The Seventh Sacrament

Book 5 The Seventh Sacrament

They had been stumbling, lost, through the labyrinth for what seemed to Alessio Bramante to be the best part of twenty minutes, not once seeing a hint of daylight, not for a moment hearing anything but the echo of their own voices and a distant trickle of water. How long would his father wait before coming back to reclaim him? When was this game meant to end?

He tried to remember what had happened in Livia’s house on the Palatino. That time, Giorgio had been gone for longer than this, so long that Alessio had amused himself by closing his eyes and imagining he could hear the voice of the long-dead empress, her hard Latin phrases demanding instant obedience, the way that powerful grown-ups liked.

A test was not meant to be easy, otherwise it was no test at all. But this ritual involved obedience, too, and there Alessio Bramante was lost, uncertain how to act. Perhaps soon there would come a roar from behind them, Giorgio Bramante, like the Minotaur bellowing for its prey in the caves in Crete, stalking them, slowly, methodically, through the subterranean veins of the Aventino.

Alessio had no idea, nor did they. Holding the hand of the tall figure in the red suit, with the wild, curly hair, Alessio Bramante moved ever deeper into the warren beneath the Aventino, aware that all seven of them were equally trapped, equally tied to one another, in hierarchies of dependence and control, all beneath the power and will of his father.

Dino — the younger man had revealed his name in a quiet moment, as they stumbled through the dark — hoped to play the part of saviour. The one who rescued the initiate who would become Corax. Some minutes after the argument, Dino had dragged Alessio ahead, then led the boy into a Stygian corner.

“Alessio,” he had said, very earnestly, “I won’t let him harm you. Don’t worry. Stay close to me. Do what I say, please. Ludo’s just… a little crazy.”

Dino didn’t understand. The boy almost laughed.

“He’s frightened of my father,” he replied, and knew this to be true. “What can he do to me?”

“We’re all a little frightened of your father,” Dino answered ruefully. “Aren’t you?”

“I’m not frightened of anything. Not you. Not…” — he nodded back towards the footsteps of the others, fast catching up — “…him.”

“Well, good for you,” Dino said, and tousled his long hair, an act that made Alessio shrink away from his grip, disgusted by the expectation of weakness.

Alessio really wasn’t scared. There was no need to be, not even as they travelled further and further into the network of tunnels that ran ahead of them in all directions, driven, it seemed, by Ludo’s terror at the unseen wraith that lay between them and escape. This was an adventure, a physical, human set of moves on a gigantic, three-dimensional chessboard, manoeuvres with an end in mind. One that only Alessio seemed to recognise fully.

Death was a part of the ritual too. Every old book, every story his father had recounted to him, said that, unmistakably. That — not simple, greedy curiosity — was why Alessio had watched every instant of the bird’s end at the knife of Ludo Torchia. He’d been determined to be a witness, a participant. And he was curious, too, to see what the grey ghost looked like when it finally emerged from the shadows.

He wanted to talk to each of them about it, to pose questions, gauge their varying reactions: crazy Ludo, the short, studious one called Sandro, big, stupid Andrea, and quiet, frightened Raul, who never spoke. Even Toni LaMarca, who had a crooked, evil set to his eyes, one that gave Alessio pause for thought. And Dino, too, who regarded himself as Alessio’s friend. He wanted to ask them what that bird would have felt. How long the creature would have remained conscious. Whether they felt different afterwards (as he did, surreptitiously reaching down, when no one was looking, to dip the fingers of his left hand, the one no adult would ever seek to hold, deeper into the pool of damp, sticky blood on the ground, determined to have more than the rest).

There was no opportunity for talk, except with Dino, who was — Alessio understood instinctively — unlike the rest of them, a virtuous person, someone whose imagination was limited by his innate goodness. Dino didn’t want to be here, deep in this game. He didn’t believe in gods and rituals and the power they might exercise over ordinary men.

The others fell through the doorway into the new, narrower, low cavern where Dino and he had come to a halt. They looked breathless, tired, all five of them. And scared.

It was Toni, perhaps the only one among them Alessio thought it was wise to fear, who spoke first.

“Where are we going?” he asked. “Is this really a way out?”

“Shut up,” Ludo said, halfheartedly.

The flashlights were failing. Their illumination had taken on that dying hue Alessio knew from those times at home when he’d creep beneath the sheets and play with the toy lantern he owned, seeing how long it could stay alive in the dark.

“We can’t keep stumbling around like this,” Dino said. “We’ve been going down. I don’t know this hill very well. I don’t have any way of judging in which direction we’ve been headed.”

He aimed the faint beam of his own light into the thick, velvet blackness ahead. It revealed nothing but rock and a continuing line of empty tunnel.

“We’ll hit a dead end here,” he said. “Or worse. And if these flashlights are dead…”

Ludo didn’t say anything. Alessio watched his face. It was interesting. Intrigued. The face of a man who didn’t recognise the boundaries that constrained the way someone like Dino would think.

“If we’re caught down here without light,” Dino went on, “we’re in real trouble. This isn’t about getting thrown out of university. This place is dangerous.”

“That’s why you feel alive,” Ludo replied, and Alessio realised he approved of that answer.

Ludo’s eyes hunted each of them, seeking a target. Finally, they fell on Alessio.

“What do you think?” he asked. “Little boy.”

Alessio said nothing. Somewhere inside himself, he felt some small beast rise on red wings.

“Spoilt little brat…” Ludo went on, bending down, in a way that spoke condescension in every crook and bend of his lanky body. “What does some rich little kid, whose daddy thinks he knows everything, have to say for himself, huh?”

Alessio flew at him then, nails scratching, fingers scrabbling, letting out some furious, pent-up rage that had been waiting so long to surface.

He made a discovery at that point, too. When he felt this way, when the world was nothing but some bleeding scarlet wall of flesh and pain at which he could claw with his strong, lithe fingers, nothing felt wrong. Nothing existed that could be labelled “good” or “bad,” “right” or “wrong.” In the wild and screaming place that his anger took him lay some kind of clear, hard comfort he’d never quite found before.

It elated him. Ludo was right. It made him feel alive.

His fingers tore at the hands of his foe. His nails scratched and found purchase on skin. Ludo was yelling, words of fear and pain and frenzy.

“Shit!” Ludo screeched. “Shit! Shit! Shit! Get the little bastard off me. Get—”

Alessio stopped, then smiled up at him. The marks of his own fingers ran in parallel scrawled lines down the back of Ludo’s hands.

It didn’t prevent him getting the knife out. Alessio stared at the blade. It was still stained with the blood of the cockerel, the bird that had choked out its life, drop by drop, somewhere in these caves. In a place his own father might well have passed by now, if he’d started looking.

“Ludo…” Dino murmured.

Alessio glanced at him. Dino was weak. Weakness was part of his character. He wouldn’t stand in Ludo’s way. Nor would any of them. They were, Alessio saw, lesser creatures, on a lower part of the hierarchy.

He raised his small hand, still painful from clawing at Torchia the moment before, a calm, unhurried gesture, one that said: Quiet.

He watched the knife rise in front of him.

“This would be so easy…” Ludo muttered.

The rest of them stood around like scared idiots. Alessio wondered what his father would have said in a situation like this. And whether this was all part of the test.

Alessio Bramante looked into Ludo Torchia’s eyes, recognised something there, and waited until Ludo saw this, too.

Then, and only then, he smiled and said, “I know the way.”

They’d searched all night, more than a hundred officers in all. Every last part of the Aventino. Every car park. Every blind alley. They’d made a cursory run past all the sites that appeared on Falcone’s lists, not that there was much to see in the dark, much to do beyond a check for recent tire marks.

Now they were engaged in a muddled, directionless conference of team leaders in the large, crowded room next to Falcone’s empty office, Costa and Peroni tagging along because it was unclear to whom, exactly, they were answering at that moment. Precious little was apparent at all, even after nine hours of solid, sometimes frantic, labour.

The one firm lead Messina and his new inspector Bavetti had to show was something Costa thought Falcone would have picked up in minutes. Early the previous afternoon, Calvi, the horse butcher, had reported one of his three vans stolen. The vehicle possessed a cargo compartment that was, for obvious reasons, impossible to see into from outside, and highly secure. The van was still unaccounted for, though every police car in the city, marked and unmarked, now had its number. Gone, too, was Enzo Uccello, Bramante’s cellmate and fellow worker at the horse abattoir, who had failed to return to work at four p.m. as expected. Maybe they’d been right to think that Uccello was helping Bramante on the outside. Bavetti certainly considered that a strong possibility. It occurred to Costa that, if true, this told only part of the story. Enzo Uccello had been sent to jail three years after Bramante. He’d been inside, without parole, of no practical use whatsoever, when the earlier killings had taken place. What help he had to offer Bramante was surely limited to the last few months.

Details like these didn’t seem to bother Bavetti, a man who was a little younger than Bruno Messina, tall, nondescript, and apt to speak little, and then only in clipped sentences upon which he seemed unwilling to expand. Both men appeared uncertain of themselves, racked with caution, because they feared the consequences of failure. There was a severe lack of experience in the Questura at that moment, and it would make the search for Leo Falcone and Rosa Prabakaran doubly difficult.

Not that Costa expected himself or Peroni to be engaged in it for much longer. Messina’s patience with them was wearing thin. He’d barely spoken to them all night. And now, in front of several other senior officers, he had virtually accused them of being party to Leo’s disappearance.

Costa had laughed, had been unable to do anything else. The charge was ludicrous. Why would they aid Leo in doing such a thing? And why would they wait for Prinzivalli to raise the alarm? It was ridiculous and he told Messina so to his face.

Peroni took the accusation more personally. He still stood, big, scarred face close into Messina’s florid features, and demanded an apology and a retraction, something the rest of the men in the room would have loved to hear from this green commissario’s lips, which was one good reason why it would never happen.

The big man tried for the third time. “I want that withdrawn. Sir.”

Peroni was drawing nods from the older men in the room, which did little to help their cause. There would be a reckoning when this was done, Costa knew, and he found himself caring little about which way the blame would fall. Leo was missing, along with Rosa Prabakaran, who had, he assumed, been taken as the price of Falcone’s surrender, in the same way Bramante had done with his earlier victims. They had no idea what had become of either of them. The game, once again, was entirely in Bramante’s hands. Messina and Bavetti lacked both the foresight and talent to second-guess the man. Perhaps Leo Falcone did, too, though things had seemed a little more equal when he was around.

“Do you want us on this case or not?” Costa asked, when Messina avoided Peroni’s demands again.

The commissario leapt to the bait, just as Costa had expected.

“No,” he spat back, as much out of instinct as anything. “Get the hell out of here. Both of you. When this is over and done with, then I’ll make some decisions about your future.”

“We know Leo!” Peroni bellowed. “You can’t kick us out just because it makes your life easier.”

Messina looked at his watch. “Your shift’s over. Both of you. Don’t come back till I call.”

Costa took Peroni’s elbow and squeezed. For the life of him he didn’t understand what Messina would have left to talk about once they were gone. He and Bavetti looked lost for what to do next.

“Worms,” Costa said simply.

Bavetti screwed up his pinched face. The man hadn’t even taken a good look at Falcone’s paperwork before taking over the case. He’d simply sent officers out into the Rome night, looking everywhere, flinging manpower at shadows.

“What?”

“Remember what Leo was chasing before all this happened. He had a lead. Today we were going to narrow down all those possible places Bramante could have been staying before. There’s a whole map of them downstairs. Inspector Falcone planned to visit them. One by one…”

Just then a nearby phone began to ring. Costa walked over to pick it up, dragging Peroni in his wake.

The conference went on behind them, a ragged, monotonous drone of confused voices. But at least Bavetti seemed to be talking about investigating Falcone’s list of possible sites.

Costa said, wearily, “Pronto.”

It was a uniform man calling from a car in the field. He was struggling to maintain his composure. Costa listened and felt a cold stab of dread run down his spine. He asked several questions and made some notes of the answers. Peroni watched him in silence, knowing, in that shared, unspoken way they both recognised now, that this was important.

After a minute, he put down the phone and interrupted Messina’s rambling attempt to sum up the case so far.

“I’m talking,” Messina snapped.

“I noticed,” Costa replied. “I think we’ve found Agente Prabakaran. She’s in Testaccio,” Costa continued, as Messina struggled for words and Peroni walked over to their desks and picked up the car keys and their phones. “The horse butcher opened his shop late because Uccello never turned up for work. In the refrigerator…” He shrugged.

“Is the woman alive?” Messina asked.

“Just about,” Costa replied. “There’s a man’s body too. She was tied to him. It doesn’t sound… pretty.”

The local officer he’d spoken to had become almost hysterical when Costa had pushed him on the finer points.

“More,” Bavetti demanded, suddenly finding his voice. “Details.”

“Details?” Costa asked, amazed.

“What? Where exactly? How…?”

Peroni came back. Costa looked at him and nodded.

“I believe, Commissario,” the big man replied, dangling the car keys, “you said we’re off-duty.”

Messina’s florid face became a livid red. “Don’t play games with me, Peroni! Damn you!”

Costa turned round and slapped the notebook firmly into the commissario’s fleshy hands, with a sudden, vehement force.

“Someone’s found a dead man. And a half-dead woman who appears to have been raped. Beyond that…”

He didn’t say another word. Peroni was already heading for the door, with the speed of a man half his age.

“I know the way,” Alessio repeated, making sure he didn’t stutter.

Ludo stopped for a moment. The knife glittered, motionless.

“Little boys shouldn’t tell lies,” he said menacingly.

“Little boys don’t.”

Alessio pulled the end of the string from the spent loop on his belt, the short section, which had broken when he’d first tried to attach it. The main ball had run for several minutes, tugging on his trousers. None of them had noticed back then, in the temple room, as he’d paused for a moment, untied this second loop, and allowed the string to fall on the floor, floating against his legs, tickling like some dead, falling insect.

He held the piece of string in front of him, staring up into those crazy, scared eyes, thinking of chess and how he’d played with his father, hour after hour, in the bright sunny garden room in a house no more than a few minutes’ walk from here, out in the light of day. This, too, depended upon the endgame.

Alessio had fought to memorise each turn they’d taken since that moment: left and right, up and down. He could, he felt sure, retrace their steps, find a way back to the fallen string and the corridor to the surface, one of seven, one that Giorgio Bramante had surely not taken when he disappeared.

He could lead them out of the caves, unseen. Or…

Games always involved a victory. Winners and losers. Perhaps he had a gift, a sacrament, to make, too: six stupid students, trespassing where they weren’t wanted.

“A piece of string,” Torchia said, taunting him. “Is that supposed to make a difference?”

“Listen to him,” Dino Abati cautioned. “We don’t have many options left, Ludo. Sooner or later we’ll stumble into a hole. Or into Giorgio. Which would you prefer?”

“Ludo…” Toni LaMarca whined.

“I know the way out,” Alessio said again, and wanted to laugh. “I can take you past my father. He won’t even see you. He won’t even know you were here. I won’t tell.” He smiled, and held up his left hand, still sticky with the cockerel’s blood. “I promise.”

Torchia stared at his bloodied fingers, thinking.

He lowered the knife.

“If we do this,” Torchia threatened, “you don’t say a word. Not to him. Not to anyone. We don’t talk about you. You don’t talk about us. That’s the arrangement. Understood, little rich boy?”

“I’m not rich,” Alessio objected.

“Understood?”

Alessio looked at the knife, reached forward, and pushed it gently out of his face.

“I won’t tell a soul,” Alessio said. “I swear.”

For once, the traffic was light. they made it to Testaccio in little more than seven minutes. Four blue marked cars stood outside the market, lights flashing. Peroni knew the most senior uniform on duty. The man nodded them through into a corner of the building that was now deserted except for police. Word had gone round. The stalls were closing for the day.

Rosa Prabakaran sat huddled next to a bread stall, two female officers on either side, a blanket over her hunched frame, clutching a mug of coffee, which steamed in the chill morning air.

Peroni walked over and placed a hand on her shoulder.

She shrieked. The big cop shrank back, muttering curses about his own stupidity, taking the stream of abuse from the women as he did so.

Costa had been in these situations before. At some point Rosa Prabakaran would disclose what had happened, quietly, at her own pace, to some trained officers, all of them female, who knew how to listen. He didn’t need to do more than look at her to understand what, in part at least, she had been through.

“Agente,” Costa said quietly. “Commissario Messina will be here shortly. I suggest, very strongly, you insist on being taken back to the Questura, and talk in your own good time.”

