When the Dead Awaken (39 page)

She was sure it was a precaution that would be withdrawn once they no longer believed there was any threat to her personal safety.

She had only seen Federico Renda once since Brescia. He had been very busy, but also quietly congratulatory and impeccably polite. She had a million questions before she went into his office, but hadn't been able to remember a single one of them when he paused in his congratulations and gave her an encouraging look with his unswervingly sad eyes. The photo of L'Artista that had always hung behind his desk chair was gone. In its place hung an architect's drawing of the new Palace of Justice, which was being built on the other side of the piazza.

They would have to think of a less formal event soon, he said. A little gathering. A private celebration. There were some people in Rome who would very much like to meet her. She had stared at him in horror and he waited a moment and then commented – a little tartly – on her lack of enthusiasm. She had a career to think of, he had reminded her. If she wanted it.

Sabrina had asked for new cases and Federico Renda suddenly became busy with some papers.

They would just have to wait and see, he said without looking up. She was still seeing the trauma therapist. There was no need to rush things. Run risks. He had suggested a holiday.

She pointed out she wasn't suffering from shellshock and Federico Renda had smiled softly and looked at his watch. Renda's telephone rang and she suspected him of arranging for one of his secretaries to call no later than five minutes after the arrival of young D'Avalos. He started muttering something about an urgent conference, plane tickets and so on, life went on … That was the bottom line, wasn't it? You could only do your best.

She sighed and stood up, interrupting his grandfatherly platitudes.

Her desk was empty. She had sharpened all her pencils and arranged her notebooks at right angles to the edge of the desk.

She thought briefly about He Who Must Not Be Named, who had vanished into thin air. She had packed Primo Alba and all his being into a steel box, locked the box into a ship's chest and dropped it into the Mariana Trench. Or into an active volcano – depending on her mood. She was in no doubt that it was Alba who had killed Don Francesco in his own home, even though no one knew for sure, and Federico Renda had clammed up like an oyster. And Alba had shot L'Artista as if she were a mad dog. No one had
wanted awkward court cases, celebrity lawyers, remorseful
pentiti
, endless negotiations, media hype and the politicians getting involved, for God's sake! They hadn't wanted legal niceties mixed up in this case. The GIS and Federico Renda had sent an unequivocal message to Francesco Terrasino's heirs.

Sitting alone on the wide backseat of the Mercedes was luxurious but lonely, and Sabrina missed her old Opel, which was currently being examined by the army's explosives experts somewhere in Milan.

She asked the driver to stop outside the bookshop in Via Dei Mille and wandered around the shop for half an hour before she found what she was looking for: an illustrated atlas with thick pages that could do lots of exciting things – make a cardboard map open up and change into a globe, a starry sky that you could rotate, and funny holograms of animals typical of each continent. She intended to study it with Ismael. Approach the subject of Africa in a gentle and informative way. Perhaps the boy would like it, perhaps he wouldn't. It was impossible to predict. The only rule seemed to be that anything she herself had been desperate to get her hands on as a child – a remote-control car, a steam engine or an electric racing circuit – never found favour with Ismael and was passed on to the other children at the orphanage at the speed of lightning – while he would be mesmerized with gratitude for ridiculous,
cheap trinkets such as a small whistle, a carved figure or a soft toy dog.

She would like to travel with him. A week somewhere warm. A week in a place where there was water – even though he hated the sea – possibly with some palm trees. The management of the orphanage and the child psychiatrist had their doubts about her project. A huge responsibility, Sabrina, they said. Very big. Perhaps it was more about her needs than Ismael's. She objected. Surely they couldn't know until she tried it. The way things were now, Ismael never saw anything. When he was too old for the orphanage, where would he go? Another institution filled with strangers?

They had avoided her gaze. They wanted to wait and see. Perhaps a week away was a little … extreme. They suggested a day trip instead.

