When the Dead Awaken

by Steffen Jacobsen

  Even she could hear the disbelief in her voice.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said.

  Raspallo shrugged his shoulders in a friendly gesture.

  ‘Don’t worry. Nanometric’s research was funded by two independent sources … as you probably know.’

  ‘The EU and the Camera Nazionale della Moda Italiana,’ she nodded.

  ‘That’s only partly true,’ Raspallo said, and found an interesting spot on the desk that appeared to warrant closer scrutiny.

  ‘Go on,’ she urged him.

  The young man looked towards the door as if he expected armed men to kick it in and arrest him at any moment.

  ‘Your father was the EU, signorina,’ he said slowly and clearly. ‘Giulio Forlani had applied to the European Union’s Structural Funds for money and been turned down. The main reason was that Nanometric didn’t have official business partners in other EU countries. Your father believed the work of Nanometric had enormous potential … and he believed in Giulio Forlani as an individual.’

  ‘They knew each other?’ she gasped. ‘My father and Forlani? Are you sure?’

  ‘Definitely. Somehow General D’Avalos managed to divert funding from an account in the Ministry of Defence to Nanometric. The company described the money as an EU grant. The paperwork was in order. This scheme operated successfully for years under the radar of the Public Accounts Office and the Ministry of Finance.’

  Raspallo smiled.

  ‘Your father was a very secretive man, dottoressa. He used to say that he knew where all the bodies were buried. He still had the shovel somewhere. He said.’

  ‘My father must have trained you,’ she declared as her thoughts flew homeless through her brain. ‘Since you know so much.’

  Raspallo nodded. ‘It was a privilege.’

  ‘Thank you,’ she muttered.

  ‘Your father was killed a few days after the Nanometric massacre,’ Raspallo said.

  ‘It has crossed my mind that the two events might have been connected,’ she assured him. ‘But timing is all they have in common, Signor Raspallo. As far as I know … But perhaps you know more than I do?’

  ‘I don’t think so. As you say, it was purely a coincidence.’

  General Agostino D’Avalos was found in a motel near Valmalenco-Laghetto in Alto Adige, close to the Swiss border. The general had rented one of the motel’s remote cabins under a false name. He would appear to have arrived at the cabin alone, in his own Range Rover. The car was parked outside the cabin and untouched. He was found fully dressed in the middle of the living-room floor, killed by two bullets from a 9-mm pistol. Every forensic test had proved negative. None of the motel’s other guests had seen or heard anything. The time of death was put at 00.30, three days after the attack at Nanometric.

  ‘Did my father enter Forlani into the MIPTP? But why, if he was already dead? People are asking questions. Including my boss, the Public Prosecutor, Federico Renda.’

  ‘I don’t know. And I don’t know if anyone does. All programmes and procedures were reviewed afterwards, as I’ve just told you. They put together a fast-track committee and followed its guidelines. The FBI assisted the committee. I myself only joined the programme a year ago. I’m sorry. But I can understand why people are asking questions. Absolutely.’

  ‘Can you make an educated guess?’

  ‘Sadly, no.’

  She rose.

  ‘Please could you check a van registration number for me?’

  ‘Of course.’

  The green Fiat van that had followed her to the pensione in Via Durini turned out to belong to a builder in Portici – a small town south of Naples.

  Raspallo didn’t ask and Sabrina didn’t explain.

  He stood up and shook her hand. He was taller and leaner than she had expected.

  ‘Happy hunting,’ he said.

  ‘Arrivederci.’

  From the window the case officer watched Sabrina D’Avalos walk down the broad steps of the Palace of Justice.

  She might think she was ready to take on Urs Savelli, the Lord of the Camorra, but to Raspallo she seemed as helpless as a newborn kitten.

  The petite figure stopped on the bottom step, looked up the facade and he took a step back. She continued out between the barriers in front of the palace and disappeared.

  He picked up the telephone and rang the rarely used direct line to Federico Renda. If Raspallo had ever seen a person on a mission, it was Sabrina D’Avalos.

  He exchanged a few words with Renda, opened a cupboard, took the envelope that had been waiting for him and rushed out.

