When the Dead Awaken

by Steffen Jacobsen

  She nodded and looked at the floor.

  ‘I look forward to hearing what you make of it,’ Federico Renda said.

  ‘I hope you won’t be disappointed, dottore.’

  The door handle felt damp under her hand.

  She walked through the anteroom looking neither left nor right, but noticed that all the secretaries were staring at her, an assistant public prosecutor who had been granted almost half an hour of Federico Renda’s time. This was unheard of, quite unprecedented, and the young woman wasn’t even bleeding from her palms. They had heard the clattering of coffee cups. Berlusconi had been granted only twenty-five minutes and no refreshments.

  *

  In his shaded office Federico Renda studied the information that Sabrina D’Avalos had had access to: ‘Forlani, Lucia / Maletta, Lucia [35 – Castellarano] & Forlani, Salvatore [12 – Milan]’ – MIPTP – and the name of the case officer, Nestore Raspallo. He looked up a couple of things in his private files and leaned back. His screen listed the names of the senior officers who had been responsible for the Ministry of the Interior’s witness protection programme since 1990 – both from the Central Committee and its ‘handlers’ – trusted members of the Carabinieri’s Raggruppamento Operative Speciale, who were tasked with the practicalities of case processing and logistics: safe houses, new identities, personal papers, plastic surgery, physical protection, etc. It was a short list and one name stood out.

  Renda had known the young assistant public prosecutor’s father, General Baron Agostino D’Avalos, very well. An admirable, highly competent and secretive man, head of the GIS and the longest serving head in the history of the Italian Special Forces. Perhaps these talents had been passed down? Perhaps not. On the other hand, in Italy the only ties that mattered were those of family, and the murder of Dottoressa D’Avalos’s father was still unsolved. Which was quite intolerable. Unforgivable. Again he compared the dates. The chronological proximity between the murder of the general and the annihilation of the Forlani family was purely incidental. Agostino D’Avalos’s name had been at the top of the death lists of the Camorra and the Cosa Nostra for years. Right above Renda’s own, incidentally. Anyone could have killed the general.

  Urs Savelli was undoubtedly aware of the work being carried out in the tents. And he knew Sabrina D’Avalos and her family, of course. And he was presumably fully informed about the NAC. Perhaps, though it was rather unlikely, he might even find the young assistant public prosecutor’s efforts interesting. So much so that he would leave his reptilian habitat and venture out into the sun. Stranger things had happened in Renda’s long career. It wouldn’t be the first time he would have had to sacrifice a pawn to take the opponent’s queen in this never-ending game of chess. He turned his wheelchair around so he could study the photograph of L’Artista.

  Renda decided that the young D’Avalos needed some inconspicuous assistance. From a more experienced, resourceful and … more objective person. Someone outside the public prosecutor’s office.

  CHAPTER 4

  She found Ismael in the bathroom in the boys’ wing of the orphanage. The skinny eleven-year-old sat on a stool in the middle of the floor with a towel over his shoulders. A young woman – a new supervisor – was shaving his head while she chatted on her mobile, a cigarette dangling from the corner of her mouth. On the towel a dolphin was jumping up towards a faded beach ball. The woman smiled at Sabrina as she leaned against the wall, her arms folded across her chest. Ismael ignored her as usual. Below the partition of the cubicle furthest away she saw two feet, socks, shorts and a pair of slim ankles and she heard the pages of a magazine turning. There were no doors; the boys had long since smashed them to pieces by using them as surfboards on the stairs. There were white bars across the windows. They were intact, though they looked as if any well-nourished four-year-old could easily rip them out of the crumbling brickwork.

  The coast guard had discovered Ismael at dawn in the surf on a beach near Amalfi next to an empty, battered life aft; the only survivor from a cargo of trafficked humans that had gone terribly wrong. He was probably from the Maghreb and when he spoke, which was rare, he spoke Arabic. He fell outside any administrative category, the worst fate for an orphaned illegal immigrant. A bureaucratic loophole. The boy had languished at the orphanage for two years with no resolution in sight. Sabrina had decided to befriend this particular boy because psychiatrists had diagnosed him as being in a worse state than any other child in the orphanage. The last black curls landed on Ismael’s shoulders, and the woman put her hand on his neck and tried turning his head in Sabrina’s direction. Sabrina knew it was futile. Ismael would look at her when he was ready. His head moved willingly, but his eyes stayed glued to the cracked floor tiles.

