‘Do you think that’s funny?’ she asked him.
Giulio Forlani looked at her with the most brooding expression he had yet worn.
‘No. No, Sabrina, it’s not funny. It’s tragic. What’s funny is that the Camorra are chasing me for no reason. The invention doesn’t work, though they would never believe me if I told them. Now that is funny, don’t you think?’
‘No, Giulio. I think that part is bloody tragic, too.’
Forlani’s mobile rang. He got up and started pacing back and forth again. He mustered a feeble smile and Sabrina offered up silent and heartfelt thanks to Captain Primo Alba. Forlani’s smile widened and finally he thanked him profusely and switched off his mobile.
He sat down and grabbed Sabrina’s hand. And broke every bone in it. Or at least that was how it felt.
‘Thank you, Sabrina.’
‘Are they okay?’
He nodded with a big new smile. The giant was happy, and Sabrina was given back the remains of her hand.
She herself received a laconic text message signed ‘Primo Alba’, filled with words such as ‘airborne’ and ‘NATO Aviano Air Force Base’, ‘ETA 04.15’.
‘Now what?’ Forlani said.
‘More cigarettes and a toast to a successful mission?’ she suggested.
‘The bottle is empty.’
‘You’re right, Giulio.’ Her voice was starting to slur. ‘So it is. But it wasn’t alone in its little larder. It had good friends and neighbours. I’m an investigator, Giulio, I see things that other people don’t, do you understand? … I’ve this special ability …’
Her voice was now more than slurred; it was thick.
‘Perhaps I should make the trip downstairs?’ Giulio Forlani offered chivalrously.
‘Do you know something, Giulio? I think that’s a super idea … super.’
When the physicist returned with a bottle of Calvados and a carton of Camels, he found the young assistant public prosecutor sleeping peacefully in his bed. He put a blanket over her without her even stirring and tiptoed to her room. He left the Calvados and the cigarettes on the bedside table, where they would be the first thing she saw when she woke up. The surprising baronessa would appreciate it.
CHAPTER 38
Ticino, Milan
She groaned softly when Giulio Forlani shook her until she woke up and she lashed out at his hand without hitting it. She didn’t open her eyes, but pressed them together hard.
‘Wharra you doin’?’
‘Max is waiting for us. Breakfast is ready.’
Once again his voice was as solemn as the Pope’s midnight prayer. The intoxication of the night and its bizarre, abandoned merriment had been forgotten.
‘I’m not hungry.’
The bed keeled over when he sat down on the edge.
She opened one eye and pulled a face.
‘Oh, God.’
Giulio Forlani was in need of a bath, she thought, and wondered what she herself smelt like.
‘We stink,’ she said.
‘Do we?’
‘I think I’m going to be sick,’ she groaned.
He got up quickly and moved over to the window.
‘I don’t think Max would approve, Sabrina. By the way, he’s leaving soon. He says he has a collection to finish.’
‘And?’
He fidgeted.
‘Nothing.’
Sabrina managed to get up on one elbow and shielded her eyes with her other hand.
She retched, then belched. She swung her feet down on the floor, and rested her head in her hands and her elbows on her knees. If she sat exactly like this for a very long time, Giulio Forlani and the rest of the world might just have disappeared when she opened her eyes again.
‘Come on,’ he said.
‘I can’t! Give me a minute, would you … ? Just one minute, for pity’s sake …’
The physicist made a small impatient click with his tongue as if she were a horse refusing to move.
‘Do you want me to carry you downstairs?’
‘Leave me alone,’ she moaned.
Sabrina sat down at the kitchen table, where she could avoid the morning light pouring in through the small windows. She grabbed a cup of espresso and downed it without breathing.
Alberto sent her a sympathetic smile.
Massimiliano Di Luca said nothing. She watched him over the rim of her cup and she saw it now: the man was wasting away. The disease was melting the flesh off his bones. A little bit every day. What had once been the white of his eyes was now yellow and what had been a fine tremor in his fingertips yesterday was today a shiver.
