‘I don’t think I can move,’ he said. ‘And it’s raining. I’ll get wet and catch pneumonia and then you’ll be sorry. I think I had better stay here. Recover. Look after you.’
‘You couldn’t look after a stuffed panda. Goodbye, Nestore.’
She started to push him away.
‘What are you going to do?’ he asked as he hobbled across the floor. ‘Did you manage to speak to Massimiliano Di Luca?’
She looked at him.
‘You’re having me followed,’ she said with the same feeling of betrayal she had felt when she sat in her mother’s apartment with the hunting photograph.
He was putting on his trousers and she could not see his face.
‘Not at all,’ he said, and she knew that he was lying. ‘It just seemed logical to me.’
‘I spoke to Signor Di Luca earlier today. Yesterday, rather,’ she said. ‘So your logic cannot be faulted.’
‘And?’
‘Nothing. He and my father co-financed Nanometric and they would appear to have known each other well. Very well. He wasn’t what I expected. I found him very likeable and straightforward. He reacted with what I think was genuine grief when I told him that the bodies of Lucia and Salvatore Forlani had been identified in Naples.’
‘People like him are never straightforward,’ Nestore Raspallo said, pulling on his socks.
‘Probably not. What about you, Nestore? Are you straightforward?’
He made no reply, but started looking for his shoe.
‘How much do you and Federico Renda speak, for example? About me,’ she asked. ‘Do you have a master plan depending on whether I survive the next twenty-four hours or do you make it up as you go along? And do you have a substitute on the bench who can be brought into play when Savelli kills me?’
‘What do you call people who think they’re the victim of a global conspiracy, Sabrina?’
‘Realists?’
‘Have you seen my other shoe?’ he asked.
There was a burning sensation behind her eyelids. She pressed her eyes shut.
She pointed to a corner.
‘Behind you. Do you want me to help you get dressed?’
‘Savelli is in town,’ he said. ‘That’s the only thing you should be thinking about right now. I know you believe that you have a plan of some sort, but Savelli has upset it by killing Mazzaferro. You need friends, not enemies. So, what are you going to do?’
She noticed that his consonants became curt and militaristic when he was angry, which further strengthened her suspicion that Nestore Raspallo – if that was even his real name – wouldn’t know what a pension plan or an awayday was if it hit him on the head.
‘I’ll work something out,’ she said.
He sighed and took a step towards her on the bed, but she waved him away.
‘Not now and not ever.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Nothing,’ she said, and knew that he would think she was petulant and childish. ‘You asked me what I’m going to do and the answer is: nothing. I’ve already done something. And since I appear to be the only person interested in solving this case, I don’t plan to consult anyone before I take action. Not you and not Federico Renda.’
He stuck his hands in his trouser pockets and straightened up. Sabrina couldn’t believe she had ever thought of him as a boy promoted beyond his ability and experience. He had the body of a gladiator and many strange scars – in odd places. He was actually rather battered. Given his age.
He smiled indulgently, which drove away her tears and infuriated her instead.
‘We’re employees, Sabrina. You and I. This is our job, it’s not a state-sponsored, personal witch-hunt or a grandiose search to clear your family name or restore the reputation of dead people. Solving crimes and bringing hell down on the heads of the guilty is what we do. And you’re being a little unfair. I think I’ve responded rather well to your requests for help.’
‘Please, would you just go now?’ she said.
‘Perhaps Forlani doesn’t want to be found. Assuming he’s still alive. Have you thought about that?’
‘Go.’
He held up his hand, but she didn’t know whether it was in anger or affection.
When he reached the door, she said, ‘I placed an ad in the personal column of Corriere della Sera.’
‘Really? I never had you down as the type.’
His voice was neutral as she clenched her fists under the duvet.
‘Figlio di puttana,’ she yelled, but he had already closed the door and taken everything with him.
In the lift, GIS Captain Primo Alba thought that he had never previously held a woman who fitted his arms like a key in a lock. That he had never been able before to lie close to a woman with whom he had made love. That he had never before been speechless for half an hour after making love to that woman.
