When the Dead Awaken

by Steffen Jacobsen

  Savelli went downstairs and into Antonia Moretti’s clean but plain bedroom. He opened her wardrobe and noted that the widow’s basic wardrobe consisted of two pairs of jeans, a couple of dresses, and a number of cheap T-shirts and shirts. The television was an old black-and-white apparatus. Above the widow’s bed there was a photograph of the sublime Ferrari Testarossa in the garage. A dark-haired boy was behind the wheel. Moretti, smiling and beautiful, was sitting next to the boy and on the rear wing sat an unrecognizable, bearded, dark-haired giant. One massive hand rested on the boy’s shoulder, the other on the widow’s. The man looked straight into the camera with an anxious smile and narrowed, dark eyes.

  Evidence of real devotion there, he noted.

  He turned around at the sound of Claudio’s footsteps.

  ‘All done?’ he asked.

  ‘The safe is open, signore.’

  ‘That was quick.’

  ‘We were lucky, signore.’

  Anyone working with Claudio should regard themselves as lucky, Savelli thought.

  The recessed fireproof box was empty apart from a stack of identical grey envelopes. Urs Savelli sat down on the bed with a pile of them on his lap and opened the first one.

  It would appear that someone wanted Enzo Canavaro, also known as Giulio Forlani, to be provided for. Well provided for. The contents of the envelopes explained the banknotes in the wardrobe – and the Ferrari in the garage. Since 1 August 2008 an unknown benefactor had transferred €30,000 every month to Credit Suisse in Rome. The contents of the envelopes were always the same: a bank statement. Apart from the Ferrari, this new version of Giulio Forlani would appear to be remarkably frugal, and the car had presumably been a wreck when he bought it.

  He estimated that Forlani’s wardrobe contained about €50,000 and was in no doubt that the cash was a runaway fund in case the Camorra were about to close in on him.

  He passed a bank statement to Claudio who entered the details into his laptop.

  ‘Let’s go,’ the Albanian said.

  The young man nodded, put the envelopes back in the box, closed the lid and set the combination lock to the default position. Using an ultraviolet lamp and specialist goggles, he checked that Giulio Forlani hadn’t used saliva to stick a hair or some other tell-tale sign on the fold of the lid, replaced the floorboards and put back the rug.

  Urs Savelli himself drove the Audi to Naples while Claudio sat in the back, hunched over his computer, muttering when something failed to go the way he had hoped, but never giving in – there were no problems as far as Claudio was concerned, only challenges of varying degrees of difficulty.

  They were outside Barberino di Mugello on the E35 when the young man cleared his throat.

  ‘Signore?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘The Credit Suisse benefactor. I have a name.’

  Savelli looked at the young man in the rear-view mirror.

  ‘The benefactor,’ Claudio repeated patiently. ‘It’s Emporia Massimiliano Di Luca s.a., Milano–Rome–London …’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  The question baffled Claudio, and Savelli elaborated: ‘Have you hacked into Credit Suisse, Claudio?’ He looked at his watch. ‘In one and a half hours? That’s … that’s …’

  The young man laughed.

  ‘No one can hack into a Swiss bank, signore. Certainly no one I’ve heard of. An American bank might be possible. There was this Russian, Levin, who stole ten million dollars from Citibank, but he had someone on the inside. But a Swiss one, no. The Americans or the Israelis might be able to, I don’t know. Possibly. But it would require enormous resources.’ Claudio looked dreamily at the flat landscape outside. ‘Possibly the brains who put the STUXNET worm inside the Iranian uranium enrichment plant could …’

  Savelli wondered how much longer he could expect to keep Claudio. Sooner or later he would be headhunted by some intelligence agency. It was bound to happen.

  ‘So what did you do?’ Savelli interrupted him. ‘And pretend you’re explaining this to your mother.’

  ‘I can’t, signore,’ Claudio said apologetically. ‘It’s very difficult to explain. It either happens or it doesn’t. But if you know that someone has an account with a specific bank, you might be lucky enough to find a ghost trail on a server that person has used from their personal computer when logging on to the bank. If they don’t, you’re out of luck. I simply found a temporary Internet file on a server that collects data transfers from Castellarano. The file contained Signor Canavaro’s passwords and access codes.’