  ‘Leave him alone,’ Sabrina said.

  The woman glared at her. Two centimetres of ash fell from her cigarette on to the boy’s scalp. He shook it off, got up and handed her the towel.

  ‘When will you be back?’ she said.

  ‘When we’re back,’ Sabrina said.

  ‘I need to record it in the log, signorina. You know that.’

  ‘Come, Ismael,’ Sabrina said and left the bathroom without looking back. She heard the soft clip-clop of the boy’s sandals behind her. They walked down a dark corridor that smelt of floor polish and glue, passing one dormitory after another. Everywhere children were sitting or lying. It was the silence of the orphanage that had first struck Sabrina. It was like a hospice. The endless waiting suffocated every emotion. It was as if the children were holding their breath.

  The orphanage was in the Arenella district and the zoo lay in the Posilippo quarter. They were stuck in a queue of traffic on Via John Fitzgerald Kennedy that moved at the speed of tectonic plates. Sabrina was sweating and chewing gum, her forearm dangling out of the window. From time to time she would make a frustrated gesture or bang the car door when yet another idiot tried to push in where there was no room. She felt a strong urge to draw her gun and shoot the intruder’s tyres. Ismael’s face was closed and he sat glued to the side door, as far away from her as possible. The only thing moving was his jaw, as he ground his teeth. Occasionally he would crack his knuckles. It was like sitting next to Pinocchio in need of oil. Was it because of her? Or because everything seemed pointless when you were an eleven-year-old African orphan?

  Ismael slowly raked his hand across the millimetre-tall stubble on his scalp and sighed. He ground his teeth.

  ‘I have to go away for a few days, Ismael,’ she said.

  There was no reaction on the boy’s face. He placed his hands between his knees and pressed them together.

  Sabrina repeated the information in stumbling Arabic and a scornful shadow flitted across Ismael’s small features. She threw the Opel into first gear, pushing in between a honking tourist coach and a three-wheeled scooter laden with yellow melons.

  ‘I’ll be back,’ she said to her hands on the steering wheel. ‘In a week. Maybe sooner.’

  Ismael always walked exactly two metres behind her. They moved like mime artists – when she stopped, he stopped. Sabrina was aware that they attracted a fair amount of attention. Right now they were eating ice cream. Ismael ate his cone with deep concentration so as not to waste a single crumb. She rested her elbows on the sturdy iron fence around the African savannah enclosure, bit into her cone and tried to synchronize her jaw with the masticating dromedary right in front of them. The animal’s girlish, moist eyes watched her without blinking.

  Ismael studied the dromedary, too. There was a special intensity in his eyes when they were near dromedaries, camels or ostriches. Sabrina imagined an oasis surrounded by soft, endlessly repeating sand dunes stretching all the way to the far horizon, salt caravans casting mile-long shadows in the setting sun. Campfires, mint tea drunk from cups the size of thimbles, freshly baked flatbread, dogs poking around and Arabic voices underneath the stars, and she wondered if Ismael had ever been to the desert.

  The boy caught her eye, instantly
switched off his interest in the dromedary and took a bite of his ice cream.

  They walked on.

  The white enamel had flaked off the black iron bedstead in several places, as if the boy chewed the metal bars in his sleep. Because he often had nightmares, Ismael had been allocated one of the few single rooms at the orphanage.

  As was his bedtime ritual, Ismael unlocked his locker with a key that hung around his neck on a piece of string, took the beaker with his toothbrush in and put it on the white bedside table next to his bed. Once she had gone, he would clean his teeth and lie down to sleep. She turned around while, like an army recruit, he folded his T-shirt and his underpants. He placed his clothes on the bottom shelf of his locker. The cessation of teeth grinding signalled that he had put on his pyjamas and slid under the blankets. He turned to face the peeling wall while she found the book of fairy tales.

