The Seventh Sacrament (33 page)

“We all want to find him,” Falcone interjected.

“Yes,” she agreed. “We all do. Unfortunately, I can’t help you there. But if you’d like to hear about the body I do have…”

They said nothing. She smiled.

“Good. Let’s make this quick.”

She shielded her eyes against the sudden harsh spring sun and stared at the sky.

“For one thing, I don’t think this weather’s going to last. The heavens are going to open sometime soon, and when that happens everyone here is going to be swimming in mud. For that very reason I’ve told Silvio that sometime in the next twenty minutes we will be putting this poor soul into a body bag and taking what’s left of him out of here. I seriously suggest you three, and any other of your colleagues who are of a gentle disposition, do not witness this event. Any objections?”

The three of them sat hunched on their little chairs, saying nothing.

“Good,” she declared, clapping her hands. “Now listen carefully, please…”

R
OSA PRABAKARAN DIDN’T KNOW THE MAN. HE WORE
a dark, somewhat shabby winter jacket, pulled tight against the rain that was now slashing down from a black, churning sky. His hood, sodden from the downpour, revealed only a snatch of face and two bright glittering eyes. Intelligent eyes. Interested.

Then he pulled an umbrella out from under his jacket. It was bright pink, the kind of cheap junk her father sold during weather like this.

“Agente,” he said cheerfully, “you should be prepared for all eventualities.”

His eyes ran her up and down. It was the same look she’d got from men everywhere in Testaccio that day, though perhaps with a touch of amused irony. Rosa Prabakaran cursed herself for dressing like this. Her clothes made her anonymous to Beatrice Bramante. To everyone else, however, it was a sign screaming
Look at me.

“Thanks,” she answered, and took the umbrella, wishing, as she did, that she could see more of his face. Commissario Bruno Messina hadn’t made himself clear on the phone. She didn’t understand why she was being dragged off surveillance like this. To start some kind of disciplinary action against Falcone? That idea concerned her. She didn’t like the old man, but she didn’t feel vindictive towards him either. In truth, she’d taken a more high-profile role in the case at the beginning than she could ever have expected. It was scarcely a surprise that Falcone had reduced her position to that which her experience actually justified.

The tiny café was deserted. The woman at the cash register was starting to stare at them.

“Aren’t you going to have a coffee? What’s the rush? By the way, what’s your name?”

“Pascale!” he replied immediately. “Didn’t Messina tell you? Jesus, things are in a mess…. I don’t know where all this is going. Do you?”

“No. The coffee.”

He pulled the hood around his head more tightly and peered at the rain, which was now a pewter sheet obscuring the old slaughterhouse. The stone figures on the portico roof were unclear. The man and the bull were one in their struggle for survival.

“I don’t want coffee,” Pascale said. “You don’t have the time for it.”

“Pascale…” she repeated thoughtfully. Rosa Prabakaran tried to remember whether she’d ever heard the name before.

“I’ve been away for a while. Sick leave. Ask Peroni about me next time you see him. Or Costa. You know his American girlfriend? My, is he a fortunate man.”

“I’ll ask them,” Rosa replied, and unhooked the cheap clasp on the umbrella, began thinking about the long walk to Via Marmorata, where she could get a bus or a tram.

“Where’s Signora Bramante now?”

“At home, as far as I know. She doesn’t go out much.”

“And the man? This butcher you saw?”

Her eyes went to the plain public housing block across the street. “He went in there. I haven’t seen him come out.”

“Did you watch all the time?”

“Yes,” she lied, badly. Watching suspects was fine. Watching the door of some cheap little apartment block, noting the comings and goings of people who didn’t interest you was deadly boring. When the sun came out briefly, she’d disobeyed Messina, found a bench by a small grassy slope of the Monte dei Cocci, sat there, thinking of nothing, for a long time, feeling useless, unwanted. She returned to the café on the hour, when Messina said his man would turn up. Even then, she’d been daydreaming. Wondering what she’d have been doing had she taken up the offer of a junior lawyer’s post in the criminal practice near the courts in Clodio. Not looking like some hooker, waiting to be relieved of duty in order to betray an officer she scarcely knew, that was for sure.

She didn’t know where the butcher was, and a part of her didn’t care.

“You really think they’re lovers?” Pascale asked.

“Messina mentioned that?”

“I’m taking over from you, aren’t I?”

Rosa Prabakaran thought about what she’d seen. It couldn’t have lasted more than thirty seconds. Could you really read an entire relationship from a single, snatched glimpse into the lives of two complete strangers?

“They didn’t want anyone to see them. He kissed her. She didn’t…” The right word was important. “She didn’t seem to object. That’s all I know.”

“This happens all the time,” he said, frowning. His expression had become severe, judgemental. “A man goes to jail. His best friend comes round to sample the goods. That’s the trouble with the modern world. People have no sense of duty or propriety. A little messing around outside the nest here and there…no one minds. So long as that’s all it is. So long as it doesn’t mess with the family or get in the way of what’s important. A man needs a sense of priority. The trouble is these days people just don’t care. They live their lives through the end of their dicks and nothing else. This lacks…balance.”

She didn’t like him, she decided. She wanted to go and meet Bruno Messina, give him what he wanted, then surprise her father with a bottle of good
prosecco
to celebrate all those rip-off umbrellas he’d sold this freezing, wet, baffling spring day.

“He’s all yours,” she said brusquely, and turned toward the door. His hand stopped her.

