When the Dead Awaken (24 page)

‘I kissed your brother once,' she said.

He said nothing.

‘By the swimming pool,' she said.

‘Behind the changing rooms.' Giulio Forlani nodded. ‘You wore a yellow dress.'

‘What?'

‘I saw you. And Bruno, of course.'

‘Do you really remember that?'

‘Bruno was always the lucky one,' he said.

‘Will you be coming back?' she asked. ‘Gianni would like … I don't know what … I would also like …'

‘I'll speak to Gianni. Perhaps, if I'm lucky, I'll come back.'

‘Would you like that?'

‘Very much.'

‘What happened? This morning.'

He touched his neck and looked out of the window.

‘Nothing. It was nothing. I was just startled by something I saw.'

‘The nurse said you had a stroke.'

‘It was nothing, Antonia, really. I'm okay.'

‘Don't forget to take your pills,' she said, and dried her eyes angrily with a corner of her cardigan.

‘I've packed them. And I won't forget to take them. Thank you.
Arrivederci
.'

‘Take care of yourself,' she mumbled.

She heard him on the stairs, took a pillow and pressed it against her face.

Antonia continued to sit on Giulio Forlani's neatly made bed; she stayed there while she heard him speak to her son through an open window and when the motorbike started up. The engine howled between the garage walls as if in Purgatory. It clattered across the cobblestones in the courtyard, and on to the road before the sound faded away. She remained on the bed, staring at the floor, and again the sound of Gianni's cornet rose up from the garage. Each note more tense and melancholy than its predecessor.

Later she went downstairs to the kitchen, swept up the shards of the broken water glass and put them in the bin. She sat down at the kitchen table and glanced at today's
Corriere della Sera
; at the crossword and the dense columns of personal ads. The crossword was half completed in Enzo's – or Giulio's – neat handwriting.

Antonia let her eyes glide down the columns with their cryptic and coded personal ads. Halfway through the third column she wondered why the same phrase appeared twice with a couple of other ads in between:

Janus seeks friendship with Minerva

In the first one ‘Minerva' was followed by the word ‘Milan' and ‘****', while only two stars followed ‘Minerva' in the second. A mobile telephone number was listed in the first, but there was nothing in the second. Giulio Forlani had circled the ads with a fine pencil.

Antonia put down the newspaper and looked at the ceiling. It was quiet upstairs. Far too quiet.

Milan

Sabrina woke up in the bathtub at five o'clock in the morning and found it impossible to get back to sleep. Not because the bathtub was uncomfortable, but because she was afraid. It was like staring down a black drain where everything whirled around before being washed away. She had been woken up by her own inchoate shouting; strange words that lingered between the tiled walls long after she had opened her eyes and closed her mouth. Sabrina had placed both the Walther and the Colt within comfortable reach on the bathroom's bidet and arranged duvets, pillows and blankets in the tub after Nestore Raspallo had left. He hadn't just left, he had walked out on her.

This enigmatic young man was unlikely to be the only one capable of tracing the use of a MasterCard in Milan.

Sabrina decided to chase him out of her consciousness with an imaginary baseball bat every time he pushed
his way in, something he was doing with alarming frequency.

The Camorra didn't murder public prosecutors or high-level police officers. It was an inviolable rule. Every clan and every individual Camorrista looked down on the Cosa Nostra, especially the Corleone family, for the murders of the investigative judges Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino. The killings were counterproductive, they attracted publicity and they damaged vital links to politicians who, of course, had to profess loyalty to the forces of law and order after each high-profile assassination, and they washed away the financial and political lubricant that oiled the wheels – political alliances that ensured the Camorra new, lucrative contracts for road building, public sector construction projects and waste management.

