When the Dead Awaken (10 page)

One so far. There were bound to be more, and again her pulse started beating hard and fast in her temple.

She took a shower and then persuaded the receptionist to show her a way out through the grid of narrow courtyards behind the guest house. The GPS function on her BlackBerry had shown her that she should be able to reach the parallel street, Corso Europa, without having to walk through the archway to Via Durini – and the green van.

‘Lucia and Salvatore Forlani have been found and identified?'

‘Yes.'

‘Extraordinary. Are you quite sure?' asked Nestore Raspallo.

Sabrina didn't stop smiling.

‘Absolutely.'

The civil servant leaned back. ‘Delighted to hear it. Excellent news … I mean … all things considered.'

She looked at the case officer. At his pale blue Oxford
button-down shirt, the polka dot red-and-blue bow tie and his well-fitting grey jacket. Under the table she could see a pair of elegant suede shoes. Raspallo didn't look a day over thirty. Far too young to carry the weight of so many lives on his tweed-clad shoulders.

Raspallo nodded pensively as he studied the empty desk in front of him. Eventually it began to dawn on him that his visitor from Naples was expecting more than thanks.

‘Thank you for briefing me, dottoressa. I'll make sure the databases are updated.'

He made to get up.

‘My father created your job ten years ago, Signor Raspallo,' she said without moving.

He sat down again, held up his hands and started to examine the armrests.

‘I'm aware of that. A great man. Much missed. But times have changed.'

‘Have they?'

‘Yes. All procedures were reviewed when your father … was killed.'

‘Was murdered.'

Raspallo nodded.

‘When your father was murdered. I don't think you can blame anyone, signorina, if there were fears that before his death, the general may have given away … revealed …'

‘He was shot, Signor Raspallo. No one kept him prisoner
in a basement for days, torturing him, pumping him full of scopolamine or some other truth serum. There was no sign of a struggle at the crime scene,' she said. ‘None at all.'

Raspallo smiled gently.

‘I'm fully aware of the circumstances. In detail. We all are. But my job is purely to administer various bank accounts around the world. Bank accounts I don't even know the details of. Everything is encrypted, dottoressa.' He paused. ‘Doubly encrypted,' he added. ‘I don't know the location of the witnesses or their at-risk relatives, and likewise the ROS case officers have no idea where the money supporting the witnesses comes from.'

Sabrina looked around the bare office. There wasn't a single sheet of paper or a ring binder to be seen. There was a laptop in front of Signor Raspallo – that was all.

‘It's a highly successful programme,' the civil servant said.

‘I understand. And Giulio Forlani?'

Raspallo watched her in silence.

He lowered his voice and folded his hands as if in prayer. It would appear that he was coming to a decision.

‘Can I tell you something and be absolutely certain that you won't reveal your source? Ever. Not to anyone? It would cost me my career.'

Sabrina nodded.

‘As a mark of respect to your father. Please don't think
that he has been forgotten. Definitely not. I myself had the honour of meeting him on several occasions when I started in the GIS.'

‘You were in the GIS?'

Sabrina had a hard time visualizing this well-dressed, sleek, clean-shaven young man as a member of the elite unit; wearing a ski mask, night-vision goggles, abseiling down vertical cliff sides, dangling from a parachute at night with foreign soil under his boots or swimming long stretches underwater towards a secret rendezvous with only a compass for guidance. The man wore a bow tie, for heaven's sake!

Even she could hear the disbelief in her voice.

‘I'm sorry,' she said.

Raspallo shrugged his shoulders in a friendly gesture.

‘Don't worry. Nanometric's research was funded by two independent sources … as you probably know.'

‘The EU and the Camera Nazionale della Moda Italiana,' she nodded.

‘That's only partly true,' Raspallo said, and found an interesting spot on the desk that appeared to warrant closer scrutiny.

‘Go on,' she urged him.

The young man looked towards the door as if he expected armed men to kick it in and arrest him at any moment.

