When the Dead Awaken (9 page)

Signorina Lombardi's crooked fingers worked their way through Ravel's
Pavane pour une infante défunte
, and Antonia, who had heard the piece far too many times before, felt the familiar tightening in her chest.

After her efforts, Signorina Lombardi's hands came to rest in the narrow lap of her dress. Very slowly Ugo Conti lifted his head and gestured the family to come up to the podium. Close to the dead seventeen-year-old, it was impossible not to be deeply moved. Her face glowed against the silk. Deeply introspective and already in the next world. Recognizable, but dragged there by force.

‘My daughter,' the mother said, at last pressing her face into her husband's shoulder. ‘She is sleeping. My daughter is sound asleep.'

She kissed her hair and looked at Antonia.

The sister stood on tiptoes and placed a small bouquet of wildflowers on the girl's chest.

‘Goodbye, Amalia,' she whispered.

The father's face darkened when he saw the injured boy, and yet it was he who stepped aside and held out his hand.

The boyfriend got his minute by the coffin.

On the steps outside the chapel Ugo Conti watched the Nesta family drive past the white lion statue down by the road.

‘You've done it again, Antonia! Forgive me for ever doubting you. It was just that the situation seemed so – well, so impossible. Deadlocked, I thought. The boy. The father. I don't know what to say! You brought them together!'

Antonia looked past him, across the small lawn, across the street and the row of houses on the other side.

Behind the houses, unseen, the river warbled.

‘I forgive you,' she muttered drily.

She made a point of looking at her watch and Ugo remembered the envelopes in his inside pocket. Signorina Lombardi curtsied, sent Antonia a smile, took her walking stick and walked away down the cobbled stones on the drive.

Antonia didn't stop to open Conti's envelope until she had rounded the corner. She counted the money and
transferred the notes to her purse. She glanced sideways, to Enzo, silently watching her with the loyal melancholy of a St Bernard. He took her bag and together they walked down Via Fuori Ponti, above which the sky looked newly washed and where the sun cast shadows under the barred window openings. You could sharpen a knife on those shadows.

Enzo Canavaro never got lost in Castellarano's maze of small narrow streets, though he claimed never to have previously visited the town. He had simply turned up at her house one evening and asked to move in. Antonia and her fourteen-year-old son, Gianni, had heard a motorbike pull up in the courtyard a few minutes earlier. She had converted her parents' old grocery into a kind of B&B, but weeks passed between visitors. He hadn't asked for a room for the night. He had asked if he could live there. Gianni had looked imploringly at his mother, but Antonia ignored him.

The man had smiled shyly. He had stood precisely – and apparently by intuition – where the diagonals of the floorboards marked what was once the layout of the shop. He had set down a bag stuffed to the brim beside one of his big black boots. His coat resembled a tent with sleeves and his wild, black beard reached down to its third button.

He smelt of the cold, deep ocean.

She had walked ahead of him up the squeaking staircase and opened the door to the three small interconnecting
rooms. The man, who said his name was Enzo Canavaro, seemed delighted with them. He sent her a grateful smile when he closed the door behind him, after paying her one month's rent in advance.

Crackling new euro banknotes that Antonia didn't bank for a long time.

Neither Gianni nor Antonia got much sleep that first night with Enzo in the house. The new lodger moved around above their heads for hours, and the next morning she found a long line of dust on her duvet. His hobbling footsteps were interspersed with deep groans, a strangled sobbing and noises that sounded as if he were rearranging the furniture, or indeed the walls. Gianni came into his mother's room, where he sat for a long time, rocking in a chair, pressing his hands against his ears.

‘Mum, you have to get rid of him,' he had pleaded.

‘Tomorrow,' she promised.

The next morning a well-rested, neatly combed and relaxed Enzo Canavaro, wearing a garish Australian T-shirt, had proudly shown her how he had aligned the double bed exactly along the East–West latitude. It was better for sleeping, he assured her. Lined up like the boats that sailed back and forth between the fishing grounds of Flemish Cap and Grand Banks.

