When the Dead Awaken (20 page)

‘
Arrivederci, professore
.'

He opened the door and left. The two men outside came into the compartment.

The train entered another viaduct, and if anyone had been standing by a window in one of the bleak high-rise buildings and looked over at the Como Express, that person might have wondered at two sudden flashes lighting up one of the compartments.

The sturdier of the businessmen looked at the doctor on the narrow floor between the seats. He shot him through the head once more, put the pistol in his briefcase, looked at the girl and thought what a pity it was. She really was lovely.

The man closed the curtains, left the compartment, shut the door behind him and wedged it closed.

The three men got off the train at the next station, dashed through the rain and reached the kerb at the same time as the dark blue Audi.

The bigger man got into the passenger seat while the smaller squeezed into the corner in the back next to Savelli.

The Audi set off. Urs Savelli leaned back, closed his eyes and surrendered to his private meditations.

Giulio Forlani was alive.
Vaffanculo!

He made a mental note to give Cesare, the truck driver, an extended lesson on how to identify unmistakable signs of death in people he presumed were dead. He would use one of Cesare's children for demonstration purposes.

‘Back to Milan, signore?' the driver asked.

‘What? Yes, let's go back.'

The raindrops tasted of kohl and mascara. Sabrina knew she must look like a wet, tragic clown.

She was in an alleyway between a patisserie and an ironmonger's. The bins smelt of cinnamon, chocolate and vanilla, and her stomach churned. She had been standing in the rain for half an hour opposite her mother's apartment block; freezing, but vigilant. There were only a few people in the street: a girl with a guitar on her back, a man walking a small dog, and a couple of boys engrossed in a conversation intelligible only to other thirteen-year-olds. There were no people in the parked cars, as far as she could see; no suspicious vans with blacked-out windows, no taxis waiting for customers who never came; none of the motorbikes or ordinary saloon cars that usually kept returning to Via Salvatore Barzilai like spurned lovers.

Sabrina extricated herself from the shadows and crossed the street to the block next to her mother's, pressed the buzzer for the dermatologist on the third floor, who always automatically opened the door on those evenings he had
consultations, and entered. The aged lift in the centre of the stairwell came clanking down to the ground floor as if it suffered from rheumatism. She opened the gated door, pulled it closed and pressed
five
. The lift seemed to summon up the courage before starting its ascent. Sabrina tilted back her head and looked up through the mesh in the ceiling of the lift. As always, she imagined that she was travelling in a spacecraft: the roofs over the lift shafts were covered with large glass domes. In the summer they glowed opal blue, like the sea under a rock, and she experienced a feeling of weightlessness if she kept staring at the dome as she travelled up. On cloudless September nights, the domes became observatories filled with stars, planets, the navigation lights of passing aeroplanes.

Tonight they were blacked out by the darkness and the rain.

She exited the lift and walked up the stairs to the top floor. Two cleaning carts were parked on the landing. Next to the carts a ladder had been bolted to the wall, a hatch at the top provided access to the attic.

The lift started travelling down. She pressed herself against the wall and held her breath. The lift continued its endless journey down and its old, dry cogs screamed out in protest. At each floor the lift produced a trembling, almost human sigh. Sabrina could hear no voices coming from below. No hard steps across the marble floors. Whoever had called the lift had to be alone and very quiet.

Her hands were damp on the rungs of the ladder and she couldn't feel her knees. Still, she pulled herself up by her hands and swore softly when the handle of her pistol clanked against the metal bars. The hinges of the hatch groaned loudly with each degree they moved. She heard the lift start its ascent. Sabrina wriggled through the hatch and on to the dusty attic floor, closed the hatch behind her, resting it on a trembling finger so she could see the top of the staircase through the crack. She eased the Walther out of the shoulder holster and aimed it at the spot at the top of the stairs where the person's head would appear.

The lift stopped at one of the middle floors, she heard a front door open and cheerful, everyday voices echoing and winding their way up the spirals of the stairwell.

