When the Dead Awaken (19 page)

‘A bit.'

‘You wouldn't happen to know if he's interested in pigeons by any chance?'

For the first time Franco smiled, genuinely surprised.

‘He talks about nothing else, Signor
Procuratore
.

‘Thank you.'

‘Can I go now?'

‘Of course. I'm sorry.'

‘Bloody hell,' Primo Alba said.

‘It's absolutely insane.' Renda looked at the map on the table. ‘There is a grain store and a smaller silo behind the carpentry business. Get some people up there. Tell them they may have to be there for a long time. The moment Signor Marchese takes a pigeon from the loft, they must stop him.'

‘And the tunnel?'

‘A stroke of luck,' Renda said. ‘Get someone down there
tonight. Remove the spilt gravel and mend the hole in the ceiling. Rig up microphones, sensors and cameras. And look after Signorina D'Avalos for me. We owe it to her father. How is she?'

‘Under pressure, but still functioning – even though she's an amateur.'

‘Arm's length,' Renda said. ‘And only you. Savelli can smell a trap ten kilometres away. He must come to her of his own free will.'

‘And when he finds her?'

Renda shrugged his shoulders.

‘We'll think of something. Nearer the time. Nothing else will happen in the meantime. Perhaps nothing else will ever happen.'

‘No, perhaps not,' the young man said.

Neither of them believed that for a second.

‘So it was her,' Renda said in deep thought.

‘Who?' Alba asked.

‘L'Artista. Damn it. She killed General D'Avalos, Lucia and Salvatore Forlani, Fabiano Batista and Paolo Iacovelli.'

A thin layer of moisture covered Renda's forehead.

‘So Sabrina D'Avalos was right all along about that,' Alba said pointedly. ‘And about the pigeons.'

He looked at the public prosecutor.

‘Don Terrasino, the tunnel, L'Artista. What more do you want?'

‘Savelli. Savelli would be good.'

He turned to face the young man.

‘I know that we agreed your services for only forty-eight hours, but would you be prepared to extend that?'

‘Of course.'

Milan

Dr Carlo Mazzaferro was a worrier, but he couldn't have done anything about it even if he had wanted to. It was like having freckles or an underhung jaw. Just a fact of life. To him, anxiety was a comfort blanket. Any carefree, happy times which fate granted him only caused him stress. When he became conscious of feeling untroubled, he would instantly seek out a reason to worry. Whenever people talked of happiness he felt like a blind man to whom a sunset is being described. Of course there were varying degrees of anxiety. He had learned to navigate it. His life was a never-ending series of hurdles that had to be cleared. No hurdle could be too high or too low, and it was his task to jump one after the other. Always looking for what would happen next.

Carlo Mazzaferro knew he was destined to travel through life with chronically wet feet, but at least he wasn't in water up to his neck. If his clinical career and research
were flourishing, he fretted about the absence of love in his life, even though he had been married for nineteen years and had two sons whom he definitely loved at that particular distance from which he viewed the people in his life. If he took a mistress, as he currently had, he agonized that he might be ill. Right now he enjoyed the benefit of the young woman sitting on the train seat next to him, good health, and he had recently been appointed professor at the Ospedale Niguarda. It was difficult, very difficult indeed, to maintain his pessimism, and it made him twitchy and anxious. He was convinced that the gods would soon notice their neglect, and return to punish such hubris. With a vengeance.

Laura was lovely. She was twenty-five years old and a former PhD student of his. She was beautiful and intelligent. She came from a respectable family of lawyers, but had an unconventional, refreshingly artistic mindset, as well as several tattoos that only a few people had ever seen.

She rested her head on his shoulder and Professor Carlo Mazzaferro looked at her dark, fragrant hair and at the raindrops lashing the window of the train. The suburbs of Milan seemed to him gloomy, rainswept and bleak. He caught sight of his own smiling reflection and tried to add it to his memories.

They were on their way to his holiday house at Lake Como. They would have the place to themselves for a
couple of days before he would have to put Laura on the train back to Milan – before his wife and sons arrived.

