that, wordless and panic driven as the noises were, they came from a terrified Raffaella Arcangelo, out of sight, and for a few desperate moments out of reach too.

Then two figures stumbled into view: Leo Falcone in the arms of a strong, powerful individual whose head was obscured by a black woollen hat pulled down low over his ears.

A man who held a gun tight to Falcone’s neck, jabbing it, shouting something Costa couldn’t understand.

He didn’t have a weapon.

That thought struck Costa as he raced up the street, trying to analyse what was happening in front of him. It had been months since he’d even touched a gun. Months since he’d given firearms a passing thought. It couldn’t be that important. They were in the centre of Rome, in a highly public area. The worst anyone encountered hereabouts was some lowlife bag-snatcher, nothing more serious than that, though something in Raffaella’s desperate voice had told Costa to bark at the women to stay behind him, just in case. Gianni Peroni was following, as fast as he could. But Costa had twenty years on his partner. When he rounded the corner into the narrow side street where Falcone’s attacker had dragged the old inspector, Nic was, he knew, on his own, unarmed, reliant only on his own wits to deal with whatever he found.

The sirens were getting louder. Costa swung left into the narrow thoroughfare, little more than an alley, shadowed by the high-walled houses that blocked the afternoon sunlight.

There was a small white van parked at an awkward angle, cut across the cobbles to block the road to other cars. Raffaella Arcangelo was on the ground a short distance away, screaming, looking as if she’d been hit. Leo Falcone struggled feebly in the arms of a tall, powerful man dressed completely in black, his face obscured by the woollen hat pulled down low, a scarf up around his mouth. He pressed a gun tight to Leo’s temple and was dragging the crippled inspector back towards the open doors of the van, not saying a word.

Peroni reached the junction sweating, gasping for breath.

“Leave this to me,” Costa ordered, waving a hand in his direction. “Don’t let the women come close. There’s a weapon.”

“Nic!” Emily yelled at him angrily.

He turned and looked at her. The pregnancy had made her pale. That morning he’d found her throwing up in the bathroom. Noisily, a little angry and shocked by the way something inside her, something she would surely grow to love, could inflict such a base, physical humiliation on her.

“Please,” he told her firmly. “Nothing’s going to happen. Just stay where you are.”

Easy words, stupid words. They’d work for a minute or so, though.

He walked calmly forward, ignoring the stricken woman on the ground. Costa was trying to see into the eyes of the man in the black jacket, determine what might be going on in his mind. They’d all done antiterrorist training in the Questura. They all knew how a professional hit man or kidnapper was supposed to behave, what tactics such monsters used to get the victim they wanted. What he saw here didn’t match the profile. This was an amateur, improvising as he went.

Peroni had his breath back and was marching into the light at the street junction — the firing zone — Costa couldn’t think of it any other way.

“Back! I told you!” he yelled, angry at his partner. There wasn’t space for confusion. This situation was delicate enough as it was. He was relieved to see the older man halt in his tracks, a dark expression on his face.

Then he looked at Leo Falcone and felt the stirrings of anger inside him. There was blood on the inspector’s mouth. Worse than that, there was something strange, foreign, in his eyes, a resigned, baffled kind of acceptance that didn’t fit in at all with what he knew of Falcone’s character.

A stray sentence entered Costa’s head.

You look like you’ve seen a ghost, Leo, he thought.

Leo Falcone could cope with almost anything life could throw at him. Even a bullet in the head that had disrupted, temporarily, the doctors all said, the neural connections between his brain and his limbs. But what was happening to him now was outside his realm of expectation. There was real fear on the inspector’s face, and it made him look old and weak and vulnerable.

Tires squealed at the end of the street. Three blue police cars had fought their way onto the busy sidewalk and screeched to a halt at the concrete blocks placed there to impede traffic. Uniformed officers were scrambling out of them, looking up the narrow alley in the direction of the two men by the car and at Costa, exposed in the wan spring sunlight at the junction.

That’s just what you do in a situation like this, Costa thought with a rising dismay. Turn up the heat.

He moved closer, until he was no more than a couple of metres from the two men, arms held high, hands open, fingers spread wide, talking calmly, not angry, not engaged, as cool as he could make it in the circumstances.

“No one’s going to get hurt,” Costa said. “Let’s just do this simply. You put the gun down. We talk this through.”

“Nic…” Falcone growled, held tight in that painful position, yet with enough venom left to make his point. Costa knew that low, embittered tone of voice. It said, Leave this to me.

He glanced behind him. A large police van, too big for the narrow streets, was blocking the opposite end of the alley. It sounded as if more cars were screaming up either side of the Via degli Zingari, determined to close every exit.

Costa took a good look into those smart dark eyes. The man held Leo Falcone tight, one arm round his neck, the other keeping the gun, a large black revolver, something ex-military, Costa guessed, at an uncommitted angle, one that could go anywhere, forward, back, where he liked, in an instant.

In training they taught you two things about a situation like this. First, that a man was always most dangerous when he was cornered. And second, that it was so easy to let your emotions get the better of you, and forget that nothing much mattered except getting the victim out alive.

