When the Dead Awaken (27 page)

‘General Agostino D'Avalos?'

‘Yes.'

‘He was my father,' she said.

There was a glimpse of interest before the eyes returned to the view of the endless Lombardy plain.

‘My condolences, signorina. He … General D'Avalos … got me out of Milan. I was flown to a hospital in the United States. Bethesda Naval Hospital in Maryland.' Forlani rubbed his forehead with one of the shovels. ‘I had more surgery. And then some more. Before they sent me on to …' He snapped his fingers and it sounded like a saloon rifle in the quiet air. ‘A centre for war veterans in Fort Worth in Texas. They did a good job.'

‘Were you able to sleep?' she asked.

‘No.'

‘Did you talk to someone?'

‘Yes … yes. I got the whole package. Post-traumatic stress disorder. What they called grief in the old days. Several other diagnoses with long names. In that respect it was a good place. Everyone had lost someone or something of themselves, arms or legs, and there were a lot of priests, psychologists, psychiatrists …'

She glanced at him and saw the pain that she had been looking for.

‘I started sleeping a little when I was on the boat. And when I came back here,' he said. ‘I sleep well at the place I live now. Mostly.'

Sabrina lit a cigarette, but struggled to keep her lighter steady.

‘How long is it since you came back?'

‘Almost two years.'

‘And before you came back?'

‘I fished. When I studied at MIT in Boston, I used to earn money in the summer vacations by fishing from Gloucester. I got a job on a boat with a skipper I knew from the old days. A man who knows how to keep his mouth shut. At the start it was hard because I can only turn my head to one side and my hearing in my left ear is poor. I didn't have all my strength back then. But I was mostly on the bridge manning the echo sounder. The sea was good. I made some friends.'

‘Why did you come back to Italy?'

Giulio Forlani shrugged and looked at the enormous chronometer on his left wrist.

‘It felt right, signorina,' he said calmly, as if she would never be able to understand.

She narrowed her eyes: ‘In Milan, did they know – in the witness protection programme – that you had come back?'

He made no reply.

‘You see,' she said, ‘it seems strange to me that they would have agreed for you to leave your relatively safe life in the US to return to Italy.'

He looked down.

‘They didn't know,' he said.

‘You're insane, Giulio.'

‘I'm in an insane situation, signorina.'

Sabrina took a hard drag on her cigarette. She was going to sound like the clerk in a lost property office, but she didn't know how else to put it. ‘You can obviously have your wife and son's bodies released whenever you want. I presume that you would like to bring them … I mean bury them in the cemetery in Chiaravalle.'

‘Where I was buried?'

‘Yes.'

‘Thank you,' he said.

‘Who is in your coffin?' she asked.

‘I don't know. Your father said he would find someone.'

‘My father was dead when you were buried,' she said.

‘Then it was his assistant. Some Carabinieri captain. The
same man who put me on a military plane to the US. He sat on the floor next to my stretcher the whole way to Maryland reading aloud to me.'

‘From what?'

‘
The English Patient
.'

He smiled. But slowly. As if his face had forgotten how to.

‘Did he have a name?' she asked suspiciously.

‘I don't know. I suppose so. I can't remember. Primo … something.'

‘Grey eyes and light brown hair? … Handsome?'

‘That sounds like him.' Giulio Forlani nodded.

‘That arsehole,' she burst out.

‘I rather liked him.'

‘He wasn't called Nestore Raspallo?'

‘No.'

So this Primo-something-Nestore-Raspallo had known everything, all along. He already knew!

Giulio Forlani suddenly extended his arms and pulled them back hard and vertically with a series of dramatic cracks from his neck and shoulder joints. Like a wet cormorant drying its wings on a rock.

Sabrina dropped the cigarette from her mouth and stepped back until there was only the balustrade between her and certain death.

‘I'm sorry. It's just … I don't know what it is. It comes
and goes.' He smiled bashfully. ‘I think they might have stitched together a couple of wrong nerves by accident.'

