When the Dead Awaken

by Steffen Jacobsen

  The young god looked at her from the seat of a Formula One car. The visor of his helmet was up and the visible part of his face was framed by the helmet’s padding and the white fire-retardant cloth of the face mask. It might be a standard publicity shot, but Antonia didn’t think so. None of the PR staff who fluttered around Formula One teams would have allowed this photo to be used to promote their driver. His gaze was far too bored, introverted and unsmiling. The glamour coefficient was absolutely zero.

  She had to sit down. She had known him once and she had recognized him by his eyes. She had been looking at those same eyes every day for the last two years.

  And she had kissed the man in the racing car. When he was a boy of only sixteen. It was a complete mystery to her until she remembered that Bruno Forlani, the man in the racing car, had a twin brother, Giulio – whom she now realized was calling himself Enzo Canavaro.

  So of course they had the same eyes, but now Enzo looked nothing like his twin.

  The picture fell to the floor and the glass shattered. But she kept looking at it.

  Below the photo of Bruno Forlani there was a short article about a crash at Zolder in October 1993. The article was very brief and focused mainly on the coincidence that the far more famous Formula One driver, Gilles Villeneuve, had come off the circuit and been killed on the same stretch, Terlamenbocht, exactly ten years before the twenty-three-year-old Italian hope nearly lost his life at the same spot. The article was from Castellarano’s local newspaper, Mercurio Reggio Emilia, which had long since gone to newspaper heaven, but its source was probably one of the international news agencies, such as AP or Reuters.

  The smallest of Enzo’s three rooms was a shrine to Bruno; a disturbing project. Everywhere were photos from Bruno Forlani’s short but spectacular career as a go-kart champion, a successful year in Formula Three, and finally the gateway to heaven: his year as a Formula One test driver for Ferrari in the ’92–3 season. Everything was categorized, laid out and displayed as if it were a tribute to a saint.

  And in between the photographs of the brother, she found one of a married couple she vaguely recognized as the boys’ parents taken during one of the family’s annual visits to their mother’s home town. She saw the Castellarano background, which she knew like the back of her hand.

  And she saw that everything had been displayed in a careful pattern centred around a single photograph of an attractive young woman and a smiling boy who had the same colouring and facial features as his uncle, Bruno Forlani, but with Enzo’s dark, pondering eyes.

  She hadn’t been inside these rooms for two years and hadn’t known what to expect. Certainly not this. She remembered the wooden crates from the freight company in Genoa that were delivered to the grocery shop every now and then. Remembered Enzo’s anticipation and secrecy when he spotted them in the garage.

  The walls seemed to close in on her. Antonia remembered that she hadn’t eaten breakfast. She leaned forwards with her hands on her knees and forced herself to take deep slow breaths.

  She closed her eyes to Enzo’s impossible, hopeless and detailed reconstruction of a past and a future that could never be his. The woman and the boy. His wife and their son, undoubtedly. His twin brother Bruno. Their happy parents. Enzo had approached the reconstruction in the only way he knew. The way he went about everything: dedicated, careful, detailed – and frustratingly unresolved … like the engine forever hovering over the empty engine compartment of the Testarossa.

  As if that was enough. As if that could ward off a new tragedy.

  And as if someone else might hold the key, interpret Enzo’s photo-collage, utter the secret password, and the wall would open like a door. As if a past come back to life was ready and waiting on the other side.

  The three rooms were interconnected. Antonia walked back to the middle room: Enzo’s bedroom. Once it had been her parents’. Now the double bed was standing in the middle of the floor, neatly made with a lace bedspread covering the blankets and the pillows, and aligned on an east–west axis. On the wall behind the headboard there was a crucifix and a wedding photograph. The same woman again. Heartbreakingly beautiful. On the steps in front of the church in Castellarano. Under the wedding photo was a picture which made her shudder: a wild, grey and black sea, the tilted deck of a fishing boat, spray cascading over orange oilskin-clad fishermen hauling swordfish on board. The fish glittered red and green and the men grinned broadly under their caps and hoods.

