When the Dead Awaken

by Steffen Jacobsen

  She stubbed out the cigarette and sat up. Found another one in the almost empty packet and wished she had something to drink. Perhaps she could sneak down to the kitchen and steal a bottle.

  There wasn’t a sound to be heard.

  Of course … of course she had convinced herself two dozen times, at least, that she could hear crunching earth and pebbles against tyres, cars stopping just behind the trees, car doors being closed by armed, dangerous and silent men. Footsteps on the grass, on the cobblestones in the yard – a window routinely eased off its hinges. A catch scraping against the woodwork. And numerous times she had told herself she had seen headlights reflected in the sky, between the trees.

  Sabrina knew it was all in her mind. Of course it was.

  She smoked the cigarette greedily and weighed the Walther in her hand. Its safe, reassuring weight offered her no comfort this time. She let the cigarette dangle from the corner of her mouth, narrowed her left eye against the smoke and pulled the Colt from the ankle holster. She pointed its barrel at the narrow stripe of the moonlight between the shutters, aimed at a star above the distant conifers and thought about Ismael.

  ‘Bang, bang,’ she muttered, and imagined shooting down the star.

  What she needed was peace and quiet, some answers … and then three months in a mental health clinic.

  Her mobile buzzed with a new text message, and she put down the weapons.

  She looked at the display, read the messages from Primo, who continued to sign himself ‘NR’ as if they were still keeping up his ridiculous fiction, and then she read the message again. And again.

  She got up from the bed, tiptoed on bare feet through the room and out into the passage, saw the flickering light under Forlani’s door and knocked.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘It’s me, Sabrina.’

  ‘Go away.’

  She looked at her feet, ghostly white in the moonlight.

  ‘May I come in?’

  ‘No.’

  She tried the handle. The door was locked, as her own door ought to have been.

  When she was at school she had been a fairly competent diver from the high board. Her coach had described her as ‘fearless’ and Sabrina wondered if he might have meant that deep down she was utterly reckless. Now she was breathing the same way as she had during preparations for the ten-metre platform.

  ‘Castellarano, Giulio. It wouldn’t happen to be Castellarano, would it? Where you’ve been hiding for the last couple of years, I mean. It wouldn’t be there, would it?’ she whispered.

  A simple ‘No’ would have been enough to make her go back to her room, lie down and go to sleep.

  But the door was torn open and the towering figure, partially dissolved in the darkness, stretched out one of his industrial-sized scoops and dragged her into his room.

  Déjà-vu.

  For the second time in this never-ending day her feet left the ground as Giulio Forlani lifted her up by the scruff of her neck. This time he executed his feat with one hand. The other was still resting on the door handle.

  Sabrina let her head slump backwards so she could still breathe and waited for him to tire, to get it out of his system. Soon he would once again become the harmless, well-mannered scientist he had been all afternoon.

  Or perhaps he was only calm and safe to be around when Massimiliano Di Luca or someone else he knew was present.

  She dangled with the blood roaring and the sound of the ultra-calm, deep breathing of Giulio Forlani in her ears.

  ‘Are you done yet?’ she squawked.

  The faint glow from the candle behind the potential Nobel Prize winner was starting to fade.

  ‘Yes,’ he mumbled eventually. ‘… Sorry.’

  He released her and she tumbled forwards on weak legs and bumped her head on the door frame.

  ‘I would hate to be present during a domestic dispute in the Forlani home,’ she said, rubbing her scalp.

  ‘What … ? No. No.’

  In the candlelight Giulio Forlani’s face was even more asymmetrical, scarred and furrowed than ever. Like congealed lava that might one day melt again and assume a happier expression.

  ‘Not Lucia …’ he said, sounding far away. ‘Never. Besides, I was … Everything was different.’

  He looked at her.

  ‘I’m not a violent man, Sabrina.’

  She touched her neck gingerly.

  ‘Of course you’re not, Giulio,’ she said.

  His expression became doubtful and searching. Then he nodded gravely and she remembered how Massimiliano Di Luca had described his friend: for him the world is concrete. It’s what he can see and measure.