Alberto poured her another cup.
She shook her head when he offered her the breadbasket.
‘Just coffee, please,’ she mumbled.
Massimiliano Di Luca looked from one to the other.
‘If I didn’t know any better, I would think that the two of you had … but you haven’t, have you? So … what did happen, if you haven’t fucked each other’s brains out?’
Sabrina glared at the designer in disbelief. Giulio Forlani placed a hand on her arm. The physicist was munching a large slice of bread.
‘Ignore him, Sabrina. The man is an incurable provocateur. Exhausting and unstoppable. I imagine you enjoyed pulling the wings and legs off flies when you were a boy, Max?’
The Venetian’s eyes widened with indignation.
‘Me? Never? Certainly not flies.’
‘Cut it out, Max.’
Forlani looked at Sabrina.
‘Any suggestions?’
‘I’m happy to shoot him if you help me bury him,’ she said.
He smiled and Di Luca laughed.
‘I would be delighted, but what I meant was, do you have any ideas as to what our next move should be? If we need to make one. Today, I mean.’
Her hangover defied description.
‘Perhaps it would be good if we could stay here for a day,’ she said feebly. ‘Gather strength. Think things through.’
They had tacitly agreed not to tell the others anything about last night’s rescue operation in Castellarano.
‘Can we stay here, Max?’ Giulio Forlani asked.
‘Of course, but I need to warn you that Alberto has locked away all cigarettes, wine and spirits in the cellar, and that he has swallowed the key.’
Sabrina stared at the table.
‘When will you be back?’
‘If we leave now, I imagine we’ll be back around five,’ Di Luca said.
Alberto nodded.
‘I can shop for a good branzino al basilica if you fancy sea bass,’ he said helpfully.
‘Lovely,’ she said with a queasy smile.
They went outside to say goodbye. Massimiliano Di Luca smiled and waved through the rear window of the Bentley. Alberto smiled to them in the wing mirror.
The car disappeared behind a bend and reappeared. Then it disappeared completely between the conifers.
Sabrina shielded her eyes with her hand.
‘Does he have someone?’ she asked. ‘I mean, I’ve read at least two hundred articles about him and no one has ever identified a woman, a man, a nice dog … nothing.’
Forlani smiled.
‘You’re right, everyone has rifled through his private life,’ he said.
‘So … does he have someone?’
‘Of course he does, Sabrina. Max is a charming man. They just haven’t been looking in the right place.’
Slowly she shook her head.
‘The driver. Alberto. Of course … invisible and right under everyone’s nose.’
‘No comment.’
Nor was one necessary.
CHAPTER 39
Outside Brescia
‘It’s only a game. Nothing will happen to Mummy. I’m like Hector; I’ve got nine lives. At least.’
The young woman stood in front of the mirror in the nursery while her daughter, Abrielle, who was still wearing pyjamas, watched her from the bed. It was early m
orning and the sky was dark. The six-year-old nodded gravely and stroked the cat curled up on the bedspread.
The woman had been busy all night. She had been woken up at midnight by the small alarm bell over the pigeon loft, she had removed the metal cylinder attached to the leg of the pigeon, read the short encoded message and had started her research.
It was almost indecently little time to prepare the assassination. Her employer obviously knew this and he had doubled her usual fee. For the first part of the job. The second part was regarded as routine.
She put on elbow and knee pads, pulled the hip guards over her head and slammed the palm of her hand against her chest shield.
‘We’re Spartans!’
Abrielle laughed out loud and startled Hector, the cat.
‘Spartans!’ her daughter echoed.
The woman pulled a pair of tracksuit bottoms over her armour and tied the laces of her running shoes. A loose-fitting sweatshirt and an oversized anorak came next, so that no one would know that she wore padding under her clothes.