‘Don't mind me.'

‘Are we here because of my wife and son or because of your father?' he asked. ‘Because you want to get famous by wiping out the Camorra single-handedly?'

Sabrina had expected the question – to some extent – because she was asking herself the same question or variations on it roughly every five minutes and she had an indignant protest ready at the tip of her tongue. But Forlani's small, patient smile made the protest die on her lips.

‘I think that I – at some point – hoped that if you were alive and if I was ready, then we could help each other,' she said. ‘But I see now that I'm not ready. And you're alive … but you're not ready, either.'

He watched her pensively.

‘I agree,' he said. ‘I just want to be left in peace and I appreciate your honesty. I really do. If we had had this conversation a couple of years ago, then I would …' His hands spread out. ‘Everything! All of it! I would have done whatever it took to get this Urs Savelli. But no more. I no longer believe that killing him will make any difference. If it's not him, it'll be someone else or then someone else again … I simply want to be left in peace, Sabrina. The psychiatrists in the US called it the five steps of grieving. Steps. They were right, I think. I actually believe I have a kind of life now.'

It was the first time he had spoken her name.

She nodded.

‘It might be a bit late for that, Giulio. For both of us. Though I think I understand you. The doctor who treated you at the Ospedale Maggiore …'

‘Mazzaferro,' he said.

‘Precisely. Dr Carlo Mazzaferro. He signed your death certificate and he was murdered two nights ago on the train on his way to Como. Together with a twenty-five-year-old woman, incidentally. Of course I don't know exactly what happened, Giulio, but I presume that Mazzaferro told his killers that he forged your death certificate. I presume that was what they wanted to know. You really shouldn't have come back.'

‘You're a dangerous acquaintance, Assistant Prosecutor,' he said.

‘I never got to talk to Dr Mazzaferro,' she said.

‘Don't you feel responsible?' he said.

‘I'm responsible for so many things. What are you referring to?'

‘Awakening the dead, Sabrina,' he said mildly. ‘But to what kind of life? I hope you've given that a little thought? Or maybe you haven't?'

‘Of course I have, Giulio. Of course,' she said.

Which was correct. Forced resurrection was not a topic you could discuss with very many people. Right now she
couldn't think of anyone who had useful experience in this area, except Jesus Christ.

‘I mean … all sorts of strange things could happen,' Giulio Forlani said. He started to breathe faster and his hands trembled as if a mild epileptic seizure was imminent. ‘They already are. All around you.'

‘Do your parents and your brother know that you're alive?' she asked.

‘No.'

He scrutinized her.

‘They don't, do they?' he asked her.

His large hands gripped the green railing around the viewing platform as if to tear it out of the brickwork.

‘Do they?' he repeated.

‘Of course not, Giulio.'

‘Of course, of course,' he mimicked her angrily. ‘But the Camorra know that I'm alive?'

‘Yes. I would think so.'

‘But that's terrible,' he said in desperation. ‘Now I'll have to start all over again. How can they know that I'm alive? Apart from Mazzaferro, I mean. Something or someone must have alerted them?'

‘Initially? Pure chance. Your wife and son appeared on every list of missing persons under the heading MIPTP, the Interior Ministry's witness protection programme. That obviously shouldn't have happened. It attracted the attention of the Carabinieri and the forensic scientists. Sooner
or later someone would have looked into it. It just happened to be me.'

‘What did they look like?' he asked into the great void around them.

Sabrina woke up the cut to her inside cheek by gnawing at it. This was impossible. There was no right thing to do or correct thing to say. She couldn't even reach out to him. She couldn't offer Giulio Forlani anything that wasn't pathetic, bogus, hollow, banal, far too inadequate. It was not enough.

He turned his face to her, waiting.

‘I think all three looked good, Giulio,' she said.

He nodded.

‘They were fine,' she said.

‘Thank you.

They looked at each other. Then he swallowed something.

‘An administrative error? Is that really all it takes?'

‘Just a coincidence,' Sabrina said.