  To the left in the picture – turning half away and serious as always – stood Giulio Forlani, whom she knew as Enzo Canavaro. Antonia remembered how his hands had still been swollen and chafed the first night she saw him, and that he still had the smell of the deep sea on him. From the trawler’s radio mast, between lanterns, aerials and radar domes, a torn Stars and Stripes was flapping in the storm.

  With a pen someone had written on the lower edge of the photograph: ‘Flemish Cap, St John’s, Newfoundland, 14 April 2009, bloody, bloody hell!’

  She sat down carefully on the edge of the bed and massaged her temples. From the garage she could faintly hear Gianni’s cornet like a bittern’s mournful call. The boy had refused to take part in this disloyal expedition to Enzo’s past, and she understood why.

  Antonia would not have believed it possible that any human being could move so quietly, least of all a man almost two metres tall whose weight was on the respectable side of one hundred kilos, but she didn’t hear him enter. Enzo Canavaro walked straight past her, opened a wardrobe and started putting things into his old salt-water-stained sea bag.

  Antonia blinked.

  Then she blinked again. She was sure that if she blinked hard enough he would be gone; preferably back in the hospital bed.

  ‘Enzo … ? Enzo! What in God’s name … ?’

  He glanced at her while he stuffed a sleeping bag into the sea bag, but said nothing. His movements were miraculously steady and measured, and his eyes and face devoid of expression.

  ‘I am … I’m sorry, Enzo.’ She made a helpless gesture towards the open door and the bundle of keys hanging from the lock. ‘I know that … What are you doing? Where are you going?’

  She began to cry.

  ‘You can’t just leave,’ she sobbed.

  A leather jacket and a white silk scarf, which Enzo only wore when he rode his motorbike. Leather gloves.

  Antonia rose and placed her hand on his arm.

  He stood still and looked at her hand until she removed it.

  Antonia leaned back and folded her arms across her chest. She tried anger instead.

  ‘So who are you? Enzo Canavaro? Giulio Forlani? Bruno Forlani’s brother? All of them?’

  Jeans, underwear and shirts. A small laptop on his desk. Her eyes widened when he casually stuffed a couple of thick bundles of banknotes into the inside pocket of his leather jacket. There were many more neat stacks like them on the top shelf of the wardrobe. She gulped.

  ‘You can keep the rest, Antonia,’ he said. ‘Spend it on yourself and Gianni as you see fit. He’s a good boy and I’ve been glad to know him. He’s bright. He deserves a good education. There’s enough for both of you. More than enough.’

  ‘Enzo … I don’t understand what’s going on. Do you think you could stop for one minute and …’

  He straightened up and finally looked at her.

  His mouth opened, and she could see that he was searching for the words, but had to give up.

  She was crying openly now.

  ‘Is that what Gianni was? A substitute for your own boy?’ she asked.

  She pointed to the photograph of the woman and the boy on the wall.

  ‘No! … No!’

  She held out her hand.

  ‘I’m sorry, Enzo.’

  ‘Giulio.’

  He placed his hands on her shoulders and she sank down on the bed. He sat next to her and took her hand.

  ‘You’ve been great, Antonia. You’re the best person I … the very best. Really. You’re very …
fine.’

  With the tip of her finger Antonia stroked the gnarled, scarred bumps that made up his knuckles. She could see nothing of her hand, which had disappeared into his enormous, warm paw.

  ‘Yeah, right,’ she muttered.

  ‘I mean it.’

  ‘What happened to your face? Where did it go?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Your brother, Giulio! When you were sixteen you were the spitting image of your brother and now you look like a train wreck.’

  ‘I know that you have a million questions, Antonia. Of course you do. But I can’t say anything right now, do you understand?’

  ‘More than a million, Giulio.’

  She pointed at the sea-sickness inducing scene on the wall.

  ‘Your ship?’

  He nodded.

