When the Dead Awaken (36 page)

The intolerable little assistant public prosecutor had been dragged into the minibus and rendered harmless and … now this: For no known reason the bus had veered out of control, scaled a high kerb, just about avoided a tree, but had then driven across the pavement and crashed into the outpatients building. And turned over on its side. They had heard shots fired.

Jesus, Joseph, Mary and the donkey … !

The windows of the outpatients building filled with faces.

They heard sirens.

The three men sat absolutely still as they silently watched the small, dishevelled and bloody figure squirming her way through a broken window in the minibus. She was like an insatiable, unstoppable alien who had just consumed the crew of a spacecraft and was now looking for fresh prey. She swung her legs up from under her and for a moment sat quietly on the bodywork. Then she turned her head slowly like a robot to locate them: her face was as white as chalk where it wasn't red. There was no expression in that face, but her eyes were wide open and all
seeing. She slid down the bodywork, landing heavily on her feet, and started limping towards them. In the middle of the road. Shedding glass splinters with every laborious step as if she were wearing cracked ice armour.

And though it looked as heavy as original sin, she raised the black automatic pistol to eye level. She started shooting as she walked.

The Audi's windscreen turned milky white around a star-shaped hole and an invisible hand tore off an ear from the ambulance man.

The man screamed and the Audi rocked when the next two shots went through the bonnet and into the engine. Savelli let himself slide down to a lying position.

‘I think we should leave the area now, Claudio,' he said quietly, and pulled a face as the stuffing of the passenger seat was blasted away right above his head. ‘And if you can hit that stupid bitch in the process, I really would appreciate it.'

The Audi leapt forwards with a roar and Savelli raised himself on to his elbow and looked out of the side window. He saw Sabrina D'Avalos get back on her feet after rolling across the pavement. The tiny fury looked straight at him with a strangely determined expression in her cloudy, grey eyes. Mesmerized, he kept watching her – now through the rear window. He had seen that promise before: in the eyes of her father, General Agostino D'Avalos. Then the terrible woman lifted her pistol again and Urs Savelli slipped back on the floor.

Ospedale Maggiore, Niguarda Ca' Granda, Milan

She heard his voice outside the curtain, but felt nothing. She was totally spent. The doctor injected a little more local anaesthetic into her back and clucked like a worried hen.

The casualty doctor kept finding more glass fragments in her back and neck. They fell with irregular clinks into a steel tray held by the nurse.

Primo Alba pulled the curtain aside and raised his eyebrows in comic surprise. Sabrina lifted the white ambulance blanket up to her shoulders, even though Primo Alba had seen it all before. In another life.

She didn't look at him, but at her hair, which lay in a thick, dark brown nest under her dangling, blood-stained feet. It had taken twelve stitches to close up the wound at the back of her neck. The nurse had offered to shave off only the hair around the cut, but Sabrina couldn't see herself with a bald spot at the back of her head.

‘Take it all,' she had said, and now her scalp felt naked, alien and cool. The nurse, who was young and pretty – well, she would be, wouldn't she? – had operated the electric shaver with a kind of gleeful pleasure.

Sabrina couldn't possibly face Primo. She looked like a train wreck. Her hands were still swollen and the cable ties had left angry red furrows around her wrists.

Primo Alba said nothing, but she was aware that he was smiling at the pretty, healthy and undamaged nurse, whose body instinctively assumed a different and possibly more flattering stance. Perhaps she pulled back her shoulders a little, pushed her breasts forwards and her hips out; the bowl with Sabrina's blood and pieces of glass was held up as if it were an offer of refreshing grapes to a travel-weary pilgrim.

Cazzo
 … Stop it now!

‘You have a nicely … shaped head,' he said to Sabrina, who slumped a little.

‘Giulio … ? How is he?' she asked.

Alba's tanned hand swung back into her field of vision and the tweed sleeve was pushed back with the other hand, so he could consult his wristwatch.

‘He's awake and in five minutes they'll take him up to the roof,' he said. ‘From where he'll travel by helicopter to Aviano. The same place as the widow and her son were taken. After that …'

‘Yes?'