The blanket had slipped. He’d caught sight of something unexpected: a flimsy, provocative slip of a dress underneath. Torn and muddy. She’d seen him notice. After that, her eyes didn’t move from the floor.

Costa walked around the back of the horse butcher’s stall, the shelves white and empty, and waited for the pale-faced uniformed man at the door of the refrigerator to get out of the way.

Then he went inside, aware immediately of the stench of meat and blood.

Peroni followed him. The two of them looked at the shape on a hook in the corner.

“That’s not Leo,” Costa said eventually.

“Thank God for that.”

“Too short. My guess is Enzo Uccello.”

Peroni, a squeamish man at the best of times, made himself stare at the cadaver.

“You’ve a better imagination than me, Nic,” he admitted. “I don’t envy you that.”

He turned and walked outside. Costa joined him almost immediately. Messina and Bavetti were there now, officious voices in a sea of uniforms. Teresa Lupo and her team had arrived too. The pathologist was seated next to Rosa Prabakaran, talking softly to her.

Peroni strode over to the young agente, kept well back this time, bent down on one knee, on the far side from Teresa.

“Rosa,” he said quietly. “I know this is a terrible time to ask. But Leo — did you see him? Do you know what happened?”

She closed her eyes. When she opened them again, they were glazed with tears, so shiny she couldn’t be seeing a thing, except, Costa thought, some unwanted mental images of what had happened.

“No,” she said firmly.

Peroni glanced at Teresa, pleading.

“Leo’s a good man,” she insisted. “I know you didn’t get on well, Rosa, but we really need to find him.”

Something, some memory, made the young policewoman shudder, raising her hand to her mouth. Teresa Lupo hugged her, tight, in a way no man could, perhaps for a long time.

“I don’t know.” Rosa choked with fury on her own ignorance. “He just did what he did, then took us here. I didn’t even know about Inspector Falcone until these men came. What was he doing?”

“He gave himself up to free you,” Teresa answered quietly. “That’s what we think, anyway.”

Rosa’s head went down again.

“You should go back to the Questura now with these officers,” Peroni said, nodding at the uniformed women. “Tell them what you want. Just…”

Rosa Prabakaran’s agonised, tear-stained face rose to look at them. “I didn’t ask him to do that!” she cried. “I didn’t know!”

“Hey, hey, hey!” Peroni said quickly. “Leo would have done that for any of us. That’s…” He cast an ugly glance in the direction of Messina and Bavetti, who’d just walked out of the refrigerated storage room, and now stood, white-faced and shocked, talking in low tones to each other. “That’s what comes naturally to some people.”

Rosa dragged an arm across her face, like a child, angry, ashamed.

Then the two senior officers marched over briskly, trying to look unmoved.

“I want,” the commissario announced to everyone in earshot, “everything focused on finding this bastard Bramante from now on. We assume Falcone is alive. When Bramante killed before, he usually made his handiwork very obvious. Until that is the case — and I pray it won’t be — we assume Falcone is a prisoner, not a victim. I want officers armed at all times. I want helicopter surveillance. And the hostage rescue unit. I want them too. The firearms people.”

Costa blinked. “Firearms?”

“Exactly,” Messina concurred.

There were two specialist state police hostage teams in the city. One focused on negotiation, the second was specifically trained to deal with urgent, high-priority incidents involving captives. Messina was making it clear he wanted the latter. The team existed more out of pride than necessity. The Carabinieri and the secret services handled most security events. But what they had, the state police wanted too.

“If Leo’s a hostage,” Peroni observed, “the last thing we want is a bunch of people pointing guns at the man who’s holding him.”

“You’re experts on hostage-taking now, are you?” the commissario barked. “Is there anything you two don’t have an opinion on?”

“We’re just trying to pass on what we think Inspector Falcone would say in the circumstances,” Costa interposed.

“Leo Falcone walked out of the Questura against my direct orders! He’s just made things ten times worse.”

Messina glanced down at Rosa Prabakaran. He looked as if he really didn’t want to see her at all. “What happened here, Prabakaran?” he demanded. “I need to know. Now.”

“No, Commissario.” Teresa Lupo rose. She prodded a stubby finger into his dark serge coat. “Not now. There are protocols and procedures for situations like this. They will be followed.”

“You’re the pathologist here,” Messina bawled at her. His hand flapped close in her face. “You do your job, I’ll do mine. I want to know.”

“Know what?” Teresa demanded, standing her ground.

“What happened?”

Costa broke in. “Agente Prabakaran has nothing to tell us about Inspector Falcone. She wasn’t even aware he’d been taken until someone told her this morning.”

“I am the commanding officer. I demand a full report—”

“Oh please!” Teresa interrupted. “Don’t you have eyes, man? Can’t you see what happened?”

“Remember your place,” Messina hissed, and stuck out a beefy arm to push her out of the way.

Costa watched what happened next with amazement.

Teresa Lupo’s arm rose in what seemed to him a passable imitation of a boxer’s right hook, caught Messina on the chin, then sent the large commissario spinning back into the arms of Bavetti, who just managed to break his fall as the man hit the stone floor.

A barely hidden ripple of amusement ran around the officers, uniformed and plainclothes, watching the scene. No one, except Bavetti, moved a muscle to help the fallen man.

Teresa turned to Costa and Peroni. “Do you really think Leo could still be alive?”

“Bramante was in no rush to kill him before,” Costa insisted, adding, with a glance at Messina, half dazed on the ground, “We could be in luck. If we had something to offer him…”

“Such as?” she asked.

“Such as finding out what happened to his son,” Costa suggested.

“This is ridiculous,” Messina snapped savagely, scrambling to his feet, not yet ready to look Teresa Lupo in the face. “If we didn’t get to the bottom of that fourteen years ago, what chance do we have now?”

She shook her head in disappointment. “For you, Commissario, I suspect the answer is none. Silvio?”

Di Capua, who was just loving this, made a military salute. Teresa threw her briefcase across to him with one easy movement.

“You know the routine,” she told her assistant. “Check for anything at the scene that can narrow down that list of potential sites Leo left us. Once the gentlemen here have ceased walking around with their chins dragging on the floor, they will, I trust, realise their time will be better spent trying to find the living instead of gawping at the dead.”

“Done,” Silvio replied happily. “And you?”

The pathologist stroked her forehead with the back of her large hand, then emitted a long theatrical sigh.

“If anyone asks, I have a terrible headache. Ladies?”

The two female police officers were helping Rosa Prabakaran to her feet. Teresa Lupo took one big stride towards them, sending Bruno Messina scampering back as she approached.

“I think,” she said, “it’s time to leave this place to the weaker sex.”

“With the exception,” she added, pointing to Peroni and Costa, “of you two.”

The hospital seemed to be run by nuns, mute, unsmiling figures who drifted around busily, taking patients and equipment and pale manila record folders around the maze of endless corridors. It was in a beautiful Renaissance building not far from the Duomo, a massive, ornate, foursquare leviathan that, from the outside, looked more like a palace than a place for the sick, or those just thinking of joining them. Arturo Messina had insisted on accompanying her. He sat with Emily on hard metal chairs in a waiting room with peeling paint and rusty windows that gave out onto a grey courtyard, its cobblestones shining with the constant rain. Four other women in front of her in the queue waited patiently with telltale bulges in their tummies, only partly covered by the magazines they read intently.

Emily Deacon, who was still slim, still, in her own mind, only half-attached to the being growing inside her, glanced at them and felt an unwanted sense of shock. This is me too, she thought. This is how I will look in just a few months.

Arturo, ever the observant one, noted, “It all goes, you know. The weight. Usually anyway. I know women think men are just beasts who’re interested in nothing but their looks. It’s not like that. I always found it hard to take my eyes off my wife when she was pregnant, and I don’t mean that in the way you think. She was… radiant. It’s the only way I know of putting it.”

“One doesn’t feel particularly radiant when one is throwing up at seven in the morning. Men get spared the hard parts.”

For a moment he looked hurt. She’d told him about the conversation she’d had with Nic. The way the case was going in Rome depressed Arturo too.

“Not really,” he commented. “The hard parts just hit us later, in more subtle ways. I don’t want you worrying about Falcone, by the way. I know that’s a stupid thing to say, and that you will anyway. When we get back, I don’t want you hanging over that computer all day. Or the phone. I’ll unplug both if you’re going to be obstinate.”

They’d left Raffaella in the company of Pietro, who was feeding her coffee and biscotti with what seemed, to Emily, a hopeful glint in his eye. Pietro did not share Arturo Messina’s talent for tact.

“Since this is a time for speaking out of turn,” the retired commissario continued, “I should say that I did not find Raffaella’s reaction to be quite what I was expecting. Were things… well with her and Leo before? I’m prying here, of course, so feel entitled to tell me to get lost.”

They hadn’t been getting on, not really, Emily thought. Leo and Raffaella had come back from Venice dependent upon each other in ways that were inexplicable. He needed someone to nurse him through his physical frailty. That much was understandable. But Raffaella’s urge to fill this role — one which was not quite, Emily believed, the same as a craving for love and affection — puzzled her.

“I don’t know, Arturo. I was never very good at relationships until Nic came along.”

“You need only one. The right one, which can be hard, I know. But you’re there already. Stupid old men see things they were blind to when they were stupid young men. I look forward to meeting this Nic of yours.”

“I’m sure you’ll like him.”

“I’m sure too. And yet he gets along with Leo! And don’t tell me the man’s changed. I know that’s impossible. He decides to walk out into the night to try to save this poor young agente for whom he feels responsible — not that he is. Then what does he do next? He phones his lover to tell her it’s all over. And how?”

Raffaella had revealed all this over breakfast, her face grim with fury and spent tears. Then she had insisted on taking a car back to Rome to return to their apartment and await developments.

“By leaving her a message on the answering machine!” Arturo declared, making a broad, incredulous gesture with his hands. “Is that Falcone’s interpretation of kindness? That, before you go out for a rendezvous with some murdering bastard who hopes to kill you, a man must call home and leave a few words on an answering machine, telling a woman who loves you it’s all over?”

“I think he meant it as kindness. Leo’s a little uncomfortable when it comes to personal matters.”

“True. But you see my point? This is precisely what I had to deal with fourteen years ago. Stubborn as a mule, utterly insensitive to the feelings of others and — this is the worst, the very worst — quite uncaring about his own skin too. Being selfless is not necessarily a virtue, my dear. Sometimes it’s just downright infuriating, a way of saying to other people, ‘You can care about me, but I’ll be damned if I care about myself.’”

Emily smiled. He had Leo to a tee. She found herself liking Arturo Messina immensely.

“And the worst thing is,” she replied, “you do care. I do. I think you do too. Even after all these years.”

“Of course! Who wants to see a good man go out into the night to confront Lord knows what? Even if we have had our arguments. Leo was right, though. He understood Giorgio Bramante a lot better than I did. If only I’d listened…”

“Nothing, in all probability, would have been any different. Leo was no closer to finding that boy than you, was he?”

“Meglio una bella bugia che una brutta verità.”

“Pardon me?” she asked.

“Ludo Torchia’s final words. Years ago I bullied them out of the doctor who was with him at the time. I was a good bully. Leo knew already, of course, not that he was any the wiser.”

The three women ahead had gone now. Surely her time would come soon.

“I was a police officer,” Arturo went on. “I was used to the idea that there were ugly truths out there. But something about that case fooled me. I found myself looking for beautiful lies. Like a father’s love is always perfect, always innocent, especially when it comes from a seemingly good, intelligent man like that.”

“We don’t know it wasn’t.”

“Perhaps. But there was something wrong with Giorgio Bramante, and in my haste I refused to acknowledge it. Why? Because I didn’t want to. Because I couldn’t bear the idea. I couldn’t stomach the notion that he might somehow have been at fault too.”

He shuffled the raincoat on his lap, a little nervously.

“Leo never played those games,” he continued. “He had never had to learn that they were part of growing up, for a father, and for a son. That both needed some beautiful lies between them, because without those fabrications, there was only the dark and the gloom to fill their lives when things got bad. Back then, I pitied Leo for that ignorance. I still do now. We all need our self-deception from time to time.”

The surgery door opened. A nurse gestured at them.

“I hope to God they can find Leo before more harm’s done,” Arturo added quickly, rising to his feet. “And this will be our final word on this subject until your Nic is here.”

She entered the exam room, acutely aware that waiting in that rigid chair had somehow made the aches worse. The doctor was a woman: slim, mid-fifties, dressed in a dark sweater and black trousers. She looked harassed, too busy to deal with stupid, time-wasting questions.

After a brief discussion of her history, the doctor asked, in a peremptory fashion, “What do you feel is wrong?”

“There was a tiny amount of bleeding. Three days ago. And then again this morning.”

“These things happen,” the doctor said with a shrug. “Didn’t your physician in Rome tell you that?”

“He did.”

“So. A man. Did you feel comfortable with him?”

“Not entirely,” Emily admitted.

The doctor smiled. “Of course not. This is your first time. You should have a woman to talk to. It makes everything so much simpler. Signora. There must be a reason why you came. So please tell me what it is.”

“I have a little cramp in my side.”

The doctor’s expression changed. “Persistent?”

“For the last few days it’s been there most of the time.”

“How many weeks are you?”

“Seven. Eight, perhaps.”

“Where is the pain exactly?”

“Here.” Emily indicated with her hand. “I had my appendix out when I was a teenager. It’s almost the same place. Perhaps…”

“You have only one appendix.”

The doctor asked more questions, the personal ones Emily was now beginning to field almost without thinking. It was easier with a woman.

Then the doctor grimaced. “What about your shoulder? Is it stiff? Strained perhaps?”

“Yes,” she admitted, unnerved by the connection the woman had made. It had never occurred to her to place the two sensations together. “I thought perhaps I’d wrenched it.”

“Have you ever suffered from a pelvic inflammatory disease?”

This was all too close.

“I had chlamydia when I was twenty. It was nothing. They cured it, they said. Antibiotics.”

The doctor scribbled some notes, then looked up. “Did your doctor in Rome ask any of these questions?”

“No.”

The woman nodded, got up, and reached into the medical cabinet by her desk, taking out a syringe.

“We will need a blood test. And an ultrasound. A special one, I think. We have the equipment here. Your husband?”

“My partner’s working.”

“What is work? He should be here. This is important.”

Nic seemed so engrossed in the search for Leo Falcone. It was impossible to divert him from that.

“I have a friend with me. Outside.”

The doctor bent over her. She smelled strongly of old-fashioned soap. The needle went into her arm. Emily was, as always, amazed how dark that blood appeared in real life.

“What’s wrong?”

“In a little while I hope we will know. Your friend can bring some things for you?”

Emily blinked. “I’ll be staying?”

The woman sighed and looked at the papers on her desk. “Emily, bringing children into this world is a game of chance. In some ways, the odds are better now, because we know more. In others, they’re worse, because of our habits, and little demons like chlamydia. Sometimes events have consequences, long after we’ve forgotten them.”

The doctor paused, wondering, it seemed to Emily, whether to go on.

“Listen to me,” she urged. “You’re an intelligent young woman. I don’t imagine this thought hasn’t run through your head. One in a hundred pregnancies in our wonderful civilised world is ectopic. They are more common in women who have suffered pelvic inflammatory diseases. The symptoms are… your symptoms. Do you want the truth?”

No, she thought. I want a lie. A beautiful lie. The doctor was already on the phone, speaking rapidly, with authority.

“I want the truth,” Emily said when the call ended.

“We will see what the ultrasound reveals. If there is a baby in your uterus, then fine. You will stay here, I shall look after you, and it is entirely possible there is nothing to worry about at all, though you will not leave until I am quite satisfied of that. If the uterus is empty, then this pregnancy is ectopic. Your baby is in the wrong place, somewhere it cannot survive. In that eventuality, what I shall be endeavouring to do is ensure that you will be able to conceive again. Parenthood is often a question of persistence, and I say that as a mother myself.”

Emily felt cold and feeble.

“My name is Anna,” the doctor said. “Please use it.” She stuck out a slender, tanned hand. Emily took it, and found her fingers in a warm, powerful grip.

“Anna,” she repeated.

“Are you sure you don’t want to call your friend in Rome?”

There was a nun at the door already. She held a grey hospital gown and a pale manila folder. Behind her stood Arturo Messina, leaning to see into the room. He looked curious, apprehensive, and, for once, lost.

But all Emily could think of was Nic, trying to cope with an investigation that was falling apart, worried to death about the disappearance of Leo Falcone, a man who, she’d long recognised, had become a kind of substitute father for him.

“I’m sure,” she answered.

