When the Dead Awaken (2 page)

Costa saw the reflection of the emergency vehicles' flashing lights on the facades of every building in the streets that radiated from the hub of the port. The sky was no longer empty, but covered with white clouds, like shimmering fish scales. He looked east as the quay filled with
ambulances, police cars, media vans with skyward-looking satellite dishes and the Carabinieri's cordons. He saw Mars rise above the horizon in the east and studied the red planet until it was obscured by clouds; he felt the steel construction vibrate under all the official boots. Gaetano Costa aimed the binoculars at the furthest, darkest part of the quay.

He observed the dark blue Audi A8 which rolled on to the quay between the warehouses, its lights turned off. A small, straight-backed figure got out, and through the lenses of the binoculars the crane operator watched the silhouette, his signature ivory-headed walking stick tucked under his left arm. At this distance the man's eye sockets were pools of black ink.

Urs Savelli from the Camorra.

Gaetano Costa let the binoculars dangle from the strap and ignored the shouts from the crane tower behind him. He lit a cigarette, took a single deep drag, flicked it into the darkness and with a curse closed his eyes and let himself fall on to the container fifty metres below him.

The presenter got her second shock of the evening when Costa hit the tarmac two metres away from her. Undaunted, she carried on smiling at the camera through the mask of tiny bloodstains that covered her face.

Assistant Public Prosecutor Sabrina D'Avalos parked her old Opel behind a row of containers sheltered from cameras and onlookers, and walked across the yard to the newly erected white plastic tents where medical examiners were working on the contents of the container, making dental imprints, if any teeth were left, fingerprinting, if any fingers remained, determining cause of death, taking tissue samples and DNA profiling.

The September sun was approaching its zenith and cast hardly any shadow. The port area was quiet, even the seagulls unusually contemplative. The
Taixan
still lay by the quay, invaded by gendarmes in dark blue uniforms and customs officers in black. The Chinese ship's officers were on the defensive – simultaneously subservient and furious.

Though she was only twenty-eight years old, Sabrina had already listened to the eulogies delivered for a female driver and male bodyguard, both killed by a car bomb that bore all the hallmarks of the Terrasino family. Three years
ago her father had been murdered either by the Camorra, the Cosa Nostra or the 'Ndrangheta. He had been at the top of the death lists of all three crime syndicates; a political killing that remained unsolved.

From a lazy journalist's point of view, she was the ultimate cliché – young, pretty and aristocratic – and people assumed that she would forever walk in the shadow of her famous father. General Baron Agostino D'Avalos was formerly head of the Carabinieri's anti-terror unit, the GIS –
Gruppo di Intervento Speciale
. She was a member of a brand-new unit, the NAC –
Nucleo Anti Camorra
 – created by the public prosecutor in Naples and closely watched by the media. It was yet another instrument in the never-ending war on the Camorra. This specialist unit recruited members from the Carabinieri, the national police and the public prosecutor's office, and had unique, extended judicial powers. NAC members were usually armed and had to complete a five-month course in forensic medicine, surveillance, defensive driving, close combat and the use of weapons. Sabrina D'Avalos had been one of the first prosecutors to volunteer and she had finished top of her class.

Sabrina, however, had no intention of becoming a stereotype and fiercely defended her right to be herself. She was unmarried and had no children. She belonged to a new generation of public prosecutors, often younger women, frequently educated in the US as well as in Italy, incorruptible and extraordinarily ambitious. She spent
more nights in her office at the Palace of Justice than in her flat in Via Andrea d'Isernia. In her spare time she read novels, watched black-and-white movies, danced Zumba and took evening classes in Arabic. She had also befriended a traumatized eleven-year-old boy at an orphanage.

She called the boy Ismael, which was as good a name as any.

La baronessa
was slim, slightly below medium height, and she walked with a very straight back. She had slanted, smoky eyes beneath a high forehead. Her mouth was sensuous, but perhaps slightly too wide; her nose was narrow, but possibly a little too long, and her face always reflected her mood.