  ‘Excellent.’

  ‘Thank you, signore.’

  Savelli shook his head in despair.

  ‘Max, Max, Massimiliano Di Luca …’ he muttered.

  Cold shivers ran up Savelli’s spine and he shuddered. He looked out across the landscape along the autostrada. Far away on the other side of this deserted no-man’s-land of market gardens, petrol stations, workshops, supermarkets, car parks, abandoned farms, fallow fields and forgotten, half-dreamt and half-finished building sites, cumulous clouds were stacking up. They were white where they met the blue, vaulted sky, and grey and dark blue where they touched the horizon.

  He was in a dangerous mood and he knew it. The most dangerous of all. A state where something deep inside him had decided that he wanted to – ought to – fail.

  Behind him Claudio was still absorbed by the computer. Claudio undoubtedly had grandiose dreams of being hired by Shin Bet or the NSA. To have the chance to use all his skills. And who could blame him, Urs Savelli thought: ultimately was there anything more fulfilling for a human being than to discover their true vocation?

  CHAPTER 33

  Ticino, Milan

  ‘You can open your eyes now,’ Giulio Forlani said.

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘We’ve arrived,’ he said.

  ‘What?’

  He pulled the motorbike on its prop stand and turned off the engine.

  Carefully and for the first time in an hour Sabrina opened her eyes and looked around. Forlani had been a gentleman and offered her his crash helmet while he himself made do with only sunglasses during the entire, terrible ride.

  The helmet was far too big and kept slipping over her eyes.

  At one point she had been foolish enough to push it up, lean forwards and look at the instrument panel in front of Giulio. The speedometer showed 230 km/h; at this speed the six-lane Milan–Brescia autostrada was the width of a rail track and the other traffic looked stationary. It had been like sitting on a motorbike falling from an aeroplane.

  Fearing the worst, she looked down between her legs. She would be mortified if she had wet herself. She was numb from the waist down from the cold.

  ‘If you want to dismount, you’ll have to let go of that strap,’ Forlani said.

  ‘What? Yes, sorry.’

  She had to prise her frozen fingers from the passenger seat strap.

  He helped her unbuckle the helmet and supported her when she reached the ground.

  ‘Thank you.’

  Again Forlani did the same big, wide and involuntary flapping with his arms as he had at the top of the basilica. She ducked to avoid a gloved fist that would otherwise have sent her flying across the yard. Forlani was standing with his back to her, looking at the house.

  She had no recollection of agreeing to this insane ride. They had walked down the endless steps inside the basilica’s bell tower. Her hangover had returned with full, murderous vengeance and her brain had almost turned to mush when they reached the bottom and looked out across the nearly deserted and drowsy Piazza Vecchia.

  ‘What now?’ he had asked and she didn’t have a clue.

  His eyes had started flickering as if there were a loose connection in his brain – just as they had before he started strangling her – and she quickly muttered something about Federico Renda, police protection, Naples, going somewhere he could gather his thoughts, when he had suggested Massimiliano Di Luca’s property by the Ticino River, fi
fty kilometres west of Milan. Hardly anyone knew the master spent his summers there.

  Sabrina looked back down the winding dirt track that disappeared behind the low coniferous forest. Behind a cluster of birch trees she could see the shallow gravel bed of the Ticino. Apart from birds and insects it was completely quiet here. A forgotten place.

  The house was one of those old Tuscan farmhouses she loved so much: a house that blended into the landscape as effortlessly as if it had been left behind by a melting glacier. An old building with a boulder foundation and a sloping roof of fat, red tiles that looked like an upside-down pâté.

  In an open barn she spotted Di Luca’s bottle-green Bentley and in the doorway to the house, the small Venetian was standing with his hands buried deeply in the pockets of his light brown cords.

  He embraced Forlani somewhere around his waist and Sabrina got a quick handshake, a nod and a blank look.