They sat in a large, empty café around the corner from the Testaccio market, stirring three excellent coffees. Teresa had waved for another one already, and was rapidly munching her way through a second honey-and-hazelnut pastry the size of her fist.

“So now that’s out of the way,” Peroni asked, “what career were you thinking of next? Chief negotiating officer with a reconciliation service or something? You know the kind of thing: Two people who hate each other’s guts walk into the room and you state that, unless they promise to leave loving one another to pieces, you’ll punch their lights out.”

“Messina, Messina,” she moaned, pausing for a big bite of the pastry. “I told you. The man’s doomed already. I don’t believe in kicking people when they’re on the ground, but there’s nothing wrong in giving them a little nudge, is there? This woman mingles for Italy, boys. I mingled greatly this morning, with people you wouldn’t even dare talk to. Messina has three days, four maybe, no more. Once this mess is over, however it works out, he’ll be despatched to Ostia to take notes for the committee designing the next generation of parking tickets. In my opinion, they overestimate his abilities, but for now I’ll let that pass.”

In the space of ten minutes they’d accomplished much. Free of the ties of the Questura, answerable to no one, it was easy to act. On the way out of the market, Teresa had summarised the growing dissatisfaction with Messina upstairs in the Questura. Then, after agreeing on their options, they’d made three calls to pet journalists they knew: radio, TV, and a newspaper. It was important the news got out quickly. There was one point on which they and Bruno Messina were in agreement. As long as there was no body, they would assume Leo Falcone was alive. Prabakaran and Uccello had been in Bramante’s hands for more than twelve hours. He was not a man to be hurried.

“You really think this fantasy about a new lead on the son will keep Bramante from hurting Leo?” Teresa asked.

The story — which was pure fabrication — would be on the radio and TV news within the hour, and in the early-afternoon editions of the papers.

Costa shrugged. “For a while maybe. It can’t do any harm. Bramante’s got to be curious, hasn’t he? Leo thought the man would give up if he knew. Besides, he must realise that if he murders a police inspector, we’re not going to focus much time on chasing what happened to his son.”

“Leo’s not himself,” Peroni pointed out.

“I’m not so sure about that,” Costa said.

“Nic!” Teresa said, shocked. “He walked out in the middle of the night to get that poor girl freed. Who’s to know this bastard wouldn’t have killed them both?”

It was Peroni who spoke. “No. Bramante wouldn’t do that. He’s bad, but bad within his own rules. Which are, I suspect, pretty much set in stone.”

“He kidnapped poor Rosa!” she objected. “And killed the rest! That’s what kind of man he is.”

Costa recalled Falcone’s words as he left: Check out Bramante before the nightmare began. He’d played around with the records database for a few minutes before Prinzivalli raised the alarm.

“He is that kind of man,” Costa agreed. “Or at least, he could be. Leo asked me to run some checks to see if we had anything on him before Alessio disappeared.”

“Well?” Peroni asked.

Costa grimaced.

“Not much there. The Questura had received two complaints of sexual harassment from students a couple of years before.”

“Anyone we know?” Teresa demanded.

“No. Someone had spoken to the university and got the usual tale. Students make up that kind of story all the time. Either way, it was impossible to prove.”

“Doesn’t tell us much, Nic,” Peroni pointed out, disappointed. “They probably do get that all the time.”

“How often?” Costa replied. “The officer who went to the university discovered there’d been other complaints about sexual intimidation too. They’d dealt with those internally. The university authorities said they couldn’t release the details. For legal reasons. The two female students who complained to us wouldn’t push the case. Bad for their degrees. So that was where it ended.”

Costa stirred the dregs of his coffee and fought off the urge to buy another. Even if Bramante was a sexual predator, it was difficult to see how that knowledge could help them in their present predicament: finding out what happened to his son. Although it might explain his wife’s habits with knives.

“How long will it take them to work through Leo’s list of sites?” Teresa asked.

“A day, two maybe,” Peroni said. “That is going to be a long and tiresome job.”

“I wouldn’t want to be banged up in some subterranean hellhole with Leo for two days,” she muttered. “He’d drive me crazy. I can push Silvio to narrow it down. Maybe Rosa will come up with something. But we don’t have much time, gentlemen.”

Yet… Costa still struggled with some hidden aspect of the case.

“What if Leo’s not what he really wants?” he suggested. “What if he’s just the route to getting it?”

“You mean Alessio?” Teresa wrinkled her big nose in disbelief.

“Perhaps. I don’t know what I mean. I just feel that, if all he wanted was Leo dead, it would have happened by now. Yesterday or the day before. And also” — of this he was sure — “I think Leo feels the same way too. He’s been fascinated with something — with what’s really driving Bramante. He has been all along, and didn’t want to let us know.”

“Too much talk,” Peroni interjected. “We’re free of Messina. We can do any damn thing we like. So what’s it to be? Back into the hill?”

“Alessio’s not in the hill,” Costa replied. “I don’t think he was ever there, not when they were looking. We would have found him.”

“Then where?” Teresa wanted to know.

“What if Alessio was too scared to return home for some reason?”

They stared at him, dubious.

“Bear with me for a moment,” Nic told them, and outlined his thinking.

Most of the roads from the summit of the Aventino would not have been appealing to Alessio Bramante. The Clivo di Rocca Savella was surely too steep and too enclosed to attract a scared child fleeing his own father. The streets that led to the Via Marmorata in Testaccio would pass too close to his own home for comfort.

There was only one obvious direction: to the Circus Maximus, and the huge crowd gathered there at the time, a sea of people in which a terrified young boy could surely lose himself.

“He’d end up in the peace camp. There was nowhere else for him to go.” Costa glanced at Teresa. “Emily told me you were involved in events like that when you were young. She thought you might even have been there.”

Teresa Lupo blushed under Peroni’s astonished gaze. This was, Costa realised immediately, a part of her past the two of them had never shared.

“I had a rebel streak back then,” she confessed. “I still do. I just disguise it well.”

“Really?” Peroni wondered with a sigh of resignation. “You were there when all this happened?”

She winced. “No. Sorry. I was asked. But at the time, I was in Lido di Jesolo sharing a very small tent with some hairy medical student from Liguria who thought — wrongly, I hasten to add — that he was God’s gift to women.”

Peroni cleared his throat and ordered another coffee.

“Even Lenin had holidays, Gianni,” she continued defensively.

“Not with hairy medical students in a tent,” Peroni grumbled.

“Oh for God’s sake,” she snapped. “I apologise. I had a life before we met. Sorry. We all existed before. Remember? What the hell were you two doing fourteen years ago? It’s OK, Nic. I can answer that in your case. You were at school. And you?” she demanded of Peroni, who watched his macchiato getting made on the silver machine before replying.

“We’d just had our second child. I was like Leo, a sovrintendente waiting to take the inspector’s exams. I got three weeks’ paternity leave, more than I was owed but some people upstairs were in my debt. The weather was beautiful, from May right through to September. I remember it so clearly. I thought…” He grimaced. “I thought life had never been so good and it would all just roll on like that forever.”

Costa recalled that year too. It was then that his father first started making mysterious appointments with physicians, the beginning of a slow, unremarkable personal tragedy that would take more than a decade to unfold.

“It was a beautiful summer,” she agreed. “Unless you happened to be living on the other side of the Adriatic. I stayed in that stupid little tent for two weeks, with some jerk I didn’t even like. You know why? Because I couldn’t face it anymore. Thinking about all the horrors that were going on then. It wasn’t that long since the Berlin Wall fell, and we’d all sat around for a couple of years waiting for the global paradise of happiness and plenty to reveal itself. What did we get? Wars and massacres. A little more madness with every passing day. Just a little local conflict in the Balkans, some small reminder that the world wasn’t the safe, comfortable place we all dreamed it would be. We went from there to here in the blink of an eye, and for the life of me I don’t remember much of what happened in between.” She shook her head. “I went because I was running away. Sorry.”

“No problem. It was a wild hope.”

“Damn right. There must have been thousands of people there!”

“The authorities said two thousand.” Costa had checked that too. “The protesters said ten.”

“The authorities lie. They always do.” She downed the last of her pastry. “Mind you, ten’s a bit much. You really thought I’d remember some child wandering around looking lost? You haven’t been to many demonstrations, have you? They’re full of lost kids, of all ages. It’s just real life, only magnified. Chaos from start to end.”

“I suppose…” Costa said, thinking.

Peroni stared at his new coffee. “So what the hell do we do now?”

Falcone would have achieved more than this. He wouldn’t just have imagined where Alessio might have wandered. He would have looked ahead, trying to work out how this fact might be extracted from the hazy lost world of fourteen years before.

“The newspapers would have taken photos,” Costa said abruptly. “We could try the newspapers’ libraries.”

“Nic,” Peroni groaned, “how long would that take? And how willing do you think they would be to help two off-duty cops and a nosy pathologist?”

“We just gave three of them great stories!” Teresa objected.

“For our own reasons,” Peroni countered. “They’re not stupid. They don’t think we’re doing this out of charity.”

“Vultures,” she spat out, so loudly the waiter gave them a worried glance.

“Vultures perform a useful social function,” Peroni reminded her, but by then Teresa was bouncing up and down on her seat with unbounded excitement, scattering pastry crumbs everywhere as she did so.

“You two really have led sheltered existences! There’s more to the media than a bunch of political cronies in flash suits. What about the radical press? They were surely there.”

Peroni gave her his most condescending look. “You mean longhaired people like that individual you shared a tent with? Teresa. Listen to me, dear heart. The radical press hate us even more than the others.”

“Not,” she disagreed, slyly, “when you’re in the company of a comrade.”

The paper was in a small first-floor office above a pet shop in the Vicolo delle Grotte, a half-minute walk from the Campo dei Fiori, in a part of Rome rapidly being taken over by expatriates and tourists. On the steep internal staircase, Costa, who’d lived nearby a few years back, and found it hard to afford the rent even then, muttered something about this being an expensive home for a weekly publication dedicated to liberating the downtrodden masses.

“You misunderstand the patrician breed of Italian socialist,” Teresa declared, taking the steps two at a time, clearly keen to reacquaint herself with this lost piece of her past. “This is about raising the proletariat up to their standards, not bringing them down to the hoi polloi.”

At the head of the stairs stood a tall, gaunt man with a long, aristocratic face and a head of thinning, wayward grey hair. In his bony hands he held a tray bearing four brimming wineglasses. It was not yet eleven in the morning.

“If they were Carabinieri, I wouldn’t let them on the premises, you know,” he announced in a high-pitched, fluting voice of distinctly upper-class origin. “I still have my principles. I am Lorenzo Lotto. Yes, I know what you’re thinking. Is that the Lorenzo Lotto you read about in the papers all the time? Rich son of that family of wicked oppressors who pollute the Veneto with their factories? It is indeed. The papers should find something better to write about. A man does not choose his own parents.”

He thrust the tray at them.

“I was thinking of the painter,” Costa said.

Lotto’s beady eyes looked him up and down.

“How extraordinary, Teresa,” the man declared. “Trust you to find the one police officer in Rome with half a brain. That Lorenzo died destitute, scribbling numbers on hospital beds for a living, though he was a better man, and a better artist, than Titian. I am a mere revolutionary, a small yet significant cog in the proletarian machine. Drink, boy. Tame that intellect or you’ll be counting paper clips in the Questura for the rest of your life.”

“It’s a little early for us, Lorenzo—” Teresa pointed out.

“Tush, tush. This is from the wicked family’s private estate. You can’t even buy it in the shops. Besides, one should always take alcohol when meeting a former lover. It dulls the senses, and God knows we both need that.”

Teresa blushed.

“This day just gets better and better,” Peroni groaned.

They’d phoned first in order to check what material the newspaper possessed from the nineties. Teresa had sounded hopeful. La Crociata Populare was not, in spite of its name, popular, though the paper remained a crusade on the part of its wealthy owner. But it was meticulous about its forty-year history. And, unlike most of the small left-wing weeklies, it didn’t fill its pages exclusively with columns and columns of dense, unreadable text. Several well-known photographers had begun their careers working for Lorenzo Lotto’s pittance salary, the bare union minimum. Even Pasolini had submitted material from time to time during the paper’s brief heyday in the early seventies.

As Lotto led them through what passed for an editorial floor — a shabby room with four desks, three of them unoccupied — Costa’s hopes began to fall. He’d read La Crociata himself from time to time. The photos were good. And numerous. It would surely take a large library to catalogue all the negatives, contacts, and prints from over the years.

Lotto led them to the corner where the one visible member of staff, a small, timid-seeming young woman, sat in front of a gigantic computer screen, working on what looked like the next issue. A headline screaming about government corruption yelled out from the screen in bright red type.

“Katrina,” Lotto said quietly, “it’s time for you to go clothes shopping.”

Her eyes flashed at him, baffled, a little in awe.

“Here.” Lotto reached into his pocket and pulled out a wad of currency. She took it, smiled, and scampered for the door.

“The redistribution of wealth,” Lotto told them. “I pay them what the unions demand. But they’re my children, really. The only ones I have.”

“Pictures, Lorenzo,” Teresa reminded him.

“I know.”

He punched some keys on the computer, then beckoned them to join him. Costa sat down in Katrina’s chair and looked at the screen. There was something marked “Library” there. He clicked on it and saw an entry form.

“Now what?” he asked.

“The state will be brought down by its ignorance of modern technology,” Lotto remarked. “I could drag in a thirteen-year-old child off the street and he’d know more about this than you.”

Keywords, Costa thought. Clues. You typed them in. Then the stupid computer tried to guess what you meant.

“Every photo that has ever passed through our hands is stored somewhere in there,” Lotto boasted. “Not just the ones we printed. Everything. Forty-three years’ worth. It cost me a fortune. Without it, I doubt even I could keep this place afloat.”

“You’re a picture agency now?” Teresa asked.

“As well as… And why not? Engels was a clerk in Manchester when he was keeping Marx and his family from starving in London. Industry and investment, Teresa. Unfashionable these days, I know…”

Costa typed in peace camp.

What seemed like a million tiny photos appeared on the screen.

“Typical lazy liberal thinking,” Lotto declared. “Dialectical materialism, boy. Ideas will only come from precise material conditions. Not obscure generalities.”

“You sound like my father,” Costa snapped.

“Ah,” Lotto replied, warmly, for the first time. “I thought you were that Costa.”

He bent and whispered in his ear, “Do you have a year?”

“Of course.”

“How about a date?”

“Exactly.”

“Good. Why not try that?”

Costa typed in the exact day.

The screen filled again, with just as many photos.

Lotto leaned over and studied the screen. “We had five different photographers supplying material to us then. Everyone wants their picture in the paper, don’t they?”

“How many?” Costa asked.

“Look at the screen! Eight hundred and twenty-eight photographs. Twenty-three rolls of thirty-six-shot film, including the blanks and the failures, naturally. It costs more to take them out than leave them in. You should think yourself lucky. We’re all digital now. There would be ten times that if you were looking today.”

Costa hit on the thumbnail of the first image. It leapt to fill the screen. They could have been looking at anything. A rock concert. A demonstration. A weekend campground. Just hundreds and hundreds of people, quiet, apparently happy under the sun.

“What about time?” Costa asked.

“Sorry. Film never recorded that.”

“What about,” Teresa asked, “telling it, ‘Find me a young boy in a peculiar T-shirt?’”

“It’s a machine,” Lotto said severely. “Are you going to drink my prosecco or not?”

“Later,” she replied.

He grumbled something inaudible and wandered off. Teresa and Peroni pulled up chairs on either side of Nic and started peering at the scores of thumbnails in front of them.

“If we can scan five a minute, we’re done in under three hours,” Peroni said, and made it sound like good news.

Costa began flicking through the first photographer’s rolls. A good third of the shots digitised by Lotto’s machines were useless: out of focus, accidental. The rest were mainly mundane. A few were simply beautiful: sharp, observant, wry pictures of people who didn’t know the camera was there, candid shots still bright with their original summer hues, frozen in time.

After half an hour, with his right hand starting to tire, Costa hit the button and accessed yet another roll. The pictures changed. The light was different, older, more golden, the kind that fell on Rome as the day was coming to a close.

He clicked through five more frames, then stopped. For a moment, none of them spoke.

The child stood centre frame, and for once this was a subject that did look into the camera. He still wore the T-shirt they’d come to associate with this case, the seven-pointed star of the Scuola Elementare di Santa Cecilia. This was Alessio Bramante, sometime during the early evening of that fateful day, when every police officer in Rome, state and Carabinieri, was looking for him.

