When the Dead Awaken

by Steffen Jacobsen

  The casualty doctor kept finding more glass fragments in her back and neck. They fell with irregular clinks into a steel tray held by the nurse.

  Primo Alba pulled the curtain aside and raised his eyebrows in comic surprise. Sabrina lifted the white ambulance blanket up to her shoulders, even though Primo Alba had seen it all before. In another life.

  She didn’t look at him, but at her hair, which lay in a thick, dark brown nest under her dangling, blood-stained feet. It had taken twelve stitches to close up the wound at the back of her neck. The nurse had offered to shave off only the hair around the cut, but Sabrina couldn’t see herself with a bald spot at the back of her head.

  ‘Take it all,’ she had said, and now her scalp felt naked, alien and cool. The nurse, who was young and pretty – well, she would be, wouldn’t she? – had operated the electric shaver with a kind of gleeful pleasure.

  Sabrina couldn’t possibly face Primo. She looked like a train wreck. Her hands were still swollen and the cable ties had left angry red furrows around her wrists.

  Primo Alba said nothing, but she was aware that he was smiling at the pretty, healthy and undamaged nurse, whose body instinctively assumed a different and possibly more flattering stance. Perhaps she pulled back her shoulders a little, pushed her breasts forwards and her hips out; the bowl with Sabrina’s blood and pieces of glass was held up as if it were an offer of refreshing grapes to a travel-weary pilgrim.

  Cazzo … Stop it now!

  ‘You have a nicely … shaped head,’ he said to Sabrina, who slumped a little.

  ‘Giulio … ? How is he?’ she asked.

  Alba’s tanned hand swung back into her field of vision and the tweed sleeve was pushed back with the other hand, so he could consult his wristwatch.

  ‘He’s awake and in five minutes they’ll take him up to the roof,’ he said. ‘From where he’ll travel by helicopter to Aviano. The same place as the widow and her son were taken. After that …’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘The mandarins have met in Rome, Sabrina. One must presume they’ll find a permanent solution to Dr Forlani’s problems.’

  ‘It never worked,’ she said, and felt tears forcing their way up under her eyelids as the doctor eased a particularly obstinate glass splinter out of her back. She gasped. ‘Ouch! It never worked … the invention. It couldn’t …’ Even though she felt dehydrated, she seemed to have an excess of sweat, because it kept running down her face. ‘… It couldn’t handle crossing datelines.’

  His hands disappeared into his trouser pockets. His face appeared not to reveal any kind of promise or interest, because the nurse turned her attention back to the doctor.

  ‘Yes, I’ve heard that,’ he said. ‘They may not have got it right yet, but I sense that they still believe the technology has huge potential. Hopefully the good doctor Forlani will end up somewhere in the US where he can carry on his work.’

  ‘Until they find him again.’

  He cleared his throat and she finally looked at him. Just a glance. His face was paler than she remembered. There were more fine wrinkles and deeper laughter lines in his real-life face than she recalled. She tightened the blanket around her.

  ‘That’s where we come in, Sabrina,’ he said, so quietly that a less attentive audience might easily have missed it. ‘We may have an opening. Promising, but something of a long shot.’

  ‘We do?’

  ‘Yes.’

  He started talking to the doctor as if she weren’t there, or as if she were an injured pet someone had brought in – an object obviously prized, at least to some extent.

  ‘Has she lost a lot of blood?’ he asked.

  ‘Some. Not much.’

  ‘Any broken bones?’

  ‘Strange as it may seem, Dottoressa D’Avalos escaped with only superficial cuts and bruises, and then all this glass. It’s actually a miracle considering her … efforts,’ the doctor said. ‘We won’t get all the glass out today. We’ll have to remove it over time. The glass doesn’t show up on X-rays. The deepest bits will eventually work their way out to the surface and … present symptoms. Then we’ll take them.’

  Or they’ll work their way in, she thought.

  There was a rasping sound as the doctor started tearing strips of surgical tape off a roll.

  The compresses felt dry and cool against her skin.

  ‘I’ll wait outside,’ Primo Alba said.

  ‘You do that,’ she mumbled.