“Let me give you a lift to the station or somewhere,” he said. “You’re going to get drenched, and frankly you’re not dressed for it. I’ve got a civilian vehicle. No one’s going to know. Besides…” He glanced again at the block across the street where the butcher lived. “I don’t think he’s going anywhere now, is he?”

They walked round the corner, a long walk, three hundred metres or more, with him holding the umbrella over her head, letting the rain pelt down on his black hood. He was parked on a little road that ran away from the old slaughterhouse, down what looked like a country lane, narrow, empty, desolate. A line of shattered pot shards from the grassy banks of the Monte dei Cocci had spilled onto the street, dislodged by the rain. They stepped over them and walked towards a white van, parked by a couple of large overflowing trash bins from the restaurants and nightclubs up the street.

He stopped at the rear.

“You never asked to see my ID,” he said, and there was a censorious tone in his voice. “You know, if I was to tell someone that, the commissario say, it wouldn’t go down well for you.”

“You’re right. I’m sorry.”

Rosa felt bone-weary. He’d moved the umbrella so now it didn’t cover her properly. The rain fell on her exposed legs, which were cold. She was shivering.

“It’s important you see it,” he said. “I keep things inside.”

She wasn’t thinking straight, but something still told her this was wrong.

He placed a fist firmly in her back and edged her towards the van doors. There were no windows at the rear. Something was painted on the sides that she couldn’t quite make out, obscured by the rain. Lettering and a symbol, all in blood red.

He pulled out keys, worked the handle, and opened the doors. Then he nudged her forward to look. She blinked. There was a man inside the van, trussed like a Christmas turkey, some kind of rag round his mouth, hands bound behind his back, ankles tied tightly together so that he lay on the floor able only to roll helplessly around, saying nothing, going nowhere. The van interior was spotless, antiseptically clean, and his floundering meant he was careening around it, bumping into white industrial boxes full of meat.

The trussed man on the floor had frightened, familiar eyes. It was the butcher from the market. She knew that the moment she saw him, and was amazed that her first emotion was fury: anger directed at herself for being so stupid.

“What do you give a condemned man?” asked the voice behind her, which was different now. More cultured. More distanced from the interested, human emotion he must have summoned up from somewhere to get her here. “Anything he wants, I guess. Otherwise he just takes it.”

Her hands were trembling as she fought to get the little purse off her shoulder, struggling to find the gun she’d secreted inside. The strap caught. Then his powerful fist wrapped itself around the cord, snapped it, flung the bag and the precious gun into the gutter.

She thought about fighting, struggled to remember the self-defence lessons she’d learned so carefully in the training school out on the Via Tiburtina, day after day, arms and hands hurting, bruises rising on her shins. But this wasn’t a classroom. He was strong, so much more powerful than she could ever be. His hands moved everywhere, grasping, hurting, forcing. Hands that seemed to enjoy what they were doing: pushing her down onto the white metal floor of the van, next to the trussed butcher, twisting a rag around her mouth, one that tasted of something raw and chemical, tying her hands, her ankles, securing her in a few swift easy movements as easily as a man preparing a beast for the knife.

She stared up at him. He saw. The hood came down. It wasn’t the face from the photographs in the files, she realised. Not quite. Giorgio Bramante, in the flesh, had only a passing resemblance to the man Rosa thought she would see. He was greyer, more sallow-faced, with the complexion of someone dying from the inside out of some cruel disease, like a cancer gnawing away relentlessly. Except for the eyes, which blazed at her.

The eyes were happy. Hungry. Amused.

C
OSTA LISTENED. HE’D THOUGHT HE WAS GETTING BLASÉ
about this kind of detail. He was wrong. What had happened to Giorgio Bramante’s former student, Sandro Vignola, if Teresa was right—and it was difficult to see how she could be mistaken—was as vicious and heartless as anything Bramante had done to his other victims. Perhaps more so. And that made Costa ask himself:
Was this different somehow?

There was much work to be done on the remains. They had suffered badly from animal attack and substantial decomposition in the airless, damp enclosure of the drain. This would take days to complete back in the morgue, and require outside assistance, possibly from a private lab or that of the Carabinieri. But two facts were clear already. Vignola had been gagged. The cloth that had been tied round his mouth to prevent him calling for help was still in place. And he’d been hobbled, hand and foot, so that he could scarcely crawl.

“Hobbled with what?” Falcone asked.

Teresa shouted to one of the morgue monkeys. He came out with a strong nylon tie, with a buckle on one end. It stank.

“I’m only guessing here,” she told them, “but I’d put money on the fact this is the same kind of hobble they use in a slaughterhouse. Remember, Bramante was working in one while he was in jail? He could have stolen a couple when he came out for the weekend. Also…”—she looked at Peroni as if to say
Sorry—
“…just to make sure, he broke both of the victim’s ankles. He did it after the hobble went on, so perhaps he was worried his original plan wouldn’t work.”

“This plan being?” Peroni asked.

“He crippled Sandro Vignola and put him in the drain. Then he capped the end of it with bricks. It wouldn’t take long. Not if he knew what he was doing. I asked her earlier…” She nodded at Judith Turnhouse, still sitting under the awning, now talking quietly, calmly, to a policewoman. “One of Bramante’s many specialities as an archaeologist was apparently the early uses of brick and concrete,” Teresa reported. “They knew an awful lot about that, even two thousand years ago. They knew the right mortar to make for a situation where there was damp. They knew what kind of material to choose so that it didn’t fall down after a couple of years. That’s what he did here. He bound Sandro Vignola. He made sure he couldn’t utter a sound. Then he walled him up in there and left him to die.”