He was holding the hand of an untidy, overweight woman of middle age, a woman with a blank, rather puzzled expression on her flat, featureless face. She wore a long pink cotton shift and large, open-toed sandals. Next to her was a skeletal, sickly-looking man, perhaps fifty, perhaps older, with a pinched, tanned face and a skimpy grey beard that matched the meagre hanks of hair clinging to his skull.

Neither of them looked remotely familiar from any of the photos of witnesses or related individuals Costa had seen, and tried to commit to memory, in the case.

But that wasn’t the worst thing. Peroni put it into words.

“Good grief,” the big man said with a sigh. “We got it wrong all along, didn’t we?”

They stared at the screen, grateful he was the one who had the guts to say it.

“I thought we were looking for a nice kid,” Peroni said, finishing their train of thought.

“It’s just one photo,” Teresa reminded him.

It was, too. One photo of a child, no more than seven, turning to stare towards the camera, his features tautened into an expression of pure hatred, of unimaginable, unspoken violence directed straight into the lens.

“He was Giorgio’s son,” Peroni pointed out.

“Perhaps he still is,” Costa added grimly.

Back in the Questura, Bruno Messina was beginning to feel a touch more in control. Now he sat at the head of the table in his own conference room, a smaller, more private place than the sprawling quarters Falcone preferred when talking to his staff. Messina believed in delegation, in keeping his immediate officers under full scrutiny while they — in the current jargon — “cascaded” down his desires, and pressure, to those below.

Bavetti was there with two men of his choosing, along with Peccia, head of the specialist armed squad and Messina’s deputy. Forensic had, to Messina’s displeasure, decided they wished to be represented by Silvio Di Capua from the path lab, in place of the absent Teresa Lupo. He would, the commissario thought, deal with her later. There was a mutinous atmosphere in that part of the Questura, and Teresa Lupo surely bore much of the blame. Technically, though, they were separate departments, answerable to civilian officers. It would take a little while and some persuasion for him to work a result there.

Di Capua had brought to the meeting a lanky, bald, odd-looking individual from the university who introduced himself as “Dr. Cristiano.” This odd pair had turned up with a laptop computer, a set of maps of the city, and a report produced principally by Peroni the previous evening.

“Let me make it abundantly clear,” Messina said, opening the meeting, “that my first priority in this investigation is the safe and early release of Inspector Falcone. Nothing is to be spared to that end. No expense, no resource. Is that understood?”

The police officers nodded gravely.

Silvio Di Capua, who had clearly learnt at the knee of his mistress, rolled his eyes and declared, “Well… yes! Did you drag me away from my work to tell me that?”

“I want our priorities clear,” Messina insisted.

“The living — if indeed Leo is still living — come before the dead. I must try to remember that in future.”

“What do we have, Bavetti?” Messina demanded, ignoring Silvio.

The inspector cleared his throat. “Prabakaran is being debriefed by two specialist female officers. This is a slow and patient process, as the procedures allow—”

“I don’t want it too slow and patient,” Messina interrupted.

“Of course.”

“Has she said anything?”

“She’s saying a lot, sir. The officer is being extremely helpful, in the circumstances. Prabakaran is a brave and conscientious policewoman—”

“I hate to interrupt the hagiography here,” Di Capua broke in, “but does she by any chance have a clue where she was held?”

“We haven’t got that far,” Bavetti said, taken aback at being interrogated by forensic.

“Well, what the hell are you asking her about?” Di Capua demanded.

“The woman was raped. She’s with two specialist officers who are trained in dealing with cases like this. They’re going through what happened very carefully—”

“Fine,” the pathologist cut in. “Let me point out three things. First, we know she’s been raped. Second, we know who did it. Third, Falcone’s missing. Asking this poor woman about her getting raped doesn’t help us find him. We need locations. We need facts.”

Bavetti shrugged. “There are procedures…”

“Screw the procedures!”

Di Capua looked at Bruno Messina, pleading. “How,” he went on, “do you think she’s going to feel if Leo turns up dead at the end of all this? Particularly if there’s something lurking in her head that could have saved him?”

“He has a point,” the commissario said, nodding. “Made with forensics’ customary grace, I must say, but he has a point.”

“Thank you.” Di Capua nodded at the uniformed Peccia and his colleague. “Now to the gun people, please? Explain.”

“We are here,” Peccia replied coldly, “at Commissario Messina’s request.”

“What for? Target practice? We don’t have a clue where Giorgio Bramante is! Why the hell are you playing cowboys and Indians at a time like this?”

Messina’s face reddened. “If Leo Falcone is alive, I want him kept that way. Whatever it takes. When we track him down, I’m not dealing with this animal. If they get a clean shot, he goes.”

Peccia nodded, and looked satisfied with that idea.

“Aren’t there ‘procedures’ when it comes to shooting people?” Di Capua wanted to know.

“Screw the…” Messina began to say, then checked himself. “You’re here to offer forensic input. Nothing else. Is there something you have to say?”

Di Capua seized the papers in front of him and slapped them on the desk. “Peroni’s report—”

“Peroni’s report tells us nothing,” Bavetti interjected. “It’s a list of possible underground sites which Bramante may or may not have visited at some stage in the last week. It’s a shot in the dark.”

“Most things are,” Di Capua replied. “Tell them, Cristiano.”

The lanky bald individual tapped the computer keyboard idly and said, “We know from the planarian samples we have that the site used to store the body from Ca’ d’Ossi was somewhere the university has never looked for genetic material. Last night your officer and I worked to try to narrow down the scope of listed archaeological locations which could fit this description. Numerically it amounts to—”

“Days of work,” Bavetti interrupted. “Weeks. For what?”

“To chase down one of the few facts you have,” Di Capua replied. “The body from Ca’ d’Ossi was stored somewhere known to Bramante, near water, with a planarian population that has not been logged by La Sapienza. So what are you doing instead?”

It was Bavetti who rose to defend the investigation.

“House to house. Throughout Testaccio and the Aventino. Someone must have seen him. All we need is one lead.”

“What?” Di Capua almost leapt out of his seat. “All you need’s a miracle? Do you think Bramante’s waiting for you in some Testaccio tenement? Think about what we know about this man. Everything he does is underground. Living. Killing. Planning, too, I’d guess. Those places are his. Out of sight in some subterranean city we don’t even know. And you’re going door to door showing people photos? I don’t believe it!”

The man from the university shook his bald head and said, “Gentlemen. I am no expert in these matters. But this seems a little illogical to me.”

“What the hell is this freak doing here?” Peccia demanded, furious.

“Trying to tell you people something,” Di Capua shot back. “Listen to me and try to understand. You know nothing. We know nothing. But the nothing we know is smaller than the nothing you know, and I think we could make it smaller still. So small that, with a little help and a little luck, it just might, at some point, become something.”

“What do you want us to do?” Messina asked.

“Rosa knows where she was picked up. And then she was taken somewhere and raped. She must have some idea how long it took to get there. Ask that. It’s a start.”

The commissario paused for a moment, then turned to Bavetti and muttered, “Do it.”

“Sir. The idea is to allow the victim to tell her own story—”

“Do it!”

Messina used the ensuing five minutes to listen to a more detailed explanation of what Peroni had been working on the previous evening. As he did so he was aware of an increasingly uncomfortable realisation: he had rejected Peroni’s ideas because they were a part of Falcone’s investigation, the kind of long-shot, imaginative leap that he regarded as typical of the inspector. Messina was envious of Leo’s talent, and it had coloured his behaviour. This was bad police work. And worse — bad leadership.

Bavetti put down the phone and said, “Bramante drove her somewhere close by to begin with.”

“Close?” Di Capua echoed, incredulous. “Don’t give me words like ‘close.’ Minutes? Seconds?”

“A minute. Perhaps two.”

“So they were still in Testaccio? Near the market?” Di Capua asked, and unfolded a city map on the table.

“Yes. After that, much later, in the evening, they drove for no more than eight or ten minutes.”

“Quickly? Or was there traffic?” Di Capua demanded.

“Very quickly. Without stopping. Uphill, then downhill.”

The young pathologist smiled at that. “He went from Testaccio on to the Aventino.”

“And then?” Messina asked.

“Let’s assume he continued in a northerly direction.”

Di Capua took out a red felt-tip pen and drew a circle on the pristine map. It ran from the foot of the Aventino by the Circus Maximus stretching past the Colosseum to Cavour directly north, then to the Teatro Marcello in the east, and as far as San Giovanni to the west.

“Not good,” Cristiano grumbled. “There’s as much under the surface as there is on it.”

“How many on our list?” Di Capua demanded.

The university man hammered at the keyboard. “Twenty-seven. Sorry.”

Messina shook his head and murmured, “Impossible.”

“Do you have archaeological data in there too?” Di Capua asked.

Cristiano nodded vigorously.

“How many of that twenty-seven have a Mithraeum?”

The bony fingers flew. “Seven.”

Di Capua cast an eye over the computer screen. “One of those is San Clemente. I hardly think he’s going to be hiding in a busy church next to the Colosseum, not with all those Irish priests crawling around above him. That leaves six on the list.”

He scrawled crosses on the map and pushed it over to Messina.

“Unless you have a better idea,” Di Capua added.

Bavetti bristled, furious. “We’re not even a third of the way through door-to-door!”

“This is all I have, Commissario Messina,” Silvio Di Capua said softly. “And do you know something? It’s all you have, too.”

Messina hated Teresa Lupo and her minions. They were intrusive and irresponsible. They never knew when to shut up, either. Just one thing got them off the hook. They were correct more often than any forensic squad he’d ever known, more often, even, than the overpaid teams of the Carabinieri who had every computer and gadget the Italian state could afford.

“We need someone who’s familiar with these sites,” Messina pointed out.

Di Capua nodded. “We’ve been talking to Bramante’s replacement. Judith Turnhouse. She knows these digs, probably as well as he does. I can call.”

“I can call,” Messina replied. “Get me your best men, Peccia.” He stared at Bavetti. “Door-to-door. What was I thinking? I lead this myself. We start at San Giovanni.”

Silvio Di Capua perked up. “Are we invited?” he asked hopefully.

“No,” Messina declared, then pointed to the door.

Alessio Bramante stood at the centre of a photograph taken fourteen years before, holding the hand of an unidentified woman. When they compared this shot with the stock photo Peroni had lifted from the Questura, it was clear his long hair had been cut roughly, perhaps just minutes before this shot was taken. Someone was attempting to disguise Alessio’s true identity, with the boy’s compliance, or so it seemed. All the same, there was little to work with. Ordinarily, Costa would have called the Questura and passed everything to intelligence. The TV and the papers could be running the photo within hours. If this couple were Italian, someone had to know them. If they weren’t, the odds were they could still be traced through European and international links.

There were two problems: time and Bruno Messina. Running to the media with names always proved a lengthy business. Possible leads had to be sifted from hundreds, perhaps thousands, of incoming calls. Bruno Messina wouldn’t be interested. Not today, not when he had a policewoman who had been viciously assaulted and an inspector who had been abducted right under his nose. Messina wanted Giorgio Bramante’s hide, and the whereabouts of the man’s son seemed, on the surface, to offer nothing to assist that particular quest.

They talked through the options and got nowhere. Then they ran through the later frames in the film. The boy was in two of them, with the same couple, no one else. Alessio was no longer glowering hatefully at the photographer. They’d taken off the giveaway T-shirt and replaced it with a plain red one marked with a hammer and sickle. He still didn’t seem happy. To Costa he looked like a kid on the edge, one who’d do anything at that moment — however dangerous, however stupid — just to prove that he could.

Teresa muttered something and went off to fetch Lorenzo Lotto. The journalist returned with the girl, who now wore a new bright white cotton shirt and looked quite pleased with herself.

“Explain the problem,” Lotto demanded.

Costa pulled up the first photo. “We need to know who the two people with the child are.”

Lotto eyed him suspiciously. “Why?”

“The child’s been missing ever since,” Teresa replied, on the brink of exasperation. “We’d like to know what happened to him. This isn’t some capitalist conspiracy, Lorenzo.”

He harrumphed. “You have to expect me to ask. Katrina?”

Katrina spoke, finally. She had an accent. It sounded Scandinavian. “I can find out.”

She did something with the computer, drawing a rectangle on the fabric of the woman’s shift, then hit more buttons with flashing fingers, clicked on something that Costa recognised, in the brief instant it was on screen, as the word “Similarity.”

Scores of thumbnails filled the screen, most of them in situations they hadn’t yet reached, on different film stock, from different photographers. The woman was in all of them. Katrina had tracked her down through the unique colour and pattern of her clothing.

“What next?” Teresa shouted.

“I keep telling you!” Lotto complained. “It’s a machine. Ask the right question and you just might get an answer.”

“Who were they with?” Costa asked.

“I like this man,” Lotto declared. “I liked your father, too, by the way. Katrina…”

She flicked through the photos faster than Costa could count them. After a minute she closed in on a sequence of four. The couple were at a stand of some kind. There were publications for sale, and a large banner behind, with an anti-American slogan and the name of some left-wing group Costa had never heard of.

“Ooh.” Lorenzo Lotto’s face creased with an expression of extreme distaste. “I’d quite forgotten those people ever existed.”

“Who are they?” Costa asked.

“They were a bunch of tree-hugging lunatics. Wanted us all to return to the woods and eat leaves. Try telling that to some Fiat worker in Turin who’s about to lose his job to a sweatshop in the Philippines.”

“Lorenzo!” Teresa chided.

But he was on the phone already, talking in a low, private whisper none of them could hear. The conversation lasted less than a minute. Then he put down the phone, scribbled something on a pad, and passed the paper to Katrina.

“E-mail all four photos to this address now, please.”

Peroni shuffled uncomfortably on his big feet. “Do we get to know with whom you are sharing our evidence?”

Lotto’s grey eyebrows rose in disbelief.

He leaned forward and stabbed a finger at a large, bearded man seated behind the stand, in front of the banner. In this shot, he was talking animatedly to the couple. The light was brighter. This was earlier in the day, before Alessio’s arrival.

“The likes of us inhabit a small world these days,” Lotto said simply, bestowing upon Teresa a short glance of reproof. “Him.”

They were silent. Then the phone rang. Lotto picked it up, walked away until his voice was indistinct again, and spoke for a good minute or more, making notes continuously.

The call ended. He returned and allowed himself a brief smile.

“The man’s name was Bernardo Giordano. He died two years after these photographs were taken. Cancer. So much for living on leaves. Give me tobacco and alcohol any day.”

“What about the woman? Did she have kids?” Costa demanded.

“They had a nephew who came to live with them in Rome some years back. It seemed he stayed a very long time. Family problems back home supposedly.” Lotto winced. “They were a strange pair. Even for the Vegetarian Revolutionary Front or whatever they called themselves. They wouldn’t have anything modern in their lives, apparently. Not even a phone.”

“The woman’s still here?” Teresa asked.

“Yes, but it may not be the same child. Not the one in the picture,” Lotto cautioned. “There are still several hundred photos you haven’t even looked at. And I was starting to enjoy your company.”

“I’ll go through the photos,” Teresa promised.

Lotto sighed, then tore off a strip of the paper from his notepad. “She still lives at the same address. Flaminio. Her name is Elisabetta, and don’t shorten it or she’ll kill you. Three minutes by car, the way you people drive. Don’t raise your hopes too much, though. The ‘nephew’ left home a while back. Also, Elisabetta’s somewhat crazy, it seems. A diet of leaves…”

Costa took the note gratefully and looked at his watch. “I wish we could work that quickly,” he grumbled.

“I am delighted,” Lorenzo Lotto replied, “you can’t.”

It looked unimpressive these days, but the Flaminian Way was one of the oldest and most important roads in Rome, a busy route into the city built two centuries before Christ, running directly from the Capital through the Apennines to modern Rimini on the Adriatic. Half a kilometre ahead it crossed the Tiber at the Milvian Bridge, a landmark that, Costa now recalled, had something to do with Giorgio Bramante’s obsession. It was here that Christianity had become all-powerful in Rome, here, not far from the modern trams and the buses locking horns with frustrated motorists, that much of Western mankind’s history had been shaped in a fateful battle eighteen centuries before. The past shaped the present; it always had, it always would, and that knowledge informed Costa’s professional outlook as much as his personal one. The line from there to here was omnipresent; part of his job was always to try to discern its path in the surrounding darkness.