  Massimiliano Di Luca led them through low rooms which, although cosy and comfortably furnished, were surprisingly ordinary. Sabrina didn’t know whether to be disappointed or not. It was a nice place, no doubt about it, homely even, but she had been expecting something extraordinary from the world-famous designer. Not necessarily a branch of Versailles, but certainly something more glamorous than worn stone floors, brown cord sofas, simple black-and-white photographs on raw stone walls and a long kitchen table covered by a red oilskin cloth – exactly like her mother’s apartment. The only concession to glamour was a black-and-white poster that covered the whole of the end wall: a mature but instantly recognizable Claudia Schiffer wearing only a cat and a Di Luca handbag. ‘To Max, all my love, Claudia,’ she had written in the corner.

  Sabrina stopped in front of the wall.

  ‘Is that Helmut Newton?’ she asked.

  ‘Mario Testino.’

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  She sat down on the kitchen bench and looked around. The light flooded in through the small recessed windows. The best light of the day, she thought. When it was low, long, golden and endless. With considerable effort Giulio Forlani edged his way in beside her.

  Sabrina studied one of the photographs on the wall, which showed Di Luca in the cockpit of a large sailboat. The boat was on the verge of keeling over, its sails filled with wind. The Venetian had one hand on the tiller and man and boat seemed perfectly balanced.

  ‘Do you sail, signorina?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘It’s in Portofino,’ he told her.

  ‘What’s her name?’

  ‘Mona.’

  Di Luca’s missing muse and favourite model, she recalled.

  She smiled politely.

  ‘I see.’

  ‘Coffee?’ Di Luca offered.

  ‘Yes, please.’

  She had expected that the designer would now ring a silver bell to summon Filipino waiters in starched white mess jackets and cease this ridiculous illusion that he was a simple Lombardy peasant, but Di Luca got up, switched on an espresso machine and started looking for cups.

  ‘Are you disappointed, Dottoressa D’Avalos?’

  ‘Not at all,’ she lied.

  ‘I’m not Versace. I never have been,’ he said. ‘But I had a big house in Milan once, crammed with French baroque furniture, butlers and maids, everything gilded, ridiculous statues, tapestries, Persian rugs and a private cinema. I felt like Randolph Hearst or Gloria Swanson. Buried alive. I want to leave my door open, signorina. Speaking metaphorically, of course. I wouldn’t want to be overrun by the rabble.’

  ‘No, of course not.’

  Forlani hadn’t moved. He would appear to be absorbed in prayer.

  ‘Now that you’ve found Giulio, dottoressa, what are you going to do with him?’ Massimiliano Di Luca asked. ‘Save him from the Camorra again?’

  Forlani was as quiet as a conductor before the first down beat. The psychopath foaming at the mouth who had been on the verge of throwing her from the bell tower of Basilica Santa Maria only a few hours ago seemed never to have existed. Only this virtuous, peacefully meditating man who would never dream of hurting a fly.

  ‘If that’s what it takes,’ she said.

  ‘Sugar, milk?’

  ‘Both, please,’ she said. ‘I presume that you’ve heard about Dr Carlo Mazzaferro, maestro? The doctor who declared Forl— … declared Giulio dead.’

  ‘Of course. Poor man … and poor girl,’ the Venetian muttered.

  She was tempted to say that it wasn’t her who had put Urs Savelli on to Mazzaferro. That she hadn’t planted the idea that Giulio Forlani might not be dead in the brain of the Camorra – but decided against it. She knew from court proceedings that protesting was as good as admitting your guilt.

  She turned her head and met Giulio Forlani’s scrutinizing stare.

  ‘There doesn’t seem to be a way back,’ she said. ‘They know that you’re alive, and they know that you would be capable of recreating your frankly wonderful invention.’

  Forlani and Di Luca exchanged quick glances.

  She looked at the giant more closely.

  ‘Because you would, wouldn’t you?’

  She opened her jacket, found her purse and placed the small date strip on the oilcloth next to an enormous and scarred hand.

  Forlani looked at it without touching it.