  She would read for fifteen minutes while Ismael lay still. She had no idea if he understood a single word, but on the one occasion when she had forgotten to read aloud to him, he had taken the book and given it to her without looking at her. As always with Ismael you never really knew who was doing what for whom.

  But the supervisors and the overworked child psychiatrists had told her that Ismael became practically catatonic, unapproachable and miserable whenever she was away.

  She closed the book and took a deep breath. Ismael turned over in bed and looked at her expectantly from behind his long eyelashes. She blushed at this last and completely inappropriate point on the agenda. She pulled the shiny Walther PPK from her shoulder holster, emptied the magazine into her hand, checked the chamber for the bullet that was never there and handed Ismael the gun. Sabrina had forgotten who or what had initially prompted this lunacy. With her hands she made a passable shadow bunny on the wall opposite. Ismael raised the gun with both hands and shot the bunny twice.

  ‘Bang, bang,’ she said in a low, flat voice, speaking for both of them.

  CHAPTER 5

  The Opel was parked between the carcass of a BMW whose axles rested on the tarmac and a new, chrome, gleaming police motorcycle. It would end up like the BMW if it was left there overnight, but no one ever touched Sabrina’s old Opel. She walked through the semi-darkness of the archway and passed the old man, dark-skinned and gaunt, who always sat on one of the narrow steps in the stairwell. He recognized her footsteps and flashed her a toothless smile. The eyes of the old man were white from cataracts. She touched his long, outstretched fingers, mumbled salaam aleikum and received a wa aleikum salaam before she crossed the narrow courtyard. She shared this crumbling apartment block with illegal immigrants from North Africa: women and children. The men continued al Nord, to the factories and the lowest levels of the service industries in Milan or Turin. Her choice of accommodation in this small North African enclave had raised several eyebrows in her family and amongst her colleagues, but she liked the place: the smell of thyme from the pots in the courtyard, the nattering of old women, the large number of fatherless children, and the sleepy, khat-chewing young Somalis who played poker or kalaha on a sheet of plywood on a cardboard box.

  Even the screams from the makeshift dental clinic that occupied half the ground floor of the green and yellow back building where she lived, fitted in. The dentist, Dr Khatib, was of the opinion that lidocaine should be reserved for major jaw surgery – which he was also happy to perform. His door was open and Sabrina saw the fat dentist stoop over a wriggling victim in the old-fashioned barber chair. Young Fakhry yawned as he pushed the pedal-powered dentist’s drill. When he nodded off and the drill stopped in the depths of a molar, the patient’s eyes were ready to pop out of their sockets, and Dr Khatib’s colourful curses would rain down over the boy.

  She noticed something else: a motorcycle police officer in the smart uniform of the Polizia Stradale, who looked like a young peacock. He was sitting on the second from bottom step in her stairwell with a red cardboard box and a grey sports bag between his boots.

  ‘Dottoressa Sabrina D’Avalos?’

  ‘Yes?’

  He smiled broadly, got up and saluted her while undressing her with his eyes.

  She held out her warrant card without a word and he handed the items to her.

  ‘Poor man,’ the officer said, gesturing towards Dr Khatib’s al fresco clinic.

  ‘Yes, but he’s cheap. Do I need to sign for these?’

  ‘That won’t be necessary. Buonasera.’

  ‘’Sera.’

  Four messages – ranging from the accusatory to the tormented – from her married lover were flashing on her answering machine. Roberto was an artist, twenty years Sabrina’s senior. The landscapes and the dispassionate portraits he painted might not be a true reflection of Roberto’s character, but he compensated with other skills, and from time to time Sabrina would allow him to get her drunk on good red wine and take her to bed – always in his studio, which was a mixture of workshop and gym. The artist was muscular and fit, and regarded his body as a temple – which had been subjected to the unfair erosion of time. He had never been to her home, which she had declared a Roberto-free zone. She deleted his messages and made a spur-of-the-moment decision never to see him again.

