When the Dead Awaken (33 page)

Mother and daughter stopped on the marble tiles outside the studio. Bach's
Goldberg Variations
floated out through the open windows like crystals. They had chosen the extension as her husband's studio because it was cool and the ceiling was high, the windows faced north, and there was an acidic smell from the apple presses and cider vats that had lived there for centuries – and because the door was level with the flagstones, which eliminated the need for a ramp for his wheelchair.

Her husband was sitting in front of the easel with the brush handle between his teeth. The young woman ran her hands through his long thick hair and quick as lightning he swung around the light aluminium wheelchair and smiled. His upper body was still agile and strong. He lifted Abrielle up on his lap and balanced on the rear wheels of the chair. The wheelchair pivoted on one wheel and Abrielle squealed with delight.

Her mother clapped her hands and threw a glance at the circus poster above the work desk: the trapeze trio The Blind Eagles. Her husband permanently suspended in the air at the apex of his treble somersault, her brother-in-law, who would catch him, hanging by his knees with long outstretched hands which had just delivered her to the bottomless dark under the circus dome. She herself was a tiny,
curved and glittering figure on an endless journey towards the recently vacated trapeze four metres away. The trio had been blindfolded during the entire act and nothing had ever gone wrong until the day a lorry with a sleeping driver behind the wheel had crushed their van and everything else – their bodies, their costumes, their equipment and their future. Her brother-in-law had been killed instantly, her husband had broken his spine, but she and her beloved had retained their foothold on life. Through discreet channels in the global community of circus artistes she had learned about the unusual requirement in southern Italy for performers with certain talents; jobs that demanded particular physical, as well as mental abilities, and she had been thoroughly tested. She had carried out fiendishly difficult missions bordering on the suicidal in Indonesia and Singapore and had built up a fine reputation as a freelance assassin.

The Camorra expected that, as was usual when Massimiliano Di Luca left his house in the country, the Bentley would drive east from Ticino, taking the scenic route through the villages of Cuggiono and Mesero before joining the Turin–Milan motorway. The route allowed the maestro to rest his eyes on the fields and low forest before joining the dense motorway traffic.

L'Artista had chosen the usually deserted road between Cuggiono and Mesero as her point of attack.

Massimiliano Di Luca wasn't being entirely fair when he claimed that Alberto didn't know any other gears of the Bentley but the first. The large bottle-green car was in fact going at a respectable speed down Via Annoni when it happened.

If the maestro, in the back of the car, had looked up from his brandy glass and enamelled pillbox, he would have noticed a fresh southern wind that skimmed the wheat fields; he would certainly have noticed the straight-backed little girl at the side of the road, walking as delicately as a bird, bouncing a blue ball in front of her, because Massimiliano had an unfailing eye for agility, coordination and elegance; he would have nodded his approval of the dark brown velvet dress with the old-fashioned lace collar, the white stockings and the gloves, and he would have thought that in today's cultural wasteland some mothers still knew how to dress their children properly – though the mother's own outfit left a lot to be desired: the usual baggy, boring, synthetic leisure clothes.

The mother and her daughter were the only people on the road.

Perhaps he might have had time to put his hand on Alberto's shoulder when the blue ball left the girl's hand and bounced out into the path of the car, less than ten
metres from the Bentley's massive chrome radiator grille. Perhaps he might have had time to shout a warning when the girl ran after the ball, and perhaps he might have smiled with relief when the mother yanked her back – only to call out again when the woman stumbled out on to the tarmac and the Bentley hit her.

Instead, Massimiliano Di Luca was brutally roused from his unusually dark thoughts. The enamelled box's contents, small white pills, spilled across the seats and blankets in the car, and he looked up bewildered as Alberto swore and slammed on the brakes.

Even though the British car weighed almost three tonnes and the woman sixty kilos at most, the impact of the collision was felt with shocking clarity. The young dark-haired woman tumbled like a rag doll over the long bonnet, crashed into the windscreen with a tragic crunch and disappeared out of sight on Alberto's side.

