When the Dead Awaken (29 page)

‘What now?' he had asked and she didn't have a clue.

His eyes had started flickering as if there were a loose connection in his brain – just as they had before he started strangling her – and she quickly muttered something about Federico Renda, police protection, Naples, going somewhere he could gather his thoughts, when he had suggested Massimiliano Di Luca's property by the Ticino River, fifty kilometres west of Milan. Hardly anyone knew the master spent his summers there.

Sabrina looked back down the winding dirt track that disappeared behind the low coniferous forest. Behind a cluster of birch trees she could see the shallow gravel bed of the Ticino. Apart from birds and insects it was completely quiet here. A forgotten place.

The house was one of those old Tuscan farmhouses she loved so much: a house that blended into the landscape as effortlessly as if it had been left behind by a melting glacier. An old building with a boulder foundation and a sloping roof of fat, red tiles that looked like an upside-down pâté.

In an open barn she spotted Di Luca's bottle-green Bentley and in the doorway to the house, the small Venetian was standing with his hands buried deeply in the pockets of his light brown cords.

He embraced Forlani somewhere around his waist and Sabrina got a quick handshake, a nod and a blank look.

Massimiliano Di Luca led them through low rooms
which, although cosy and comfortably furnished, were surprisingly ordinary. Sabrina didn't know whether to be disappointed or not. It was a nice place, no doubt about it, homely even, but she had been expecting something extraordinary from the world-famous designer. Not necessarily a branch of Versailles, but certainly something more glamorous than worn stone floors, brown cord sofas, simple black-and-white photographs on raw stone walls and a long kitchen table covered by a red oilskin cloth – exactly like her mother's apartment. The only concession to glamour was a black-and-white poster that covered the whole of the end wall: a mature but instantly recognizable Claudia Schiffer wearing only a cat and a Di Luca handbag. ‘
To Max, all my love, Claudia
,' she had written in the corner.

Sabrina stopped in front of the wall.

‘Is that Helmut Newton?' she asked.

‘Mario Testino.'

‘Yes, of course.'

She sat down on the kitchen bench and looked around. The light flooded in through the small recessed windows. The best light of the day, she thought. When it was low, long, golden and endless. With considerable effort Giulio Forlani edged his way in beside her.

Sabrina studied one of the photographs on the wall, which showed Di Luca in the cockpit of a large sailboat. The boat was on the verge of keeling over, its sails filled
with wind. The Venetian had one hand on the tiller and man and boat seemed perfectly balanced.

‘Do you sail, signorina?'

‘No.'

‘It's in Portofino,' he told her.

‘What's her name?'

‘
Mona
.'

Di Luca's missing muse and favourite model, she recalled.

She smiled politely.

‘I see.'

‘Coffee?' Di Luca offered.

‘Yes, please.'

She had expected that the designer would now ring a silver bell to summon Filipino waiters in starched white mess jackets and cease this ridiculous illusion that he was a simple Lombardy peasant, but Di Luca got up, switched on an espresso machine and started looking for cups.

‘Are you disappointed, Dottoressa D'Avalos?'

‘Not at all,' she lied.

‘I'm not Versace. I never have been,' he said. ‘But I had a big house in Milan once, crammed with French baroque furniture, butlers and maids, everything gilded, ridiculous statues, tapestries, Persian rugs and a private cinema. I felt like Randolph Hearst or Gloria Swanson. Buried alive. I want to leave my door open, signorina. Speaking
metaphorically, of course. I wouldn't want to be overrun by the rabble.'

‘No, of course not.'

Forlani hadn't moved. He would appear to be absorbed in prayer.

‘Now that you've found Giulio, dottoressa, what are you going to do with him?' Massimiliano Di Luca asked. ‘Save him from the Camorra again?'

Forlani was as quiet as a conductor before the first down beat. The psychopath foaming at the mouth who had been on the verge of throwing her from the bell tower of Basilica Santa Maria only a few hours ago seemed never to have existed. Only this virtuous, peacefully meditating man who would never dream of hurting a fly.