  She presumed that hints, irony and sarcasm were wasted on the physicist.

  ‘What did you just say?’ he asked.

  ‘May I sit down?’

  He nodded in the direction of the bed.

  ‘What did you say?’ he asked her again.

  ‘Castellarano,’ she whispered.

  She glanced up, saw the look on his face and buried her face in her hands.

  ‘Oh, God! I’m sorry!’

  Giulio Forlani shook her like a terrier shakes a rat.

  ‘Speak!’

  ‘There were some men, some Camorristi who followed me from Naples. I … I’m so sorry.’

  He let her go and rested his forehead against the wall. His hands hung – for the moment – idly by his sides.

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘I drove past Castellarano on my way to Milan.’ She started to cry. ‘I don’t know why … your wife, Lucia, she went to school there … it was just a whim. My boss thought Castellarano was where it all started.’

  ‘Did you speak to anyone?’ he asked the wall.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Yes!’

  ‘A woman I happened to meet in a park. You can see the river from there. It was only a moment. We shared some grapes.’

  ‘Blue grapes,’ Forlani said.

  Sabrina hiccupped and the tears kept flowing in the way that she knew they would not stop.

  ‘How do you know they were blue?’

  Giulio Forlani didn’t appear to hear her.

  ‘What did she look like?’ he asked.

  ‘She was a tall, attractive woman, I thought. She had a slightly strange smell about her. I recognized it, but I can’t remember where from.’

  ‘Formaldehyde,’ he said. ‘She works for an undertaker.’

  She wiped her eyes with her sleeve.

  ‘She always wears that grey dress when she goes to the undertaker’s,’ Giulio Forlani said. ‘When she comes home, she washes it and hangs it on the clothes line to dry so it can be aired in the sunshine. She says it’s the only thing that makes the smell go away.’

  ‘Who is she?’

  ‘Antonia Moretti.’

  ‘Who is she, Giulio?’

  ‘She is … damnit, Sabrina, the widow with whom I’ve been staying for two years. She’s my landlady.’

  There was a dangerous glint in his deep eye sockets.

  ‘So they followed you and they photographed you with Antonia and now they’ve found her,’ he declared.

  ‘We don’t know that for sure, Giulio.’ She got up and started pacing up and down. ‘We don’t know that for sure …’

  ‘You’re beautiful but useless, Sabrina,’ he said. ‘You really are.’

  Giulio Forlani started rummaging around in his biker jacket for his mobile.

  ‘Antonia has called me several times today, only I didn’t hear a damn thing because you blasted my eardrums!’

  ‘You tried to strangle me!’

  ‘I wish I’d succeeded,’ he said.

  He pressed the keys like a madman, but the call went straight to Antonia’s voicemail. He tried Gianni’s mobile next and finally heard the boy’s sleepy voice on the handset.

  ‘Gianni? It’s Giulio. Enzo, I mean.’

  The boy seemed to have been sound asleep and as far as Sabrina could make out he sounded completely normal.
Giulio Forlani straightened up and his movements became a little less tense.

  ‘Wake your mum up, Gianni. It’s important. It’s extremely important. Do what I say now, okay?’

  He listened for a moment and scowled at Sabrina.

  ‘An unknown woman has been asking about Antonia in Castellarano,’ he hissed. ‘And someone was at the house. Gianni said his mum could smell that someone had been there.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ was all she said. ‘So sorry.’

  Shortly afterwards Antonia Moretti was on the phone. She seemed to be a woman who used many and strong words because the giant held the phone a couple of inches away from his ear.

  A few times he managed to interject a simple ‘But’, ‘Sorry’ or ‘Antonia, please listen to me, it’s—’.

  And in Sabrina’s opinion it was nowhere near productive enough. She pressed the speed dial for Captain Primo Alba.

  ‘Sabrina?’

  He sounded as if he had had at least eight hours of sleep in a good bed.

  ‘Yes. I got your message,’ she said. ‘Thank you.’

