When the Dead Awaken (6 page)

He smiled broadly, got up and saluted her while undressing her with his eyes.

She held out her warrant card without a word and he handed the items to her.

‘Poor man,' the officer said, gesturing towards Dr Khatib's al fresco clinic.

‘Yes, but he's cheap. Do I need to sign for these?'

‘That won't be necessary.
Buonasera
.'

‘'
Sera
.'

Four messages – ranging from the accusatory to the tormented – from her married lover were flashing on her answering machine. Roberto was an artist, twenty years Sabrina's senior. The landscapes and the dispassionate portraits he painted might not be a true reflection of Roberto's character, but he compensated with other skills, and from time to time Sabrina would allow him to get her drunk on good red wine and take her to bed – always in his studio, which was a mixture of workshop and gym. The artist was muscular and fit, and regarded his body as a temple – which had been subjected to the unfair erosion of time. He had never been to her home, which she had declared a Roberto-free zone. She deleted his messages and made a spur-of-the-moment decision never to see him again.

Roberto reminded her of her father, which was the root cause of the problem. She had feared that her father's chin would one day disappear, along with the exact colour of his eyes, the tone of his voice, laughter lines, the ironic gaze with which the general viewed the world, the trust and the understanding. She had dreaded waking up one
morning to find that, overnight, her father's image had faded from her daily life. But it never happened. She remembered everything clearly.

Her hatred of his unknown killers hadn't diminished, either. Her therapist called it an amputated-father fixation, fed by her choice of profession. It wasn't grief, but phantom pains, he said. Find yourself a husband and have some children. Learn sign language or something else useful.

She told him about Roberto and heard the pieces fall into place behind the therapist's high forehead.

‘It's obvious,' he said. ‘You're not in love, Sabrina, you're trying to escape from reality.'

‘But I'm seeing someone …'

‘Someone who doesn't pose a risk, Sabrina.'

She had felt superficial. With the emotional depth of a Labrador.

‘Maybe I just haven't met the right man yet,' she argued.

‘Perhaps – assuming that special someone exists. The whole concept is overrated. In my experience there is no Mr Right until you choose to make him so. It takes compromise, hard work and careful planning. You have to make an effort.'

He made it sound like building a garage.

‘Maybe love shouldn't have to be so hard,' she said.

It was only later she got angry. She despised this modern idea that everything was of equal value. Her family had been on this earth for 1,200 years. You just didn't kill its
head and get away with it. It was unthinkable. It was equally impossible to explain this to the idiot across the desk. Even her brothers, who had chosen dull careers far removed from the Law and the Army, struggled to understand her.

She put the cardboard box and the sports bag on the dining table, opened the shutters, watered the pelargoniums in the window boxes and scattered a handful of seeds on the bird table. Sometimes they would be eaten by the local sparrows, other times by the pigeons. She spent a moment looking at the red and deep blue sky above the black roofs, took a can of Coke from the fridge and got down to work.

Many Cokes and nineteen Lucky Strikes later, Sabrina lay down on her bed and stared up at the ceiling.

At approximately 10.00 a.m. on 5 September 2007, Camorra killers had forced their way into Nanometric s.a. in Via Ippodromo in Milan, where they had shot the physicist Fabiano Batista, age sixty-three, in the head with a 9-mm pistol. Two burn marks from an electric stun gun were found on his neck. He had been paralysed but conscious when he was executed and it would appear that he had let his killers into the high security building himself. The computer programmer, Paolo Iacovelli, age twenty-two, was shot twice through the heart while sitting on a chair
in the kitchen. The ballistic report proved that the same pistol was used for both killings. The German chemist Hanna Schmidt, age twenty-eight, was killed by a single stab wound to her chest with a double-edged blade. The blade had severed the aorta and death had followed a few seconds later.

The hard disc of the company's security cameras had been destroyed, as had the discs on all computers and servers. Two safes – one on the ground floor and one in Giulio Forlani's office on the first floor – had been opened with plastic explosives and emptied. The patent applications had been doused in petrol and set on fire.