And he thought that Sabrina D’Avalos had been as light and soft as a feather. That is, when she wasn’t as hard as a pawnbroker’s heart.
CHAPTER 27
Castellarano
The face at the hatch had been white as dough and framed by a starched black and white veil. And it had been vehemently dismissive, as if the mere sight of Gianni outside the door had been intolerable to behold. No male had been inside the convent school walls for two hundred years, unless repair work, new building constructions or parties for alumni required it, and the sister on duty had no intention of letting one in now.
The nun’s lips remained tight in the face of the fifteen-year-old’s plea; her gaze remained downcast as if she hadn’t heard a single word he said. She hadn’t even looked him in the eye – something for which Gianni was grateful. Everyone knew that nuns and priests could see inside your mind and read your sinful thoughts. This was God’s reward for their sacrifice. Her lips were narrow and red, as if she had just downed a chalice filled with the blood of a newborn.
The steel shutter slid back in place over the door’s peephole with a well-oiled click.
Gianni had sprinted across the fields and gabbled more quickly to the nun than he had ever spoken to anyone. Now he stood, bent over, resting his hands on his knees; a galloping heartbeat, a stitch and a feeling of emptiness within him. Again he considered banging his fists on the door or pulling the bell chain, which disappeared into the obscenely widened mouth of a bronze creature above him. He tried his mother’s mobile again.
Nothing.
Gianni took a few steps back and looked at the distant parapets and crenellations that cut small rectangles out of the sky. For a moment he thought he could hear distant piano music and … singing?
He had found Enzo lying unconscious on the kitchen floor with a broken water glass by his side. On the kitchen table was a pencil and today’s newspaper, open on the crossword and personal ads page.
He had never imagined that Enzo’s body could take up so much space. His eyes were half open but the huge man had stared right through him.
Gianni knew it was bound to happen one day: his mother’s exasperated reproaches, the untouched pills, the constant headaches, the nosebleeds whenever Enzo’s blood pressure caused a blood vessel to burst.
He had squatted down beside him, placed a hand on Enzo’s shirt and realized that his chest was moving. Gianni’s brain had locked into basic first aid: free up the airways, put the body into recovery position, call the emergency services – the things any son of a policeman would know.
When the ambulance crew banged on the door, Enzo had opened one eye and was smiling at Gianni – or whoever he thought he was. The smile turned into a tragic distorted grimace and Gianni started to cry.
He leaned his forehead against the oak door and closed his eyes. His mother must be told about Enzo. Immediately. The ambulance crew had fired questions at him that left him gaping like a fish. Who was Enzo’s next of kin? Was he, Gianni, related to the unconscious man? Who was he, and who was the man? Allergies? Medication? Medical history? Had anything like this ever happened be
fore? Did he know anything at all? He had escaped the stream of unanswerable questions by ducking under an outstretched arm, running down the old wooden steps that were missing the third step from the bottom, and sprinting across the yard and over fields – to the tall walls of the convent.
He walked out into the sunshine and took another look at the parapet, high, high above him. With his fingertips trailing the wall, he ran towards the eastern corner of the convent where he was shaded by the vegetation. His fingers closed around a dry, fraying trunk of ivy and he was three metres above ground before he realized he had started climbing.
Gianni’s trainers had no trouble finding cracks between the old stones where the mortar had crumbled away. The thick branches offered excellent holds for his sweaty hands. The branches bounced, gave way, and the boy noticed – from the shower of dried twigs and withered, but previously undisturbed leaves – that his body-weight tore loose handfuls of the tiny invasive roots with which the plant had clung to the stones for centuries from the crumbling brickwork right in front of his face. He stared at the ground between his shoes, gulped and decided to focus on the distant sky instead while he prayed that the nun’s triumphant face wouldn’t appear between the crenellations – a second before she tipped a vat of boiling oil over him.