  ‘How did you get—’

  ‘Shut up … Primo, or whatever you call yourself these days. Listen to me.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘You’re definitely not the public prosecutor’s office boy. I’m sure of that now.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Good. I need a helicopter. Not in a moment, but right now, do you understand?’

  ‘A helicopter? Let me check if I’ve got one lying around.’

  She wanted to scream, but Forlani was staring attentively at her. The agitated female voice could still be heard from his own mobile.

  ‘Now, Primo Alba. I want you to pick up two people in Castellarano in Reggio Emilia – Antonia and Gianni Moretti – and take them to a safe place.’

  ‘I’ll probably need a good reason to mobilize the air force,’ he argued. His voice was intolerably calm, intolerably languid and intolerably professional. ‘Why, Sabrina?’

  ‘I’m with Giulio Forlani. He has lived with Antonia Moretti in Castellarano for the last two years. The Camorra know it. The Camorra have identified her and they have been to her house.

  ‘Address?’

  She sat down, placed her hand over the microphone and looked at Forlani.

  ‘The address, Giulio?’

  ‘Via Santa Caterina. The last house before the fields. It’s opposite a restaurant called La Stazione.’

  Sabrina repeated the information.

  ‘Any weapons in the house?’ he asked.

  Hand over the microphone.

  ‘An old shotgun over the fireplace,’ Forlani said.

  ‘A basement?’

  It would have been so much easier to pass the mobile to Forlani, but she knew that the physicist would inevitably become unresponsive at the sound of a new and unfamiliar voice.

  ‘There is a basement,’ Sabrina told Primo Alba.

  ‘Good,’ he replied. ‘I imagine they’re watching the house in the hope that Forlani will return. If he does, all they have to do is kill him and everyone can go home: job done. What we need to do is perform a single low flight over the house. Soldiers will abseil onto the house and secure it. It’ll be frightening for Signora Moretti and her son, but they’ll just have to deal with that. Tell them to take the shotgun and go to the basement. Don’t turn on any lights. And they mustn’t come out until the head of the operation calls out a codeword. Any suggestions?’

  She asked Giulio Forlani if he had any ideas.

  ‘Einstein,’ he said.

  ‘Walther,’ she decided.

  ‘Good,’ Prima Alba said. ‘The codeword is Walther. I’ll call you back.’

  He hung up and Sabrina looked at the mobile in her hand. It weighed a ton.

  She nodded to Forlani, who interrupted the woman and repeated the instructions.

  It took some time.

  Finally he was able sit down and lean against the wall.

  ‘Are they really that important to you, Giulio?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes, but I didn’t know till now.’

  CHAPTER 37

  Ticino, Milan

  Sabrina was pacing up and down the floor. She checked her watch every minute while Forlani, brooding and immobile, perched on the edge of the bed. Every now and then, in a tacit choreography, they would swap places.

  ‘She sounds … assertive, your landlady,’ she said at one point.

  ‘Antonia? Most certainly. Merciless. On the surface, at least.’

  ‘Do you still not believe in coincidences, Giulio?’

  ‘What you mean?’

  ‘That it happened to be Antonia Moretti I met when I spent just five minutes in Castellarano.’

  ‘I don’t believe in coincidences, Sabrina. They’re a manifestation of a system, a logic, we have yet to understand,’ he said solemnly.

  Sabrina sighed.

  ‘I’ve got a text message from the man I was speaking to just now. I was followed from Naples by some Camorristi from the Terrasino family. I didn’t discover them until after Castellarano. I managed to get some of them arrested, but not all of them, it seems. One of them has now admitted to following me to Castellarano. I’m sorry. I don’t know how they could have found your landlady so quickly.’

  He waved away her apology.

  ‘You were trying to find me to tell me about Lucia and Salva,’ he said calmly. ‘It’s your job. You were just doing your job. I should be apologizing to you.’

  She looked at her watch. 2.34 a.m.