She stood by the bed, gave her daughter a look they both understood and Abrielle let go of the cat and jumped down on the floor. The cat licked its back, leapt up on the windowsill and out on to the roof. Its usual route would take it across the ridge of the old cider house, down a trellis and into her husband’s studio.
The mother stretched out on the floor and did breathing exercises while the daughter got dressed.
‘I’m ready, Mummy!’
‘Great. Gloves?’
Abrielle waved her hands in front of her mother’s face. On the inside she wore latex gloves and on the outside beautifully embroidered cotton gloves. A dark brown velvet dress, white stockings and shiny shoes. Like she was on her way to a dancing lesson or her first day at a new school.
‘Let’s go and say goodbye to Daddy,’ her mother said. As always when they were alone, they spoke Romanian.
Mother and daughter stopped on the marble tiles outside the studio. Bach’s Goldberg Variations floated out through the open windows like crystals. They had chosen the extension as her husband’s studio because it was cool and the ceiling was high, the windows faced north, and there was an acidic smell from the apple presses and cider vats that had lived there for centuries – and because the door was level with the flagstones, which eliminated the need for a ramp for his wheelchair.
Her husband was sitting in front of the easel with the brush handle between his teeth. The young woman ran her hands through his long thick hair and quick as lightning he swung around the light aluminium wheelchair and smiled. His upper body was still agile and strong. He lifted Abrielle up on his lap and balanced on the rear wheels of the chair. The wheelchair pivoted on one wheel and Abrielle squealed with delight.
Her mother clapped her hands and threw a glance at the circus poster above the work desk: the trapeze trio The Blind Eagles. Her husband permanently suspended in the air at the apex of his treble somersault, her brother-in-law, who would catch him, hanging by his knees with long outstretched hands which had just delivered her to the bottomless dark under the circus dome. She herself was a tiny, curved and glittering figure on an endless journey towards the recently vacated trapeze four metres away. The trio had been blindfolded during the entire act and nothing had ever gone wrong until the day a lorry with a sleeping driver behind the wheel had crushed their van and everything else – their bodies, their costumes, their equipment and their future. Her brother-in-law had been killed instantly, her husband had broken his spine, but she and her beloved had retained their foothold on life. Through discreet channels in the global community of circus artistes she had learned about the unusual requirement in southern Italy for performers with certain talents; jobs that demanded particular physical, as well as mental abilities, and she had been thoroughly tested. She had carried out fiendishly difficult missions bordering on the suicidal in Indonesia and Singapore and had built up a fine reputation as a freelance assassin.
The Camorra expected that, as was usual when Massimiliano Di Luca left his house in the country, the Bentley would drive east from Ticino, taking the scenic route through the villages of Cuggiono and Mesero before joining the Turin–Milan motorway. The route allowed the maestro to rest his eyes on the fields and low forest before joining the dense motorway traffic.
L’Artista had chosen the usually deserted road between Cuggiono and Mesero as her point of attack.
Outside Mesero
Massimiliano Di Luca wasn’t being entirely fair when he claimed that Alberto didn’t know any other gears of the Bentley but the first. The large bottle-green car was in fact going at a respectable speed down Via Annoni when it happened.
If the maestro, in the back of the car, had looked up from his brandy glass and enamelled pillbox, he would have noticed a fresh southern wind that skimmed the wheat fields; he would certainly have noticed the straight-backed little girl at the side of the road, walking as delicately as a bird, bouncing a blue ball in front of her, because Massimiliano had an unfailing eye for agility, coordination and elegance; he would have nodded his approval of the dark brown velvet dress with the old-fashioned lace collar, the white stockings and the gloves, and he would have thought that in today’s cultural wasteland some mothers still knew how to dress their children properly – though the mother’s own outfit left a lot to be desired: the usual baggy, boring, synthetic leisure clothes.
The mother and her daughter were the only people on the road.
