When the Dead Awaken (14 page)

‘No idiots,' Don Francesco had said.

It was easier said than done.

Savelli sat on the table, dangling his legs over the edge. His heart was no longer in the dance. He was wearing the traditional white Basque dance costume with a red cummerbund. Under Generalissimo Franco a red cummerbund, proof that you had killed at least one member of the Guardia Civil, meant life imprisonment – if you were caught – or a bullet to the back of the head.

‘Castellarano,' he muttered to himself.

Lucia Forlani had been from Castellarano. And it was hardly a coincidence that the irritating assistant public prosecutor had stopped in the mountain town.

He had never been there himself, but seemed to remember it featuring in Napoleon's campaign.

*

The house, like all of Savelli's secret homes, had been chosen with care. It was built at an elevation of eight hundred metres and the metre-thick stone walls ensured a pleasant temperature in both summer and winter. His years of isolation meant Urs Savelli had poor tolerance of temperature extremes. The basement prison cell seemed to have installed a thermostat in his brain that switched off his thinking when the temperature rose above 23°C or fell to below 10°C.

He got up, went over to the windows and traced the journey of a raindrop down the pane with his fingertip. He looked out across the lake, which was almost invisible now. His claustrophobia stirred and he started a series of breathing exercises. Spending three years in a cell measuring 1.5 metres by 2.5 metres had also instilled in Savelli an inextinguishable need to have an unbroken view to the horizon.

He didn't know how old he was. His best guess was that he had been in the cell from the age of seventeen until he was around twenty years old.

Urs Savelli's earliest memory was waking up because he was cold. Snow covering an empty landscape outside windows he was barely tall enough to look out of, a naked room and a kitchen with a table, a bench and a stove, which had been cold to the touch. It must have gone out long ago. On the bench lay a skinny woman dressed in black. Old far beyond
her years. He had tugged at her, tried to wake her up, but her arm was as stiff as the branch of a tree.

He remembered a green truck and a man in a large black coat with a long black beard and black boots, who had opened the door to the kitchen a couple of days later. He had taken him by the hand and lifted him up into the body of the truck, given him some sacks to cover himself with and a piece of bread to eat.

Ten lean, wild, black dogs were already lying on the floor of the truck. When he woke up, he was warm. He could see through the tear in the tarpaulin that the truck was driving down an endless, snow-covered road; the dogs had snuggled up to him and kept him warm with their bodies.

Later the boy learned that the man with the beard was called Hristo. He sold guard dogs to farmers. He was famous for his dogs all over western Albania – or so he claimed, after the second of his daily bottles of vodka. He had once sold a dog to the boy's father and since his father's disappearance he had occasionally stopped by to see the woman on the kitchen bench.

‘What was my mother like?' the boy had asked once and was rewarded with a clip around the ear that nearly knocked him unconscious.

‘A good hooker,' the man had said after giving it some thought. ‘Or rather … she wasn't any good, but she was the only one south of Ohrid!'

He howled with laughter at his own wit and lay down to sleep with the dogs.

One day, while drunk, he had gone outside to urinate and fallen through the ice on a bog. The boy and the dogs had watched from the shore as the man's face paled and his movements grew slower and less coordinated. He tried to wiggle out of his coat, pull off his boots, while he stared at them, screaming. Eventually Hristo fell silent even though his mouth was still open. Eventually, he was pulled under the ice by his waterlogged clothes. His fur cap continued to float on the surface of the water and the boy fished it out with a long stick. It was a good cap.

At a market in Berat the boy traded the dogs for a dancing bear.

There was another reason. An old restlessness, which other people might call fear, rumbled inside Savelli. For a shipwrecked, orphaned
straniero
, he had been incredibly lucky. He had had a fantastic career with the Terrasino family. But with great luck came an equally great debt of karma. It was inevitable. Urs Savelli was extremely conscious of the cosmic balance sheet. He knew he would have to pay the bill one day. The art was postponing that day to extreme old age, when nothing really mattered.