‘Your father
was
the EU, signorina,' he said slowly and
clearly. ‘Giulio Forlani had applied to the European Union's Structural Funds for money and been turned down. The main reason was that Nanometric didn't have official business partners in other EU countries. Your father believed the work of Nanometric had enormous potential … and he believed in Giulio Forlani as an individual.'

‘They knew each other?' she gasped. ‘My father and Forlani? Are you sure?'

‘Definitely. Somehow General D'Avalos managed to divert funding from an account in the Ministry of Defence to Nanometric. The company described the money as an EU grant. The paperwork was in order. This scheme operated successfully for years under the radar of the Public Accounts Office and the Ministry of Finance.'

Raspallo smiled.

‘Your father was a very secretive man, dottoressa. He used to say that he knew where all the bodies were buried. He still had the shovel somewhere. He said.'

‘My father must have trained you,' she declared as her thoughts flew homeless through her brain. ‘Since you know so much.'

Raspallo nodded. ‘It was a privilege.'

‘Thank you,' she muttered.

‘Your father was killed a few days after the Nanometric massacre,' Raspallo said.

‘It has crossed my mind that the two events might have been connected,' she assured him. ‘But timing is all they have in common, Signor Raspallo. As far as I know … But perhaps you know more than I do?'

‘I don't think so. As you say, it was purely a coincidence.'

General Agostino D'Avalos was found in a motel near Valmalenco-Laghetto in Alto Adige, close to the Swiss border. The general had rented one of the motel's remote cabins under a false name. He would appear to have arrived at the cabin alone, in his own Range Rover. The car was parked outside the cabin and untouched. He was found fully dressed in the middle of the living-room floor, killed by two bullets from a 9-mm pistol. Every forensic test had proved negative. None of the motel's other guests had seen or heard anything. The time of death was put at 00.30, three days after the attack at Nanometric.

‘Did my father enter Forlani into the MIPTP? But why, if he was already dead? People are asking questions. Including my boss, the Public Prosecutor, Federico Renda.'

‘I don't know. And I don't know if anyone does. All programmes and procedures were reviewed afterwards, as I've just told you. They put together a fast-track committee and followed its guidelines. The FBI assisted the committee. I myself only joined the programme a year ago. I'm sorry.
But I can understand why people are asking questions. Absolutely.'

‘Can you make an educated guess?'

‘Sadly, no.'

She rose.

‘Please could you check a van registration number for me?'

‘Of course.'

The green Fiat van that had followed her to the
pensione
in Via Durini turned out to belong to a builder in Portici – a small town south of Naples.

Raspallo didn't ask and Sabrina didn't explain.

He stood up and shook her hand. He was taller and leaner than she had expected.

‘Happy hunting,' he said.

‘
Arrivederci
.'

From the window the case officer watched Sabrina D'Avalos walk down the broad steps of the Palace of Justice.

She might think she was ready to take on Urs Savelli, the Lord of the Camorra, but to Raspallo she seemed as helpless as a newborn kitten.

The petite figure stopped on the bottom step, looked up the facade and he took a step back. She continued out between the barriers in front of the palace and disappeared.

He picked up the telephone and rang the rarely used direct line to Federico Renda. If Raspallo had ever seen a person on a mission, it was Sabrina D'Avalos.

He exchanged a few words with Renda, opened a cupboard, took the envelope that had been waiting for him and rushed out.

Castellarano

On Via Ariosto, Antonia walked past the hedge to the municipal swimming pool and changing rooms, behind which every fourteen-year-old girl in Castellarano kissed a boy for the first time. In Antonia's case it was Bruno, a demigod who visited the town every summer with his twin brother Giulio and their parents. Their mother was from Castellarano, their father American. It didn't bother her that Bruno marked the wall with a piece of chalk for each girl he kissed. She considered herself lucky. She had removed his politely attentive hands from her breasts and rewarded him for not persisting by opening her mouth against his, so that her tongue bumped into his teeth and the lump of chewing gum behind them. Her knees and hips had trembled when his tongue found hers. The chlorine smell from the pool evoked memories of Bruno Forlani's twin, Giulio, in seclusion on a green towel near the edge of the pool. He had watched her as she came
around the corner, and she had no trouble looking him in the eye. But he lowered his gaze when Bruno appeared.

