by Sam Christer
For almost a minute, both women just stare at Anna.
She looks so weak.
Her pinched white face is accentuated by eyelids the colour of raw meat. Her scarred arms are bandaged, and medical tubes tentacle their way off into hanging bags and monitoring machines.
Louisa breaks the sombre silence. ‘Look, I’m sorry we took her out, back to Cosmedin. It was a stupid thing to do. If Valducci hadn’t been tugging me along on a lead, I would have called you and asked you about it.’
‘And maybe not given my guard the slip?’
‘And not given your guard the slip. Is he in trouble?’
Valentina lightens up. ‘He’s not yet scrubbing toilets with a toothbrush, but he’s not far from it.’ She gestures to a water cooler just a metre away. ‘Aqua?’
‘Si. Grazie.’
Valentina fills two plastic cups and hands one over. ‘There’s something else you should know. On my way over, I got a call saying more than a dozen exercise books have been discovered at Anna’s place. All filled with drawings and writing.’
‘Life logs.’
‘Scusi?’
‘DID sufferers are aware that the host is taken over by multiple personalities, so the alters write journals, daily diaries about what’s happening to them. That way, when the host momentarily regains control of the body, it’s possible to put some pieces of the puzzle together.’
‘Wait a minute. Are you saying that all Anna would know about what has happened to her – what’s been done with her body – is when she reads about it in a journal filled in by the alters?’
‘That’s about it.’
Valentina doesn’t say it, but she thinks it.
This could be a breakthrough.
The logs might well explain the mystery of a severed hand in a church in Cosmedin and a dead eunuch on the banks of the Tiber.
60
It’s almost four a.m by the time the Carabinieri arrest team process their newest prisoner.
Down in the shower block a shameful freak show is under way. Soldiers crowd around to see the guy with no balls and the smallest penis known to man.
‘I should have sold fucking tickets. Get back to work!’ barks custody officer Piero la Malfa.
Outside, at the admissions counter, Federico Assante is trying to shrug off a heavy night’s drinking and go through the prisoner’s clothes. He got home after what everyone would admit was a pretty emotional day and decided drink was the best short cut to a place where all the shit with Caesario and Morassi had never happened.
Then Valentina had called.
That damned woman was relentless. Even when he didn’t answer the phone, she left haunting messages, the kind you can’t ignore, the type that keep the pressure on and don’t let you rest.
Federico pulls apart the stack of forensically bagged clothes in front of him. Black trainers, black socks, black jeans, black pants, black T-shirt, black hooded top and black gloves. That ball-less buffoon either has a black fetish or he dresses professionally for the night-time.
Federico is sure it’s not a fashion choice.
Black doesn’t only help burglars, robbers and rapists blend into the shadows; it completely screws eye-witness reports. Without distinctive clothing or something visually unique to tie to an offender, judges and juries are wary of any testimony that includes the phrase ‘I think it was black.’
The young lieutenant is dispirited. There’s nothing to give him a clue to the identity of the man, and so far the son-of-a-bitch hasn’t said a word.
Maybe he’s mute as well as ball-less.
Assante looks again at the prisoner’s sum possessions: two hundred euros, a handful of Kleenex tissues and a spool of old fishing line. The line is significant: it’s handy to tie people up or choke them with. Apart from that, there are car keys and an interesting piece of cheap jewellery.
It’s a black pendant on a rope necklace.
He gets a shiver as he turns it over in its clear forensic bag.
It’s exactly the same as the one the nurses at the hospital took from Anna.
‘Anything come back on his prints yet?’ Federico calls to la Malfa through the open door to the cell block.
‘Domani!’ comes the reply. ‘Why the fuck don’t you go upstairs to your own office and do the job yourself?’
‘Come on, man. I told you how much I’ve had to drink. I can barely search for the toilet. Give me some help here.’
‘Vaffanculo stronzo!’
‘Hey! Per favore.’
La Malfa stomps off somewhere.
Lazy fucker, thinks Assante. He’d have helped out if the tables had been turned.
He pulls up a second chair, puts his feet up and closes his eyes. Twenty minutes’ sleep is what he needs. A quick nap, then he’ll do the job himself.
Somewhere off in the distance he hears raised voices.
Iron doors clanging shut. Keys rattling. Drunks swearing. Someone throwing up. More swearing. Cops laughing.
The chunky old radiator he’s curled up next to coughs and hisses, and within a few minutes he’s drifted off.
‘You want this or not?’
Federico is still half-asleep, and the voice doesn’t really register.
‘I said, do you want this or not?’
La Malfa is standing over him, waving a piece of paper. ‘I’m knocking off. With a little luck I’ll be home before my wife wakes and starts bitching at me.’
Federico looks at his watch. Six-thirty a.m.
Unbelievable.
It feels like he shut his eyes ten seconds ago, not two hours back.
La Malfa slaps the paperwork on his chest. ‘We hit the jackpot with your guy’s prints. By the look of it, he’s got more history than Julius fucking Caesar.’
61
The room is so filthy, Tom and Valentina have spent the last few hours scratching or sneezing.