‘If that's what it takes,' she said.

‘Sugar, milk?'

‘Both, please,' she said. ‘I presume that you've heard about Dr Carlo Mazzaferro, maestro? The doctor who declared Forl— … declared Giulio dead.'

‘Of course. Poor man … and poor girl,' the Venetian muttered.

She was tempted to say that it wasn't her who had put Urs Savelli on to Mazzaferro. That she hadn't planted the idea that Giulio Forlani might not be dead in the brain of the Camorra – but decided against it. She knew from court proceedings that protesting was as good as admitting your guilt.

She turned her head and met Giulio Forlani's scrutinizing stare.

‘There doesn't seem to be a way back,' she said. ‘They know that you're alive, and they know that you would be capable of recreating your frankly wonderful invention.'

Forlani and Di Luca exchanged quick glances.

She looked at the giant more closely.

‘Because you would, wouldn't you?'

She opened her jacket, found her purse and placed the small date strip on the oilcloth next to an enormous and scarred hand.

Forlani looked at it without touching it.

‘Wouldn't you?' she repeated.

‘Yes.'

‘As far as I've been told, no one has continued Nanometric's work,' she said. ‘So your … crystals are still the best bet for the copyright protection which everyone so desperately needs.'

‘I expect that I could recreate it,' Giulio Forlani said after another sideways glance at the designer. ‘With the right facilities. We patented several of the key processes. The patents are valid for a few more years before other companies can use them.'

He smiled at her, but looked at the strip.

‘I'm sorry, Sabrina. It feels so very far away. Do you understand?'

‘Of course.'

‘Can't I just go back to where I came from?'

‘Where is that?' she asked.

He smiled.

‘The south.'

She felt a desperate urge for a cigarette and asked if she could smoke. Massimiliano Di Luca rose and produced a silver ashtray. She lit a cigarette and without thinking pushed the packet across the oilcloth to Forlani, who also took one.

‘The Camorra will always see you as a clear threat,' she said.

His face disappeared momentarily behind his hands. Somewhere behind them he nodded.

‘I know, I know …'

The smoke seeped slowly out of his nostrils as his face reappeared.

She got up and went over to one of the small windows. She folded her arms across her chest and looked out into the yard. The driver, Alberto, was busy oiling a teak bench. He was tanned and muscular, wearing a pair of faded jeans and a khaki T-shirt. On the far side of the yard the meadow sloped down towards the river. Sabrina was transported back to the summers of her childhood by Lake Como, where she had learned to shoot with a bow and arrow, ride, swim, build a decent kite and keep it away from the kite-eating trees opposite the house.

This investigation had changed her, she knew that. Changed her – or had she found herself?

‘Dottoressa … ?'

Massimiliano Di Luca had walked up close to her without her noticing him.

She picked up the concern in his voice.

‘I'm fine.'

‘Perhaps we're all a little tired,' he said and gestured her back to the table.

She looked over her shoulder – towards the distant trees – raised her hand and waved goodbye.

Qualiano, Naples

Afterwards, there was a moment of awestruck silence before young voices filled the earpieces. The girl with the tattoos mumbled into her throat microphone that it had been like seeing Kurt Cobain walk again, while one of the boys said it was like seeing Michael Jackson.

He indulged them. How many times in their hopefully long careers would they come into close contact with a myth, a ghost, who up until now had been made of the same substance as dreams – and paranoid delusions? However, after thirty seconds of excited chattering on the strictly guarded radio channel, Primo Alba told them to shut up.

Urs Savelli, complete with his trademark Basque walking stick, had just passed under the well-hidden cameras which GIS experts had installed in the roof of the tunnel the previous night.

The brim of his hat hid half of Savelli's face and he had
moved swiftly and purposefully. Shortly before he appeared, an unmarked van had driven down the ramp under Signor Marchese's small workshop next to his house and the old man had closed the garage doors after it himself.

