Read When the Dead Awaken Online
Authors: Steffen Jacobsen
When the Dead Awaken
First published in Great Britain in 2013 by
Quercus Editions Ltd
55 Baker Street
7th Floor, South Block
London
W1U 8EW
Copyright © 2013 by Steffen Jacobsen
English translation copyright © 2013 by Charlotte Barslund
The moral right of Steffen Jacobsen to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
The translator asserts her moral right to be identified as the translator of the work.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
PBO ISBN 978 1 78087 629 0
EBOOK ISBN 978 1 78087 630 6
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places and events are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
You can find this and many other great books at:
www.quercusbooks.co.uk
Steffen Jacobsen is a Danish orthopaedic surgeon and consultant.
When the Dead Awaken
is his third novel. He was inspired to write it by his travels around Italy and by the writer and journalist Roberto Saviano's
Gomorrah
, a non-fiction book about the Camorra.
With thanks to Thomas Harder for everything Italian
.
Port of Naples, 1 September 2010
Gaetano Costa had long since ceased to notice Naples' famous red lighthouse, which filled the cabin of his crane with white, red and green light every fifteen seconds. His eyes were fixed on a monitor, which showed the freezer container, weighing eighteen tonnes, swinging under the crane's spreader, fifteen metres below his cabin, and thirty metres above the quay. He adjusted the joysticks that were controlling the container's journey from the trailer truck on Vittorio Emanuele II Quay to the top layer of containers on Pancoast Lines' newest container ship, the threehundred-metre long
Taixan
. Gaetano was proud of his hands and what they could accomplish. Some people had the stamina and the concentration to become the invisible link between the gigantic winch of the Terex crane, the flexible steel wires, the moving container and the pitching ship's deck â whatever the weather or visibility â while others never mastered it.
Earlier that evening American engineers with broad smiles and thumbs-up had said goodbye to an anxious Gaetano and his equally sceptical foreman. The job required the Italians to speak and understand a kind of pidgin English, and they had nodded unconvinced in response to the engineers' parting cry of âDon't worry, guys!'
Nevertheless, Costa had to admit that the crane now worked like a dream. It was as if the American engineers in their white overalls had integrated his spine into the crane's control systems.
It had been a good shift. A thin crescent moon sat high in the sky, the sea was black and calm, and the last container of the night hung safely below. He had the Chinese loading officer barking orders into one ear of his headset and John Denver singing in the other. When the white container with the green Maltese crosses on its sides had been delivered and secured, the ship would slip its moorings and reverse into the basin to make room for yet another of the illuminated container ships anchored on the dark roadstead of Naples like a never-ending chain of fairy lights.
Gaetano would climb down from the cabin, change, chat briefly with his replacement, swallow two painkillers for the left-sided headache which the signature flashes of the lighthouse always induced, before spending a couple of pleasant and uneventful hours at a late night café drinking coffee, smoking cigarettes, reading
La Gazetta
dello Sport
and most likely indulging in an erotic fantasy featuring the almond-skinned waitress, Giuseppina. When the sun rose he would cycle home to his bachelor flat in Via Colonnello Carlo Lahalle.
It was by no means the first freezer container with the distinctive green cross that Gaetano had loaded on to a Pancoast-owned ship. Always late at night. Always as the last item and always when Filippo Montesi from Autoritá Portuale di Napoli, the Neapolitan Port Authority, was the harbour master on duty. The container had been delivered by an anonymous truck, which kept its engine running and drove off the moment the crane had removed its load.
The screen by Gaetano Costa's right knee showed him the details of the container's barcode. The consignee was an anonymous warehouse in Macao, the sender a shipping company in Hanover: two destinations that deviated completely from the normal traffic. However, the fifty-five-year-old crane operator, whose body had moulded itself to the shape of the cabin with the passage of time, had, like everyone else in the port, learned never to ask questions. The Port of Naples processed twenty million tonnes of freight every year and the freezer container represented barely a single particle in this unimaginably extensive stream of goods.
In this mighty port, the Camorra had a thousand eyes and ears, and not one container moved without its knowledge.