  She flicked the last cigarette butt out of the window and went downstairs and through the old rooms with the low ceilings. She found a wooden box on a coffee table, sniffed it and stole a generous handful of Turkish cigarettes. Her luck must be changing, she told herself when she also found an unopened bottle of Napoleon brandy in the larder. She took two glasses and returned to Giulio Forlani’s monastic cell.

  She held up her spoils in triumph and was rewarded with a small smile.

  She poured and they clinked glasses without saying anything.

  The cigarettes were perfumed and could only be smoked at a time like this, for want of anything better.

  *

  At the point when the bottle was three-quarters empty and they had both lit fresh cigarettes, and Sabrina sensed more than actually saw dawn at the horizon of the eastern sky, Giulio Forlani suddenly leaned forwards and started to laugh.

  Sabrina was speechless. A couple of times she had seen the hint of a smile in the man’s face and taken that to be the upper limit of his ability to express joy. Was he hysterical? Psychotic? She couldn’t blame him. Personally she had been on the verge of a nervous breakdown for days. And yet Forlani’s laughter sounded completely authentic, but also strangely forced. He tried to drink, but hiccupped instead and the glass clanged against his teeth; he had to put it down again and convulsed in laughter. Highly inappropriate when the lives of his landlady and her son were hanging by a thread. Sabrina could feel her face starting to mimic him. Forlani’s laughter was infectious. She bent double in a fit of giggles and had to stuff her arm into her mouth so as not to wake up the whole house.

  They couldn’t stop laughing.

  It was both incredibly liberating and terribly surreal.

  Every time they looked at each other, they would laugh even harder. Sabrina was close to wetting herself and held up her hand.

  ‘Stop it! Stop it at once, Giulio.’

  The physicist gasped for breath … and was overpowered by a new fit. A few seconds later Sabrina had to follow suit.

  ‘Now stop it!’ she shouted in desperation with tears rolling down her cheeks.

  She pulled out the Walther and pointed the pistol at his head.

  ‘I mean it! I’ll shoot you!’

  He looked at her … then at the pistol … and howled with laughter.

  Merriment rolled over them in huge waves that eventually subsided and left them like washed-up survivors from a shipwreck on a nameless be
ach.

  They lay on the bed with their feet dangling towards the floor and cognac glasses in their hands. At last she turned to face him. Small laughter hiccups, like aftershocks, rippled through them from time to time.

  ‘What was all that about?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘What were we laughing at, Giulio? I need to know,’ she said.

  He looked up at the ceiling.

  ‘The invention. I don’t think it ever worked.’

  ‘What? … What the hell are you talking about?’

  She wiped the final tears of laughter from her cheeks.

  ‘The invention. It … well, I don’t know how else to put it. It just didn’t work.’

  ‘Why not?’

  She went through her jacket pockets. Found her purse and held up the date strip. Today the digits were yellow like tiger eyes. And they showed the correct date.

  ‘Looks all right to me,’ she said.

  He glanced at the strip without interest. Then he looked sadly back at the ceiling.

  He stood up, found his biker jacket and wallet. He rummaged around one of its many compartments and then he tipped a small heap of identical black strips into her hands.

  They were nearly all blank. On some of them she could still make out a single number or letter.

  ‘Jesus, Mary …’ she muttered, in shock.

  ‘Your strip works because it hasn’t travelled. It hasn’t crossed datelines. They can’t travel, Sabrina. And they had to be able to. Max had sent these strips to me in Massachusetts. Only one small test remained outstanding before we could file the patent applications. I had sent a few dozen strips around the world with a freight company. They returned to Nanometric, two days after the attack. It would appear they can’t tolerate travelling through timelines. The earth’s magnetic background radiation, the radio-activity of the atmosphere … something, I don’t know what, killed them. They weren’t strong enough.’

  He emptied his glass and Sabrina lit another cigarette. She would have to make a second trip downstairs soon.

  ‘Good grief,’ she said, and closed her eyes as the implication of the words started to sink in. ‘But this is terrible, Giulio. It’s absolutely awful.’

  ‘Yes. It is. Everyone has died for nothing.’