They had boarded the train at Milan's Porta Garibaldi station. They had the first-class compartment to themselves. Laura kissed him and found a couple of apples in her shoulder bag. She offered him one, but he shook his head. He leaned forwards and looked out of the window. No one on the platform seemed to want to travel north. The few passengers who got off the train made a dash through the rain for the shelter of the canopy. He let himself fall back into the seat when the train pulled out of the station. He did not want to see anyone he knew.

Laura kissed him again. She tasted of apple as she prised open his mouth with her pink tongue.

The door to the compartment was opened and the noise from the corridor burst the bubble that surrounds all lovers. Laura pulled away and smiled. The stranger returned her smile, checked his seat number and reservation, and sat down opposite her. He placed a black briefcase between his boots, wedged a long walking stick into the corner and started reading his newspaper. The man was eminently forgettable. The black coat was expensive, but nothing out of the ordinary. The creases of his trousers were sharp and his shirt was white as snow.

The stranger disappeared behind his newspaper and Laura rested her head on Mazzaferro's shoulder. She
yawned, closed her eyes and dozed off while Mazzaferro played Tetris on his mobile. The professor looked up when he heard voices outside the compartment. Two businessmen had stopped in the corridor. Their broad backs in raincoats blocked the door. He heard a window open and both men took out cigarettes, leaned against the wall in the rattling train and carried on with their conversation. The new arrival looked dry, even though he was not carrying an umbrella. It would seem that he had boarded the train at Porta Garibaldi, but hadn't found his seat until now. Given that the train was only half full, at best, this surprised Mazzaferro, but he brushed it aside. Perhaps the man had enjoyed a cup of coffee and a grappa in the dining car.

Mazzaferro looked up from his mobile and discovered that the man opposite was studying him over the top of his newspaper. His gaze shifted to Laura's peaceful face, her high forehead with the tiny scar above her left eyebrow, her dark curly hair and her smile, like that of a sleeping child. Laura had tiny freckles everywhere and her hair had a deep chestnut glow. All her hair. Her skin was milky white and she never tanned properly, she had told him. Mazzaferro loved the exquisite white skin across her breasts and stomach. It was even whiter against the stripe of her auburn pubic hair. Laura had lips redder than any other woman and right now they were slightly parted. Carlo Mazzaferro saw her eyelids twitch.

‘She's dreaming,' the man opposite said softly. ‘That's good.'

Mazzaferro was about to straighten up but sank back into the seat in order not to wake Laura. The man's remark was inappropriate. Too intimate. It might have been acceptable to comment on a sleeping child, but not on another man's woman. He glared at the man without replying and hoped that by doing so he had signalled his indignation.

The man's face disappeared behind the newspaper once more. A ticket collector spoke to the men outside before opening the door to the compartment and the stranger folded his newspaper and took out his ticket from the inside pocket of his coat. The man's movements were precise and economical. Mazzaferro rummaged around in his leather jacket behind Laura's head and fished out their tickets. The ticket collector looked at them, smiled politely and wished everyone a pleasant journey. He closed the door behind him and squeezed past the businessmen in the corridor.

The rain pelted the window of the train and the man opposite him checked his watch.

The train entered the first of many viaducts, which took the line through the low northern hills. The carriage swayed and rattled through a set of points, the compartment darkened and Mazzaferro felt Laura's head roll on to his shoulder. She twitched like a dreaming puppy, her
body tensing briefly. She sighed and he wondered if she was having a nightmare. He had never spent an entire night with her. He stroked her face and smiled at the warm wetness on the back of his hand. Women. Tears of joy. Or perhaps she dribbled a little in her sleep like a baby. He heard the newspaper rustle opposite him. The squeal from wheels echoed against the brickwork of the viaduct and once more they found themselves in the suburbs. Across the roofs Mazzaferro caught a glimpse of a purple sunset sky between black clouds and dark, naked facades. He looked at his hand. His palm was dark in the yellow light and a long tongue, black like his palm, coloured the front of Laura's white shirt. It reached the belt of her jeans and seeped from a small, still breathing cut to the base of her long, white neck. Carlo Mazzaferro leaned forwards. Laura's arms hung limply down her sides, her hands lay open in her lap as if she were offering him everything in the whole wide world, looking directly at him. Her fine eyelids with the delicate veins trembled.