The Camorra preferred to destroy the reputation of a public prosecutor; they ruined his or her career by making them the subject of scandal, by getting the public prosecutor pilloried in the press, making him look suspicious, ridiculous, accusing him of fraud, incompetence, nepotism or abuse of power and getting him transferred to some bureaucratic gulag where he would be harmless and disillusioned. The methods were many and subtle. The attack on Federico Renda had been an exception, and a weighty decision, which had undoubtedly given ‘The System' plenty to think about, created internal hostilities
and long, heated discussions. The attack was sanctioned only because it was regarded as a financial necessity. Renda had grown too mighty, too effective and successful.

But even the Camorra drew a line. On one side of that line you were faceless, a respectable agent of law and order, like thousands of others; an understandably anonymous and tolerated public servant who was simply doing their job. On the other side, you had earned a name for yourself, a face, you became someone who failed to respect the status and dignity of the old clans; an unforgivable threat. A person many Camorristi talked about. Someone a young, hot-headed Camorrista might be tempted to go after. Sabrina knew she was well on the way to getting a name and a ‘face', and she dared hardly think the thought through to its conclusion. Her brothers, her mother … even Ismael … could be targeted by the Camorra. They could make her turn right or left, or force her to disappear into the witness protection programme – sell flowers in Stockholm or hire out surfboards on Lesbos for the rest of her life.

She climbed out of the tub, carried the bed linen back to the bed, returned to the bathroom and took a long hot shower while she suppressed the new warm sensation in her groin and inspected her injuries in the mirror. She had an interesting discoloration and bump on her forehead where Nestore had hit her. Her lower jaw hurt when she rocked it from side to side. She brushed her teeth with
some difficulty. She tried to cover the worst damage to her face with a little foundation, but despaired at the result.

She got dressed, lay down on the bed and switched on the television. The murders of Dr Carlo Mazzaferro and Laura Rizzo were breaking news on every channel. Photographers sent to an exclusive property in the Porta Romana district had found a tall, slim woman dressed in black; silk scarf around her head, sunglasses, and getting into a Mercedes with tinted windows. On the other side of the car two teenage boys were making their way through the throng of journalists and photographers. Mazzaferro's wife and sons. They looked exactly like grieving relatives in news broadcasts always did, as if the bereaved were told how to dress and behave by the media.

Sabrina switched off the television.

An hour later she got off the bed, put on her anorak and boots, armed herself and threw her rucksack over her shoulder.

In the lobby she found today's
Corriere della Sera
and entered the quiet dining hall with its high ceiling, where she attracted the inevitable, polite attention from the other very differently dressed guests. Sabrina didn't care. After turning up as an emo in Emporio di Massimiliano Di Luca, nothing would ever be as embarrassing again.

People instinctively avoided her at the colossal buffet, and she forced herself to pile her plate high with scrambled eggs, bacon, bread, cheese, butter and jam.

She drank juice and coffee, munching her breakfast mechanically without tasting it as she flicked through the newspaper. She found the ad halfway down the third column, and was about to turn over when she spotted an almost identical ad a little further down. Only two stars after the word ‘Minerva'. No telephone number. No ‘Milan' or other geographical location. Sabrina checked her new mobile. There had been no calls while she showered.

In the absence of any better interpretations, she had assumed that the number of stars after ‘Minerva' referred to the four weeks in a month. Today was the 11th of September; the front page of the newspaper was divided between the ninth anniversary of the attack on the World Trade Center, the murders on the Como Express and a suicide bomb in a market in Baghdad, so perhaps she should have limited her entry to two stars. But then again the number of stars – which she was sure wasn't coincidental – could mean so many things.

She folded the newspaper, glanced around the dining hall without noticing anything unusual, and stroked the newspaper absent-mindedly with a finger.

A hotel side exit took her to Via Agnello; she pulled her hood up and walked slowly around the back of the building and into Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II. There were few people in the shopping arcades so early in the day, which suited her fine. Identifying potential tails when the streets
were practically empty was much easier. At one point her heart skipped a beat when out of the corner of her eye she saw a figure who could have been Nestore Raspallo. The acute joy ambushed and shocked her, and she cursed herself – yet she could not help turning around to look for him while forbidden joy bubbled up inside her despite her self-reproach. But the figure was gone.