  CHAPTER 12

  Castellarano

  On Via Ariosto, Antonia walked past the hedge to the municipal swimming pool and changing rooms, behind which every fourteen-year-old girl in Castellarano kissed a boy for the first time. In Antonia’s case it was Bruno, a demigod who visited the town every summer with his twin brother Giulio and their parents. Their mother was from Castellarano, their father American. It didn’t bother her that Bruno marked the wall with a piece of chalk for each girl he kissed. She considered herself lucky. She had removed his politely attentive hands from her breasts and rewarded him for not persisting by opening her mouth against his, so that her tongue bumped into his teeth and the lump of chewing gum behind them. Her knees and hips had trembled when his tongue found hers. The chlorine smell from the pool evoked memories of Bruno Forlani’s twin, Giulio, in seclusion on a green towel near the edge of the pool. He had watched her as she came around the corner, and she had no trouble looking him in the eye. But he lowered his gaze when Bruno appeared.

  The outside of the shop bore witness to centuries of groceries. As the years passed, painted advertisements of long-since discontinued household articles remained, worn away. The words ‘Barzoni Pasta’ were illustrated by a potbellied glutton under a tilted plate piled high with spaghetti, Bertolli olive oil advertised by white fish sizzling to their doom on a black frying pan, Olio Sasso with torn white clouds and a windswept olive tree. The olive tree, the oldest image, would be the last wall painting to fade.

  Even though the traffic was today led around the town on Strada Statale 486, the old road hadn’t been completely forgotten. From Sassuolo to Torrente Dragone it wound its way through the heart of the town before running between her parents’ shop and La Stazione restaurant. The memory of truck drivers turned out to be longer than that of the town’s housewives, who had stopped coming to the shop, as La Stazione was still a popular place to eat.

  The rooms were empty and quiet; from her son Gianni’s room a guttural, breathless song could be heard.

  The noise which Antonia identified as Balkan rap came from the old shortwave radio. Enzo had sourced antique radio valves for it from Rome and sanded and polished its mahogany cabinet until it shone like a japanned piano, all for Gianni’s fifteenth birthday. On a good day the radio could pick up Montevideo and Moscow, thanks to a fivemetre-high aerial that Enzo had mounted on the chimney, his boots dancing delicately on the loose roof tiles. A remarkable achievement from someone who could only turn his head slightly to the left. The bandwidth marker was tuned to some unholy place between Bratislava and Tirana, so she switched off the apparatus, picked up Gianni’s grey school blazer from the floor, dusted it down and hung it over a chair. The dark blue school trousers had been tossed over an empty music stand, the cornet case sat forgotten under the bed.

  Antonia opened the kitchen window facing the courtyard and heard her son’s and Enzo’s voices drifting through the garage doors. From the window she had a view of the rest of the property: the cobblestone courtyard permanently overgrown with weeds, the boundary wall on top of which the family cat dozed in the sun, the garden with a few ancient apple trees and the glasshouse with its broken ridge.

  One summer Antonia and her husband, Tancredo, had fallen in love with the idea of growing their own vegetables. They had cultivated the high beds in the greenhouse with ridiculously small gardening tools, sowed aubergines, pea
s, courgettes and tomatoes. They worked in the greenhouse while Tancredo grew thinner and paler, until he was as transparent as the white painted windows. The vegetables thrived while her husband wasted away. A few months later he died from cancer.

  What remained were brown stems, spiders and the knowledge that they had had projects instead of each other. Tancredo had been in charge of matters of the heart, and Antonia of their other dreams.

  She leaned out of the window and heard Enzo holding forth: ‘It’s the little things, my friend. If you’re to stay on top of the little things … pass me a twelve … then the big things won’t control you.’

  Her son did not appear to disagree and Enzo continued. ‘A flight mechanic, for example. Isn’t he just as important as the pilot? Or even more important? Pilots are just glorified bus drivers, while a flight mechanic knows everything there is to know about every single bolt, gasket, pitot tube, every spring, every nut that keeps things in the right place and the plane in the air. He has no autopilot he can switch on, no control tower to ask for help. He has only his knowledge, his hands, his eyes, his manuals and his experience to follow. Lives depend on him, Gianni.’

  Antonia sighed and walked down the kitchen steps. The courtyard lay in shadow and she pulled her cardigan closer around her, balanced on the domed cobblestones and skirted around the holes.