  She spotted her shoulder bag, which some kind and eternally blessed soul had rescued from the crashed minibus and placed inside the curtain.

  ‘All done,’ the doctor said, and she let herself slide down on to the vinyl floor, then nearly fell over because she had no strength or control of her hips, ankles or knees.

  The nurse supported her. She smelt of some fleeting citrus perfume that Sabrina might have chosen for herself.

  ‘Signorina? Will you be all right?’

  Anxiously she looked into her eyes.

  ‘My bag, per favore.’

  ‘Of course.’

  She seemed to communicate something non-verbal to the doctor, who left.

  ‘Here, signorina.’

  The nurse placed Sabrina’s shapeless shoulder bag on the stretcher and Sabrina let the blanket fall around her feet. She was naked beneath it.

  ‘A bath?’ the nurse suggested.

  Sabrina looked herself up and down. She looked like a hunting trophy flayed by an amateur.

  ‘No, I’m fine, thanks. Later. Doesn’t matter.’

  The young woman smiled gravely and helped Sabrina find the last clean white T-shirt, a clean pair of knickers, socks and dark trousers from her trouser suit.

  Sabrina struggled to get into the clothes. Everything hurt and she had to move deliberately and carefully like someone underwater. The nurse was a credit to her profession, she really was, and Sabrina was able to forgive her the small flirtatious pantomime in front of Primo Alba. She had never been able to feel ownership of any living creature, with the exception of Ismael and Ziggy, and she wasn’t going to start now, certainly not for Alba, whom she would quite happily see swallowed up in the bottomless crevasse of a glacier.

  She spotted him at the end of the grey hospital corridor. His figure was blurred from the back lighting from a large window behind him. He was speaking quietly into his mobile and she was about to dismiss her first impression of him as a carefree yuppie. He was a serious man, she thought, and his smiles were as rare as solar eclipses – when he was on duty. Which he probably always was. She walked as stiffly as if she had just got off a horse. Her clothes were uncomfortable and dry against her body and new sore spots were constantly trying to draw attention to themselves.

  Primo Alba ended the call when he noticed her and put the mobile in his jacket pocket. With the light behind him, his face was black and unreadable.

  He took her bag and slung it over his shoulder.

  ‘An opening?’ she asked.

  ‘Or the chance of one,’ he nodded.

  ‘A chance of an opening? That sounds great. An opening to whom or what?’

  ‘The woman. L’Artista. It was she and a little girl, possibly her daughter, who attacked Massimiliano Di Luca. A farmer watched the whole thing, but didn’t connect the incident to anything criminal until he heard about it on the radio.

  ‘A little girl?’

  He shrugged his shoulders.

  ‘A little girl, a boy with long hair, a dwarf in a dress, what difference does it make, Sabrina?’

  ‘None.’

  ‘Incidentally, you were right about the homing pigeons,’ he said. ‘Your boss Federico Renda is ecstatic. He sends his regards. A carpentry business is connected to Don Francesco Terrasino’s estate by a particularly well-constructed and well-equipped tunnel. The carpenter is a well-known breeder of pigeons. That’s the opening.’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me your name?’

  ‘What we need are a couple of stoats or polecats. Do some da
mage. Make it look like an accident. The pigeons, I mean. Meanwhile we abduct a couple of them.’

  ‘Who is Nestore Raspallo?’

  He started walking.

  She hobbled after him.

  ‘Are you with the GIS? You’ve been working for them the whole time, haven’t you? You knew that Forlani was alive.’

  The tears started burning behind her eyelids and she had to swallow several times.

  ‘We think that L’Artista lives on a line north-north-east from Naples. We fit a couple of the carpenter’s pigeons with a small GPS sender and follow them in a helicopter. At least that’s the plan.’

  ‘Are you married?’

  He groaned with exasperation.

  She was like the journalist who insisted on asking about the divorce while the actor only wanted to promote his latest movie.

  ‘Are you? What I’m saying is, right now is there a Signora Alba somewhere pining for you, darning your socks, ironing your shirts, cooking dinner for your children …’

  ‘Jesus Christ, Sabrina! Do you think for once you could just be—’

  ‘Professional? That’s just what I was being. I killed two men, Primo.’