Finally he could put his hands on the parapet and swing his legs over the stone wall. He was standing on a deserted watchman’s gallery under an empty sky.
He scurried down the nearest steps, scanned the cloisters for the nun, who would appear to have been swallowed up by the refectory or chapel, and ran towards the main building.
From an open window he could hear girls’ voices accompanied by a honky-tonk piano.
It was like running through an underwater dream, a dream that was simultaneously wonderful and terrifying.
The vaults faded out of sight in the eternal twilight high above his head; founding fathers and saints glowered with disapproval at him from every pilaster, niche and column. Gianni ignored them. While his trainers brought him forward silently and quickly, his eyes were feasting. They were presented with one delightful tableau after another: everywhere he saw young, supernaturally beautiful, girls. Some of them were dressed in silk kimonos with artful Japanese wigs on top of their white painted faces, many of them were dressed only in their underwear – most of them, in fact. They rummaged through boxes and suitcases for costumes or props, or sat in front of dressing tables, bathed in a golden light from mirrors and lamps. Others were absorbed in scripts or sheet music, or they were on the stage at the far end of the hall. There was more naked flesh on display in the colossal room than he had ever thought possible. The unfamiliar smells and voices lingered between the columns. Subconsciously Gianni straightened his back, pushed up his chest – and was tackled mercilessly from behind by two well coordinated lacrosse players from one of the senior years.
He didn’t mind at all.
Even though there was blood on the tiles right under his face from a split lower lip, he discovered – as his hands were competently twisted up behind his shoulder blades – that by turning his head to the right, he could study a smooth armpit and follow its outline to a finely curved breast in a white lace bra cup, and that by turning his head to the left, he could observe a thigh, the hollow of a knee and a shin that continued into a narrow foot with red toenails.
He could happily have stayed there forever. The girls’ skin was burning hot against his. He had their breathing in his ears and their scent in his nose: Gianni pressed his groin hard against the cold floor so that no one would notice his reaction to the ambush.
‘Gianni? Gianni?’
His mother’s voice.
The boy groaned.
‘What are you doing here? How did you get in?’ And addressing the girls: ‘Let him go! He’s my son. I’m sorry.’
The three singing geishas on stage broke off ‘Three Little Maids’ and a little later Signorina Lombardi at the piano also noticed the upheaval and lifted her hands from the keyboard.
Gianni sensed the growing silence in the room, snapped out of his reverie and rolled over on his back. He got up and rubbed his sore elbows. The two girls who had floored him were looking straight at him. Their underwear was bright white. Their arms hung along their sides, their hands still tense.
His mother had red spots on her cheeks. She had gathered up her hair in a schoolmistress bun at the back of her head, pinned up with two make-up brushes, with small squares of colour tests high up her forearms.
Antonia folded her arms brusquely across her chest. He could see she was sorely tempted to slap him across the face.
His hands found each other in front of his shorts.
‘Enzo has collapsed in the kitchen and you didn’t answer your mobile,’ he said in a calm voice. ‘He has been taken to hospital. He was unconscious, Mum.’
Antonia looked at him as if she had never seen him before.
‘Enzo?’
The boy’s attention was magnetically drawn to the two Amazons. Especially the taller of the girls, with the beauty spot above her left breast and the cold stare.
She had to be at least seventeen.
‘What?’
‘Unconscious. Almost dead,’ he said.
‘Did he say anything?’
‘No.’
The girl’s toes were perfectly straight. And the multicoloured afternoon light that poured through the stained glass lit up fine, almost invisible golden down on her shins, before bouncing off the varnish on her toenails.
‘Nothing?’
‘He looked at me, I think,’ Gianni said.
‘That idiot!’
‘Mum …’
She bit her lower lip in shame, but then she gave way to her indignation.
‘I warned him, didn’t I? Over and over and over! About his blood pressure.’
She raised her hands to the Gothic vaults as if looking for a sign of agreement from the Almighty.