He broke off suddenly, as if he had said something inappropriate and stared down at the floor.

‘Are you a sailor?' she asked, and the huge man had nodded.

‘I used to fish, but not any more.'

‘My boy goes to school, Enzo,' she had said. ‘He needs his sleep. As do I. You have to be quiet at night or do your walking in the fields if you want to stay here. Otherwise you'll have to go.'

He had held up his massive, chafed hands in total surrender.

He promised.

And he had kept his promise for almost two years now.

First the butcher, and now the supermarket. She put a bottle of wine back on the shelf after debating whether or not to buy it.

The big man looked at her and her shopping bag when she came outside.

‘No wine?'

‘No, Enzo. No wine today. There is gnocchi with tomato sauce, water and bread. I've no money. There is no work for me. Italians no longer want to be beautiful. Neither the living nor the dead. Joanna, the hairdresser, says the same.'

Enzo nodded gravely.

‘I can pay more,' he offered.

‘You pay enough as it is. More than enough.'

‘Less?'

‘No, no, no! Certainly not.'

They walked down Via Don Reverberi and Via Chiaviche, narrow cobbled streets that had once been like a Middle Eastern kasbah with dazzling textures of fabrics, brocades, leather of all colours, enamel, shoes and bags. Where the sounds of looms and sewing machines on warm evenings – until the stars were high in the sky – had once poured from every doorway. In the narrow rooms you could see lines of women, their damp faces and shoulders hunched over endless rolls of fabric. You could hear their singing and complaining. The rivers of glittering fabric and tanned leather that had once run through Castellarano to Fendi, Valentino, Versace and Armani in Milan had dried up in the little mountain town and resurfaced in bootleg factories in Asia.

As was their habit, they stopped at the bottom of the street leading to the small park. Antonia Moretti needed half an hour to herself when she had finished at the undertaker's.

‘I'm going home,' he said.

‘Tell Gianni to do his homework and practise his cornet.'

‘Of course,' he said.

He sent her a brief smile by way of goodbye and limped down the street. He moved like a man thirty years his senior. He had once told her there was more metal in him than in most cars.

She spotted a young woman on her favourite marble bench. The woman was pressing her palms against the seat and
had turned her face to the sun. When she came closer, Antonia could see several deep scars on the woman's forehead and cheekbone. She didn't notice Antonia until she cleared her throat. Her eyes were hidden behind mirrored aviator sunglasses, but she smiled and moved politely.

Antonia sat down, exchanged a few words with the woman and offered her some of the blue grapes.

The woman had a pleasant voice, quick and sure movements and a calm expression. She also had a nickel-plated pistol in a shoulder holster, Antonia Moretti noted with some surprise.

The visitor rose after thanking her for the grapes, and left the park. Antonia's eyes followed her. The woman skipped down the stone steps of Via Kennedy.

The E35 to Milan

Sabrina had gone past Parma, the traffic flowed smoothly, there were no road works and she had eighties hits on her iPod. She sang along to Cock Robin's ‘Just Around The Corner', beating out the rhythm with her palms on the steering wheel, chewed gum and thought about nothing much. It was one o'clock and she had plenty of time to drop off her bags at her mother's before going on to the Palace of Justice in Corso di Porta Vittoria and Nestore Raspallo at four o'clock. Raspallo's office address and position weren't listed on official databases or telephone directories. Perhaps Raspallo – like James Bond – was an inherited pseudonym. One of Federico Renda's secretaries had set up the meeting and she had forbidden Sabrina to make any written notes of the details.

There were no troubling noises coming from her old car, but some were starting to come from her – sounds she initially chose to ignore. Her gaze started to wander from
the wing mirrors to the rear-view mirror, the scars on her forehead started to itch – something they hardly ever did. She dropped the iPod in between the pedals and nearly hit the crash barrier when she bent down to retrieve it, listening to a fast, regular throbbing noise until she established it was the pulse in her neck.