She was on the verge of tears and gasped for air. Breathing again required an act of will.

She knew every square centimetre of the dusty attic corridors. The attic had provided the scenery and setting when Sabrina and her brothers played their deadly serious games. It was crammed full of dark nooks and crannies and she relived the fears of her childhood as she tiptoed through the darkness, convinced that at any moment a black-clad ninja would kick her legs away from under her or throw her to the floor. She had left at least half a pint of blood, some skin, and a couple of teeth up there.

*

Earlier that day Sabrina had checked into the five-star Grand Hotel Duomo in Via San Raffaele. She believed it was the last place that anyone would think to look for an emo. The concierge had already prepared a smile of rejection when a soaked Sabrina reached the mahogany counter with a queue of much more desirable opera goers behind her. However, his smile warmed by several degrees when she handed him her MasterCard wrapped in a €100 note.

The man's last line of defence was to offer her the bridal suite – ‘the only room available tonight, signorina, I'm afraid'. The emo with the dead stare silently stuck out her hand for the key.

Sabrina emptied the minibar of crisps, salted almonds, two Cokes and a gin and tonic in a matter of minutes. She found the suite's bedroom and instantly fell asleep on the white heart-shaped bed.

And woke up at eight o'clock.

It took her several long moments to remember where she was. She found the remote control, sat up against the headboard and pressed
on
without being able to see a television. There was an expensive humming sound before some panels slid aside to reveal a large flat-screen mounted on the wall above a sideboard.

She channel-hopped until something caught her attention. The towering, platinum-blonde – and frightened – beauty who had relinquished her cubicle to her in the ladies' lavatory at Dal Pescatore appeared on one of those
forgettable talkshows with a fairground set design, this time wearing a green cocktail dress, sprinkled with sequins and with a neckline that went all the way down to her belly button, leaving absolutely nothing to the imagination. She was eagerly sparring with her silver-haired, somewhat shorter male co-host in the discipline of excitable nonsense.

She flicked to a local news channel. Emergency lights, blankets of rain drifting past street lights and flashing cameras. Behind the female reporter, Sabrina could see rail tracks, overhead cables, ambulances, police cars, cordons and railway buildings of a station she failed to identify. She was about to change channels again when the reporter's breathless words made her sit up.

‘
The bodies of fifty-seven-year-old surgeon Professor Carlo Mazzaferro and a twenty-five-year-old doctor, Laura Rizzo, were found in a locked first-class compartment on the Como Express. Preliminary investigations suggest that the two Milanese doctors were travelling north on a private visit when they were killed by unknown assailants for reasons yet to be determined
.' The reporter's face was suitably sober as the nature of the gloomy feature demanded, but her voice lingered seductively over the words ‘twenty-five-year-old' and ‘private'.

Sabrina pressed the
off
button and the flat-screen disappeared.

She tossed the remote control aside, got up from the bed and started pacing the room in ever decreasing circles
until she stopped, bent over with her hands on her knees, the bedroom still spinning behind her eyelids.

Back in her mother's flat, a fresh shiver almost made her knees buckle. She rubbed her palms together, blew on them and walked down the passage.

Something rubbed against her legs and she bent down to scratch the old, half-blind tomcat, Ziggy, behind the ear. The cat pressed its head against her hand and followed her into the kitchen with a miaow.

That same afternoon she had ordered her mother out of the flat and up to the family's holiday home by Lake Como. Her mother had asked few questions; forty years of marriage to the general had instilled a set of reliable automatic reflexes in her which Sabrina shamelessly activated.

‘One suitcase and you're leaving now, Mum, do you hear? Take a taxi to the station and don't speak to anyone. I'll explain later. A couple of days. I need a couple of days.'

The call had lasted less than a minute and Sabrina had promised to feed the cat.

She wondered if her mother had caught the same train as Dr Carlo Mazzaferro and his young friend, Laura Rizzo.