Perhaps he might have had time to put his hand on Alberto’s shoulder when the blue ball left the girl’s hand and bounced out into the path of the car, less than ten metres from the Bentley’s massive chrome radiator grille. Perhaps he might have had time to shout a warning when the girl ran after the ball, and perhaps he might have smiled with relief when the mother yanked her back – only to call out again when the woman stumbled out on to the tarmac and the Bentley hit her.
Instead, Massimiliano Di Luca was brutally roused from his unusually dark thoughts. The enamelled box’s contents, small white pills, spilled across the seats and blankets in the car, and he looked up bewildered as Alberto swore and slammed on the brakes.
Even though the British car weighed almost three tonnes and the woman sixty kilos at most, the impact of the collision was felt with shocking clarity. The young dark-haired woman tumbled like a rag doll over the long bonnet, crashed into the windscreen with a tragic crunch and disappeared out of sight on Alberto’s side.
Before Massimiliano slid across the seat and opened the door on the roadside, he glanced at the pavement and saw the face of the little girl. She had the darkest eyes, the palest skin, and her wide-open mouth was the blackest he had ever seen.
CHAPTER 40
The woman registered the consequences of the collision without any particular emotion. Her calculations had been a little bit out. The speed of the Bentley had been more like sixty kilometres per hour rather than her prediction of fifty. She hadn’t managed to turn her left leg as she rolled over the bonnet, even though the subsequent forward roll over the tarmac was executed to a satisfactory extent. She knew that a ligament on the inside of her left knee had been torn or sprained despite her knee guard, and her right wrist had started to swell up.
When she heard the driver’s footsteps, she groaned, studied the tarmac two centimetres below her nose and bit through the tiny bladder of pig’s blood she had concealed in her mouth. There could surely be no other substance in the world that so magnetically attracted immediate attention as blood on the face of a young woman.
Especially if you had caused it to be there.
Alberto carefully turned the woman over on to her back and breathed a sigh of relief when her pupils contracted. Massimiliano Di Luca mumbled a mixture of curses at Alberto’s bowed neck and apologies to the woman’s bloodstained face. Shifting from foot to foot he was busy pulling out a business card and handkerchiefs from the pockets of his jacket – and neither of the men noticed the girl on the roadside qu
ickly cutting away a square of the ball’s plastic skin with a Swiss Army knife. Pressing her nose and mouth against her velvet sleeve and holding the ball in her outstretched hand, she pumped the ball with her fingers and watched the clouds of dust disperse inside the Bentley. She aimed the hole in the ball at the front seats and pressed again. Then she put the ball in a double plastic bag exactly as her mother had instructed her, removed her gloves and put them in as well, closed the bag and tied a knot.
‘Mummy!’
Alberto lifted up the girl, who buried her face in his shoulder. The woman staggered to her feet. She swayed, took a step to test her leg’s ability to support her and even attempted a smile.
‘You must excuse my driver, signora,’ Di Luca mumbled. ‘He’s as blind as a bat. He’s—’
‘It’s nothing, signore. It was my own fault. The ball. My daughter. Foolish. Idiotic, in fact.’
The woman had tears in her eyes and she wiped the blood from her face with one of the maestro’s handkerchiefs.
‘Your face.’
‘I think I’ll survive, signore. Grazie.’
She limped to the side of the road and Alberto put down the little girl. A couple of passing cars slowed down at the scene, but Alberto waved them on.
‘Mummy’s fine, darling.’
Massimiliano Di Luca followed her, wringing his hands while Alberto hung his head.
‘We need to contact the police, signora. I insist. They’ll need to make a report – my insurance company will obviously – otherwise I will personally—’
‘No, no! It really was nothing, signore. It was entirely my own fault. Please don’t blame your driver.’
Massimiliano Di Luca cut short his flow of words as if an insect had flown into his mouth, and began studying the woman more closely. There was something – the accent, it was obvious now.
He shook his head at his own stupidity. The woman and her daughter were clearly Eastern European; like so many others, they might even be in the country illegally, and her reluctance to involve the police now became obvious.
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