Lucia and Salvatore Forlani. Yes, they were dead. He had been there when it happened. And he had seen Baron Agostino D'Avalos shot and killed in the Alpine cabin. The
old man had looked into his eyes while his pupils dilated and the last breath left his chest. Even though the Baron was dying, even though he knew he was beaten, Savelli had seen his own freshly dug grave in his fading green eyes. The old man's gaze had promised him that.

Then there was Giulio Forlani, the genius physicist with his copyright protection invention that would have ruined everything for them.

Savelli closed his eyes and rested his forehead against the cold windowpane. He grabbed the makila and swung it through the air. As always, a certain sense of reassurance flowed from the carved ivory bear on the handle, his totem.

Castellarano.

He rang a man in Naples and would appear to have caught him in the middle of lunch, because there was an infernal noise from a television, clattering cutlery, bickering children, and an outnumbered woman trying to control them.

‘Cesare?'

‘Yes.'

Savelli didn't introduce himself. His voice sufficed. Cesare. Rarely had a name been more ill-chosen. This soldier was anything but aristocratic. A fat, psychopathic toad, who dressed in shiny, colourful sports clothes, also painfully ill-chosen. But Cesare did what he was told to, though his mental capacity would forever keep him in the Family's lower echelons.

‘Cesare?'

‘
Si, signore
.'

‘Either you strangle your reptilian children and shoot your wife or you find a quiet place. This instant. Do you hear?'

A door was slammed shut in the flat in the Neapolitan suburb and Savelli could hear himself think again. An irritating slurping noise continued.

‘Cesare?'

‘Yes.'

‘Right now you're picking semi-masticated beef from your molars with your fingers, am I right?'

‘Yes, signore.'

‘Do you think you could leave the animal alone and go back a few years with me? Do you think you could do that without overtaxing your brain powers?'

‘I think so, signore.'

‘Good.'

Savelli was a vegetarian.

‘Three years ago I gave you an entirely manageable task. You were to stop a green Škoda Octavia on the A7 south of Milan and take out its driver.'

‘And I did, signore.'

‘So you did, my friend.'

Savelli pressed his eyes shut.

‘This man. Are you absolutely sure that he was dead
when you left him? Think very carefully before you answer. This is very, very important.'

‘Yes.'

‘Yes, what?'

‘I'm sure, signore.'

The words rolled out slowly.

‘Because you checked the pulse on his neck? You checked whether his pupils were reactive? That he had stopped breathing?'

‘He was a mess, signore. Completely smashed up. There was blood everywhere. I shot him twice. Once in the head and once in the chest. He was stone dead.'

‘So there was no pulse?'

Cesare was silent.

‘Was there a pulse, Cesare? Did his eyelid twitch? Was he breathing?' Savelli insisted.

‘I'm sure, signore. Quite sure. I didn't check those things you mention. I know if a man is dead or not from looking at him. There was no point.'

Savelli sighed.

‘Of course not, Cesare. Go back to your family. Don't give it another thought.'

Cesare stuttered something, but Savelli ended the call and stretched out on the rough floor boards.

Figlio di puttana!

Savelli massaged his eyes and pondered his next move. He could ask Don Francesco for L'Artista. If she was given
the job, the nosy little assistant public prosecutor Sabrina D'Avalos would be dead and gone within twenty-four hours. No power on earth could prevent it. But L'Artista was for very special occasions. A last resort. Don Francesco guarded her jealously.

The young woman who had helped them gain entry to Nanometric was an enigma: a fly constantly irritating Urs Savelli's flank. She was the only person in the world he was scared of. Among the few facts he was allowed to know was that she had a daughter who was around six, that she was married to a disabled painter and that she lived with her family at a former cider press near Brescia. When Don Francesco told him about her over a glass of apricot liqueur, he had warned him under no circumstances to ever try to identify her.

‘She's for the finer things, Urs. Delicate, difficult things. Things that can't be solved with a baseball bat, a
lupara
or plastique, do you understand? And only for special occasions. She's an athlete. Athletes must rest in order to give their best. I know you don't like the idea of working with someone you don't know well, Urs, but in her case you must make an exception.'