  ‘Enzo! Gianni!’

  Silence. Of the guilty kind. She could only see her son’s lower legs, odd socks and worn trainers. The rest of him was hidden under Enzo’s old Ferrari, which a year ago had been a complete wreck, but had since been transformed by her lodger’s miraculous hands. All she could see of Enzo Canavaro was his big boots. Chukka boots, the best in the world, obviously, made for him by a cobbler in Pakistan at the foot of the Karakoram’s white peaks. All of Enzo’s few possessions were special. From his diving watch to his metallic, charcoal-grey, ultra-powerful motorbike, a Honda 1100 XX Super Blackbird. With the exception of these few treasured objects her lodger would appear to be a man without needs.

  ‘Out!’ she shouted.

  ‘The brake lines need soldering, Mum. I’m just about to—’

  ‘I’m counting to three, Gianni! One, two …’

  ‘Mum!’

  The boy slid out on the mechanic board – a device Enzo had constructed from a sheet of plywood and an old skateboard. Her son was wearing an antique leather helmet and goggles, and presented her with the deadpan face of a fifteen-year-old. His hair was black and thick and fell in long locks. The goggles held a reflection of Enzo Canavaro’s Holy Grail: a perfect 1958 Ferrari 250T Testarossa. Even Antonia was awestruck at the sight of the ingenious monocoque bodywork every time she entered the garage – as neat and sterile as an operating theatre. The twelve-cylinder aluminium engine hung suspended from chains above the empty engine compartment. Enzo had bought the car as a wreck from some friends in Castellarano, but the restoration was nearing completion.

  The whole town was waiting for the engine to go in, for the Testarossa to erupt in a tiger roar of rebirth. But Enzo kept them waiting. The timing was never quite right – according to some mystical calendar or planetary alignment known only to him.

  Gianni’s eyes were the exact the same shade of Black Sea blue as his mother’s.

  ‘Homework?’ she snarled.

  ‘Eh … yeah? What about it?’

  ‘And practising your cornet? You know you’re playing tomorrow, don’t you? Didn’t Enzo remind you? I asked him to.’

  A groan of outrage. Gianni wouldn’t dream of betraying Enzo.

  ‘Off you go. Now!’

  Sulking, the boy hung the helmet and goggles on the throttle of the Honda. He marched off without looking at her. She knew that Enzo was hiding, waiting for her to leave the garage. But she stayed. Her toe tapped the concrete floor with impatience as her gaze wandered across the icons on the rear wall: Enzo Ferrari wearing big sunglasses with black crepe draped around the picture frame and the Ferrari Formula One drivers’ line of succession from Juan Manuel Fangio to Michael Schumacher.

  ‘Enzo? I’m waiting.’

  He emerged from under the car and stood up with a series of cracks from his back. He watched her with a kind of pious indifference in his boxer’s face.

  Enzo was wearing a spotless, red Ferrari-mechanic’s boiler suit.

  Once Antonia had seen him almost naked one morning when she passed the bathroom. He had worn only a towel around his waist. The door was ajar and she had stopped to close it when she noticed him. Enzo Canavaro’s back was a battlefield of jagged scars and white patches from skin transplants. Some transplants had taken, while other sections of his back were nothing but gnarled red and white scar tissue.

  He had seen her reflection in the mirror and turned around to close the door. But not before giving her a look she didn’t think a human being was capable of.

  Stripped of self-pity or embarrassment.

  The look of a wild thing.

  Enzo’s chest and stomach had made the skin on his back look like that of a newborn – and she had cried the rest of the afternoon, hidden away in her bedroom.

  ‘Gianni is my son, Enzo,’ she shouted. ‘Do you hear me? He’s only fifteen years old. Too young to understand what it means to shoulder the heavy responsibility for other people’s lives, don’t you think?’

  His brown eyes blinked. Enzo’s gaze was focused on the cat on the wall. No one was ever too young for that, he would appear to think.

  ‘Gianni isn’t here to be your companion or apprentice,’ Antonia said. ‘He’s my son. He has duties and homework and music practice. Do you understand? Tell me that you understand. That you’re listening to me!’