The rain had ceased by the time they reached the address in Flaminio that Lorenzo Lotto had given them, a narrow back alley behind the main road, close to the point where the trams changed direction, filling the air with their metallic wheezes and groans. It was an old, grimy block. The woman lived in what a real estate agent would have called “the garden apartment.” In truth it was the basement, a dark, dismal-looking place down a set of greasy steps. Peroni opened the rusted iron gate bearing the name Giordano, stared down the mossy steps to the flecked red door which stood behind two trash cans and muttered, “I don’t know about you, Nic, but I never much liked cats.”

The stench of feline urine was everywhere, rising like a fetid invisible cloud from behind the stairwell, made worse somehow by the recent downpour.

Elisabetta Giordano didn’t just refuse to have dealings with the phone. She didn’t answer the doorbell either. Peroni kept his index finger hard on the button at the head of the steps for a good minute and heard nothing. Maybe it didn’t work. Nor was there a neighbour around to offer a clue as to whether the woman might be at home, not until they were halfway down the stairs. At that moment an old man appeared behind them, waving a skinny fist in their direction.

“You two friends of the old witch?” he demanded.

“Not exactly,” Peroni replied. “Is the old witch around?”

“What am I, social services? Why’s it my job to look after these lunatics? What do I pay taxes for?”

Costa was getting impatient. The windows were opaque with dirt and dust. All he could make out behind them were a few grubby curtains; it was impossible to tell whether anyone was at home.

“Have you paid much in tax recently, sir?” he asked nonchalantly and immediately regretted it.

“Paid a fortune in my lifetime, sonny! And what do I get for it? Nothing! I phoned you morons two days ago!”

The men looked at one another.

“Phoned who?” Peroni asked. “About what?”

“Social services! That’s who you deadbeats are. I know your look. All cheap clothes and bored faces. You’d think that boy of hers would come back and help from time to time. Not that the young lift a finger for anyone these days.”

Costa took three steps upwards towards the man, who stood his ground, leaning on a hefty stick. He showed him his card.

“We’re not social services. What did you call about?”

The man looked a little taken aback by the realisation he was shouting at the police.

“What else? What we’ve all been complaining about for years. The noise. Crazy bitch. Plays music all night, all day. Yelling to herself and calling it singing. She shouldn’t be left on her own like that. We’ve told them a million times.”

“She sings to herself?” Peroni asked.

“Yes! She sings. Sounds worse than her stupid cats. Would you like to live next to that?”

“No,” Costa said, and put away his card.

“Also” — the stick came out and jabbed perilously close to Costa’s face — “it wasn’t just the singing. The last time, she was yelling and screaming worse than ever. Why do you think I called?”

Costa looked at him. “Yelling and screaming what?”

The old man hunted for the words. “Like she was in trouble or something,” he said grudgingly. “But don’t start getting on your high horse with me. We’ve put up with all manner of shit from that woman over the years. If I called for help every time she went bananas, you’d be here three times a day.”

“Have you heard her since?” Costa asked.

He looked guilty all of a sudden. “No…”

“Where do you live?”

“Number three. First floor. Been there twenty-two years—”

“Go home,” Costa interrupted. “We may want to talk to you later.”

He didn’t wait to see if the old man did as he was told. Costa walked down the steps, got in front of Peroni, and stared at the door.

The smell was terrible. Peroni sniffed and screwed up his big, plain face.

“I hope I’m wrong,” he observed miserably, “but I don’t think that’s just cat.”

Lorenzo Lotto was right. the questura ought to have these toys. They probably did, but all the familiar obstacles — procedures, bureaucracy, interoffice feuding — got in the way. Photo records were in the firm grip of intelligence, a bunch of secretive, surly, computer freaks who were capable of doing a great job, but only on their terms, and only if they and they alone pushed the buttons. Large organisations choked on their own fat, whether they were police forces or huge companies. Teresa had known that for years. What she’d never understood was how quickly technique and skill had progressed out in the real world, where machines and working practices were embraced without the need for committees or long consultative procedures. Lorenzo and Katrina could achieve in minutes what would take her days to do. And that was another good reason not to slink back to the Questura, apologise for slugging the duty commissario, and then try to lend some weight to the hunt for Leo Falcone.

Teresa liked toys. They intrigued her. She wondered about their possibilities.

After Costa and Peroni left, she spent forty minutes with Katrina going through the photos of Bernardo and Elisabetta Giordano, finding a few more with Alessio Bramante in them, learning nothing. The boy didn’t look quite as angry in the other photos. He didn’t look totally normal either. Something had happened to the child that day. Something had sent him scuttling down from the Aventino, fleeing something that could, if there were such a thing as logic in this case, only be his father. And whatever it was, it was also, it seemed to her, quite out of reach. Kids ran away, of course. They probably had sour, bitter faces like this when they did so. It was possible Alessio had run in the wrong direction. And that a couple of left-wing leaf-eaters like the Giordanos were child molesters or worse, simply looking for an opportunity to find their next victim.

But it didn’t feel right. She’d got Lorenzo to call a couple of other people and check on them. The same message came back from everywhere. The Giordanos were solitary, decent, if deeply weird people, who didn’t like the modern world, hated mixing with their fellow human beings outside gatherings of other tree-huggers, but would, when called upon, perform acts of extraordinary kindness up to the point that their meagre standing in society allowed.

Bernardo had been a tram driver all his life. His wife worked part-time in a bakery. The word ordinary didn’t do them justice. But they’d kept a “nephew” for years, a kid who became a teenager, then left. Only two facts seemed to be agreed upon about him: he didn’t go out much, even when he got older. And Elisabetta, possibly with help from some fellow leaf-eaters, educated him at home.

There had to be more. Teresa had drunk one of Lorenzo’s glasses of prosecco — which was so good she steeled herself against accepting another — then sent him fishing again. One thing bothered her. The old one: money. Even leaves didn’t come for free. When Bernardo died, Lotto’s informant said, Elisabetta had given up her job at the bakery. This didn’t ring true. A tram driver’s pension wouldn’t provide enough money to retire on. Most women in those circumstances, particularly one with a child to raise, would have looked for more work, not abandoned what she had.

Lorenzo shook his head. No one knew where Elisabetta got her income, and that had intrigued plenty at the time. She never seemed well off. But she never seemed short either. It was one of life’s mysteries.

“Another for the list,” Teresa grumbled, then glared at Katrina, who was starting to look bored. There were no more images of Elisabetta’s horrible pink dress to be found. The machine couldn’t find anything reliably on the basis of a face. People changed too much when seen from different angles. The mind was used to working in three dimensions. Stupid chunks of silicon weren’t.

She studied the final picture of Alessio. He looked surly, holding Bernardo’s hand — or, more accurately, being held by him, since there was a tight possessiveness to the man’s grip that surely said This one won’t run away again.

“The T-shirt he was wearing,” Teresa murmured. “The one with that seven-pointed star. Can you search for that?”

She glanced at Katrina, who pulled up a photo of Alessio with it on almost immediately. The keyboard clacked. Some invisible digital robot went off on its whirring work.

“Seven is a magic number,” Katrina said, apropos of nothing.

“Only if you believe in such things,” Teresa muttered.

The screen cleared. It revealed most of the photos they’d seen before. Katrina did something to get rid of them. Just three remained now.

Teresa Lupo stared at them and, to her surprise, found herself wondering exactly where she stood on the subject of magic.

“Be there, be there,” she whispered, stabbing at the speed-dial keys on her phone.

The idiotic beep came back at her: unavailable.

She swore. Men.

This couldn’t wait. She called Silvio Di Capua.

“Greetings, minion,” she said. “Now get a piece of paper and write this down.”

“What happened to ‘And how are you this fine day?’”

“I’m saving it for later. Take these names to Furillo in Intelligence. Just say to him I am now calling in the debt I’m owed and if he so much as tells a soul without my express permission I can guarantee his small yet highly embarrassing medical secret will be on every Questura notice board come Monday.”

“Subtle persuasion. I like that. Messina’s out there ticking off the sites Peroni had down for Leo, by the way. I am personally responsible for that.”

“Congratulations. Tell Furillo to look at everything. Debts. Criminal records. Motoring. Social services. Everything he can lay his prying little paws on. I want to know about records. In particular I want to know about connections.”

“Done. Names.”

She gave him Bernardo and Elisabetta Giordano, and their address, and crossed her fingers as she spoke. Even leaf-eaters had to step out of line from time to time.

“More?”

She looked at the photos on the screen. They weren’t great. This was a guess, perhaps a bad one. All the same…

“One more,” she said.

The site they first visited in San Giovanni looked more like a bomb crater than an archaeological dig. It stood close to the busy hospital, a mass of buildings, some old, some new, that, in one form or another, had been providing medical aid to the citizens of Rome for sixteen centuries. Peccia and his men had changed into their preferred work uniform: black, all-covering overalls, and, for the handful ready for action, hoods. They were carrying slim, modern-looking machine pistols. Messina, a man who had always preferred to avoid firearms, had no idea what kind of weapons they were or why Peccia would prefer them. They just looked deadly. That, he decided, was enough.

There was, naturally, a procedure. The interior layout of the target was established. A method of entry was agreed upon. Then a small number of men — Peccia had twelve in all — made the first sortie, watched by backup officers.

Bruno Messina observed, uneasily, as the squad entered the low, algaed tunnels of the site next to the hospital’s main emergency unit. These men had the slow, mechanical gestures of trained automatons, jerking their way through the open corridors and half-hidden chambers of some ancient underground temple as if they were taking part in some video game. He knew now why Bavetti preferred sending uniformed officers, men and women with visible faces, out into the city to ask questions. It seemed more human, more of a real response than this puppet show.

The woman didn’t help either. Messina had called her personally at the office she kept in the Piazza dei Cavalieri di Malta, the same place, they now knew, that Falcone had been driven to early that morning, to await his fate. Everything about this case seemed to hinge around the Aventino. It irked him that Judith Turnhouse was unable to find a suitable location for Bramante to hide on the hill itself — the site beneath the Orange Garden had been quickly ruled out. So he had arranged for her to be picked up and brought to the Questura, to run through forensics’ short list, nodding in agreement as she saw the list of names there, adding one herself as a possibility.

They stood above the abandoned dig, watching two black-clad figures work their way towards what appeared to be a cave running underneath the busy main road. One of the men rolled something like a smoke grenade into the darkness. There was a small explosion and a plume of white cloud. Nothing else. No figures exiting theatrically, arms in the air.

“I told you, Commissario,” Judith Turnhouse snapped. “I do this on the understanding that there will be no damage to these locations. None whatsoever.”

“We have a man missing,” Messina replied, almost pleading.

“That’s not my problem. These sites are irreplaceable. God knows they get little enough care as it is….”

Peccia, who was watching his team with the aloof distance of an army general, leaned over and said, “They are nothing more than fireworks. A small flash of thunder to daze anyone who’s in there.”

“No one’s in there!”

“How do you know?” Messina asked.

She shook her head. “I just do. I spend half my life in these places. You get a feel for them. Whether they’re current. Whether someone just gave up on them years ago. This site…”

She glanced down into the pit of rubble and spent rubbish blown in from the road.

“It feels dead. You’re wasting your time here.”

Bavetti pulled out the map and thrust it in front of her.

“Where would you go? If you were Bramante?”

“Straight to the nearest asylum. The man’s nuts. Why try to look into his head?”

“This isn’t helping us,” Messina said. “Think about it. Please.”

“I can’t think like Giorgio. No one could. If you wanted the site that was most interesting archaeologically, then I’d be looking at Cavour. If you wanted space, privacy, you’d go for the one near Santo Stefano Rotondo. Tick them off. Send in your little action men and see what they find. Just don’t ruin anything.”

Three of Peccia’s officers, part of the team that had been held back in reserve, rifles at the ready, stood there listening. Black masks, black guns, black clothing. They didn’t look like police at all. Messina was beginning to have misgivings.

“What’s the most obvious place?” one of them asked. “The one you’d go to first?”

“That’s easy,” she replied without hesitation. “The site at the eastern end of the Circus Maximus. Where it meets the Viale Aventino. Everyone in this business knows that one.”

The men glanced at each other.

“But it’s so public,” she cautioned. “You’re in the centre of Rome. There are busy roads on either side. You can see into it from miles around, from the grass, from everywhere.”

“Is it all like that?” Messina asked.

She thought about the question for a moment, trying to remember.

“Actually, no. I haven’t been there for years. If you know what you’re looking for, in some ways it’s one of the most interesting Mithraic sites we have. Now that you people have destroyed what was on the Aventino. There are several extant underground chambers. There’s a…”

She stopped.

“What?” Bavetti demanded.

“There’s a very good Mithraic altar there. Giorgio fought a long battle to keep it there, to stop it from ending up in a museum. He wanted it to stay in place.”

“The map, quick,” Peccia ordered.

One of the team rifled through the document bag they had and came up with a complex architectural chart. It was large; two of the men in black stretched it out so that everyone could see. Judith Turnhouse’s eyes were glued to the complex illustration.

“I never did much work there,” she confessed. “It’s a lot bigger than I remember. Three levels. All those rooms.”

“The corridors are narrow,” Peccia said. “Something like that will take us a while to clear. We’d have to be careful. I’d need to send a small team in first.”

Messina screwed up his eyes and stared at the illustration in the corner of the map. It was, he presumed, of the altar: a helmeted man fighting to subdue a struggling bull, thrusting a dagger into the dying animal’s neck.

“Prabakaran was taken uphill, then, for a short distance, down,” he commented. “It would fit with him driving through over the Aventino.”

Judith Turnhouse nodded in agreement. “I just realised,” she said. “Giorgio’s old house was above this part of the Circus. When you sat in his garden and looked down towards the Palatino, this was what you’d see.”

Peccia shuffled nervously from foot to foot. The rescue team hadn’t done work like this in living memory. Messina wondered, for just one second, whether he ought to call in more specialist help. But it was one man. A man who had brought the state police disgrace twice now. It was no one else’s job to bring him to justice.

Costa took out his gun, pushed against the door, pushed harder, then gave the old, peeling wood a kick. It didn’t budge. This wasn’t the movies. In the real world a man couldn’t go anywhere he liked with a simple shoulder charge.

“I can try,” Peroni offered.

“Let’s do this the easy way,” Costa replied.

He walked to the nearest window, shattered the upper panes with the butt of his pistol, found the latch, unlocked the lower half and, with some considerable effort, managed to lift it. Then he clambered through and found himself in a malodorous dark pit.

The stench was so bad he hated having to breathe.

He walked back towards the door and found the light switch. Three weak bare bulbs pulsed with a thin yellow light when he did so. The apartment was a hovel: mess on the floor, papers and clothes, food too. He located the latch on the door and unlocked it. Peroni walked in and glanced around.

“I wish your girlfriend was here,” Costa murmured. “This smells like her line of work.”

“True,” Peroni replied.

He was scanning the room, not looking at the floor. Costa was aware, as always, of Peroni’s squeamish side.

“What are you looking for?” Costa asked.

“Something personal. Anything.” He walked over to the fireplace and examined everything that stood above it: cheap ornaments, a tiny vase of plastic flowers. “What I’d really like is a photo. Do you see any?”

There wasn’t one in the room, not visible anyway. And this was procrastination. They’d been in the apartment long enough now to know what lay waiting for them….

There was a half-open door ahead. Costa took four purposeful strides and threw it wide. He was greeted by a warm, miasmic smell, a cloud of flies, and, in the corner, several sets of twinkling feline eyes.

He reached for the light.

Peroni, who had followed behind him, spookily silent for such a large man, swore, turned round, and went back to the entrance.

Costa stayed.

There was a body there, lying on its back, rigid on the bed. The dead woman was in a dressing gown, her hands taut around her throat.

One step closer and he’d seen all he needed. The knife was still in her body, plunged deep into her throat. Her fingers gripped the shaft and the blade. Black gore caked around the neckline of her grubby nightdress. As he watched, one of the cats ran across the room, dashed onto her chest, and began to lick in a proprietorial, threatening gesture, staring at him, daring him to intervene.

Costa yelled at the thing, then shooed it away with a violent gesture. It darted into the shadows and waited.

He tried to hold his breath as he took a good look around. Then he went back to where Peroni stood. The odour was still there, identifiable: cat piss and old dried blood.

“Is it what I think?” the big man asked.

“Stabbed in the throat. Probably as she lay in bed. As you noticed, there are no photographs at all. Just this…”

He passed Peroni the photo frame he’d found in the bedroom. The glass was broken. Half the picture had been torn away. What remained showed the sickly-looking Bernardo Giordano out of doors, standing, smiling proudly, the way a man would have smiled if he were being photographed next to someone, a child perhaps, of whom he was inordinately proud.

“What the hell’s going on, Nic?” Peroni asked. “Why would Giorgio Bramante want to kill some crazy old woman out here? Did he know about Alessio?”