For security reasons, her driver informed the bodyguards' central office of the address of the orphanage and their arrival time. When they arrived, he got out first and checked the area before he gave the all clear to Sabrina. She hurried across the pavement with the carrier bag in her hand. She nodded to the student behind the hatch at the entrance and walked up slowly to the first floor. She stopped by a window on the darkened stairs and looked down into the courtyard. The light was on in the sports hall across the courtyard and the corridors lay silent. Some
company had donated a digital projector and a box of DVDs to the orphanage and now every Tuesday evening was movie night. She stood on tiptoes and could see the top of the screen suspended from the wall bars at the back of the hall. She saw a close-up of Harry Potter's scarred forehead and intense eyes behind his spectacles. The young wizard would appear to be in the middle of yet another showdown with Lord Voldemort.

She walked down the corridor to Ismael's room. The boy never attended the screenings. The few light bulbs in the ceiling that had not yet been smashed gave the linoleum floor a dull shine, the shadows at the far end of the corridor were as black as ink. There was no light under Ismael's door.

‘Ismael?'

His room was empty and the bed neatly made, as always. She smiled at the sight of the postcard from Milan. The cathedral. It had been stuck to the wall with Sellotape. Ruler straight, like all her other postcards, in a row above his bed.

She put the bag from the bookshop on his bed and walked back along the corridor. She heard a noise from the bathroom at the far end of the corridor and turned around.

The large bathroom was cool and quiet. There were a dozen cubicles with lavatories, but all the doors were missing and the light wasn't working. The switch merely
gave a small, impotent click when she pressed it. A little light from the streetlights across the road fell diagonally through the windows and down on to the grey tiled floor. She turned on the tap and drank some cold water from the palm of her hand.

Sabrina straightened up when she heard the faint, regular clicks. Like a forgotten metronome in a music room. It took several long seconds before she identified the sound.

‘If you hear that stick – like a chisel against a gravestone – you must run as fast as you can and don't ever look back. Will you promise me that?' Federico Renda had said. And there was nothing she would rather do. But there was nowhere to run. So she stood completely still while her mind raced and shut her eyes, which opened instinctively when she heard his whisper.

‘Dottoressa Sabrina D'Avalos.'

He was very close. The voice flowed from the shadows right behind her. A pleasant voice. The consonants well formed and clear; the Albanian accent barely noticeable.

She didn't move. The man's position would also appear to be stationary. Perhaps he was standing in the doorway. Perhaps. She had a panic button on a string around her neck connected to a receiver in her bodyguard's pocket, but knew she would never get to press it.

‘I find myself … for the first time since I was thirteen
years old, incidentally … unemployed, Dottoressa D'Avalos. Fortunately I have numerous interests to keep myself busy. I lack for nothing. Nothing but a certain conclusion … You understand. I have nothing against you personally. Of course not. But there has to be a certain …'

Sabrina spun around and her hand found the handle of the Walther. Since Brescia she had acquired the habit of having a bullet in the chamber. The weapon was ready to discharge once she pushed the safety catch forwards with her thumb. Most people assumed that you waited politely while they finished speaking before taking the next step. Perhaps Savelli was one of them.

She had cocked the weapon when her arm grew numb and dead. Savelli had swung the makila in a large arc through the air while she was still thinking about drawing the pistol and its lead-capped tip had hit her right upper arm just below the shoulder joint at full force.

He was a dancing, fleeting shadow. Free from sound or smell. He was very close to her and she found herself lying on the floor without knowing how it had happened. The Walther skidded across the tiles and ended up at the far end of the lavatories. She could see it in the distance. It winked wistfully at her, but it might as well have been located on the moon.

She turned over on her side, her jacket fell open and she studied the toes of Urs Savelli's shiny shoes in front of her face.

‘I think we were interrupted, signorina,' he said. ‘You really mustn't exert yourself.'

She rolled over, tried to kick his legs away from under him or at least destabilize him. Her arm was heavy and leaden and agonizingly painful. The makila. A long thin blade emerged from the stick while he avoided her kicking feet effortlessly.