  Enzo cracked his knuckles; hung his head as much as a high priest of a Testarossa could. His enormous hands opened in a display of feigned contrition, he hunched his shoulders, and his mouth started to open, but Antonia was not in a forgiving mood.

  ‘Yes …’ he began.

  ‘Yes what?’

  ‘Yes!’

  She handed him an envelope.

  ‘A letter for you.’ She looked at the address. ‘Enzo Johann Canavaro.’

  He took the envelope without saying anything and stuck it in the inside pocket of the flame-red boiler suit. Every month a letter in a plain envelope would arrive. Postmarked Milan. No sender; handwritten address. Antonia had no idea of the contents, even though she had been tempted to steam open the letter several times.

  But Enzo would have known immediately.

  ‘Your blood-pressure medication,’ she asked. ‘Have you taken it? No, of course not. Your face looks like it’s trying to escape. Have you had another nosebleed?’

  ‘No.’

  Antonia folded her arms across her chest. The sun was setting behind the roof and the garage light automatically came on in Enzo’s five-by-six-metre-square kingdom – for which he insisted on paying additional rent.

  ‘Johann? Why Johann?’

  Enzo smiled.

  ‘Why do you think they call me “The German”?’

  ‘Because you’re so … so … incredibly pedantic about everything?’

  ‘Un-Italian, you mean?’

  ‘No … Yes!’

  She shook her head, as always in doubt about what was true, false or irrelevant in Enzo’s biographical information.

  ‘I’m about to start dinner,’ she said.

  ‘Did you get them?’ he asked her in a different voice. ‘The papers?’

  He stood in the shadow and the light from the garage fell like a yellow cape around his shoulders. His figure grew denser and darker.

  ‘Yes. I got them … It’s the last time, Enzo. I’m not doing it again. Do you hear me?’

  He ignored her protest.

  ‘The girl … Amalia …’

  ‘Amalia Nesta. Aged seventeen. Motorbike. The bridge by the gorge,’ she repeated, sounding tired. ‘She’s dead, Enzo, stone dead.’

  The huge man nodded darkly. ‘Serramazzoni. It’s the fifth time in three ye
ars.’

  ‘Then why do you need to know what happened? Tell me. It’s not going to bring her back, Enzo.’

  ‘Bad luck or a preventable accident?’ he asked. ‘Someone has to look into …’

  Antonia knew that tomorrow Enzo would drive up to the bridge with his friends, all retired Ferrari mechanics. Like death’s self-appointed actuaries they would take measurements, photograph the scene of the accident, study charts and enter data into spreadsheets. Antonia thought their undertaking was offensive and morbid.

  ‘We can’t … control everything, Enzo.’ ‘Yes! We have to. Don’t say that! If I … if we just take enough care …’

  He fell silent, but he had come close to gripping her forearm with his gigantic paw. He walked around her to get to the door to the stairs.

  ‘Take your damn pills,’ she called out after him.

  Enzo and the boy both ate in silence, barely taking their eyes off the plates, and Antonia said only as much as was necessary. Enzo got up as soon as he could, rinsed his plate under the tap and put his plate, cutlery and glass in the dishwasher. He looked at Antonia, took the case file, pressed it to his chest and went off to his rooms. Enzo had fitted new and advanced locks on the doors; he had even offered to secure the whole shop with sophisticated electronic surveillance equipment, but Antonia had said no. There hadn’t been a burglary in Castellarano for as long as anyone could remember and she thought he was being ridiculous. She heard a window open and an electronic whirring from the garage: Enzo had burglarproofed his precious garage with a remote-controlled device.

  Gianni made tea, and mother and son shared the last four biscuits in the tin. He looked up at the ceiling, which resounded with Enzo’s footsteps.

  ‘Don’t be mad at him, Mum,’ he said.

  ‘I’m not. I’m mad at both of you.’

  ‘Okay …’

  An hour later the boy opened the door to Apollonia and showed her into the kitchen. The blonde in the sharp designer glasses was the headmistress of the most exclusive girls’ school south of Lausanne. Since 1733 the oldest and best families in Italy had sent their daughters to the convent school in Castellarano to lay the foundation for a successful marriage and a well-run household. And instil a favourable disposition towards sending their own daughters to the school when they themselves became mothers.