Giulio Forlani had been the victim of a staged traffic accident on the northbound A7 motorway near the suburb of Assago at 9.45 a.m. The time had been verified by several eyewitnesses and a motorway surveillance camera. Minutes before the crash Dr Forlani had signed for a box of semiconductors at General Electrics' dealer in Assago. The assassin had overtaken Giulio Forlani in a twenty-two-tonne truck and had then braked hard in front of the Å koda Octavia resulting in the violent collision. The wires between the brake pedal and the brake lights on the truck had been cut, so Giulio Forlani hadn't realized it was braking. The assassin had proceeded to fire twice at close range at the badly injured physicist: once to his face and once to the right side of his chest. The assassin had then vaulted over the crash
barriers that separated the northbound and southbound lanes and been picked up by a black BMW 320i. Both vehicles turned out to be stolen. Forlani was taken to the trauma centre at the Ospedale Maggiore and pronounced dead at 6.15 p.m. after almost seven hours on the operating table. The head of the trauma team, Dr Carlo Mazzaferro, had signed the death certificate himself.

Giulio Forlani's brother, Bruno Forlani, and his parents claimed the body and Giulio was buried five days later in the family plot at Chiaravalle Cemetery, south of Milan. On the morning of 5 September, Milan's most famous haute couture designer, Nanometric's main investor, and Giulio Forlani's good friend, Massimiliano Di Luca, had had a vague lunch appointment with Forlani at the restaurant Dal Pescatore. Forlani had never arrived and Sabrina had read the testimony of Massimiliano Di Luca, which was detailed, but not particularly helpful. The fashion designer had drunk a couple of Martinis in the bar while he waited and studied the racing pages before giving up. His driver had then taken him from the restaurant to the San Siro racecourse where he had spent the afternoon.

Sabrina inserted a CD from Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II into the computer and watched the grainy, blurred recordings from the two surveillance cameras in the shopping centre on 5 September 2007 over and over again. She saw Lucia Forlani and her twelve-year-old son, Salvatore, step
aside for a young couple with a buggy before entering a lift on the ground floor. The doors had started to close when a man squeezed in at the last moment. She could see from behind that he was of medium height and wearing a green oilskin jacket and dark trousers. He had a cap on his head. Lucia Forlani had smiled at him and he had presumably smiled back. Then he leaned forwards and said something to her. Her smile disappeared. She staggered and the man put his hand around her elbow to support her. Salvatore Forlani started to cry.

There could be no doubt about this: two cameras, one behind the till in a menswear shop on the other side of the shopping mall and one directly opposite the lifts, had recorded the incident. Sabrina played the recording at a slow speed, fast-forwarded it and played it backwards. She cut out sequences and viewed them in Photoshop; zoomed in on the woman's face and what little she could see of the boy's.

If she had ever seen a smile of recognition, then this was how Lucia Forlani had reacted when the man had entered the lift.

She would have expected the trio to be picked up by the cameras that overlooked the café on the first floor, but they never arrived. In his report, the investigating officer had mentioned the possibility that cameras in the underground car park might have caught the boy, the woman and the man. These cameras, however, had been out of action – by
unfortunate chance or sabotage. Lucia Forlani, Salvatore and the unknown man had vanished without a trace between three floors of one of the most frequented shopping centres in the world. An almost impossible achievement.

The officer had included a list of vehicles in the underground car park at the time of the abduction. Every owner had been interviewed with no result.

As the days and weeks passed, the tone of the reports grew increasingly despondent. The investigating officer had followed up even the most improbable theories and Sabrina was impressed by his diligence. No one could find fault with the investigation.

Sabrina lit a couple of candles behind her bed and was holding a small strip of magic between her fingers. Thin, sharp, black and bendy like celluloid. Half a centimetre wide and four centimetres long. The strip had fluttered down on her naked foot when she found Giulio Forlani's apparently empty wallet in a paper bag. On the paper bag was the name and address of a famous patisserie in Milan. She could still smell almond cake.