Apollonia, the headmistress, appeared out of nowhere as if emerging from a trap door in the floor. She nudged aside the two athletes, told the girls to put on some clothes – ‘At once, thank you!’ – and then Antonia informed her of the reason for her son’s presence.
The boy looked at the downy girl and thought that it might not be her fault she seemed so aloof. Perhaps the cold stare wasn’t a reflection of her personality. Perhaps it was just how very clear eyes, grey like the sea, looked. Gianni was ready to forgive her.
‘You should go,’ Apollonia said.
Antonia made a gesture that included all of the nave, the numerous tables, the girls and the stage.
‘Your friend Enzo is more important,’ the headmistress said. ‘I hope he’s all right.’
She handed Antonia her car keys.
‘The blue BMW in the car park.’
‘Thank you. Thank you so much.’
‘Does he have any family?’
‘No. Yes.’ Antonia blushed. ‘I don’t know. I don’t think so. I’ve never heard of anyone.’ She turned to Gianni. ‘Have you?’
‘No,’ he said.
‘Never?’
‘No.’
Apollonia herded them down the corridor.
‘Come on, off you go.’
‘I’ll deal with it,’ Antonia said. ‘Come on, Gianni. Now! And stop staring at the girl. She’s eighteen.’
CHAPTER 28
The nurse was sympathetic, as one would expect, but also matter-of-fact: the MRI scan of Enzo Canavaro’s brain showed no abnormalities, but they believed that Signor Canavaro had suffered a minor stroke; a blood clot in one of the brain’s smaller arteries which had yet to show up on the scan. They would repeat the scan tomorrow. The blood clot was probably the result of hardening of the arteries, which again was caused by Signor Canavaro’s sky-high blood pressure and possibly a genetic predisposition. Did Signora Moretti follow? Her lodger was currently being kept in a kind of artificial coma on a respirator. He was not sedated so he could wake up. He might experience pa
ralysis and confusion, possibly speech difficulties. Prognosis? His future? The nurse’s gaze became evasive. Her hands lifted with a shrug of the shoulders. Impossible to predict, signora. We can only hope for the best, can’t we? On admission the patient’s blood pressure had been terribly high, the nurse repeated. Was Antonia imagining things or was the nurse blaming her? It really was quite irresponsible, the nurse added. Antonia stuttered as she tried to explain Enzo’s rejection of any reality check regarding his health … she had, and God was her witness … tried, she really had … but he was careless with his medication to the point of suicidal. The nurse nodded and turned to the bed, which the large, bearded man filled from headboard to foot. Family? Did he have any? Not as far as Antonia knew. The nurse found this most peculiar. She couldn’t imagine anyone without a family.
‘Paralysed … ?’ Antonia started counting the floor tiles. Then he would be better off dead. Enzo was as active as a sheepdog right from dawn to his late evening walk. Sometimes he would even wander around all night when insomnia kept him awake. He encountered the world through his hands. Such a situation would be intolerable. As if she had read her mind, the nurse carefully explained to Antonia that obviously they had got the blood pressure under control at once and that they had started him on medication to break down the presumed blood clot; ‘thrombolytic therapy’, as the treatment was called, would – if all went well – restore the blood supply to the affected section of the brain. A new MRI scan would provide more information.
As would the patient’s own responses, of course. When he woke up. Antonia looked at her. Was it really possible? It was. Both in theory and in practice, signora. Thrombolytic therapy had revolutionized neurology in the last five to ten years. Doctors now got patients through strokes mostly without permanent physical side effects. Obviously not every time. Far from it. But often.
While the nurse was busy at the neighbouring bed, Antonia slipped her hand into the bedside table drawer and helped herself to Enzo’s keys.
A young ghost was staring back at her from the wall. Antonia had automatically straightened the crooked frame before she looked at the picture. The frame wasn’t dusty and the wall behind it had not faded. It showed a grainy colour photograph. It could have been cut from one of the old racing magazines piled up under Enzo Canavaro’s desk, tied and bound up with twine. As if they would escape if given their freedom.
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