In order to eliminate any doubt that she was modern and capable, Sabrina D'Avalos wore reflective Ray-Ban Aviator sunglasses and carried a BlackBerry on her belt. She often had a mug of Starbucks coffee in her hand, an iPod headset in her ears and a nickel-plated Walther PPK – the James Bond model – with a mother-of-pearl handle, in her shoulder holster. She wore her dark brown hair in a tight ponytail so everyone could see the deep scars in her forehead and above her right cheek caused by the car bomb. She used only mascara and she followed Paloma Picasso's edict of only wearing black, white or red, but never wore red.

The car bomb hadn't been intended for her, but for her boss, Federico Renda, the public prosecutor for the Republic
of Naples and the founder of the NAC. Sabrina, however, had been in the second car of Renda's motorcade and had been injured by shell fragments and glass splinters.

As an assistant public prosecutor, she handled interesting cases, but not the really juicy ones that could make a public prosecutor's career overnight. She didn't deal with the Terrasino family, the Camorra clan that controlled Naples' sweatshops. She had been sent to the Vittorio Emanuele II Quay today because the container had hit the already overworked public prosecutor's office like an earthquake. All leave and holiday had been suspended and additional staff had been brought in from Rome and Salerno. Sabrina D'Avalos's were responsible for identifying victims with surnames from ‘F' to ‘L'.

She was from Lombardy in northern Italy and detested the dying port of Naples. After three years there she still felt like she was living in exile. Her family had been soldiers or lawyers for as long as anyone could remember. Throughout her childhood her father, the general, had been posted as the Carabinieri's Head of Security at several of Italy's overseas embassies, so before she turned thirteen Sabrina had already lived on every continent except Africa.

After a posting to Norfolk, Virginia, her father accepted the job as head of the Carabinieri's anti-terror unit, the GIS, and the family was able to settle down at last. Sabrina D'Avalos had loved her new existence, life in the huge apartment on Via Salvatore Barzilai in Milan and the view
across the parks. She fought with her heavy-handed brothers as an equal, and enjoyed summers spent at the family's villa in the mountains surrounding Lake Como. And she had the opportunity to get to know her father. The general's devotion to all his children was unconditional, but Sabrina was his favourite, and she could always be found right behind him. An old dog with his pup, as her mother would say.

Near the tents the air vibrated from the generators. Fans in the trucks ensured a low temperature and rapid air circulation inside the tents. The trucks had been provided by the United Nations Protection Force, UNPROFOR, and had last done service during the excavation of mass graves in Bosnia-Herzegovina.

Her father had often remarked that a story always found its author rather than vice versa, and now this story had found her. When Sabrina had entered the tents for the first time, she had felt ready. Now she was no longer sure. She didn't think she would be able to contribute very much that the medical examiners hadn't already found out.

Outside the tents, staff in blue scrubs were smoking and talking in several different languages. Twenty-five vacuum packed Chinese bodies and the remains of another thirty-five people of European descent meant that medical examiners from other European countries, Canada and the US had been flown in. She nodded to a young civil servant
from Salerno. The woman was sitting cross-legged on the tarmac inhaling a cigarette, ashen-faced, like most people who had done the rounds of the tents.

She walked through an airlock and into the women's changing room. The white plastic walls moved in sync with the breathing of the compressors. She folded up her clothes, placed them in a fibreglass cupboard along with her shoulder holster, and locked it. Two women were huddled under the showers behind a frosted plastic wall. They spoke quietly in a language she didn't know.

The smallest coveralls were too big, but she had learned to wear thermal underwear underneath them. The temperature in the tents never exceeded 2°C, and her breath was clearly visible in the air. She tightened the strap on her breathing apparatus, tucked her hair under the hood and entered the first tent.

The bodies had been removed from the plastic wrapping, the same stiff, white material that Camorra waste-management firms used to dispose of the toxic, non-degradable waste that suffocated Naples and her suburbs, and each sweatshop worker had been placed in a ribbed white plastic tray with a drain and a numbered tag tied to the right big toe. The Camorra had removed all fingerprints with acid and no dental records existed. The idea of the Chinese as individuals had to be abandoned.