The blade swiftly and smoothly penetrated the right side of her chest and her body froze in shock. She couldn't get her next breath. It was impossible. She tried sitting up before the darkness took her, but she needed the use of her right arm. She ended up on her left side and could now see his pale face above her.

Savelli smiled and the blade of the makila sank into her again … more slowly this time … probing almost … into her chest cavity, now on the left side. A stream of bubbling blood was forced through her nose and mouth.

She thought that Savelli said something to her about giving into it. Letting death take her. Like a warm bath.

Her chest heaved in wild spasms. It fought for her even though she had given up, and she managed to inhale a little bit of air. She felt drowsy. Warm. She, too, had started to smile when she noticed Ismael. The boy was coming out of a cubicle, the last in the row. His shorts hung around his ankles and he shuffled across the tiles, put down his comic and picked up the Walther. He walked towards them with her gun in his hands. His sandals
flip-flopped softly against the floor. Ismael's face was grave and introspective. He didn't look at her, and he didn't look at Savelli.

She lifted her head and saw a frown and a bemused smile spread across Urs Savelli's handsome, middle-aged face. He held the bloody stick in both hands.

Now quite close to them, Ismael lifted the pistol and fired twice in quick succession.

Sabrina didn't see where the shots landed, but she heard a surprised, deep sigh and a few seconds later a bump as Savelli sat down. The stick crashed down on the tiles.

She got on to her elbow and looked at Savelli's face. There was a neat, black hole in his neck and his white shirt was already soaked in blood above his heart. He smiled apologetically at her.

Ismael carefully placed the pistol on the floor and looked at Sabrina.

‘Bang, bang,' he said quietly.

She thought she might have nodded. She couldn't agree more.

He walked back to his cubicle and picked up the comic on his way back before she had time to tell him that he was the best and cleverest and bravest boy in the whole world. He disappeared into the cubicle and Sabrina wearily turned her head towards the voices and faces in the doorway.

She would like to have told them something about
Savelli and Ismael, but she had no air for words. Her white shirt was red to her belt and she could feel her throat filling up. She rested her cheek against the cool tiles.

It had been impressed on the staff in the intensive care unit that they mustn't speak to the man; that they should simply go about their work as if he wasn't there.

He had been at the woman's bedside constantly. While she was in surgery for six hours – where the surgeons had given up on her several times, but had carried on out of pure defiance, six hours where her blood pressure disappeared and swearing anaesthetists pumped plasma expanders and universal donor blood into all the small woman's accessible veins until her pulse line had tentatively reappeared on the monitors, only to disappear soon afterwards and trigger shrill alarms which nearly drove everyone insane. He had sat like a sphinx by the side of her bed in the intensive care unit while they kept the seriously injured assistant public prosecutor in an artificial coma and a ventilator took care of her breathing. He barely moved. Didn't look at or speak to anyone.

Late in the afternoon on the second day, they had taken
the assistant public prosecutor off the ventilator and she had woken up a couple of hours later.

There were concerns that she might have suffered permanent brain damage from oxygen starvation.

When she was stable, she was moved to an ordinary side ward.

As the sun was setting behind the hospital's tallest buildings and the light in the ward was deep and golden, the department's most experienced nurse came to change the patient's drip. She discovered that Dottoressa D'Avalos had opened her eyes and was looking at her. For the first time the nurse observed the assistant public prosecutor's remarkable slanted smoky eyes that seemed unnaturally big in her white face. She put a hand on the bedguard and smiled at the patient. The water in the chest drainage canister bubbled steadily. Tomorrow, both her lungs would probably have unfolded completely and the canister could be removed. There were still the drains in the abdominal cavity, but here they had to take it one step at a time. When the patient had first arrived at the hospital, the admitting doctor had been about to declare her dead on arrival. Her lungs had collapsed, she had lost a lot of blood and she had injuries from stab wounds to her chest, her diaphragm and liver. Yet a more experienced doctor had decided to start resuscitation. Just in case – and because His Excellency
il procuratore generale
Federico Renda was deluging the hospital with telephone calls.