Their arms are still wrapped around each other as morning creeps icily through the gaps in the ragged curtains and beneath the ill-fitting bedroom door.
They’re huddled together, still dressed, on a stained mattress smelling of strangers long since gone.
They were both so tired when they got back from the hospital they just curled up tight and fell asleep.
Through the haze of waking, Valentina peers for her Mickey clock on the bedside cabinet, and realises it’s not there. A grim reminder – not that she needs one – of the blaze that destroyed her apartment, robbed her of parts of her own past and almost cost her a precious part of her future too.
She kisses Tom until he wakes. ‘Come on,’ she says softly, ‘let’s make love in the shower, then get out of here and find some breakfast.’
He’s still not ready to open his eyes. ‘God, woman, you’re insatiable. Is there not just time for me to wake first?’
She slides her body on top of his. ‘Nope. I’ll wake you in the shower.’
And she does.
She wakes him so well that neither of them complains about the barely warm drizzle that oozes painfully from a filthy shower caked in limescale.
A five-minute drive, just after eight a.m., finds them a bar that’s already filled with locals bolting espresso like shots of vodka before rushing off to work.
Valentina plates up croissants, jam, cheese, fruit, water and coffee. She pays, and joins Tom at a table in the corner beneath an overhead heater that sounds like it’s on its last legs. ‘I’m starving,’ she says, grabbing a croissant before she’s even sat down.
Tom takes everything off the old brown tray and slides it on to a spare table so they have more room. ‘I hope today isn’t quite as eventful as yesterday.’
‘I’ll drink to that.’ She takes a slug of coffee and then looks straight into his eyes. ‘Before we talk work – all the nasty shit – I need to tell you something.’
‘What?’
She leans forward so that she can whisper. ‘I want to say that not only are you the best lover I’ve ever had, but I’ve never be
en happier in my life than I am right here, right now, with you.’
The sweetness catches Tom off guard.
He puts a hand to her beautiful face and kisses her a little longer than suitable for a public place.
What she said was a code for ‘I love you’ and he knows it. He just wishes he was more confident, more practised in expressing his own feelings, but he isn’t. It’s the price he has to pay for too many years as a priest.
A few ironic claps splatter across the tabletops around them.
‘I’m very happy as well,’ manages Tom.
Valentina blushes. ‘I can tell from that kiss.’
They both laugh and reach for their coffees.
Tom drains the last of his espresso and changes the subject.
‘What are your plans for today?’
‘Well, providing you don’t get us arrested, when we’re finished here I’ll call Federico and see what he got from the guy we arrested at the apartment last night. After that, I want to re-interview Suzanna.’ She corrects herself. ‘Sorry, Anna. And I’d like you to be there for that.’
‘Me? Why?’
‘Professional reasons.’ She smiles. ‘Or maybe I just don’t want to leave you today. I want you on hand for my personal satisfaction.’
‘And what if I don’t want to satisfy you?’ He picks up a croissant and a small pot of strawberry jam.
‘Then you’re dumped. History. Gone. I’ll even throw you out of that palace we slept in last night.’
He scoops jam on to his plate and scrubs the end of the croissant in it. ‘And that’s supposed to be a threat?’
She laughs. ‘No, seriously, this case obviously has some confusing religious dimensions. It would be good to have you around to make sense of them.’
‘Glad to help in any way I can.’
Valentina hesitates for a moment. ‘I’m not sure I’ll be able to pay you – you know, like we did in Venice.’ She struggles to explain. ‘Given our relationship, I’m worried it might seem a little – corrupt.’
He sees her point. ‘It’s really not necessary. I’ll settle for sleeping with the boss.’
‘Deal.’ She drinks some water. ‘While we’re seeing Anna, I’ll have Federico run background checks on her – medical, criminal, social records, et cetera. We need to find out where she works, where she gets her money from, who she knows and who knows her.’
‘And who’s scaring her so much she has to rest in a bed of Bibles.’
‘Exactly.’ Valentina forks a slice of cheese on to her plate. ‘I really want to go through the diaries we found at her apartment. I told Louisa about them last night when you were sleeping. She says they’re probably life logs – a sort of diary kept by each of the alters. I’ll try to get her opinion on those too.’
‘Have you thought about the fire – who might have done it?’
Valentina has. Long and hard. She plays down what she really thinks. ‘Someone who had a grudge against whoever lived there before I did? Maybe they owed money or had crossed some mafioso. Or it could be lunatic teenagers; vandals these days are pazzo.’
‘That’s not who did it.’
‘Or maybe the owner of the building, wanting to cash in on insurance.’
‘That’s not it either.’
She knows he’s right.
Tom stretches his hand across the table and takes hers. ‘Whoever started it wanted to kill you. They wanted you dead so you wouldn’t uncover some nasty secret to do with this case.’
‘That might not be true.’ She squeezes his fingers.
‘I think you know it is.’
She has no option but to put him right.
‘What if it’s not? What if it’s you they were trying to kill, and not me?’
62
Federico is almost sober.
He spends twenty minutes steaming the booze out of his system in a shower at HQ.