The captain had adopted a solemn expression and assured him that he understood – of course he did – while he thought about: (1) how much time the old man had left; (2) that these days no one ever used
lupare
, crudely sawn-off
shotguns, as they had in the old man's violent youth for close-up, ‘wet' work, but machine pistols or automatic carbines; (3) that it was a long time since anyone had referred to plastic explosives as ‘plastique'; (4) that his status in the Council was promising when the devil finally decided to come for the old man; and (5) that he wouldn't dream of working with, let alone trust, someone like L'Artista without knowing everything about her.

But an order was an order and the old man was still as dangerous as a cobra.

So Urs had hired a private detective in Milan to investigate her. The middle-aged retired policeman had been told to follow the young, dark-haired woman late one night as she left a haulage company in Via Riccardo Pitteri in an eastern suburb of Milan. The haulage company transported eco bales for the Camorra; shrink-wrapped, unprocessed waste, from the city with more than a million inhabitants, was moved from one illegal rubbish tip to another in Italy while attracting generous state and local authority subsidies. An eternal, lucrative circle. The haulier had decided to hold back income from Milan City Council; money the Camorra believed they were entitled to. An example had to be made and Don Francesco had assigned the task to L'Artista.

Savelli had told the private detective to ignore the police scanners and any emergency vehicles that might turn up, and concentrate solely on the woman.

When the gunfire from the Portakabin that served as the haulier's office died down and columns of flames from the torched trucks coloured the sky, the detective saw a figure leave the haulage company by scaling a high wire fence and jumping on a motorbike.

The detective threw his half-eaten sandwich out of the window, counted to twenty and started his anonymous Volvo.

The woman adhered to every traffic regulation and speed limit on her ride to the centre of Milan and the detective made sure that there were at least three vehicles between him and her motorbike.

He watched from a professional distance as the woman drove down the ramp into a multi-storey car park in Via Melzo. He assumed that she would shortly reappear behind the wheel of a car or on another motorbike. He knew the car park well and the only way in or out was this one underground ramp.

He was wrong.

The detective heard a click from his Volvo's back door and the cool night air that flowed into the car made the hairs on his forearms stand up.

Three days later Urs Savelli had been woken by a frantic knocking on the door to his secret flat in Rome. He had arrived after midnight and was bleary-eyed when he opened the door to a stream of complaints from
a distraught concierge. The woman was wringing her handkerchief in front of her red face. It could not go on. He, Signor Mela, would have to do something … immediately …
subito!
 … There had – handkerchief pressed against the face – been … complaints … many … he couldn't expect that decent people … the other residents in the block … would be able to tolerate – the handkerchief again – she would alert the authorities at this instant … if he didn't immediately …

Savelli eventually managed to extract a relatively coherent explanation from her. The letterbox. The residents all had letterboxes in the lobby. He followed her downstairs, breathed in once in front of the square, grey letterboxes and ordered her back up the stairwell, citing a possible risk of infection. He unlocked his letterbox, paled and locked it again.

He decided to deal with the problem himself. He had veterinary training and considerable experience in handling decomposing organic material, he told the concierge. In his flat on the fifth floor Savelli found plastic gloves, tinfoil, bin bags and gaffer tape; he ran downstairs, ensuring that the concierge remained out of sight, and with difficulty eased the head of the private detective out of the letterbox. He wrapped the head in foil and put it in a bin bag, which he sealed with tape. Then he scooped a handful of wriggling, homeless maggots into another bag, dried the inside of the letterbox with copious
amounts of kitchen towel and washed it down with ammonia and water.

As he drove away from the secret flat with the head of the private detective in his boot, he thought about the small apple wedged in between the detective's teeth.

Savelli's responsibility had been the containment and neutralizing of Forlani and Batista's new and dangerous invention. He had suggested a political solution to the Council: that influential members of the Camorra should encourage politicians in Rome – a braying herd, as Don Francesco, ever the peasant, had called them – to suppress the technology in the usual manner: by appointing a government committee and producing an endless stream of white papers, considerations and provisional circulars until the Camorra had found a final solution.