A large green Fiat van kept appearing in her mirrors.

When she reached a Shell petrol station between Castione Marchesi and San Rocco, she was certain. She was being followed.

NAC members had to complete a course in defensive driving before being accepted into the new unit, and Sabrina, along with a handful of other young lawyers, police officers and Carabinieri, had spent a fortnight at a disused airport driving battered cars down runways, doing handbrake turns, shooting through the windows of the car while driving at speed at discs that would pop up from concrete trenches along the runway. They also learned to interpret traffic patterns. Especially patterns indicating that you might be being followed. The pursuers' standard formation was a square where the car was tailed by two vehicles, whether two-, three- or four-wheeled. Two other vehicles, making up the top corners of the square, would be in front ready to anticipate and follow any spontaneous exits or sudden acceleration which the person in question – such as a desperate assistant public prosecutor – might consider executing. The trick was to ignore the square
until a safe option to escape presented itself – or to feign ignorance and exploit the presence of the pursuers for your own purposes.

Sabrina pulled in at the petrol station.

She parked the Opel in a queue of cars waiting for the car wash, where it would be watched by other drivers, and went into the shop to pay for a wash, which included a hosing down of its undercarriage – an excellent precaution if you suspected that it might be infected with electronic tracking devices – then went to the ladies' toilet with her shoulder bag. Inside a cubicle she unzipped the bag and strapped the holster with the Colt .32 around her ankle.

She carefully scanned her surroundings as she walked back to the car wash. The waiting or departing cars, trucks, motorbikes and camper vans didn't stand out from those found at any other motorway service station in Europe. No one was watching her and she couldn't see the green van anywhere.

Sabrina stayed in the car while it was washed and used the privacy to search the inside with her torch between her teeth. Nothing. She closed her eyes, slumped back into the seat, shook the steering wheel and screamed at the top of her voice.

Milan

Staying with her mother in Via Salvatore Barzilai was now out of the question, so she drove around the centre of Milan for an hour until she found a suitable hotel: a small
pensione
called Albergo Merlin in Via Durini, whose facilities had been awarded a gloomy one star by the Ministry of Tourism. The street was cobbled and the old-fashioned streetlights were set far apart. The place was within walking distance of the Palace of Justice and offered guest parking in the courtyard in front of the entrance, directly overlooked by the reception.

A receptionist with a comb-over, and a yellow nylon shirt open at the neck over a grey vest, looked up at her without interest. He livened up a little when she explained that she wanted to book two double rooms for three nights, one overlooking the courtyard and the other the street, and preferably no higher than the first floor,
per favore
. Sabrina told him that she didn't like heights.

‘Are you expecting anyone, signora?'

He turned off his television under the counter and started looking for the keys.

‘My husband and children will be arriving from Palermo tomorrow,' she chirped happily. ‘Your hotel has special memories for us, signore. We're from Naples and your hotel was where my husband and I stayed when we visited Milan for the first time. We were
very
young!'

She giggled bashfully.

The receptionist, who thought that
la signora
was still incredibly young, followed her gaze around the lobby as if seeing it for the first time. Then he smiled feebly.

‘Aha … in that case, welcome back, signora.'

‘Thank you. Is breakfast included?'

The receptionist looked at her.

‘No, sorry. I mean … we don't do breakfast.'

‘Never mind. I'll take them.'

She smiled warmly.

The rooms were shabby, but clean. A sheet of white chipboard with countless cigarette burns served as a kind of desk. She moved it away from the window and looked down. The Opel was sitting alone in the courtyard. Perfect.

The time was 3.10 p.m.

Before she entered the room facing Via Durini, she switched off the light in the corridor. The curtains were heavy and shut out the light when she closed them. She
put a chair by the window, eased the curtain back and looked up and down the narrow street. A hundred metres away, a large green van pulled up along the kerb. In the windscreen was the reflected glare of the sun, so she couldn't see how many people were inside. She waited ten minutes, but no one got out of the van. She made a note of the registration number and got up.