“Nowhere to go…” Costa began saying, then found his voice drowned out by a familiar sound.

The high-pitched screech of a small, overworked scooter engine, a mechanical, too-loud bee buzz, rose up from the main street, getting more vocal, more angry, as it approached.

To his astonishment, the bike had crossed the stone barriers, worked its way through the officers and marked cars, and was now accelerating up the hill. The middle-aged man at the controls gunned the little engine and dropped another gear to get some speed, turning to shake his fist at the cops, a little unsteadily, and maybe not through mere gravity either.

Costa recognised the model. It was a scarlet Piaggio Vespa ET4, a retro machine clothed in 1960s styling to give it the look of the original from some old black-and-white movie in the old Rome of Fellini and Rossellini.

This unexpected sight silenced them all: Falcone and his captor; Costa; the baffled and tardily irate uniforms who let it slip past them.

The figure in black watched the Vespa approach, then picked up Falcone by the scruff of his overcoat and saw something, an opportunity perhaps.

Costa assessed the situation around him. A dozen officers, at least six vehicles, all with four wheels. A perfect closedown for a man on foot or in a car. But with some fake sixties Vespa…

He took one step forward and found himself facing the gun.

“Don’t do anything stupid,” Costa said quietly.

Falcone found his voice. He turned his head as best he could, looked his captor straight in the face, and told Nic, “This is Giorgio Bramante. He only ever did one stupid thing in his entire life, as far as I’m aware. I thought he was still paying for it.”

“You thought right,” the man said, and pressed the barrel of the gun tight against Falcone’s temple.

Raffaella was screaming again. The rattle of the bike got louder. Costa weighed his chances: next to nothing. It didn’t make a difference. He had to try.

Then something extraordinary occurred. Bramante leaned close to Leo Falcone’s ear and whispered something, his eyes never leaving Costa, always ready for the attack. The weapon flashed hard against Leo’s head. Bramante released his grip. The inspector went down, clutching his skull.

The fake Vespa reached them at that moment, lurching over the cobbles, the curious drunk at the handlebars mouthing something faintly obscene. Bramante timed what came next perfectly, before Costa could intervene. He jumped out in front of the scooter, waving the gun at the rider until he braked, punching the bewildered idiot out of the saddle, then picking the machine off the ground, revving that high-pitched engine up into the red, and leaping up the hill, front wheel rising.

The two officers from the Fiat across the junction had their weapons out. The man on the motorcycle was jinking to the right, trying to head past them, into the skein of alleyways that got narrower and narrower into the heart of Monti, an area where no car stood a chance against a man on a fast, agile bike.

“No guns!” Falcone yelled, clawing himself to his feet on unsteady, wavering legs. “There are civilians here, dammit!”

No one argued with the old inspector when he sounded like that. The uniforms let their weapons drop.

Costa walked over and offered Falcone his arm. The older man took it, furious, then hobbled, in obvious pain, to the crossroads, staring at the fumes of the departing scooter as it disappeared down a turning ahead.

“You’re bleeding,” Costa said, and held out a clean white handkerchief. It wasn’t necessary. Raffaella Arcangelo was already at Falcone’s side, distraught, wiping his face, checking the damage, which was minor. A cut lip. A bruise starting to stain his temple where Bramante’s weapon had struck.

Falcone let her fuss over him, scowling all the while in the direction of the vanished bike.

“There’s nothing wrong with me, Raffaella,” he told her curtly. “Please. This is too much fuss.”

Another police van had navigated the gaping bystanders in the Via degli Zingari. It was now stationary behind Peroni, Emily, and Teresa Lupo, none of whom knew quite what to do next.

A stout, powerful-looking man got out. He was in his thirties, wearing a black woollen overcoat and the disdain that went with rank. Nic Costa had already decided, for no good reason, he didn’t much like Commissario Bruno Messina.

Falcone watched the newcomer approach.

“You know, Leo,” the commissario said, shaking his head, as if dealing with amateurs, “it would be nice if, just this once, you were where you were supposed to be. Home.”

Falcone said nothing, just nodded with that brief smile that was too professional to be classed as insolence.

“Did he say much?” Messina asked. “An explanation? Anything?”

Costa thought of that last whispered message. Bramante meant it to have some private significance, he thought.

“He said,” Falcone replied, looking a little bewildered, a little baffled, “that he was sorry, but I’d have to be the last now. Number seven.”

Commissario Messina listened and then, to Costa’s disgust, burst out laughing.

“I want everyone in the van,” Messina ordered when his private amusement had receded. He pointed to Falcone, Costa, Peroni, and Teresa Lupo. “You four are back on duty, as of this moment.”

Raffaella was squawking a protest already, about Falcone’s sick leave, his injuries, his physical difficulties.

“You…” Messina interrupted her. “…and Agente Costa’s girlfriend here are in protective custody. One of the cars will take you to the Questura. You can wait there.”

“And where,” Teresa Lupo interjected, just loud enough to override the shrieks of protest from Emily and Raffaella, “are we going, might I ask?”

Bruno Messina smiled.

“To see number five.”