She continued down the rows of plastic tubs.

Human trafficking and slave labour in the sweatshops where these people were worked to their deaths were crimes against humanity, but it was a dead end from a career perspective. Many previous public prosecutors and police officers had faced this prospect, and Sabrina had no intention of joining their ranks.

She squeezed through a blue plastic airlock into the European section and turned on her breathing apparatus. Whiteboards were lined up along the tent wall. Body parts in every stage of decomposition were being assembled like jigsaws in the plastic trays. Many had already been identified and Sabrina recognized most of the names. The trays contained a fraction of the Camorra's victims over the last thirty years. Conservative estimates put the figure of those killed since 1980 close to 3,660: teachers, journalists, mayors, priests, city councillors, North African human traffickers, business owners, or any Camorrista who had challenged the sovereignty of the Terrasino family. The fact that these bodies were lying here, right now – that they had even been found at all – was pure chance.

Three kilometres off the coast of Torre Picentina, one of Europe's biggest off-shore wind farms was being built. Transporting the colossal turbine towers, generators and blades had necessitated the construction of a bypass from Strada Statale 18 to Strada Provinziale 175, a project that meant the compulsory purchase of several small farms, market gardens and three old rubbish tips.

Sabrina imagined how the Camorra, in the nights preceding the arrival of the contractor's machines, had tracked down and dug up the evidence of their old sins from the rubbish dumps, loaded them on to trucks and piled them high inside the white containers.

The medical examiners had been working round the clock and the number of question marks on the boards was decreasing. More and more fields had been filled in with names, social security numbers and last known addresses.

She would have liked to take the day off; have a manicure and pedicure, wash her clothes, do some shopping, pick up Ismael and take him to the zoo. However, Dr Raimondo Sapienza called her because he had discovered something unusual. The doctor from Rome supervised ‘F'-to-‘L' identifications. Even though he was wearing the same blue scrubs as everyone else, the eminent pathologist was easy to spot. His enormous grey beard tried to escape his mask on all sides. He waved Sabrina over to his office – which consisted of a door placed across two trestles, a plastic beaker containing a blue, a red and a green dry-wipe marker pen, and a laptop. Confirmed identifications were green, doubtful were blue, and unknown were red. Gradually all the whiteboards had acquired a green glow.

‘
Buongiorno
, Sabrina.'

‘I was hoping to take the day off, Raimondo,' she said.

The eyes behind Dr Sapienza's protective glasses
expressed a kind of ironic empathy. He himself hadn't slept for three days.

‘And I would never have called if it wasn't important, Sabrina. Or remarkable, at least. Number twenty-nine, thirty and, yes, thirty-one.'

‘Remarkable?'

‘Follow me.'

He walked over to one of the tables, and her stomach churned.

Dr Sapienza removed a thin sheet, moistened with formaldehyde, from one of the plastic trays and gestured for her to come closer. A child. A small human being the size of Ismael. A little bit of shoulder-length black hair stuck to the remains of the scalp.

‘The only child in the container, Sabrina. A boy. He's twelve years old and has been in the bin bag for around three years. Even so, the body is relatively well preserved, as you can see. This is partly due to the plastic bag and partly due to the weight of waste on top of him, which will have forced the decomposition bacteria further down.'

Dr Sapienza pointed to a light box displaying X-rays. Below a yellow Post-It note with the number twenty-nine were two images of the boy's hands.

‘Bone age?' Sabrina D'Avalos said.

‘Yes. Bone formation in the carpus says twelve years. That matches the distribution of adult and milk teeth. A handsome little boy. Very handsome, in fact.'

Dr Sapienza replaced the sheet over the boy.

He took a step to the left. Number thirty. Another sheet.

‘A woman. We have spectroscoped her hair. Counted the rings, so to speak. And we've identified her via dental records from a dentist in Milan.'

Sabrina D'Avalos nodded.

‘She's thirty-five years old,' he said.

The teeth in the tray were white as chalk, intact and even.