The outside of the shop bore witness to centuries of groceries. As the years passed, painted advertisements of long-since discontinued household articles remained, worn away. The words ‘Barzoni Pasta' were illustrated by a potbellied glutton under a tilted plate piled high with spaghetti, Bertolli olive oil advertised by white fish sizzling to their doom on a black frying pan, Olio Sasso with torn white clouds and a windswept olive tree. The olive tree, the oldest image, would be the last wall painting to fade.

Even though the traffic was today led around the town on Strada Statale 486, the old road hadn't been completely forgotten. From Sassuolo to Torrente Dragone it wound its way through the heart of the town before running between her parents' shop and La Stazione restaurant. The memory of truck drivers turned out to be longer than that of the town's housewives, who had stopped coming to the shop, as La Stazione was still a popular place to eat.

The rooms were empty and quiet; from her son Gianni's room a guttural, breathless song could be heard.

The noise which Antonia identified as Balkan rap came from the old shortwave radio. Enzo had sourced antique radio valves for it from Rome and sanded and polished its mahogany cabinet until it shone like a japanned piano, all
for Gianni's fifteenth birthday. On a good day the radio could pick up Montevideo and Moscow, thanks to a fivemetre-high aerial that Enzo had mounted on the chimney, his boots dancing delicately on the loose roof tiles. A remarkable achievement from someone who could only turn his head slightly to the left. The bandwidth marker was tuned to some unholy place between Bratislava and Tirana, so she switched off the apparatus, picked up Gianni's grey school blazer from the floor, dusted it down and hung it over a chair. The dark blue school trousers had been tossed over an empty music stand, the cornet case sat forgotten under the bed.

Antonia opened the kitchen window facing the courtyard and heard her son's and Enzo's voices drifting through the garage doors. From the window she had a view of the rest of the property: the cobblestone courtyard permanently overgrown with weeds, the boundary wall on top of which the family cat dozed in the sun, the garden with a few ancient apple trees and the glasshouse with its broken ridge.

One summer Antonia and her husband, Tancredo, had fallen in love with the idea of growing their own vegetables. They had cultivated the high beds in the greenhouse with ridiculously small gardening tools, sowed aubergines, peas, courgettes and tomatoes. They worked in the greenhouse while Tancredo grew thinner and paler, until he was as transparent as the white painted windows.
The vegetables thrived while her husband wasted away. A few months later he died from cancer.

What remained were brown stems, spiders and the knowledge that they had had projects instead of each other. Tancredo had been in charge of matters of the heart, and Antonia of their other dreams.

She leaned out of the window and heard Enzo holding forth: ‘It's the little things, my friend. If you're to stay on top of the little things … pass me a twelve … then the big things won't control you.'

Her son did not appear to disagree and Enzo continued. ‘A flight mechanic, for example. Isn't he just as important as the pilot? Or even more important? Pilots are just glorified bus drivers, while a flight mechanic knows everything there is to know about every single bolt, gasket, pitot tube, every spring, every nut that keeps things in the right place and the plane in the air. He has no autopilot he can switch on, no control tower to ask for help. He has only his knowledge, his hands, his eyes, his manuals and his experience to follow. Lives depend on him, Gianni.'

Antonia sighed and walked down the kitchen steps. The courtyard lay in shadow and she pulled her cardigan closer around her, balanced on the domed cobblestones and skirted around the holes.

‘Enzo! Gianni!'

Silence. Of the guilty kind. She could only see her son's lower legs, odd socks and worn trainers. The rest of him
was hidden under Enzo's old Ferrari, which a year ago had been a complete wreck, but had since been transformed by her lodger's miraculous hands. All she could see of Enzo Canavaro was his big boots. Chukka boots, the best in the world, obviously, made for him by a cobbler in Pakistan at the foot of the Karakoram's white peaks. All of Enzo's few possessions were special. From his diving watch to his metallic, charcoal-grey, ultra-powerful motorbike, a Honda 1100 XX Super Blackbird. With the exception of these few treasured objects her lodger would appear to be a man without needs.