  ‘Not mine, but Fred Wilson’s, the skipper of the Roseanne, from Gloucester in Massachusetts. Or perhaps it doesn’t belong to him, but some consortium. It’s complicated.’

  ‘Why Massachusetts?’

  ‘My father is from Boston.’

  She hid her face as tears dripped quietly down from her fingers on to the floorboards, leaving perfectly round circles.

  ‘Where are you going?’ she said.

  ‘My wife and my son have been found,’ he said. ‘They went missing three years ago.’

  She looked at him.

  ‘What do you mean, missing?’

  ‘The Camorra took them.’

  ‘The Camorra? Why? Are they alive?’

  ‘No.’

  There was a hint of a terrible smile.

  ‘No,’ he said again.

  She pointed to the central photo on the wall. ‘Is this your wife?’

  ‘Yes, that’s Lucia.’

  ‘Was she from here?’

  ‘Yes. She went to the convent school and later worked as a lawyer in Milan.’

  ‘Did you meet her here … during one of your summer holidays?’

  ‘Yes and no. I saw her here, but didn’t give her a second glance. Later I recognized her in Milan at a concert.’

  ‘Who was she with?’

  He blushed.

  ‘You ask a lot of questions, Antonia.’

  ‘Who was she with?’

  ‘Eros Ramazzotti.’

  ‘Why did the Camorra take them, Giulio? Why did they take your wife and son?’

  ‘Not now! I was an idiot. I was working for … various industries. I had started a business with a friend. We thought we could take the bread from the mouths of the Camorra and that they would just roll over. I was an idiot, Antonia. The police said they would take care of us, that nothing would happen, that we were safe.’

  He buried his face in his hands and his shoulders tensed up, but he didn’t let go of her hand.

  ‘I kissed your brother once,’ she said.

  He said nothing.

  ‘By the swimming pool,’ she said.

  ‘Behind the changing rooms.’ Giulio Forlani nodded. ‘You wore a yellow dress.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I saw you. And Bruno, of course.’

  ‘Do you really remember that?’

  ‘Bruno was always the lucky one,’ he said.

  ‘Will you be coming back?’ she asked. ‘Gianni would like … I don’t know what … I would also like …’

  ‘I’ll speak to Gianni. Perhaps, if I’m lucky, I’ll come back.’

  ‘Would you like that?’

  ‘Very much.’

  ‘What happened? This morning.’

  He touched his neck and looked out of the window.

  ‘Nothing. It was nothing. I was just startled by something I saw.’

  ‘The nurse said you had a stroke.’

  ‘It was nothing, Antonia, really. I’m okay.’

  ‘Don’t forget to take your pills,’ she said, and dried her eyes angrily with a corner of her cardigan.

  ‘I’ve packed them. And I won’t forget to take them. Thank you. Arrivederci.’

  ‘Take care of yourself,’ she mumbled.

  She heard him on the stairs, took a pillow and pressed it against her face.

  Antonia continued to sit on Giulio Forlani’s neatly made bed; she stayed there while she heard him speak to her son through an open window and when the motorbike started up. The engine howled between the garage walls as if in Purgatory. It clattered across the cobblestones in the courtyard, and on to the road before the sound faded away. She remained on the bed, staring at the floor, and again the sound of Gianni’s cornet rose up from the garage. Each note more tense and melancholy than its predecessor.

  Later she went downstairs to the kitchen, swept up the shards of the broken water glass and put them in the bin. She sat down at the kitchen table and glanced at today’s Corriere della Sera; at the crossword and the dense columns of personal ads. The crossword was half completed in Enzo’s – or Giulio’s – neat handwriting.

  Antonia let her eyes glide down the columns with their cryptic and coded personal ads. Halfway through the third column she wondered why the same phrase appeared twice with a couple of other ads in between:

  Janus seeks friendship with Minerva

  In the first one ‘Minerva’ was followed by the word ‘Milan’ and ‘****’, while only two stars followed ‘Minerva’ in the second. A mobile telephone number was listed in the first, but there was nothing in the second. Giulio Forlani had circled the ads with a fine pencil.