Before Massimiliano slid across the seat and opened the door on the roadside, he glanced at the pavement and saw the face of the little girl. She had the darkest eyes, the palest skin, and her wide-open mouth was the blackest he had ever seen.

The woman registered the consequences of the collision without any particular emotion. Her calculations had been a little bit out. The speed of the Bentley had been more like sixty kilometres per hour rather than her prediction of fifty. She hadn't managed to turn her left leg as she rolled over the bonnet, even though the subsequent forward roll over the tarmac was executed to a satisfactory extent. She knew that a ligament on the inside of her left knee had been torn or sprained despite her knee guard, and her right wrist had started to swell up.

When she heard the driver's footsteps, she groaned, studied the tarmac two centimetres below her nose and bit through the tiny bladder of pig's blood she had concealed in her mouth. There could surely be no other substance in the world that so magnetically attracted immediate attention as blood on the face of a young woman.

Especially if you had caused it to be there.

Alberto carefully turned the woman over on to her
back and breathed a sigh of relief when her pupils contracted. Massimiliano Di Luca mumbled a mixture of curses at Alberto's bowed neck and apologies to the woman's bloodstained face. Shifting from foot to foot he was busy pulling out a business card and handkerchiefs from the pockets of his jacket – and neither of the men noticed the girl on the roadside quickly cutting away a square of the ball's plastic skin with a Swiss Army knife. Pressing her nose and mouth against her velvet sleeve and holding the ball in her outstretched hand, she pumped the ball with her fingers and watched the clouds of dust disperse inside the Bentley. She aimed the hole in the ball at the front seats and pressed again. Then she put the ball in a double plastic bag exactly as her mother had instructed her, removed her gloves and put them in as well, closed the bag and tied a knot.

‘Mummy!'

Alberto lifted up the girl, who buried her face in his shoulder. The woman staggered to her feet. She swayed, took a step to test her leg's ability to support her and even attempted a smile.

‘You must excuse my driver, signora,' Di Luca mumbled. ‘He's as blind as a bat. He's—'

‘It's nothing, signore. It was my own fault. The ball. My daughter. Foolish. Idiotic, in fact.'

The woman had tears in her eyes and she wiped the
blood from her face with one of the maestro's handkerchiefs.

‘Your face.'

‘I think I'll survive, signore.
Grazie
.'

She limped to the side of the road and Alberto put down the little girl. A couple of passing cars slowed down at the scene, but Alberto waved them on.

‘Mummy's fine, darling.'

Massimiliano Di Luca followed her, wringing his hands while Alberto hung his head.

‘We need to contact the police, signora. I insist. They'll need to make a report – my insurance company will obviously – otherwise I will personally—'

‘No, no! It really was nothing, signore. It was entirely my own fault. Please don't blame your driver.'

Massimiliano Di Luca cut short his flow of words as if an insect had flown into his mouth, and began studying the woman more closely. There was something – the accent, it was obvious now.

He shook his head at his own stupidity. The woman and her daughter were clearly Eastern European; like so many others, they might even be in the country illegally, and her reluctance to involve the police now became obvious.

While the woman carried on consoling her daughter, Massimiliano Di Luca whispered his assumption to Alberto and the driver nodded.

‘Perhaps some small recompense would be in order, maestro?'

‘You're suggesting … ?'

Alberto nodded.

Massimiliano Di Luca fished out a rarely used wallet from his inside pocket and opened it. Good! It was filled with banknotes. He handed all of them to the woman, who shook her head.

‘There's no need, signore! It really was nothing.'

She stuttered with embarrassment.

In the course of the next minute Di Luca and the woman performed a sincere exchange of offers and rejections with the girl and Alberto as their silent audience. At last the immigrant capitulated and put the banknotes into the pocket of her anorak with two fingers. She took her daughter's hand and limped back the way they had come. The woman had firmly declined their offer of a lift with a kind of fraught bashfulness, which further confirmed Di Luca's suspicions that the woman and girl were illegal immigrants, desperate to get away.