Costa shook his head. A knife in the throat? Torn-up photos?

Peroni took two steps up the stairs, found a patch in the lee of the wall that had been left reasonably dry, sat down and stared glumly at his partner.

“If we do nothing but call in about this, Messina will have our hides. I don’t care a damn about that. In fact, unlike you, I might welcome it. But we’ll either get thrown into a cell to await his pleasure or bullied into going back on duty. Then we’ll have to wait for him and Bavetti to read the instruction manual on how to start a murder investigation. If Leo has any time left at all, it’s not that kind of time.”

Peroni hit the target spot on. He always did. Costa wondered whether he’d ever be able to work with another officer when the big man finally gave in to temptation and took retirement.

“I agree,” Costa said.

“So what do we do?”

“When we have something we can work with, we go. And make that call on the way out.”

Peroni nodded. “And when will we have something?”

“As soon as we talk to the old man.”

Peroni smiled. He wasn’t slow. He’d picked it up instantly too. He just wanted Costa to make the connection, to take the lead he knew was there already.

“‘You’d think that boy of hers would help,’” he quoted.

“Exactly.”

Finally, something was moving. Costa’s head felt light and clear, the way it did when a case began to open up.

They walked back up the stairs, grateful for what might almost pass for fresh air. As he hit the top step, Costa’s phone rang.

Giorgio Bramante turned the flashlight on his watch and frowned. Falcone sat on the broken stone wall in his cell, following his movements in the gloom.

“Are you in a hurry, Giorgio?”

“Perhaps they’re happy to let you rot,” Bramante replied without emotion.

“Perhaps,” he agreed.

From what he could work out — Bramante had taken his watch after searching him in the piazza after the taxi had left — Falcone had spent a half day or more trapped in this subterranean prison, locked behind an iron door in a chamber of brick, rock, and earth that appeared to be as old as Rome itself. To his faint surprise he had been treated with a distant respect. No violence, not much in the way of threats. It was as if Bramante’s mind was, in truth, elsewhere, on other matters, and abducting Falcone was merely a step along the way.

He had been given a blanket and some water, left alone for hours, though Falcone had the sense Bramante never strayed far from the site. The man had a mobile phone and a pair of binoculars. Perhaps he simply walked to the distant entrance they’d passed on the way in to see if they were still alone. Perhaps he was waiting….

Now that he was back, he looked as if he would stay for good, perched on the remains of an old, upright fluted column outside the iron gate, unwrapping a supermarket panino.

“I could use something to eat,” Falcone remarked.

Bramante looked at him, grunted, then broke the sandwich in half and passed it through the bars.

“Is this the last meal for a condemned man?” Falcone wondered. “I’d always pictured something more substantial.”

“You’re a curious bastard, aren’t you?”

“That is,” Falcone replied, nodding, “one of my many failings.”

“You were curious all those years ago.”

“About you, mainly. There was so much that puzzled me.”

“Such as?”

Falcone took a bite of the sandwich. “Why you took Alessio there in the first place.”

Bramante cast him a dark look. “You don’t have children.”

“Enlighten me.”

He looked at his watch again. “A son must grow. He has to learn to be strong. To compete. You can’t protect them from everything. It doesn’t work. One day — it comes, inevitably — you’re not around. And that’s when it happens.”

“What?”

“What people think of as the real world,” Bramante answered wearily.

“So being left alone in a cave, somewhere he was frightened — that would make Alessio stronger?”

Bramante scowled and shook his head. There was something Falcone, to his dismay, still didn’t grasp.

“I never had the courage to think about parenthood,” Bramante confessed. “When I married, it was one of the first things my wife learned about me. You’d think she would have worked that out before. Being a father seems to require something selfless. To raise a child, knowing that, in the end, you must send it on its way. Cut the strings. Let it go. Perhaps I’m too possessive. The few things I love I like to keep.”

The last sentence surprised Falcone. He wondered if Bramante really meant it. He wondered, too, how Raffaella Arcangelo was feeling. It had been a cruel, hard way to say goodbye. But wasn’t that the point?

Then he heard something from above, a loud, high-pitched sound. The screech of a police siren.

“But at the age of seven?” Falcone asked. “He was too young, Giorgio. Even a man like me knows that. You were his father. You, of all people…”

Bramante reached into his jacket pocket and withdrew a black handgun. He pointed it straight through the bars, holding the barrel a hand’s length away from Falcone’s skull.

The inspector took a final bite of the sandwich, finishing it.

“I hate processed cheese,” he commented. “Why do people buy this rubbish?”

“What is it with you, Falcone?” Bramante snapped. “Don’t you know how many men I’ve killed?”

“I’ve a pretty good idea,” the inspector replied. “But you didn’t kill Alessio, even if a part of you feels you did. Yet that is what instils the most guilt in you. Surely you see the irony?”

Bramante didn’t move.

“I had hoped,” Falcone went on, “to find him. Not just for you. For his mother. For us all. When a child goes missing like that, it breaks the natural order somehow. It’s as if someone’s scrawled graffiti on something beautiful. You can fool yourself it doesn’t really matter. But it does. Until someone removes the stain, you never feel quite happy. You never come to terms with what’s happened.”

“And you’re that person? The person who removes the stain?”

“I’m supposed to be. But I failed. I’m sorry.”

“And he’s still dead,” Bramante insisted.

“You don’t know that for sure. I certainly don’t. We searched everywhere. Ludo Torchia never said he was dead. Not to me. Nor to you either, I think. Did Ludo confess? You beat him so hard. I would have expected…”

“Just lies. Lies and nonsense. My son is dead,” Bramante repeated.

“As someone once pointed out, in the long run so are we all.”

Bramante almost laughed. He lowered the gun. “A police inspector who quotes ancient English economists. Who’d have thought it?”

Falcone shrugged. “I am the curious sort.”

There was another siren now. Perhaps more than one. Closer.

Falcone took a deep breath, knowing he had to ask, uncertain of the consequences of doing so.

“When you and Ludo had sex in the cell… was that the first time? The only time?”

Giorgio Bramante blinked, unmoved by the question, thinking carefully of an answer. “I expected to be asked that fourteen years ago. Not now,” he said eventually.

Falcone shrugged. “Pathologists are fallible too. This particular one decided to save you the embarrassment. He felt some sympathy towards you, I imagine. So many people did.”

“But not you?” Bramante asked in a cold voice.

“No,” Falcone agreed. “Not on the information I saw presented to me. Was I wrong? Was that the first time?”

“The second, I believe,” Bramante said. “Or third. I forget. A lot of students passed through my classes. Opportunities arise, on both sides. They meant nothing. To me anyway.”

“Except,” Falcone pointed out, “he didn’t meet his side of the bargain.”

The man’s face darkened. “He laughed in my face. He said he still didn’t know. Or care.”

Falcone nodded. “Which is what he told us.”

“It doesn’t matter!”

“I—”

Bramante rattled the gun against the iron bars to silence him. Then he unlocked the door and waved the weapon towards the chamber. Falcone understood immediately. There was a reason Bramante had returned when he did. He knew they were approaching. Perhaps there’d been a call, from a person on the outside. Perhaps…

Falcone thought of the ritual and the mysteries, the ideas Giorgio Bramante — and Ludo Torchia — had played with all those years ago. Powerful as they were, they remained myths. He was still convinced that what took Alessio Bramante from the world was something both more mundane and more terrible.

Slowly he shuffled out of the cell, then, when he was beyond the bars, placed his hand against the wall to steady himself. Instantly, with a surge of revulsion, he snatched it away. Something was there: a fat white worm, the size of a little finger, was working its way up the damp green stone, almost luminous in the darkness.

Falcone turned to look Bramante directly in the face. “What if I could still find him?”

Bramante hesitated. Just for a moment. Just enough for Falcone to see that somewhere, buried deep inside the dark tangle of hate and confusion that was Giorgio Bramante, a flicker of hope, of belief, still existed.

“It’s too late.”

Bramante was edging him forward, towards something emerging out of the murk.

Falcone’s eyes fell on the far end of the chamber, a place partly illuminated by wan, grey daylight falling through what he took to be a gap in the earth above.

Something stood there that had not been visible in the dark when he arrived. It was low and long, the colour of good marble. A ceremonial slab of some kind. An altar, Falcone realised.

“Keep moving,” Bramante, the old Bramante again, snarled, propelling him forward with the barrel of the gun.

Falcone took a few stumbling steps of his own volition. A smooth white stone slab stood at waist height in front of him. On the perfect marble surface — Istrian, he thought — was a pattern picked out in dark red.

Leo Falcone had seen sufficient crime scenes to recognise this pattern. These were classic blood spatters, fresh too, he thought.

“Agente Prabakaran,” he muttered. “We had an arrangement—”

“She’s safe,” Bramante insisted. “Safe and busy cursing my name no doubt. With good reason. I’ve no complaints.”

Bramante ran his hand across bloodstains, sweeping his fingers through the dust and blood.

“I had another to deal with. He wasn’t someone you’ll miss.”

“Seven rituals, seven sacraments,” Falcone murmured quietly, almost as an afterthought. “Aren’t you there already?”

“Not with those who count,” Bramante answered, reaching beneath the altar to withdraw a coil of rope that was stored there, then something else. A long, slender knife. Something ceremonial, Falcone thought. Something, he realised, looking at the discoloured blade, that had been used recently.

“Nic?”

She simply spoke his name into the phone and received, in return, such a torrent of words they silenced her immediately. Emily Deacon recognised this in Costa now. It was the momentum of the case gripping him. In this instance, a case that had far more personal resonance than most.

There was little she could do but listen. And think. Arturo had exercised his influence. She had a private hospital room overlooking a narrow lane leading up to the Duomo, with an attentive nurse who’d already apologised for the fact that there would now be nothing to eat until the following day. Arturo sat outside alone. Raffaella had appeared briefly to explain her rapid return to Rome, chasing a shadow.

And Nic was so wrapped up in what was happening in Rome, so engrossed in the hunt to unravel the fate of the man who’d become a surrogate father to him over the years. Emily envied him. That kind of activity had always made her feel alive when she worked in law enforcement. You disappeared inside the case. It was one reason you did the job.

There was news too. Not of Leo, but of someone who might prove the key to finding him. She listened intently and found herself asking, in spite of herself, “He’s alive?”

It seemed so improbable. Disturbing, too, from the brief details Nic outlined.

Alessio Bramante had, for reasons which remained unclear, apparently walked from the Aventino to the peace camp on the Circus Maximus, met an odd couple from one of the left-wing groups there, and, it seemed, had not simply left with them, but been brought up almost as an adopted child until leaving home sometime during his mid-teens, perhaps four or five years ago.

She recalled what Nic had said about abducted children. How they assimilated to the environment in which they found themselves. All of this was, she now realised with a brief shock of alarm, quite understandable. Normality, to a child, was the situation he or she faced in everyday life. If Alessio Bramante didn’t return to his real home within weeks, he would, surely, be lost forever. He was seven when he disappeared. What memories he had of his life with Giorgio and Beatrice Bramante would be entirely coloured by the picture of the world painted by those who had replaced them. It was possible, she thought, with a growing dismay, to take a child and, with sufficient will, turn it into an entirely different creature. History was full of dictators who had created their own armies of admirers from the schoolroom.

“You’ll never find him, Nic,” she said. “If he remembers his real parents at all, he’ll hate them. They’re probably more like a dream to him. You can’t possibly hope to help Leo like this.”

“No?”

He sounded amused, the way he always did when there was more information to come.

“Tell me,” she ordered.

“We got it from one of the neighbours. They hardly met the kid. The couple never mixed. Never after the man died. The neighbour didn’t even know Alessio’s real name. He thought he was called Filippo. But we know what happened to him. He left school at sixteen, and home too. A little while later he came back on a visit.”

“So?”

“In uniform. He was a police cadet, Emily. Unless he’s quit for some reason, Alessio Bramante, or whatever name he uses now, is an officer in the state police.”

She didn’t know what to say.

“We’re going back to yell at people in the Questura until they come up with something. We know which year’s cadet class he’s got to have been in. Even if he’s managed to use a different name…”

“There’d still have to be addresses, references,” she suggested, wishing she were with him now, feeling the adrenaline rising as this palpable lead rose to the surface.

“Exactly.”

“Why would someone like that join the police?”

There was a silence at the other end. Then Nic asked, “It’s not that strange a career choice, is it?”

“No. You know I didn’t mean that. It’s just so… odd somehow. Why would a boy with that kind of screwed-up background want to sign up?”

“Perhaps because of it. I don’t know.”

“Me neither. You’d best go find him.”

“Of course.” He hesitated. She could feel his embarrassment. “I’m sorry. I never even asked. What happened at the hospital?”

“Just routine tests,” she said firmly. “All the usual things I’m starting to get used to. Nothing to worry about. You track down your missing schoolboy. And Leo. After that…”

“I can’t wait,” he said quickly.

The door opened. A nun walked in and scowled at the mobile phone. Emily said her goodbyes hastily and dropped the handset back in her bag.

“Is it time?” she asked.

“Sì,” the nun said, nodding. “I have to do this. A little bee-sting.”

Emily Deacon rolled up the sleeve on her green hospital gown and looked away.

Bruno Messina cast a weary eye at the Viale Aventino. The rain had stopped. A weak sun was struggling against the falling shade of late afternoon. Behind him the traffic backed up all the way to Piramide. To the east a solid, angry line of cars ran as far as the river. Vehicles traversed the city like blood through arteries. Everything was interlinked. One single blockage in the south could cause chaos in the north. The commissario didn’t want to know what was going on elsewhere. He had turned off his personal radio, intent on avoiding calls from the Questura. This was too important.

The first team to arrive at the site had discovered a woman’s purse flung away close to the entrance. Inside was Rosa Prabakaran’s police ID card. A clumsy lapse, perhaps indicative of the man’s state of mind. Bramante’s options were closing. Messina was determined that here, at the southeastern end of the long, grassy rectangle beneath the gaze of the Palatino, the man’s bloody adventures would finally come to an end.

He put Bavetti in charge of dealing with the barriers to keep out traffic, spectators, and the media. For the rest he would lean on Peccia, who seemed energised by the challenge ahead, one for which his men had practised long and hard over the years, with very few real-life opportunities in which to test their mettle.

Messina drove past this place every day he went to work, and, like most Romans, had scarcely given it a second thought. It was, he now realised, much more than the simple stretch of open land it appeared to be.

He stood by the empty tram lines, facing the length of what had once been a great stadium, trying to understand the geography of what lay before him. To his right stood the honey-coloured ruins of the former Imperial palaces, now reduced to a network of multi-storeyed arches, rising up the hill, their shattered tops like jagged teeth, yet still high enough, grand enough, to reach the summit. Like many a Roman schoolchild, he’d been taken here on a class trip. He could remember the view to the Forum and the Colosseum and Trajan’s Markets, across the hideous modern thoroughfare built by Mussolini. It was like gazing down on the city from an eagle’s nest. The greener lee of the hill, looking south, always seemed more serene, part of a different, more ancient place, one, Messina ruefully reminded himself, Giorgio Bramante knew far better than most.

What had once been the racetrack of the stadium was now grass with a dirt track worn by the feet of amateur runners. At the far end, from his present position, the view to the Tiber was blocked by a low building. To his left ran the park that led to the Aventino. Ahead, before the shallow dip of the racetrack, was something Messina had scarcely noticed in almost four decades. A small tower — like the remnant of some shrunken medieval palace — stood remote in a meadow of long grass.

Blocked off from the stadium by a tall green wire fence stood the familiar detritus of the archaeologist’s trade: white marble stones cast in irregular lines, some still showing evidence of fluting; rows of low brick walls rising from the soil like old bones; rusty metal gates and barriers delineating a pattern that was impenetrable from the surface, marking some subterranean warren of chambers and alleyways dug out of the rich, damp soil and the rock below.

And, to his left, on the Aventino side, the low, shallow roof of some more important site, rusting tin resting over the half-visible entrance to God knows what. As a child, Messina had gone into the bowels of the Colosseum, come to understand that the ancient Romans liked to build underground, finding it a hospitable place to hide practices that were never fit for the light of day. There could be a subterranean enclave the size of the old stadium itself running from the small arched entrance, little more than a cave, that was visible from where he now stood.

No doubt Giorgio Bramante knew. Perhaps he’d picked this place for that very reason. Perhaps, it occurred to Messina, he had no plans to run any further, not after the final death, the last sacrifice to his lost son.