  Antonia put down the newspaper and looked at the ceiling. It was quiet upstairs. Far too quiet.

  CHAPTER 29

  Milan

  Sabrina woke up in the bathtub at five o’clock in the morning and found it impossible to get back to sleep. Not because the bathtub was uncomfortable, but because she was afraid. It was like staring down a black drain where everything whirled around before being washed away. She had been woken up by her own inchoate shouting; strange words that lingered between the tiled walls long after she had opened her eyes and closed her mouth. Sabrina had placed both the Walther and the Colt within comfortable reach on the bathroom’s bidet and arranged duvets, pillows and blankets in the tub after Nestore Raspallo had left. He hadn’t just left, he had walked out on her.

  This enigmatic young man was unlikely to be the only one capable of tracing the use of a MasterCard in Milan.

  Sabrina decided to chase him out of her consciousness with an imaginary baseball bat every time he pushed his way in, something he was doing with alarming frequency.

  The Camorra didn’t murder public prosecutors or high-level police officers. It was an inviolable rule. Every clan and every individual Camorrista looked down on the Cosa Nostra, especially the Corleone family, for the murders of the investigative judges Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino. The killings were counterproductive, they attracted publicity and they damaged vital links to politicians who, of course, had to profess loyalty to the forces of law and order after each high-profile assassination, and they washed away the financial and political lubricant that oiled the wheels – political alliances that ensured the Camorra new, lucrative contracts for road building, public sector construction projects and waste management.

  The Camorra preferred to destroy the reputation of a public prosecutor; they ruined his or her career by making them the subject of scandal, by getting the public prosecutor pilloried in the press, making him look suspicious, ridiculous, accusing him of fraud, incompetence, nepotism or abuse of power and getting him transferred to some bureaucratic gulag where he would be harmless and disillusioned. The methods were many and subtle. The attack on Federico Renda had been an exception, and a weighty decision, which had undoubtedly given ‘The System’ plenty to think about, created internal hostilities and long, heated discussions. The attack was sanctioned only because it was regarded as a financial necessity. Renda had grown too mighty, too effective and successful.

  But even the Camorra drew a line. On one side of that line you were faceless, a respectable agent of law and order, like thousands of
others; an understandably anonymous and tolerated public servant who was simply doing their job. On the other side, you had earned a name for yourself, a face, you became someone who failed to respect the status and dignity of the old clans; an unforgivable threat. A person many Camorristi talked about. Someone a young, hot-headed Camorrista might be tempted to go after. Sabrina knew she was well on the way to getting a name and a ‘face’, and she dared hardly think the thought through to its conclusion. Her brothers, her mother … even Ismael … could be targeted by the Camorra. They could make her turn right or left, or force her to disappear into the witness protection programme – sell flowers in Stockholm or hire out surfboards on Lesbos for the rest of her life.

  She climbed out of the tub, carried the bed linen back to the bed, returned to the bathroom and took a long hot shower while she suppressed the new warm sensation in her groin and inspected her injuries in the mirror. She had an interesting discoloration and bump on her forehead where Nestore had hit her. Her lower jaw hurt when she rocked it from side to side. She brushed her teeth with some difficulty. She tried to cover the worst damage to her face with a little foundation, but despaired at the result.

  She got dressed, lay down on the bed and switched on the television. The murders of Dr Carlo Mazzaferro and Laura Rizzo were breaking news on every channel. Photographers sent to an exclusive property in the Porta Romana district had found a tall, slim woman dressed in black; silk scarf around her head, sunglasses, and getting into a Mercedes with tinted windows. On the other side of the car two teenage boys were making their way through the throng of journalists and photographers. Mazzaferro’s wife and sons. They looked exactly like grieving relatives in news broadcasts always did, as if the bereaved were told how to dress and behave by the media.

  Sabrina switched off the television.

  An hour later she got off the bed, put on her anorak and boots, armed herself and threw her rucksack over her shoulder.