Mother and daughter found their sensible Citroën Berlingo on a forest track a few hundred metres from the road.

L'Artista muttered a few words into a walkie-talkie and they got in the car.

She removed the last of the blood from her face with a
wet wipe, pulled down her tracksuit bottoms and inspected the already swollen and discoloured knee. Then she flexed and bent the fingers of her right hand. They all worked. In the back her daughter put on her seatbelt and started playing on her Gameboy. Her mother opened a cool box in the passenger footwell, found an ice pack and strapped it to the inside of her knee.

‘Do you want an ice cream?' she asked the girl.

‘Yes, please.'

‘You did very well, sweetheart.'

The girl nodded, totally wrapped up in her game.

‘Here you go,' her mother said.

She handed her daughter an ice-cream cone and opened a can of Coke for herself.

‘What are we doing now, Mummy?' the girl asked without looking up.

‘You're not doing anything, darling. You're going home to Daddy. I've got to go out and do something.'

‘Were they bad people?'

‘Make sure you don't get ice cream on the seat, sweetheart.'

Massimiliano Di Luca and Alberto Moravia drove off together without exchanging a single word. Massimiliano Di Luca leaned back in his seat, frowned and held up his hands. He rubbed his palms together and studied the tiny dots of blood on the tips of his fingers. The blood kept
flowing even though he pressed his fingertips together. He looked down at the pale leather seat and wondered at the fine layer of dust.

His fingers started to convulse involuntarily. His arms flopped into his lap, the nerves unresponsive.

With great difficulty he managed to lift his head and found Alberto's eyes in the rear-view mirror. His driver was sitting in exactly the same position as he was; his hands had let go of the steering wheel and were resting on his thighs, his eyes unresponsive like his own. The Bentley drifted to a halt on the verge, and the engine stalled. Di Luca and Alberto both slumped forwards at the same time and threw up.

Di Luca's eyelids were as heavy as the sins of the world and the sweat poured over his eyes. He couldn't utter a single word. If he had been capable of speech, if Alberto hadn't been in just as bad a state as he was, he would have asked him to find the old Colt .45 in the glove compartment and shoot him through the heart.

A tow truck pulled up in front of the Bentley and two men wearing overalls climbed down from the driver's cab. They set about manoeuvring the truck's towing brackets underneath the front wheels of the Bentley.

One of the men smiled at Massimiliano Di Luca, who was now lying in a foetal position in the back, incapable of movement, but fully conscious.

The two men pushed their shoulders against the rear of
the Bentley and rolled it on to the tow bars. They secured the front wheels with chains, lifted up the front of the car, got back into the driver's cab and drove off, towing the Bentley.

The whole sequence of events took only a few minutes.

Outskirts of Milan

The irony of the situation had temporarily stumped Urs Savelli. He was a fan of Massimiliano Di Luca and over the years rip-offs of the designer's creations had earned the Camorra more money than all the other Milan fashion houses' products put together.

That it would all come to an end in a derelict warehouse offended Savelli's sense of decorum.

He sat motionless on an office chair in the warehouse on Via Carlo Montanari in one of Milan's outer industrial areas; abandoned by its owners, no longer with any purpose. The few still unbroken windows had been painted white, the doors had been removed and the openings boarded up.

A rat scurried across the floor along the edge of a sunbeam and he noticed a couple of pictures of girls torn from a tyre-company calendar flutter through the shadows. One of them flew past the chair and he stepped
on it with the tip of his boot. The blonde had a curly eighties hairstyle and eye make-up to match. Apart from the make-up, the girl was naked: kneeling, inviting … but with a pneumatic tool strategically placed in front of her crotch. He lifted his foot and the girl whirled on. He looked up. The old plywood ceiling was close to giving up the ghost and the wooden walls, roasted by the sun, were dry and fraying.

It was a good place. Several of the sheds around the warehouse had burned down and Savelli had big plans for this final building – and for Assistant Public Prosecutor Sabrina D'Avalos. She was a young witch and witches should be burned.