The magic ingredient was in the luminous green numbers and letters that could be read from any angle at which she viewed the strip:

Which, as it happened, was today's day and date. The date was followed by a twelve-digit code. She had run a fingernail across the strip. The numbers and letters drifted apart, but reformed when she removed the pressure. It was extraordinary. She now started to understand the potential of the strip, not just for goods produced by the fashion industry, but also for banknotes, DVDs, credit cards, passports and driving licences. She imagined a yuppie on a rush-hour train in Rome or New York with a Prada bag and a date strip that displayed 12 December, for example – at the height of summer. If the strip was sewn into or mounted on the relevant product, visible to anyone, with a date that changed at midnight like a clock, the combination would be unbeatable; and no fashion-conscious woman – or man – would ever risk exposing their expensive accessories as rip-offs.

She put the strip inside a copy of
Northanger Abbey
on her bedside table.

Forlani's wallet was covered in dried blood and it had been emptied of photos, credit cards, driving licence and banknotes, which had undoubtedly been handed over to his family. The wallet itself had been stored with his bloodstained clothes, shoes and socks.

She poured the remaining contents of the grey sports bag out on to the floor, tiny fragments of glass from the Å koda's broken side windows sparkling like sugar crystals on Giulio Forlani's clothes. A dark blue anorak, socks stiff
with congealed blood, a shirt that had once been blue, an enormous pair of moccasins, khaki trousers cut from the turn-ups to the belt loops and black underpants. Sabrina picked up the shirt and poked her index finger through a sooty hole, just the diameter of a fingertip, high up on the right-hand side of the chest. A shot to the right lung, as the trauma doctor, Dr Carlo Mazzaferro, had stated. This injury was in addition to multiple fractures, the gunshot wound to the head, internal bleeding and two collapsed lungs.

Sabrina searched the pockets and turn-ups without finding anything. Shards of glass from the Å koda pricked her fingertips. When she squeezed her fingers tiny drops of blood appeared.

Federico Renda had requested the case files and Forlani's belongings from various agencies in Milan who had divided up the investigation between them. It was as Sabrina had expected: no single coordinating officer or public prosecutor had previously looked at the case as a whole.

The forces of law and order in Italy were a battlefield for feuding intelligence services, departments and police forces, each fiercely protective of their own privileges and remits and engaged in a never-ending turf war. Her father had always advocated a centralized effort to fight organized crime, like the FBI in America.

Perhaps that had been the real reason for his assassination.

*

She woke up at the sound of flapping wings and an excited cooing. She yawned, stretched and discovered that she had fallen asleep fully dressed. Two pigeons were fighting over some seeds on the bird table. Sabrina took the last cigarette, lit it, scrunched up the packet and threw it at the birds.

It was dawn and the air was cool and clean. She finished smoking the cigarette, dropped the butt into a half-empty coffee cup and pulled the duvet over her head.

Qualiano, Naples the Estate of Francesco Terrasino

The nurse knocked politely on the door, but Don Francesco Terrasino had already heard her heels on the floor.

His fork hovered over the plate of ham and eggs, but he was no longer hungry. He was losing his appetite more with every passing day.

He opened the door to the grey-haired nurse.

‘Can I see her now?' he asked.

‘She has had a good sleep, signore,' she said. ‘
La signora
has had a bath and eaten a little.'

He followed her through a passage with a low ceiling to the living room and caught himself ducking under the door frame. When he and Anna moved to the estate, the beam had been level with his forehead. Now he could pass under it with space above his head.

They passed a room that had once been the office of his closest adviser, but was now used by his grandchildren
when they came to stay. Don Francesco didn't mind. He had moved with the times. Today his closest adviser was the senior partner in a major law firm in Rome and the family's accounts were handled by an international accountancy firm. The estate was no longer the headquarters of the Terrasino family. Feuding was over. They had entered a post-war era, which everyone hoped would last. The big conferences in the nineties with the Cosa Nostra, the 'Ndrangheta, the Albanians and the Ukrainians had put an end to costly and pointless strife. Urs Savelli had been a masterful negotiator for the Terrasino family. Especially when it came to the Albanians.