The monitor by Gaetano's knee displayed the section of the quay between the crane tracks and the ship. Traffic was usually barred from this area during loading and unloading, but tonight was an exception: a camera crew from the British television station Channel 4 had been granted access to shoot a popular series with a breathless, globetrotting presenter.
It was the absence of a particular sound that made Gaetano mutter the word âno'. The missing sound made the sweat break out under his orange overalls. The ratchet-locking pin in the cable drum above the cabin was no longer transmitting its solid clicks â the spreader was in free fall. The numbers on the drum's digital revolution counter spun faster than the eye could follow. Costa flicked open the safety cap on the emergency brake and his palm hit the red button to release the secondary locking clamps that bit deep into the oiled cable to break the fall of the runaway container.
An ear-piercing metallic sound made Gaetano Costa look up. While he muttered âno' again and again, while he bashed his hand until it bled on the emergency-brake button, he saw the fifteen-tonne trolley keel over right above his head. Sparks flew from the undercarriage of the drum housing, and the colossal construction rocked menacingly.
The white container tumbled towards its doom,
condemning Gaetano Costa to certain death at the hands of the Camorra in its wake.
The presenter on the quay heard the high-pitched squeal above her and watched in disbelief as the soundman was replaced by the shipping container on the square of tarmac which he had been standing on a second ago.
The impact of the container caused her and the rest of the camera crew to jump twenty centimetres into the air, and she felt her hair stand on end. Everyone was momentarily deafened and many experienced various degrees of deafness in the days that followed.
The producer landed first on his Italian loafers and shouted in a thick voice:
âF-u-u-ck! Did you get that, Jack?'
Then he discovered a part of his own tongue that he had bitten off, instinctively caught it in his hand, and fell silent.
A veteran of Beirut, Tikrit, The Foreign Correspondents' Club in Hong Kong and Wilma's Bar, the Irish cameraman was the first to pull himself together. He held the camera steady, and zoomed in on a twisted aluminium bar, a microphone, a cable and an undamaged tape recorder that were the only visible remains of the soundman. Next, the open doors of the smashed container from which white cocoons spilled out on to the tarmac through an ice-cold-hoar
frost that reeked of diesel; and then a wall of perforated and rotting black bin bags from which human body parts in every stage of decomposition were sticking out. A skeletal hand ended up a few centimetres from his Converse. He held his breath as he let the camera light up every gruesome detail of the steel coffin.
Through the glass floor of the cabin, Gaetano Costa saw with a kind of gloomy joy how the elegantly uniformed Filippo Montesi tried to yank the camera from the cameraman who, without straining himself, and with the camera still securely resting on his shoulder, knocked the harbour master to the ground.
Costa, who had seen a thing or two during his time in the port, frowned. Herding Chinese workers from the Camorra's sweatshops into a garage with rubber seals on the door, and connecting a hose from the exhaust of a trailer truck to a pipe in the wall, was generally regarded as an effective and humane way of putting down worn-out slave labour. After gassing them, every form of identification was removed from the deceased and the bodies vacuum-packed in white plastic. The containers were eased overboard when the ship was directly above the threekilometre-deep Agadir Canyon off the coast of North Africa. However, the containers didn't usually contain black bin bags with body parts. This was a first.
*
The production assistant punched in the numbers of the Italian police, the ambulance service, the fire service and Channel 4's news desk in Rome on her mobile, while the presenter frantically delved into her artistic persona for a suitable character who would appear both resourceful and glamorous.
The crane cabin was equipped with a small but powerful pair of binoculars. Costa put the strap around his neck, opened the door and climbed out on the ladder to the crane's main tower. After two minutes of careful climbing, he reached the long loading outrigger above the cabin, edged his way past the trolley and the capsized cable drum, and found a suitable vantage point high above the loading deck of the
Taixan
. Through the windows of the ship's bridge he could see the Chinese officers frantically waving their arms. A small circle of condensation had formed on the storm glass in front of each open mouth. The loading officer was standing on a separate gangway above the deck at the same level as Gaetano. He had his back to the crane operator and was shouting into a walkietalkie, but Costa only had John Denver's âLeaving on a Jet Plane' in his earpiece.