  Roberto reminded her of her father, which was the root cause of the problem. She had feared that her father’s chin would one day disappear, along with the exact colour of his eyes, the tone of his voice, laughter lines, the ironic gaze with which the general viewed the world, the trust and the understanding. She had dreaded waking up one morning to find that, overnight, her father’s image had faded from her daily life. But it never happened. She remembered everything clearly.

  Her hatred of his unknown killers hadn’t diminished, either. Her therapist called it an amputated-father fixation, fed by her choice of profession. It wasn’t grief, but phantom pains, he said. Find yourself a husband and have some children. Learn sign language or something else useful.

  She told him about Roberto and heard the pieces fall into place behind the therapist’s high forehead.

  ‘It’s obvious,’ he said. ‘You’re not in love, Sabrina, you’re trying to escape from reality.’

  ‘But I’m seeing someone …’

  ‘Someone who doesn’t pose a risk, Sabrina.’

  She had felt superficial. With the emotional depth of a Labrador.

  ‘Maybe I just haven’t met the right man yet,’ she argued.

  ‘Perhaps – assuming that special someone exists. The whole concept is overrated. In my experience there is no Mr Right until you choose to make him so. It takes compromise, hard work and careful planning. You have to make an effort.’

  He made it sound like building a garage.

  ‘Maybe love shouldn’t have to be so hard,’ she said.

  It was only later she got angry. She despised this modern idea that everything was of equal value. Her family had been on this earth for 1,200 years. You just didn’t kill its head and get away with it. It was unthinkable. It was equally impossible to explain this to the idiot across the desk. Even her brothers, who had chosen dull careers far removed from the Law and the Army, struggled to understand her.

  She put the cardboard box and the sports bag on the dining table, opened the shutters, watered the pelargoniums in the window boxes and scattered a handful of seeds on the bird table. Sometimes they would be eaten by the local sparrows, other times by the pigeons. She spent a moment looking at the red and deep blue sky above the black roofs, took a can of Coke from the fridge and got down to work.

  Many Cokes and nineteen Lucky Strikes later, Sabrina lay down on her bed and stared up at the ceiling.

  At approximately 10.00 a.m. on 5 September 2007, Camorra killers had forced their way into Nanometric s.a. in Via Ippodromo in Milan, where they had shot the physicist Fabiano Batista, age sixty-three, in the head with a 9-mm pistol. Two burn marks from an electric stun gun were found on his neck. He had been paralysed but conscious when he was executed and it would appear that he had let his killers int
o the high security building himself. The computer programmer, Paolo Iacovelli, age twenty-two, was shot twice through the heart while sitting on a chair in the kitchen. The ballistic report proved that the same pistol was used for both killings. The German chemist Hanna Schmidt, age twenty-eight, was killed by a single stab wound to her chest with a double-edged blade. The blade had severed the aorta and death had followed a few seconds later.

  The hard disc of the company’s security cameras had been destroyed, as had the discs on all computers and servers. Two safes – one on the ground floor and one in Giulio Forlani’s office on the first floor – had been opened with plastic explosives and emptied. The patent applications had been doused in petrol and set on fire.

  Giulio Forlani had been the victim of a staged traffic accident on the northbound A7 motorway near the suburb of Assago at 9.45 a.m. The time had been verified by several eyewitnesses and a motorway surveillance camera. Minutes before the crash Dr Forlani had signed for a box of semiconductors at General Electrics’ dealer in Assago. The assassin had overtaken Giulio Forlani in a twenty-two-tonne truck and had then braked hard in front of the Škoda Octavia resulting in the violent collision. The wires between the brake pedal and the brake lights on the truck had been cut, so Giulio Forlani hadn’t realized it was braking. The assassin had proceeded to fire twice at close range at the badly injured physicist: once to his face and once to the right side of his chest. The assassin had then vaulted over the crash barriers that separated the northbound and southbound lanes and been picked up by a black BMW 320i. Both vehicles turned out to be stolen. Forlani was taken to the trauma centre at the Ospedale Maggiore and pronounced dead at 6.15 p.m. after almost seven hours on the operating table. The head of the trauma team, Dr Carlo Mazzaferro, had signed the death certificate himself.