  He nodded.

  ‘And what you did was clever and brave. Definitely. I’m in the GIS. I travel two hundred days a year. I’m not married and I have no children. The closest I’ve come to having a family is my divorced sister, her two fairly intolerable daughters and a cat who sleeps on my windowsill when it rains and I’m at home to open the window. I haven’t even given it a name.’

  Sabrina stopped and stared miserably at the floor. Two hospital porters pushed a stretcher past them in the corridor. A sheet had been pulled over its contents.

  ‘You knew that he was alive,’ she said. ‘He told me you were with him on the plane to the US.’

  ‘I didn’t know that he was still alive. I knew that he had survived the attack, that much is true. I knew that he went to Gloucester and had got a job on a trawler. And then he disappeared.’

  ‘Disappeared?’

  Primo Alba nodded wearily.

  ‘We had a … system. Coded messages delivered with junk mail. Telephone numbers he could call if everything was all right and numbers he had to call if he thought someone was after him. He did neither. We sent people over there to look for him. In vain. We presumed that Savelli had found him.’

  ‘But why didn’t you tell me?’

  ‘Because I’m not allowed to, Sabrina! I work in Intelligence and I follow my orders – on the whole. When the bodies of Lucia and Salvatore were discovered and you started your … investigation, everyone was rather rattled. Because of … your father, whom many people regarded as a saint … Forlani disappearing. Mistakes had been made. Both during the attack on Nanometric and –’ Alba looked at the floor – ‘later, the general. It was unforgivable that we couldn’t take better care of him. That I didn’t. I spoke to him three hours before he was killed. I should have been there.’

  ‘Did Renda know that Forlani was alive?’

  ‘No.’

  Sabrina nodded. She believed him, and there was a strange comfort in knowing that her boss had been just as ignorant as she had been.

  ‘She’s dangerous,’ she said. ‘L’Artista.’

  ‘I’m perfectly aware of that. Do you want to come along? Are you up for it?’

  ‘I want to, but I don’t think you understand just how dangerous she is. Have you seen her? And, by the way, where were you an hour ago?’

  He looked straight ahead.

  ‘We were here. In the wrong place. We presumed that you and Forlani would leave the hospital by the main entrance.’

  ‘So we were bait? That’s why you didn’t answer your phone. You wanted it to look natural.’

  At least he had the decency to blush a little. One hand opened in a kind of gesture, the other wiggled his wristwatch free from the sleeve of his jacket.

  ‘We don’t have very much time, Sabrina. I’m sorry.’

  ‘So am I.’

  CHAPTER 45

  Three hours and ten minutes to dawn, and she was totally in the dark. She didn’t know where they were, who the other people in the helicopter were, what they were doing or what – if anything – was expected of her. She had now spent five hours sitting still, trapped inside this metal cocoon, and she hated it. The matt black transport helicopter had picked her and Primo Alba up from the landing pad on the roof of the hospital. Alba had closed the sliding door after them and the helicopter had taken off immediately. The few instrument lights in the cockpit had struggled fruitlessly against the darkness inside the body of the helicopter. At the first lurch, Sabrina had fallen into a canvas seat she thought was vacant and which triggered an outburst and a hard smack to her backside that sent her deeper into the cabin to an empty seat. A hand had passed her a padded headset that she had put on, but still the engine noise was indescribable. It was like sitting inside a metal barrel while a group of keen blacksmiths worked on it with pneumatic drills. All the bones in her skull vibrated out of sync and her teeth refused to stop clattering. She knew that this type of helicopter would sometimes fly for hours without stopping, during troop transports and rescue missions, and she couldn’t imagine how people coped. After five minutes she was on the verge of a breakdown. Surely the pilots must be lobotomized before beginning active duty.

  When her eyes had acclimatized to the darkness, she could make out half a dozen shapeless figures on the rough canvas seats. They didn’t look particularly bothered by the infernal noise, even though Sabrina couldn’t see much of their faces. They all wore black helmets and ski masks. Even the area around their eyes had been painted dark grey with camouflage sticks. They stared right ahead, unmoving. They were experts at waiting.