She turned on the lights in the rooms facing the courtyard and sat by the kitchen table for a long time. She traced patterns on the checked oilcloth with her spoon and ate
slowly. She had heated up a tin of minestrone, found some bread and a bottle of Chianti, and was dozing her way through the joyless meal. Her eyelids were as heavy as lead.

When she had finished her meal, she emptied a tin of cat food into a bowl, found a tin of tuna in a kitchen cupboard and served up it up to Ziggy for pudding. The cat blinked, surprised at this royal treatment, and its purring grew deeper and stronger. She looked at it with envy while it ate – and kept putting off what she had to do next.

Finally, she went down the corridor and into her father's old study. The room would forever smell of his tobacco. His pipes were still sitting in a stand on the desk. She closed the door to the passage and took down a photograph from the wall. She had glanced at it a hundred times without ever really looking at it. As far as she knew it had always been there, but the recollection had hit her like a kick in the stomach that same afternoon when, after speaking to Federico Renda, she had passed a hunting shop in Via Case Rotte and noticed a selection of oilskin jackets in the window.

The colour photograph had been taken some time in the eighties during one of her father's frequent hunting trips. A black Labrador was lying on the ground gazing adoringly at the photographer, whom she presumed to be one of her father's hunting friends. Its jaws were wrapped around a beautiful dead drake, giving the dog an idiotic circus-clown grin. Her father was standing with a pipe in his
mouth, smiling at something one of the other men in the picture had said. His eyes were crinkled with laughter.

Wellington boots, broken shotgun on the elbow, oilskin jacket and a checked flat cap: the man who had entered the lift in Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II in Milan with Lucia and Salvatore Forlani three years ago was her own father.

She was certain of it.

It took her five minutes to find her father's old tweed cap in a wardrobe in the corridor. She photographed it from several angles with her mobile before putting it back.

She found the key to the gun cabinet under the pipe stand and remembered that her father's expired passports were kept on the top shelf in the gun cabinet with ammunition for the shotgun and the hunting rifles. She stuck his most recent passport in her anorak pocket and was about to close the door when she spotted his old oilskin jacket. On impulse she checked the pockets. There was a half-empty pouch of pipe tobacco in a side pocket. She opened it and inhaled the scent. The general always used to put a small piece of apple in with his tobacco to keep it fresh.

As Sabrina put the tobacco back, she felt a piece of paper under her fingertips: an ordinary tote ticket from the San Piro racecourse. The lucky owner had won €12 on a horse by the name of Bucefalo in the sixth race, the odds-on favourite, on 5 September 2007 at 16.05. On the back in black ink someone had written the words:

CDS Janus seeks friendship with Minerva****

She had never known her father to have been interested in horse racing. Sabrina yawned and scratched her cheek; she was about to put the tote ticket back in the jacket pocket when her heart skipped a beat.

She had seen those tiny, five-pointed stars before. Today. A few hours ago.

Massimiliano Di Luca had marked the dishes on the menu with tiny stars.

And Bucefalo had crossed the finishing line two hours before Giulio Forlani had been pronounced dead by Dr Carlo Mazzaferro, the next person on her short list of leads.

She shook her head in despair at her own slow-wittedness. Of course: ‘CDS Janus seeks friendship with Minerva****'. A personal ad in the newspaper
Corriere della Sera
. What could be a more classic or simpler method if you wanted to contact someone? A man presumed dead, for example. If you couldn't access the print version, you could always find it online.

Little by little she was able to breathe again. Nose, airways, lungs. Exhale air out of her nose. And inhale it back in. It was easy once you knew how.

Her old bedroom would remain unchanged for as long as she needed it, her mother had promised her that. Sabrina
navigated her way through the darkness, found the box of matches on the shelf below her private altar and lit the tealight under her holy icon: the framed cover of David Bowie's
Heroes
album.

As always, the master's white, healing hands and prophetic eyes instilled a certain amount of serenity in her. She sat on her bed for a long time, with the hunting photograph in one hand and the tote ticket in the other, without thinking of anything in particular.

Much later she got up, put the photograph back on the wall in her father's study and whispered goodbye to the cat.