‘The mandarins have met in Rome, Sabrina. One must presume they'll find a permanent solution to Dr Forlani's problems.'

‘It never worked,' she said, and felt tears forcing their way up under her eyelids as the doctor eased a particularly obstinate glass splinter out of her back. She gasped. ‘Ouch! It never worked … the invention. It couldn't …' Even though she felt dehydrated, she seemed to have an excess of sweat, because it kept running down her face. ‘… It couldn't handle crossing datelines.'

His hands disappeared into his trouser pockets. His face appeared not to reveal any kind of promise or interest, because the nurse turned her attention back to the doctor.

‘Yes, I've heard that,' he said. ‘They may not have got it right yet, but I sense that they still believe the technology has huge potential. Hopefully the good doctor Forlani will end up somewhere in the US where he can carry on his work.'

‘Until they find him again.'

He cleared his throat and she finally looked at him. Just a glance. His face was paler than she remembered. There were more fine wrinkles and deeper laughter lines in his real-life face than she recalled. She tightened the blanket around her.

‘That's where we come in, Sabrina,' he said, so quietly that a less attentive audience might easily have missed it.
‘We may have an opening. Promising, but something of a long shot.'

‘We do?'

‘Yes.'

He started talking to the doctor as if she weren't there, or as if she were an injured pet someone had brought in – an object obviously prized, at least to some extent.

‘Has she lost a lot of blood?' he asked.

‘Some. Not much.'

‘Any broken bones?'

‘Strange as it may seem, Dottoressa D'Avalos escaped with only superficial cuts and bruises, and then all this glass. It's actually a miracle considering her … efforts,' the doctor said. ‘We won't get all the glass out today. We'll have to remove it over time. The glass doesn't show up on X-rays. The deepest bits will eventually work their way out to the surface and … present symptoms. Then we'll take them.'

Or they'll work their way in, she thought.

There was a rasping sound as the doctor started tearing strips of surgical tape off a roll.

The compresses felt dry and cool against her skin.

‘I'll wait outside,' Primo Alba said.

‘You do that,' she mumbled.

She spotted her shoulder bag, which some kind and eternally blessed soul had rescued from the crashed minibus and placed inside the curtain.

‘All done,' the doctor said, and she let herself slide down on to the vinyl floor, then nearly fell over because she had no strength or control of her hips, ankles or knees.

The nurse supported her. She smelt of some fleeting citrus perfume that Sabrina might have chosen for herself.

‘Signorina? Will you be all right?'

Anxiously she looked into her eyes.

‘My bag,
per favore
.'

‘Of course.'

She seemed to communicate something non-verbal to the doctor, who left.

‘Here, signorina.'

The nurse placed Sabrina's shapeless shoulder bag on the stretcher and Sabrina let the blanket fall around her feet. She was naked beneath it.

‘A bath?' the nurse suggested.

Sabrina looked herself up and down. She looked like a hunting trophy flayed by an amateur.

‘No, I'm fine, thanks. Later. Doesn't matter.'

The young woman smiled gravely and helped Sabrina find the last clean white T-shirt, a clean pair of knickers, socks and dark trousers from her trouser suit.

Sabrina struggled to get into the clothes. Everything hurt and she had to move deliberately and carefully like someone underwater. The nurse was a credit to her profession, she really was, and Sabrina was able to forgive her
the small flirtatious pantomime in front of Primo Alba. She had never been able to feel ownership of any living creature, with the exception of Ismael and Ziggy, and she wasn't going to start now, certainly not for Alba, whom she would quite happily see swallowed up in the bottomless crevasse of a glacier.

She spotted him at the end of the grey hospital corridor. His figure was blurred from the back lighting from a large window behind him. He was speaking quietly into his mobile and she was about to dismiss her first impression of him as a carefree yuppie. He was a serious man, she thought, and his smiles were as rare as solar eclipses – when he was on duty. Which he probably always was. She walked as stiffly as if she had just got off a horse. Her clothes were uncomfortable and dry against her body and new sore spots were constantly trying to draw attention to themselves.