  There really wasn’t much to look at and, apart from a few brief exchanges between the pilots and an occasional update from a military flight leader, none of those on board had spoken a word for the first couple of hours.

  Then the miracle happened: she fell asleep.

  She woke up when the helicopter landed at Camp Darby outside Vicenza. Primo Alba pulled her to her feet and helped her across the dark apron to a low, anonymous building.

  In a drab changing room he watched while she put on the regulation black fighter suit, helmet, yellow shooting goggles, throat microphone, a Motorola communications unit and earpiece, a bulletproof vest and boots one size too big. He strapped a plastic holster that contained a Beretta 9-mm pistol with laser sights to her right side.

  ‘Do you know how to use this?’ he asked, and she checked the magazine and nodded.

  ‘How about you?’

  Primo Alba was dressed in civilian clothing: a dark grey tweed jacket, a dark blue shirt, jeans and black running shoes.

  ‘This is fine,’ he said.

  ‘Shouldn’t you at least be wearing a bulletproof vest?’

  ‘The Lord preserveth the simple,’ he said. ‘Besides, I’m the leader of this operation and my apparent contempt for death inspires my team … and they can see who I am.’

  He winked merrily at her with one bright grey eye.

  ‘Now you look ready and very dangerous,’ he declared.

  Around five thirty in the morning the helicopter landed in an anonymous field outside Cremona, the engines were switched off and everyone straightened out and stretched their limbs as far as the seat belts and extensive equipment allowed.

  Someone eventually opened the loading bay, and Sabrina savoured the fresh air. After a few minutes of silence the first brave cicadas resumed their night-time concert. Sabrina looked up at the cockpit. A tall figure momentarily blocked the instrument lights before kneeling down and starting a hushed conversation with the pilots. Primo Alba, no doubt. The figure rose and resumed his seat at the front of the cabin.

  She recognized the voice in her earpiece.

  ‘Status update, ladies and gentlemen. Those of you who wish to are free to remove your helmets and masks.’

  There was a
murmur of approval and everyone removed their helmets and balaclavas. Sabrina could smell a feminine shampoo close by. The person to her left ran a hand through short hair and Sabrina could see that the profile was definitely a woman’s. She also had a couple of rings in one nostril. The woman half turned in her seat and offered Sabrina a piece of chewing gum. Then smiled with very white teeth in her camouflage painted face.

  Alba resumed his briefing.

  ‘Exactly five minutes ago our friend Agent X in Naples released a couple of ferrets in Signor M’s pigeon loft and within a few seconds the animals bit the necks off practically all of Signor M’s prize-winning homing pigeons, with the exception of a few that Agent X had earlier evacuated from the central loft, the one which we believe houses the pigeons that consider L’Artista’s den their actual home. They’ve been fitted with tiny GPS transmitters and will be released in a moment. We hope …’

  Primo Alba held a rhetorical pause.

  ‘Correction: we very much hope that the pigeons will lead us to L’Artista, and not some hapless pigeon fancier who just happens to share Signor M’s passion for breeding pigeons. In which case this innocent bystander will get the shock of his life and we, ladies and gentlemen, will have a hell of a lot of explaining to do. A well-fed homing pigeon in good shape can cover between ninety and a hundred and twenty kilometres in an hour. At least. There is an AWACS aircraft in the air above Naples. It will follow the pigeon and give us its coordinates. We have every reason to believe that L’Artista’s pigeon loft is equipped with some sort of alarm that will alert her to the arrival of a new pigeon. This means we have a very short time span from the arrival of the pigeon to the raid. We have a window, but only a very narrow one, before she disappears or arms herself. Besides, we don’t know if she lives in a penthouse flat in Turin or on a houseboat on the River Po. We’ve a lot of work to do, and everything … everything will be improvised.’

  Primo Alba fell silent without warning. He didn’t ask if anyone had any questions, she noticed. Either it wasn’t the done thing – a breach of professional etiquette – or the others had only heard the word ‘improvised’, and that rendered everything else irrelevant.