It was exactly as the city engineer, Signor Franco, had told them: the old man loved his pigeons. From the corn silo behind the carpenter's house members of Primo Alba's young team had admired Signor Marchese tirelessly tending to his beautiful pigeons, both white and speckled, that lived in large wire cages in the yard behind his workshop. He chatted to them as if they were his beloved grandchildren, constantly replacing their water, food and bedding; took them out, stroked their feathers, trimmed their claws with a pair of small nail clippers.

Primo Alba slowly turned on to his back. Absent-minded ly he watched a busy spider fashion a new web between two laths in the silo's ancient roof construction. Dried-up pigeon droppings crunched under his leather jacket. If he had wanted to, he could have reached out and touched the young man who was currently operating the telescopes and cameras pointing at Signor Marchese's courtyard.

They had lifted a couple of roof tiles to accommodate the telescope, the camera lenses and the CO
₂
-powered rifle which – if and when the need arose – would fire a dart containing a needle and a glass ampoule containing enough fentanyl to knock out an elephant into Signor Marchese's unprotected neck.

With his left hand Primo Alba would be able to reach the young woman, one of the first in the history of the GIS to achieve full active field status. The girl was a goth and the European tae kwon do champion at her weight. She should really be sleeping now, but was probably too agitated at the sight of Urs Savelli to nod off. Just like Primo she was lying quietly looking up at the roof.

Primo Alba entertained himself by visualizing a bare-knuckle fight between the young female GIS soldier and Assistant Public Prosecutor Sabrina D'Avalos.

He had no doubts about the hypothetical outcome.

The ‘Little Miss Girl Dragon versus The Three Brothers from Hell' technique. Few things could match that, he thought.

He sent an encrypted text message to Federico Renda's mobile informing him of Savelli's arrival. He assumed that Renda was nearby in his customized Mercedes.

They had reviewed their options: (1) they could arrest Savelli and undoubtedly have him put away for a long list of murders, but they would lose L'Artista, the fabled female assassin who was at the top of Federico Renda's personal wanted list – after all, it was she who had put him in a wheelchair. However, the public prosecutor was a rational man and would at all times set aside private motives in pursuit of the greater good; or (2) they could let Savelli carry on, let him drip his poison into the ear of Don Francesco and subsequently hope that their sinister
plans would involve activating L'Artista with a homing pigeon – if that really was what Signor Marchese's pigeons were used for … and then what? Wait for the assassin to execute yet another innocent victim – perhaps Sabrina D'Avalos herself – before they intervened?

Everyone had been allowed to voice their opinion. Captain Primo Alba was a democratic leader. Within reason. The girl with the tattoos had suggested positioning a group of falconers around Signor Marchese's house and pigeon cages to catch and intercept the lethal message with their hawks and falcons. Primo Alba had asked if she knew of any. And what was the overall success rate of a goshawk? Unless it was one hundred per cent, they were back at square one. The lad had suggested using one of the military's unmanned drones to follow the pigeon, but a call to a specialist in the air force had put a stop to that idea: no matter how advanced drones were these days, they were unable to follow a specific bird through an airspace of possibly several hundred kilometres populated with other birds of the same size and with the same infrared signatures. Pigeons are social animals, the man had told them. It would probably join up with other pigeons and roost at night with them.

The tranquillizer had been Primo Alba's suggestion: knock out the old man before he had time to dispatch the pigeon, find Terrasino's code and break it as quickly as possible. Then send another pigeon fitted with an electronic tracker device and follow it to L'Artista's hideout.

And that was the plan.

The mobile vibrated his hand.

Renda.

Wait
, was his order.
Wait and see
.

He whispered the command into his throat microphone.

The young woman sighed and closed her eyes.

Don Francesco and Urs Savelli were sitting on their usual bench shaded by the pergola. Savelli leaned back and looked at the vines while he let Don Francesco digest the news. Good as well as bad.

‘This Cesare,' Don Francesco said. ‘He couldn't tell the difference between a dead man and a living one? He crushed Forlani's car and then he shot him?'

He made an impatient gesture with his liver-spotted hand. He had never been in any doubt whether a man was dead or alive.