  ‘Wouldn’t you?’ she repeated.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘As far as I’ve been told, no one has continued Nanometric’s work,’ she said. ‘So your … crystals are still the best bet for the copyright protection which everyone so desperately needs.’

  ‘I expect that I could recreate it,’ Giulio Forlani said after another sideways glance at the designer. ‘With the right facilities. We patented several of the key processes. The patents are valid for a few more years before other companies can use them.’

  He smiled at her, but looked at the strip.

  ‘I’m sorry, Sabrina. It feels so very far away. Do you understand?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Can’t I just go back to where I came from?’

  ‘Where is that?’ she asked.

  He smiled.

  ‘The south.’

  She felt a desperate urge for a cigarette and asked if she could smoke. Massimiliano Di Luca rose and produced a silver ashtray. She lit a cigarette and without thinking pushed the packet across the oilcloth to Forlani, who also took one.

  ‘The Camorra will always see you as a clear threat,’ she said.

  His face disappeared momentarily behind his hands. Somewhere behind them he nodded.

  ‘I know, I know …’

  The smoke seeped slowly out of his nostrils as his face reappeared.

  She got up and went over to one of the small windows. She folded her arms across her chest and looked out into the yard. The driver, Alberto, was busy oiling a teak bench. He was tanned and muscular, wearing a pair of faded jeans and a khaki T-shirt. On the far side of the yard the meadow sloped down towards the river. Sabrina was transported back to the summers of her childhood by Lake Como, where she had learned to shoot with a bow and arrow, ride, swim, build a decent kite and keep it away from the kite-eating trees opposite the house.

  This investigation had changed her, she knew that. Changed her – or had she found herself?

  ‘Dottoressa … ?’

  Massimiliano Di Luca had walked up close to her without her noticing him.

  She picked up the concern in his voice.

  ‘I’m fine.’

  ‘Perhaps we’re all a little tired,’ he said and gestured her back to the table.

  She looked over her shoulder – towards the distant trees – raised her hand and waved goodbye.

  CHAPTER 34

  Qualiano, Naples

  Afterwards, there was a moment of awestruck silence before young voices filled the earpieces. The girl with the tattoos mumbled into her throat microphone that it had been like seeing Kurt Cobain walk again, while one of the boys said it was like seeing Michael Jackson.


  He indulged them. How many times in their hopefully long careers would they come into close contact with a myth, a ghost, who up until now had been made of the same substance as dreams – and paranoid delusions? However, after thirty seconds of excited chattering on the strictly guarded radio channel, Primo Alba told them to shut up.

  Urs Savelli, complete with his trademark Basque walking stick, had just passed under the well-hidden cameras which GIS experts had installed in the roof of the tunnel the previous night.

  The brim of his hat hid half of Savelli’s face and he had moved swiftly and purposefully. Shortly before he appeared, an unmarked van had driven down the ramp under Signor Marchese’s small workshop next to his house and the old man had closed the garage doors after it himself.

  It was exactly as the city engineer, Signor Franco, had told them: the old man loved his pigeons. From the corn silo behind the carpenter’s house members of Primo Alba’s young team had admired Signor Marchese tirelessly tending to his beautiful pigeons, both white and speckled, that lived in large wire cages in the yard behind his workshop. He chatted to them as if they were his beloved grandchildren, constantly replacing their water, food and bedding; took them out, stroked their feathers, trimmed their claws with a pair of small nail clippers.

  Primo Alba slowly turned on to his back. Absent-minded ly he watched a busy spider fashion a new web between two laths in the silo’s ancient roof construction. Dried-up pigeon droppings crunched under his leather jacket. If he had wanted to, he could have reached out and touched the young man who was currently operating the telescopes and cameras pointing at Signor Marchese’s courtyard.

  They had lifted a couple of roof tiles to accommodate the telescope, the camera lenses and the CO2-powered rifle which – if and when the need arose – would fire a dart containing a needle and a glass ampoule containing enough fentanyl to knock out an elephant into Signor Marchese’s unprotected neck.