‘I don't believe in coincidences,' he said. ‘And I don't believe in you.'

‘Perhaps you should start now? Believing in someone, I mean.'

‘Perhaps you shouldn't believe in them, either,' he said. ‘Do you really think it was by pure chance that you got this assignment? An assignment in which your own father is deeply involved?'

‘Yes, I think so.'

His face took on a wild expression.

‘I didn't want to be found, Sabrina!' he shouted. ‘I don't want to be a part of your CV, do you understand? One of your success stories. I was all right where I was! There are …'

‘People who depend on you?' She completed his sentence.

‘Yes.'

He gave her an almost pitying look as if she were a dense student who had long since reached the limit of her ability.

‘Have you considered that it's the same for me?' she said, thinking of Ismael.

She was starting to get angry.

And she liked it.

‘I haven't followed you all the way here, Giulio, and exposed myself to all sorts of danger to annoy you,' she said. ‘Only to discover that it was my own father who hid you. That it was my own father who spirited your wife and son out of Milan and got himself killed in the process. He was another one who was just doing his job – as well as he could in the circumstances. And he left behind a wife and four children. It was pure chance. It happens. Do you understand? Your wife and son fell out of a container, but they weren't the only ones. They were in a container with sixty other people who also had wives and fathers and children … and who will never know a damn thing about what happened to their loved ones.'

His forehead knitted up under his black dense hair.

His eyes were no longer quite as lifeless.

‘What did you say?'

Again his fingertips twitched. It mesmerized her. It was as if his hands had a life of their own.

‘Have you been listening to a word I said?'

It was Sabrina's turn to throw up her hands in the air. A middle-aged German couple were struggling to reach the last stretch of the spiral staircase, sweating, out of breath as they chatted. The couple took one look at Sabrina and the giant in the black leather clothes and turned around on the spot.

‘Are you deaf? I said that in the container there were—'

‘Your father?'

‘Yes. My father.'

‘With Lucia and Salvatore?'

She stared at him. Perhaps he had suffered brain damage after all?

‘He took them to a motel in Alto Adige,' she said. ‘Where he was shot in the back, your wife was shot and … and …'

‘What? What did they do to Salvatore, Sabrina? What?! I know you want to tell me. So tell me! What did they do to my son?'

‘They … garrotted him with a piece of wire.'

He moved incredibly smoothly and quickly for a man of
his size, despite all the scars, the metal brackets and titanium nails and screws in his bones.

Sabrina found herself lifted half a metre up by the neck of her anorak. Giulio Forlani pushed her back over the railings. She felt gravity pull her down as the balustrade dug into her lower back. Giulio Forlani's enormous hands were strangling her – very slowly. He was distant as he pushed her over the railings. It was as if the man's face were carved in stone. Locked and inaccessible. His eyes were blank.

Patterns like glitter balls in a nightclub started blossoming behind her eyelids and her consciousness grew sooty and black around the edges like burning paper.

Sabrina hit him as hard as she could, her palms connecting with Giulio Forlani's ears. Executed correctly, the blow ought to have burst his eardrums. Or at least given him something to think about for a couple of minutes. Giulio Forlani let go of her, put his hands over his ears and staggered back three paces with a grim expression on his face.

Sabrina landed on her feet and had the barrel of the Walther pressed hard against one of his melancholy eye sockets in less than a second. She released the safety catch and cocked the gun.

Her index finger was white on the trigger and Giulio Forlani's free eye pondered her trigger finger in surprise.

‘Your son was garrotted, Giulio,' she whispered. ‘Plain
and simple, and then both he and his mother, your wife Lucia, were put in black bin liners and tossed into a hole in a rubbish dump outside of Naples, do you hear? That must mean something to you! Do you just want me to pull the trigger and put you out of your misery right now? Or are you ready to start listening to me?'

He took a step back and rubbed his eye.

Sabrina cupped a hand behind her ear. The pistol was still aimed at his face.

‘What did you say? I can't hear you,' she said.