Messina couldn’t shake from his brain the image of Prabakaran’s little purse, left idly by the entrance to the site. It was almost an invitation, and that thought left him deeply uneasy.

Judith Turnhouse was poring over the set of maps which she had asked to be brought from the university. Messina joined her, eyed the complex maze of corridors and chambers outlined there, on multiple levels, it seemed, and asked, “Do you understand this site, Professor Turnhouse?”

She looked up from the map and grimaced.

“I told you. It’s not a project I’ve ever been involved with directly. Giorgio worked on it when he was a student. It’s hardly been visited in years.”

She peered at the paper, squinting.

“Also,” she added, “this map is twenty-five years old. It’s not accurate. The site’s changed since then. I think there’s been some ground collapse that isn’t described here. It’s tricky.”

“What is this place?” Peccia asked.

She stared at him. “I sometimes think this city is wasted on the Romans,” Judith Turnhouse declared. “This was part of the barracks of the third cohort of the Praetorian Guard. The same military unit that had the temple on the Aventino. They were wiped out when Constantine invaded Rome. Giorgio always had a thing about that.”

Peccia looked puzzled. “An underground barracks?”

“It wouldn’t all have been underground back then,” she replied. “Only part. The temple. The ritual quarters. The ground level of the city has risen considerably over the years. You really never noticed?”

Messina shook his head. “There’s a temple here as well?”

“They were soldiers. Most soldiers, certainly in the Praetorian Guard, were followers of Mithras. That, ostensibly, was why Constantine slaughtered them. They were the heretics all of a sudden.”

“So what does this tell us?” Peccia demanded crossly.

“If you don’t need me here,” Judith Turnhouse said sharply, “I will quite happily go back to my work. I was rather under the impression you wanted to know where Giorgio might be in this rabbit warren. There are three levels of tunnels. Probably close to a hundred different chambers and anterooms of different dimensions. This map doesn’t tell you perhaps eighty percent of what it’s like now. You could spend the next two days wandering around down there. Or I could make an educated guess. It’s your call.”

“So you know where this man is?” Peccia asked, with a childish degree of sarcasm.

She shook her head. “No. Do you?”

“What about there?” Messina, determined to seize back the direction of this argument, pointed to the emblem on the map: the picture of the altar, with its powerful figure subduing the bull. “This is the temple, isn’t it?”

“Read the fine print, Commissario. I told you: This place has changed.”

The two policemen stared at the paper. Sure enough, something had been scribbled underneath the figure.

“I think,” she added, “that’s Giorgio’s handwriting. It indicates that the altar has been moved. The original position” — she pointed towards the Palatino — “was over there. Where you can see a visible collapse in the ground. Whatever Giorgio found, it didn’t go into a museum or I’d know about it. So it’s a safe bet it’s somewhere else inside this complex for safekeeping.” She looked them both in the face. “And for what it’s worth, yes, I think that would be where Giorgio would go. This is all some kind of ritual for him, isn’t it?

Sacrificing the people he blames for Alessio. Where else would he be?”

Messina squinted at the labyrinth of lines on the map. “Where the hell do we begin?” he asked of no one in particular.

Judith Turnhouse peered at the map, scrutinising what looked like an indecipherable maze.

“I can tell you how I’d proceed in there. I can see where a professional archaeologist would want to go. If they moved that altar, it can’t be that far away.”

“So where?” Messina demanded.

She laughed in his face. “I’d need to be inside. It’s not something you can tell from a map. I’d have to see what it’s like on the ground—”

“No, no, no, no,” Peccia exclaimed. “This man is armed! I will not have a civilian around. It’s impossible.”

Messina couldn’t avoid the woman’s gaze. She wanted to do this for some reason, and he wasn’t remotely interested in what it was. All he cared about was Giorgio Bramante. And, he reminded himself, the fate of Falcone.

“Professor,” he said, “this may be a dangerous offer you’re making.”

“Giorgio hates you people,” she insisted. “But he has no reason to harm me. I don’t believe, for one moment, there’s even a possibility he would do so. Perhaps if I’m there, someone he knows, I can talk a little sense into him. I can try, anyway. I wouldn’t say we’re the best of friends, but at least he doesn’t loathe me. Are you really going to pass up that possibility?”

“Sir—” Peccia began to say.

“If the professore wishes to help,” Messina interrupted, “it would be foolish to reject her offer.”

She muttered some short thanks.

“I must insist,” Messina went on, “that you follow the strict orders of Peccia’s men. This is important.”

“I’m not intent on getting myself killed, Commissario. You don’t need to worry about that.”

“Good.” Messina stabbed a finger at the map. “I want a team down there within twenty minutes. Look at this map. Listen to Signora Turnhouse. Go where she suggests. Your men in front. Always, Peccia.”

“Sir…” Peccia seemed to expect something else. “What are your orders?” he asked.

“If Falcone’s alive, get him out of there.”

“And if Bramante resists?”

“Then do what you will. If there’s a corpse at the end of this, let it be his. No one else. You hear me?”

Peccia gave him a cold look.

A large black helicopter swooped overhead, its blades so loud the roar blocked out the desperate timbre Messina knew was in his own voice. He waved to Bavetti and ordered him to call off the surveillance flights. They were, surely, no longer needed. Then he ordered Peccia to assemble his team. The man grunted and stalked off to one of the dark blue vans, all bristling with antennae, from which his unit operated. He returned with four individuals, each dressed entirely in black, each carrying the same stubby, deadly-looking military machine pistol Messina had seen before.

They were all about the same height: all young, alert, dispassionate. They didn’t appear much like police officers. More like soldiers ready for battle.

“We have no idea what you’ll meet down there,” Messina told them. “Inspector Falcone may be alive or dead. If the former, I wish him to stay that way.”

“We negotiate?” one asked.

“You see if that’s an option, by all means,” Peccia declared.

Messina shook his head. “This man is not going to negotiate. If he says he is, it will be a ploy. He kidnapped Falcone in order to kill him. Just as he’s killed the others.”

“People change when they’re cornered,” Peccia told his men.

“Giorgio Bramante does not change. You order him to lay down his weapons and hand himself over. If he doesn’t comply, you act accordingly. Do I make myself clear?”

The men nodded. One of them glowered at the woman, an expression of bafflement and aggression on his face.

“Who’s the civilian?” he asked.

“My name is Professor Judith Turnhouse,” she said. She held out her hand. He didn’t take it. “I’m an archaeologist. I think I can help you find him…”

Peccia’s team glanced at one another. The leader grimaced, then retrieved a black hood from his pocket and pulled it over his head. “We can find him ourselves,” he muttered.

“That,” Messina said firmly, “I very much doubt. Professor?”

Judith Turnhouse spread out the map. Her thin, nimble fingers worked their way across its surface, following each line, travelling across the maze, tracing each chamber, each passage, every last dead end.

It took Alessio five minutes to get his bearings. The string was where he remembered it, left on the floor, just at the point where the one he now knew as Andrea — big, stupid, but strong — had grabbed him in the dark.

They went quiet when he found it. They were all grateful, even Torchia. All games, all the rituals, had to come to an end, one way or another.

He couldn’t begin to imagine what Giorgio Bramante would say if he found out what they’d done. Alessio had seen his father’s fury in full flight only occasionally, and each time it had left him chilled and shaking. Once he’d witnessed him beating his mother, an act that was too much, one that made him intervene, small fists flying, miniature mimics of his father’s, struggling to separate them. Women were weak and needing of protection. That was something the young Alessio Bramante never doubted. What his family required — all three of them — was to become closer, to wind themselves into each other’s lives, so tightly nothing could come between them again, ever. What was needed, it occurred to him, was a sacrament.

And fate, or perhaps some destiny he himself had found in this labyrinth, had provided one: six stupid students who thought they could get away with trespass, dreamed they could sneak into some secret, holy place, desecrate it with their clumsy rites, then walk out, free, untouched.

Smiling to himself, confident, he went on running the string through his fingers as they walked slowly up the corridor. There was no light yet. But if he continued for a minute or more, it would be there, surely. The sun. Escape. Freedom for the interlopers. The six of them would be like the cowards rescued by Theseus, ungrateful for their release, unworthy of saving.

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.

“The name I was asked to check,” Furillo interjected, “was Judith Turnhouse, if that’s any help.”

“Thanks,” the pathologist spat at him. “Spoil all my surprises!”

Costa shook his head, baffled. “You’re saying that Judith Turnhouse took Alessio to the peace camp that evening?”

“I’m saying more than that. I looked her up in the phone book. She lives in some tiny studio apartment at the back of Termini. Cruddy place for a university academic, don’t you think?”

Costa remembered the clothes Turnhouse had worn the first time they interviewed her. Cheap clothes. Academics of her stature weren’t badly paid. The money had to be going somewhere.

“Via Tiziano, 117a,” Furillo said, pointing at the screen, and getting ignored all round.

“In one of those photos,” Teresa continued, “Judith Turnhouse seems to be passing the Giordanos money. What if she didn’t just take the boy there? What if all these years she was his fairy godmother or something? Paying for his keep out of her own salary?” She paused. “Elisabetta dead too?” she asked.

“Elisabetta was murdered in her bed,” Peroni replied. “Three nights ago. All the rest of this is… speculation.”

“Dammit, Gianni!” Teresa pulled out the prints she’d had made from Lorenzo’s machine. “Look at these. Tell me this isn’t her.”

Peroni and Costa leaned over and examined the photos.

“It’s her,” Peroni agreed instantly. “But what does that mean? She’s out with Messina now, trying to help him track down Bramante and Leo. It doesn’t make sense.”

“Signora Turnhouse…” Furillo began.

“She was protecting Alessio from his father!” Teresa Lupo waved her heavy arms in the air. “What else could it be?”

“From what exactly?” Peroni asked. “And why? And for all these years?”

“Enough! Enough!”

Emilio Furillo never shouted. A raised voice always seemed, to him, an admission of defeat. But there were times…

They stared at him.

“Emilio?” the pathologist asked.

“I told you there was no connection between this Signora Turnhouse and the Giordanos. None that I could see. That does not mean,” he continued, “that I found nothing.”

“Out with it,” Teresa ordered.

“Some years ago this woman was stopped for speeding outside Verona. I have the full report on the system….”

“Summarise it,” Peroni said.

“She received a spot fine. However, there was a man in the passenger seat. He was forced to show his papers. Normally this wouldn’t be a matter of record, of course….”

They waited.

“But on this occasion,” Furillo continued smugly, “it was. The man was a prisoner out on weekend leave.”

Teresa blinked at him, openmouthed, like a freshly landed tuna.

“It was Giorgio Bramante,” Furillo announced. “To save you some time, I checked these dates against the incidents on the list Falcone circulated. This was the very weekend the farmer, Andrea Guerino, disappeared. He was later found murdered. Not far from Verona. Make of it what you will.”

“Judith Turnhouse was helping Giorgio?” Peroni asked, amazed. “And supporting his son?”

Costa’s mind kept returning to that first meeting with the American academic, and how it had come about. Everything had seemed so easy.

“The reason we spoke to her was because she and Giorgio had a very loud, very public argument, with the Carabinieri within earshot outside,” he pointed out. “Those officers were always there. Bramante and Turnhouse must have known someone would have made the connection. Someone would come, and then she could take us to the body Giorgio had left down by the river. He wants his victims seen. Not hidden away forever.”

Peroni nodded, catching on instantly. “She told us she would have called if we hadn’t arrived,” he pointed out. “I’m sure that was the truth. So we’ve just been picking up the crumbs this pair have been dropping for us all along. Where does Alessio fit in?”

“Tiziano—” Furillo began.

“And now,” the young detective went on, “she’s leading Messina directly to Bramante.”

“Why?” Peroni demanded.

“Because it’s what Bramante wants,” Costa replied immediately. “She pointed us to the fact he was looking for those underground maps. That’s what Messina is using right now. This is…”

It was clear in his head. He just lacked the precise words.

“…a kind of performance. His last act. Leo is his finale. Giorgio Bramante wants to be found. The man needs an audience.”

He glanced at his partner.

“Giorgio Bramante never killed Elisabetta Giordano. He never even knew she existed. But if Judith Turnhouse has been playing both sides… Paying the woman for years. Perhaps even after Alessio left home. She had a reason to keep Elisabetta quiet. The best there was. It could have destroyed everything.”

Costa spoke with authority and a rapid, quick intelligence, Furillo thought. His demeanour reminded the older man of Falcone himself.

“We’ve got to let Messina know,” the young agente added, reaching for a phone. “Now…”

Furillo raised a finger. “Hostage situation. The commissario has called a radio silence for everyone except the control room. And I would seriously advise you three not to show your faces there at the moment. As I was saying, Tiziano—”

“Alessio would be an agente by now,” Teresa Lupo interrupted. “A fully formed one, newly emerged from the cocoon. So where is he?”

“Tiziano!” Furillo yelled. “Are you people listening to me or am I some kind of computer peripheral here?”

Teresa Lupo reached over and patted his right hand. “Emilio,” she said sweetly. “You’re never peripheral. Not to me. We’re just a little… stumped.”

“God, I wish I had that on camera,” Furillo sighed. “Judith Turnhouse lives at 117a Tiziano. If you look here—” he pointed at the screen — “you will see that one of the recruits from four years ago, Filippo Battista, gave the very same address in his recruitment forms. Perhaps he is a lodger. I don’t know. However, he is now attached to—”

“—the airport,” Peroni read from the screen.

Costa was already dialling the Fiumicino police office. They waited as he dashed off a rapid-fire set of questions, then put down the phone.

“Filippo Battista still lives in Tiziano,” Costa reported quietly. “The sovrintendente thinks he’s shacked up with some stuck-up American girlfriend almost twice his age. The woman’s a little domineering, or so the gossip goes.”

“Is he on duty?” Peroni asked.

Costa grimaced. “He was on rest day until Messina asked for volunteers. Somehow he talked his way onto the team. He’s in the armed response unit — looking for his own father.”

The three of them took this in for a moment. Then Furillo watched them flee the room.

“You’re welcome,” he muttered to himself, grateful, and a little guilty, that this was their problem, not his.

These caves were new to him. No comforting thread to run through his fingers. Just black damp walls that seemed to go on forever, twisting serpent-like through the hillside. Alessio led, the six of them followed, stumbling upwards on the rough-hewn rock floor, eyes fixed on the flashlight in the child’s hand, the circle of yellow light waning as the batteries wound down.

Then a sharp corner, one that took them all by surprise. Someone fell painfully and let loose a low, frightened curse. The flashlight flickered, became first the pale colour of dry straw, then the dark, fading ochre of the moon in a polluted Roman night sky.

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 well: 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.

He stared at the sea of vehicles ahead of him and cut the engine. Then he thought about Teresa Lupo’s question.

“They couldn’t both know,” Costa said. “If Giorgio realised his son was still alive, none of this would have happened.”

Peroni glowered angrily at the traffic. They were still the best part of a kilometre from the broad sweep of green behind the Palatino.

“Agreed,” he said. “So who’s pushing the buttons here? That Turnhouse woman. She helped Giorgio kill those students over the years. Why? And why take the boy, for God’s sake? What did the boy ever do?”

Costa had been a police officer long enough to understand that the simplest reasons were always the best ones. They were the same reasons that had existed for millennia: love, hate, revenge, or a combination of all three.

“He gave her the means,” Costa answered, and threw open the driver’s door.

There was a motorcycle courier a few metres away, smoking a cigarette, seated on his machine. The man was truly slacking off; his sleek, fast Honda could have cut through the traffic easily if he rode the way most Romans did.

Costa flashed his ID card.

“I’m requisitioning the bike,” he said, then seized the lapels of the rider’s leather jacket and propelled him off the seat. “Gianni? Can you ride pillion?”

Teresa was out after them. “What about me?”

“Sorry,” Costa apologised.

The courier drew himself up to his full height, tapped his chest, and demanded, “What about me?”

Then he took a good look at Peroni and backed off.

“No scratches,” the man said, gesturing meekly toward his bike.

Costa turned the key, felt the motorcycle dip as Peroni’s bulk hit the seat behind him, tried to remember how to ride one of these things, then crunched his way through the gears, ignoring the pained gasps of its owner.

He eased it onto the broad pedestrian dirt path that ran from the Colosseum to the Circus Maximus, the route of the Number 3 tram, a quiet, leafy thoroughfare, a place for pleasant evening promenades before dinner.

There was a photographer ahead. A woman in a wedding dress was posing next to her new husband, the Colosseum in the background. Costa steered gently round, making sure not to splash mud, then opened the throttle.