For breakfast he grabs black coffee from the canteen and drinks it while chain-smoking two cigarettes on the steps of the station house. It’s not healthy, but it’s the closest he’ll ever get to a low-calorie, zero-fat meal.
Back at his desk, he enters the new information he has on the male prisoner languishing downstairs in the cells and pulls up his record. On his computer monitor he stares at a slightly younger version of the guy they arrested.
The text below the mug shot tells him it’s Guilio Brygus Angelis and he’s thirty years old. He’s unmarried and has no children.
No surprises there.
Federico scrolls down. Guilio was born in Athens and moved to Rome with his mother, Maya, when he was only three. It figures. Both the Christian and surnames are Greek, not Italian.
Maya worked in a city library and died a year later.
The report doesn’t say how.
Federico reads on. There’s no trace of the kid being fostered or adopted. He only appears on official records again in his early teens. It seems he was in trouble.
Serious trouble.
His juvenile record shows convictions for possession of drugs, assaults on two teachers and even an attack on a Catholic priest inside a young offenders’ detention centre where he spent just over a year.
By his late teens, the librarian’s child had added another volume of serious charges, including burglary and wounding. He spent his twenty-first birthday in jail for theft, assault and breach of previous bail orders.
Recently, though, there’s no trace of any convictions and no outstanding warrants for his arrest.
On paper, Guilio almost looks as though he’s turned over a new leaf.
Or at least he did, until he got caught red-handed in Anna’s apartment and nearly beat Valentina to death.
Federico stops scrolling and sits back.
One thing puzzles him.
Why are there no listed associates? From what he’s just read, it doesn’t seem as though this guy ever hung around with gangs or teamed up with anyone to commit his crimes.
That’s unusual.
He dives deeper into the files and digs around in the assessment notes from the governor at the detention centre.
Eventually he falls on a clue.
Guilio is described as ‘painfully shy’, ‘explosively violent’ and ‘an out-and-out loner’. The centre’s psychiatric report says that ‘pre-puberty castration can be expected to have resulted not only in his anger and violence but also in his introversion’.
Federico logs off and catches the elevator to reception.
He steps outside for a final cigarette before starting his interview with Guilio, and watches people drift by the front of the Carabinieri building. The weather’s turned wintry again. Everyone’s wrapped tight in coats and scarves and gloves. It’s his least favourite time of the year. Give him summer any day. Girls with long smiles and short skirts. That’s how God intended things to be.
63
Administrator Sylvio Valducci has foreign guests arriving within the next hour. This means he’s more than happy for Louisa Verdetti to meet the Carabinieri on her own. With a little luck they’ll lock her up and throw away the key.
Even before her early-morning call to him, he’d already decided that from now on she could take all the risks with this so-called DID patient, and if things turned out all right then he’d take the credit.
His one brush with the law has given him plenty to talk about at lectures around the globe. If things go pear-shaped, then at least by distancing himself from the action, he’s renewing the possibility of sacking Verdetti.
Louisa knows all this as surely as if Valducci had said it to her face and then mailed her a summary of his words.
He’s a health-care politician. In the job purely for power and bonuses, not because it’s a vocation.
It’s only a five-minute walk from the psychiatric wing of the hospital to ICU, so Louisa arrives long before Tom and Valentina. The young Carabinieri guard who was there last night has been replaced by a surly-looking older one who goes to great lengths to chec
k Louisa’s credentials and have her sign a log book.
It seems the patient – the newly named Anna Fratelli – has had a good night. The stitching done by the trauma team has held firm and the spell of sedation has left her patient stable, conscious and calm. According to the ward sister, there’s no reason why she shouldn’t be transferred back to the psychiatric department after she’s been checked by her doctor.
Louisa has just finished being updated when Tom and Valentina fill the doorway of the sister’s office.
‘Buongiorno. How is she?’ asks the captain.
Louisa holds up a report in her hand. ‘Good, by the sound of it.’ She nods to the sister, who is watching from her desk, and adds, ‘Let me update you outside, and then we can go and see her.’
Valentina’s pleased to be getting on with things. She feared medical complications would mean putting a hold on the interview.
Tom says hello to Louisa as they walk from the sister’s office, and then falls in line behind them.
‘She’s been moved to a room of her own,’ announces the clinician, ‘so we can talk to her in there, but I don’t want her stressed. Best to chat for a little while, give her a break and then you can talk again if it’s really necessary, okay?’
‘That’s fine,’ confirms Valentina.
‘Did you bring the photographs and diaries you spoke of last night?’
‘No. But copies are on their way over to your office. You should have them within the next couple of hours.’
The doctor enters the room first, uncertain of who she’s going to be talking to. Will it be Anna, or one of her many alters?
The patient is asleep in a bed set up at a thirty-degree angle. Her eyes are closed, but begin to flicker open as she responds to the click of the door handle and sounds of people entering her room.
The psychiatrist rolls the dice. ‘Buongiorno, Anna. Come lei è?’
‘Bene.’ Her voice is weak and sleepy. She tries to gather her wits and politely sit up a little.