She ended up in front of an exclusive menswear shop. The shop assistants were getting ready to open. Behind the counter she spotted one of the two surveillance cameras that had been the mute eyewitnesses to the disappearance of Lucia and Salvatore Forlani – accompanied by her beloved father. She turned around and examined the lifts opposite. There were four, with stainless steel doors and two sets of illuminated buttons.

She went over to them.

One of the lifts opened with a ping and startled her.

A Filipino cleaner looked at her in surprise. She wheeled her cart out of the lift and Sabrina looked inside. No power on earth could make her enter that lift. She smiled to the woman and began a short conversation, which despite some language problems resulted in the cleaner photographing Sabrina with her own mobile next to the lifts with many smiles and gestures.

Sabrina thanked her and offered the small woman a €10 note for her troubles, but she refused to accept it.

*

The zombie behind the counter of the Internet café recognized her and nodded when the door closed behind her. Sabrina could have sworn that the two boys from the other day hadn't moved an inch from
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare
in her absence.

He handed her a frosted can of Coke from the fridge without asking, and she sat down in front of a vacant computer and transferred the photograph taken in the Galleria to the PC via her mobile's mini USB cable. Sabrina knew that she was exactly 167 centimetres tall. Her boots made it 168.5 centimetres. She had been standing close to the lift door when the cleaner had taken the picture and with the help of a simple drawing programme she could calculate the height of the lift door accurately.

According to her father's passport he had been 175 centimetres tall in his stockinged feet. She cut and pasted the old recording from the surveillance cameras into the photo-editing programme and froze the sequence at the moment when her father passed the lift door and confronted Lucia and Salvatore Forlani. She moved the grid over the image. The man in the oilskin jacket was exactly 176.5 centimetres tall. Her father would obviously have been wearing shoes or boots. She sighed, and drained the Coke. Her father's flat cap matched the one in the pictures exactly. Everything added up. Her own father had been the last person to see Lucia and Salvatore Forlani alive. Apart from L'Artista, of course.

*

The streets were already filled with cars, trucks, scooters, motorbikes and pedestrians, the deafening noise of traffic and voices; Sabrina felt overwhelmed, invaded, breathless. She knew that even the cathedral, her usual place of refuge, would be packed with tourists, gesticulating guides, nuns on pilgrimage and groups of schoolchildren. So without further ado she continued across the cathedral square, hailed a cab and asked to be taken to Milan's Lambrate Station. She went into the ladies' lavatory and left immediately. She was hoping to wrong-foot anyone who might be watching her, but no one at the busy commuter station staggered, turned around, changed direction or behaved suspiciously.

She drank some more coffee, bought a one-way ticket and found a vacant seat on the 11.25 a.m. regional service to Bergamo, forty kilometres north-east of Milan; the D'Avalos family's ancestral home for the last 1,200 years, and a town she knew inside out.

The fashion house had taken a deep breath – and was holding it: in twenty-six days, four hours and twenty-two minutes the carnival procession would dance through the streets of Milan unveiling Di Luca's summer collection. Everyone expected it to be the triumph it always was. Front and centre pages in every exclusive fashion magazine would be cleared by those editors and photographers who had been lucky enough to be invited and the designs would
make every rival designer contemplate suicide or a career change. A gigantic digital clock suspended in the old factory hall showed the countdown to a hundredth of a second. The mood was tense and heightened, but not feverish. The fever would set in three or four days before the procession. Assistants, stylists and seamstresses would dart around with their pin cushions, beauty boxes, tape and scissors, tear around the city in taxis or riding pillion on messengers' scooters, their mobiles glued to their ears, clutching bottles of Evian water and labelled bags with G-strings, bras, dresses, shoes and stockings for each model's change. Some models would change up to eight times behind the runway, redo their hairstyle and makeup, and replace every item of clothing, shoes, bags, accessories and jewellery.