Primo Alba ended the call when he noticed her and put the mobile in his jacket pocket. With the light behind him, his face was black and unreadable.

He took her bag and slung it over his shoulder.

‘An opening?' she asked.

‘Or the chance of one,' he nodded.

‘A chance of an opening? That sounds great. An opening to whom or what?'

‘The woman. L'Artista. It was she and a little girl,
possibly her daughter, who attacked Massimiliano Di Luca. A farmer watched the whole thing, but didn't connect the incident to anything criminal until he heard about it on the radio.

‘A little girl?'

He shrugged his shoulders.

‘A little girl, a boy with long hair, a dwarf in a dress, what difference does it make, Sabrina?'

‘None.'

‘Incidentally, you were right about the homing pigeons,' he said. ‘Your boss Federico Renda is ecstatic. He sends his regards. A carpentry business is connected to Don Francesco Terrasino's estate by a particularly well-constructed and well-equipped tunnel. The carpenter is a well-known breeder of pigeons. That's the opening.'

‘Why didn't you tell me your name?'

‘What we need are a couple of stoats or polecats. Do some damage. Make it look like an accident. The pigeons, I mean. Meanwhile we abduct a couple of them.'

‘Who is Nestore Raspallo?'

He started walking.

She hobbled after him.

‘Are you with the GIS? You've been working for them the whole time, haven't you? You knew that Forlani was alive.'

The tears started burning behind her eyelids and she had to swallow several times.

‘We think that L'Artista lives on a line north-north-east from Naples. We fit a couple of the carpenter's pigeons with a small GPS sender and follow them in a helicopter. At least that's the plan.'

‘Are you married?'

He groaned with exasperation.

She was like the journalist who insisted on asking about the divorce while the actor only wanted to promote his latest movie.

‘Are you? What I'm saying is, right now is there a Signora Alba somewhere pining for you, darning your socks, ironing your shirts, cooking dinner for your children …'

‘Jesus Christ, Sabrina! Do you think for once you could just be—'

‘Professional? That's just what I was being. I killed two men, Primo.'

He nodded.

‘And what you did was clever and brave. Definitely. I'm in the GIS. I travel two hundred days a year. I'm not married and I have no children. The closest I've come to having a family is my divorced sister, her two fairly intolerable daughters and a cat who sleeps on my windowsill when it rains and I'm at home to open the window. I haven't even given it a name.'

Sabrina stopped and stared miserably at the floor. Two hospital porters pushed a stretcher past them in the corridor. A sheet had been pulled over its contents.

‘You knew that he was alive,' she said. ‘He told me you were with him on the plane to the US.'

‘I didn't know that he was still alive. I knew that he had survived the attack, that much is true. I knew that he went to Gloucester and had got a job on a trawler. And then he disappeared.'

‘Disappeared?'

Primo Alba nodded wearily.

‘We had a … system. Coded messages delivered with junk mail. Telephone numbers he could call if everything was all right and numbers he had to call if he thought someone was after him. He did neither. We sent people over there to look for him. In vain. We presumed that Savelli had found him.'

‘But why didn't you tell me?'

‘Because I'm not allowed to, Sabrina! I work in Intelligence and I follow my orders – on the whole. When the bodies of Lucia and Salvatore were discovered and you started your … investigation, everyone was rather rattled. Because of … your father, whom many people regarded as a saint … Forlani disappearing. Mistakes had been made. Both during the attack on Nanometric and –' Alba looked at the floor – ‘later, the general. It was unforgivable that we couldn't take better care of him. That
I
didn't. I spoke to him three hours before he was killed. I should have been there.'

‘Did Renda know that Forlani was alive?'

‘No.'

Sabrina nodded. She believed him, and there was a strange comfort in knowing that her boss had been just as ignorant as she had been.

‘She's dangerous,' she said. ‘L'Artista.'

‘I'm perfectly aware of that. Do you want to come along? Are you up for it?'