The bike tore along the dirt track, beneath the bare trees on this quiet side of the Palatino.

It took only minutes. There was scarcely a soul along the way, just a few tourists, a handful of curious spectators, and, as they approached the open ground, a swelling number of police vehicles, officers, and the media, penned into a surly crowd.

Without being asked, Peroni took out his ID card, leaned sideways from the seat, letting everyone see his large, distinct face, one known throughout the city force.

No one stopped them, not until they reached the yellow tape that barred everything from going further. They were at the edge of the Circus Maximus. Costa could just make out the racetrack shape on the grassy field, the knot of blue police vans in front of it, and the small sea of bodies, some uniform, some plainclothes.

Again, Peroni’s presence got them through without a word. Costa came to a halt, let Peroni dismount, struggled to put the heavy bike on its stand, then scanned the crowd of officers, pinned down Messina, in his smart dark suit, and walked up to face him. The man had the nervous energy senior officers possessed when awaiting the results of an operation they’d ordered.

“Where’s Judith Turnhouse?” Costa wanted to know.

Messina glowered at him. “You’re off duty, sonny. Don’t try my patience. I’ve enough to throw in your direction later.”

The commissario didn’t look as confident as he was trying to sound. Peroni pushed back Peccia, who was hoping to elbow them out of the way, then Costa took a deep breath and began to explain to Messina, as concisely and accurately as he could summarise it, what they now knew.

The blood drained from the commissario’s swarthy features as he spoke. Peccia turned quite pale too.

“Where is Filippo Battista?” Costa demanded.

Peccia’s eyes turned to the entrance to the subterranean workings beyond the sea of uniforms.

“Let me guess,” Peroni interjected. “He was a volunteer. Nic? That’s enough talking.”

Peccia started barking orders: more guns, more bodies.

“No!” Costa yelled. “Don’t you understand anything about what’s really going on?”

“Educate me, Agente.” Messina said it quietly.

“We’re here because Giorgio Bramante — and Judith Turnhouse — summoned us. Maybe for Leo, in Giorgio’s case. As for the woman… I don’t know.” He paused. “But I do know this. The more men and weapons you pour into that place, the more chance there is they’ll get used. You’ll look bad enough with a dead inspector on your hands. Do you want Alessio Bramante dead too?”

Peccia’s backup team looked ready. They had metal-stocked machine pistols and black hoods pulled tight over their heads. Peccia himself had a weapon in his own hands too. He looked at Messina with ill-disguised contempt and said, “We will take care of this.”

“You’ve got four men down there already, one of whom is the man’s son!” Messina barked. “And that woman…”

“I told you we didn’t need the woman. Battista is one of ours. We will take care of this—”

“Leo Falcone is my friend,” Costa interrupted with an abrupt vehemence that silenced the pair of them. “I am not waiting any longer.”

“No…” Messina replied quietly. He closed his eyes, looking like a man who was about to break. “Listen…” he began.

“I don’t have time. We don’t have time…” Costa answered.

“Listen, damn you!” Messina snarled.

He had a black, lost look in his eyes. Costa glanced at his watch and thought, Maybe a few seconds.

“I’m sorry,” the commissario went on. “My father wrecked this case fourteen years ago through his instinct. I hoped to rectify that by being detached, whatever that means. I didn’t…”

He shook his head and stared at the distant golden walls of the broken palaces on the green hill, as if he wished he were anywhere else at that moment.

“How the hell do you and Falcone cope with all this? It’s not… natural.”

“We cope,” Costa answered instantly. “Now if you’ll excuse me—”

Peccia moved to their side as they started forward.

“Stay here,” Messina ordered. “This is my responsibility. No one else’s.”

One of the men in black stopped in his tracks. Then he held out the ugly, lethal-looking weapon: a gift.

Messina shooed the gun away with his hand.

“There are three armed men down there I ought to be able to rely on. I think that’s enough weapons for one day. Agente?”

Costa was already heading for the entrance. He paused.

“Allow me the privilege, please,” the commissario insisted, and took the lead.

Giorgio Bramante’s knife glittered in a shaft of dying sunlight from a crack in the earth above. Falcone watched it, unmoved, thinking. Bramante had tied his hands behind his back, pushed him around, into the position he wanted. This was not, Leo thought, the way a man who was about to die would be treated. Bramante’s attention lay elsewhere. Falcone’s presence in this underground chamber, next to the altar, was of importance to this event. But he was a prop, not the central actor, much as he’d been in Monti when Bramante had seemed to want to snatch him. And in the Questura, too, the night before last.

There was a faint sound down the corridor, the route by which he assumed they’d approached. The gap in the rock was barely wide enough for two men. What little Falcone knew about tactical training told him this was an impossible position to attack. Anyone entering the room would be fatally exposed to Bramante’s view the moment they arrived. And given a broad, uninterrupted view of the scene ahead of them, two men at an altar, one apparently about to die.

He thought about Bramante’s last words.

This isn’t about you.

Then there was a single, distinct sound: the voice of a woman, her Italian still bearing the faint imprint of an American accent. Judith Turnhouse. Falcone recognised her hard monotone from their brief conversation by the banks of the Tiber the day before. He couldn’t begin to imagine what reason she had to be there or why a police team that was surely attempting to operate with some secrecy and surprise would allow her to break silence in this way.

He and Bramante stood upright before the altar in anticipation, like figures on a stage. The woman’s voice drifted to them sporadically, approaching. As the police team grew closer, Bramante gripped Falcone’s coat, held the knife to his throat, eyes on the entrance, both bodies exposed to the line of fire.

Falcone didn’t struggle. Instead, he said, quite calmly, “You’re a poor thespian, Giorgio. I’m pleased to find something at which you don’t excel. It makes you more human.”

“Be silent,” Bramante murmured, not taking his gaze from the dark cave mouth ahead. A lone flashlight beam danced there, like a distant firefly, one more sign to betray their approach.

Falcone had been unable to shake from his brain the words of Teresa Lupo when he’d believed, for a few brief moments, they might have solved the riddle of what had happened to Alessio Bramante. And of what Giorgio himself had said to him in Monti, when he was almost snatched. When, if Falcone was honest with himself, he could have been taken, too, had Bramante pushed his luck.

“The seventh sacrament,” Falcone said, peering into Bramante’s face, which now betrayed some trace of fear, and that, too, made him more human. “It’s not me at all, is it, Giorgio? This is about you. It was about you all along. Is suicide not enough? Is that dead child trapped in your imagination so hungry that he needs his father’s blood, too, along with all the others’?”

The figure gripping him flinched.

“If Alessio is dead,” Falcone pressed, “he surely doesn’t require this spectacle. If he isn’t, do you think he’d be happy to know?”

The dark, intelligent eyes flashed at him. “You don’t understand,” Bramante muttered. “You’ve no idea what’s in my head.”

“I’d willingly listen,” Falcone said. “If we’d had this conversation all those years ago…”

“Then you’d hate me even more than you do now, Falcone. This is simple. They kill me. Or I kill you. One or the other. You choose it.”

Falcone waited, thinking about his physical state, what worked, what was still struggling back to health. One thing, above all, he’d learned these last three days: he wasn’t weak. He was merely, to some unknowable extent, damaged.

A flood of yellow illumination burst into the chamber: four flashlights searching, probing. Finding.

With all the remaining strength he could muster, Falcone abruptly twisted hard on his ankle, forced his body round in a fast, powerful spin, tore himself from Bramante’s grip, rolled left, kept on rolling, aware that the man’s attention was divided now, between the captive he’d lost and the group ahead of him — black suits, black masks, four men, and Judith Turnhouse, whose eyes shone with anticipation, like a Fury leading them on.

“No weapons!” Falcone barked, rolling two more turns on the floor. “No damn weapons! That’s an order!”

The dark figure still stood in front of the altar, confused, struggling for some form of response.

Four black barrels rose in a line, aimed directly at the man with the knife who was frozen in front of them.

The woman was screeching something Falcone couldn’t understand.

“Secure the prisoner,” he ordered. “Get the knife. One of you only. The rest, cover.”

A single masked figure stepped out of the line. He lowered his machine pistol.

Bramante held the silver blade in front of him, point upwards.

“Put it down, for God’s sake,” Falcone barked at Bramante, battling to his feet, leaning against the raw rock wall, feeling the breath come back into his lungs. Feeling well, if he was honest with himself. Already, he was thinking of the Questura. An interview room. He’d be in charge. The deal for time he’d cut with Messina hadn’t yet run out. “And one of you get over here and cut these ropes.”

Falcone closed his eyes, fought to clear his head. He’d always been proud of the way he could claw his way back to some form of competence, some quick, avid intelligence, even in the most pressured of situations. It was a skill he hadn’t lost after all.

“We need that conversation, Giorgio. We will have that conversation. I want this finished, once and for all….”

He opened his eyes, determined to control this situation. Then he fell silent. The two of them had acted so swiftly, so silently, that during his brief, self-indulgent reverie he’d not heard a thing. Three officers in black were now being pushed, weaponless, to one side of Bramante, hands in the air. One of their pistols sat easily in Judith Turnhouse’s hands, pointed in their direction. The other two weapons lay on the floor out of reach. The fourth individual in the team moved his gun slowly from side to side, from Bramante to his colleagues and back.

“You think,” Judith Turnhouse spat at Falcone, with a bitter malevolence, “you can take this from me? After all these years?”

“I apologise,” he replied honestly. “I simply had no idea.”

He glanced at Bramante, who looked uncharacteristically helpless.

“But then I’m not alone in that,” Falcone added. “Signora Turnhouse—”

The dark, ugly weapon in her hands swung round and pointed directly at his head. To his surprise, Falcone found that, for the first time since leaving the Questura the previous evening, he was genuinely in fear for his life.

“Say one more thing,” she muttered, “and I will, I swear, empty this into your head and enjoy every moment.”

She walked forward and, without a word, took the blade from Bramante’s hand.

Bramante shook his head, opened his hands, looked at her, glanced at Falcone, then turned to the woman again.

“What is this?” he asked, baffled, a shred of anger rising on his face. “We agreed.”

“I’ve something to show you,” she said, and nodded at the man by her side.

The figure in black crooked the weapon under his left arm, then with his free hand dragged the hood off his head.

He was a handsome young man, Falcone thought. A little young for the job. A little naive, not fully in control. He stood erect in the shadows, Bramante’s height, his build. And with his looks, too, though they seemed more exaggerated somehow, so that the resemblance was obvious only by comparison.

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.

A rock rests in her hand. She lunges forward, dashes it against his father’s head, not a powerful blow, a spirit’s fist against the monster.

Stunned, Giorgio Bramante falls to the red earth, silent for a moment, eyes hazy, lacking vision.

The sheep flee, feet echoing into nothing down a corridor lit by the chain of dim yellow bulbs that lead from this grim and deadly place. Alessio wants to join them. Running in any direction, provided it leaves this hidden tomb behind, forever.

Anywhere except home, a place to which Giorgio will return. A spoiled dream of lost memories and deceptions.

As his father writhes, half conscious, in the dust, the woman bends, stares into Alessio’s face, and for a moment his heart stops again. It is as if she knows his thoughts, as if nothing need be said at all, because in her eyes is a message they both comprehend: We are the same. We are what he owns, what he uses.

The blood is dry on her mouth now. She looks at him, pleading. For his forgiveness, perhaps, which he grants readily, since she is, he understands, a part of his father’s damage too.

And for his hand, which joins hers, tight, the blood of Ludo Torchia’s slaughtered offering joining them, and with that bond comes a promise of safety at last, perhaps, even, of release.

“Run,” she urges softly, and his eyes flicker towards his father, still barely conscious, but recovering quickly. “Run to the Circus. Don’t stop. Wait there. I will meet you.”

“And then?” the boy asks meekly, frightened and hopeful at the same time.

She kisses him on the cheek. Her lips are damp and welcome. A sudden rush of warmth falls down her cheek and enters his open mouth, a sacrament made of salt and pain and tears.

“Then I’ll save you forever,” she whispers in his ear.

Remember…

The pain below, the delicious violence, the taste, the feel of blood that first time he took her, with brutal, rapid force, in a lonely dig down some desolate country lane in Puglia.

Judith Turnhouse lost her incurious virginity that day, in the remains of a dusty, unremarkable Dionysian temple while the other students worked with their trowels and their brushes, no more than fifty metres away, out in the sun, unaware. The condition was taken from her in no more than three or four savage minutes, as if it were truly meaningless, a pathway to some brief instant of fruition on his own part, one that lay outside her own small individuality, dismissive even of its existence.

She was the simple vessel, the physical route to this conclusion, and somehow this made it all the more rewarding. In her humiliation and his animal fire lay a reality, so hard and wretched and alive that she could nurture it later, cradle the feeling on the cold lonely nights when she thought of him, nothing but him, over and over.

Here, now, in the Mithraeum beneath the Circus Maximus, in the place they’d agreed on all along, she could recall everything of the last fourteen years, every time they’d coupled, every savage, bloody encounter, beneath the earth, against rough stone, fighting, fucking… it was all the same, and had been from the beginning.

That act was the closest she would ever achieve to ecstasy, the ritual that took her out of herself, sent bruised and battered angels flying through her head, then left her exhausted, praying for the next time.

Never again.

That’s what he’d said, all those years ago, before the world changed.

It was a lie, on both their parts. She’d watched his son stare through the keyhole in Piranesi’s piazza that morning, followed them furtively as he led the child into the dig.

She’d caught his attention, drawn him away from his child. Away from the boy, they had argued in near silence. They had fought again. And then, on the promise that this was the last time — no more violent encounters in the dark, no more mouldy soil in her hair — she’d won, proved victorious through the brute physicality of the madness that conjoined them.

Not love. That was too mundane a word, and besides, there was scant affection inside it, and no respect.

This was need and, that last time, as he heaved so ruthlessly into her she could feel her skull cracking against the rock wall, she knew he would deprive of her of this, her only delight, because that was Giorgio Bramante: hard and cold and supreme in his own mind, a man to rule over everything and everyone, to take from them what they found most precious, simply because he could.

Even on that hot June day, feeling his power inside her, some mindless, ecstatic agony rising alongside every thrust, she understood that he would still take what he wanted, leave her there, walk out, with his strange little child, go home, to his miserable battered wife, believing nothing had really changed, that he could return to his world of papers and study, the life of a successful, intellectual academic, and no one would know, not even when it happened again, with some other naive student this time, some other vessel to take her place.

Giorgio Bramante was at war with everything: her, his family, the world. But most of all, she knew, he was at war with himself. And there lay his weakness…

He was scarcely conscious when the boy fled. He had barely recovered his senses when she scolded him for his fury and his threats, told him to stay inside, where none of his victims could see him.

When he came to, he scarcely thought about the fact she’d struck him, that they’d been seen, locked together against the wall, their secret captured, stolen.

“Alessio,” he groaned, eyes scanning the chamber anxiously.

It was all so easy.

“Those stupid students took him,” Judith said quickly. “They’re terrified of you, Giorgio. Leave this to me. I’ll talk to them. They’ll keep quiet. I’ll find Alessio. Stay here. Don’t worry.”

She could find somewhere to keep the child for a day. Perhaps more. A lesson would be delivered. A bargain would be struck. It was, too, though not the one either of them expected. Giorgio’s fury, and the way it sparked such an unpredictable chain of events, saw to that. But by the time Ludo Torchia was dead, everything had changed. Alessio could not be returned to the world, not without the destruction of everything she possessed. And Giorgio was gone, lost to her, through his own stupid arrogance, turning murderous and suicidal inside his own grief and guilt and overweening self-hatred.

There was no going back. Not when he asked, that first time in prison, for her help in tracking them down, one by bloody one. Not now, near the end, a conclusion he craved because only in that final act — the sacrifice of himself — would lie peace.

And in his place, she found another. As Giorgio Bramante grew more bitter, more insane, in jail, his son flourished under her tutelage, from boy to youth to man, ever closer over time until he was hers completely, as she had been his father’s, bound together by the brutal force of her character, an icy devotion that made captives of them all.

In her mind there was no hiatus in time between then and now, between the blood and sweat in a cave in Puglia and this end, the one he sought, the one she would deliver, in a way he had never expected, beneath the Roman earth. All was continuous, linked, cemented together by the same harsh inevitability born of the sinuous, brute passion that had once joined them.

She waved the gun at them, the three men in black, the inspector, crouched, helpless, Giorgio, imploring, pathetic, hands outstretched.

“He failed you,” she told his son, alarmed now, because there were more men arriving. Time was growing short. “He failed me. He is old and useless and wasted. Do it!”

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.