The man opposite lowered his newspaper and smiled at him.

‘She's still alive, Dr Mazzaferro,' he said in a conversational tone of voice. ‘Just about. If I were you, I would say my goodbyes now.'

The long walking stick lay across his knees.

‘What—'

Carlo Mazzaferro moved to get up. His mouth opened, but no words came out. He looked at the two men outside. How strange that they hadn't noticed anything. Their backs still blocked the door to the corridor.

Mazzaferro never saw the movement, but the pain exploded under his right shoulder joint. He stared at the long steel blade that had grown out of the stick in the stranger's hand. The blade must have damaged the nerve beneath his collarbone before penetrating the dark blue upholstery of the seat. A burning sensation ran through his arm right down to his fingertips. The blade disappeared into the stick and Laura's head lolled towards the window. Carlo Mazzaferro looked at the sleeve of his jacket, at Laura's head, and he started to cry.

The stranger smiled. A crooked but apologetic smile sparkled in his eyes. They even expressed compassion, solicitude. His hands, which Mazzaferro now noticed were gloved, rested quietly on his walking stick.

‘I regret that we have to meet like this, Dr Mazzaferro. I'm sorry –
Professore
Mazzaferro. Congratulations.'

The professor's eyes flitted from his own bloody armpit to Laura's half-closed eyes.

‘I don't think she felt anything, professore. Apart from surprise, of course. My blade penetrated the lower part of your girlfriend's throat and severed the spinal cord between the sixth and seventh vertebra. She was paralysed instantly. Not a bad way to go, in my opinion.'

The pain gripped Mazzaferro's arm like a vice. He gasped loudly and looked from the man's face towards the two deaf and blind men in the corridor. The emergency brake was a red handle just above his right arm.

The stranger followed the direction of Mazzaferro's eyes.

‘They're my people outside, doctor. I'm sorry. You see, there really is no sudden salvation or miraculous escape.'

Mazzaferro tried to breathe as slowly as possible, so as not to disturb the severed muscles in his armpit.

‘You're looking at my walking stick,' the man said. ‘It's a makila. In the olden days Basque men of a certain standing would carry a stick like this. To protect themselves against robbers, bears and wolves in the mountains. Are you listening to me?'

The professor nodded.

‘The Basques are an interesting people,' the man said. ‘Their language is one of the oldest in the world and the Basques themselves are genetically different from all other European races. Take the unique distribution of their blood types, for one thing. No one really knows where they came from. From the ruins of Carthage? The last survivors of the massacres by that butcher Scipio Aemilianus?

Mazzaferro looked as if he might lose consciousness at any moment and the man hurried up.

‘What I want to tell you is that there are many types of
death. For years I have administered death in every imaginable way and so I really do know what I'm talking about, doctor. As indeed do you – on the other side of the table, as it were. So … did you fake the death certificate of Giulio Forlani on the fifth of September 2007? I need a quick answer, professore.'

Saliva bubbled helpfully on the surgeon's lips, but he was incapable of saying a word. He removed his left hand from the cut under his shoulder and made a helpless gesture with it.

The stranger sighed. ‘We'll do this another way. Did you treat Giulio Forlani after the traffic accident on the A7?'

Mazzaferro nodded. His wet hair flopped into his eyes.

‘Did he survive?'

Mazzaferro's mouth was moving, but no words came out.

Eventually he nodded furiously.

‘Thank you. My compliments. It was an outstanding achievement. General Agostino D'Avalos asked you to certify him dead?'

Mazzaferro nodded sickly.

‘Do you know where he is now?'

The doctor shook his head.

‘You're going to kill me,' he whispered.

‘I promise I'm not going to kill you, Professor Mazzaferro. You have my word. So do you know where he is?'

‘No, but I know you're going to kill me.'

The man shook his head and stood up. He balanced like a dancer against the jerky movements of the train.