Contents
Cover Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
CHAPTER 24
CHAPTER 25
CHAPTER 26
CHAPTER 27
CHAPTER 28
CHAPTER 29
CHAPTER 30
CHAPTER 31
CHAPTER 32
CHAPTER 33
CHAPTER 34
CHAPTER 35
CHAPTER 36
CHAPTER 37
CHAPTER 38
CHAPTER 39
CHAPTER 40
CHAPTER 41
CHAPTER 42
CHAPTER 43
CHAPTER 44
CHAPTER 45
CHAPTER 46
CHAPTER 47
CHAPTER 48
CHAPTER 49
EPILOGUE
First published in Great Britain in 2013 by
Quercus Editions Ltd
55 Baker Street
7th Floor, South Block
London
W1U 8EW
Copyright © 2013 by Steffen Jacobsen
English translation copyright © 2013 by Charlotte Barslund
The moral right of Steffen Jacobsen to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
The translator asserts her moral right to be identified as the translator of the work.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
PBO ISBN 978 1 78087 629 0
EBOOK ISBN 978 1 78087 630 6
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
You can find this and many other great books at:
www.quercusbooks.co.uk
Steffen Jacobsen is a Danish orthopaedic surgeon and consultant. When the Dead Awaken is his third novel. He was inspired to write it by his travels around Italy and by the writer and journalist Roberto Saviano’s Gomorrah, a non-fiction book about the Camorra.
With thanks to Thomas Harder for everything Italian.
CHAPTER 1
Port of Naples, 1 September 2010
Gaetano Costa had long since ceased to notice Naples’ famous red lighthouse, which filled the cabin of his crane with white, red and green light every fifteen seconds. His eyes were fixed on a monitor, which showed the freezer container, weighing eighteen tonnes, swinging under the crane’s spreader, fifteen metres below his cabin, and thirty metres above the quay. He adjusted the joysticks that were controlling the container’s journey from the trailer truck on Vittorio Emanuele II Quay to the top layer of containers on Pancoast Lines’ newest container ship, the threehundred-metre long Taixan. Gaetano was proud of his hands and what they could accomplish. Some people had the stamina and the concentration to become the invisible link between the gigantic winch of the Terex crane, the flexible steel wires, the moving container and the pitching ship’s deck – whatever the weather or visibility – while others never mastered it.
Earlier that evening American engineers with broad smiles and thumbs-up had said goodbye to an anxious Gaetano and his equally sceptical foreman. The job required the Italians to speak and understand a kind of pidgin English, and they had nodded unconvinced in response to the engineers’ parting cry of ‘Don’t worry, guys!’
Nevertheless, Costa had to admit that the crane now worked like a dream. It was as if the American engineers in their white overalls had integrated his spine into the crane’s control systems.
It had been a good shift. A thin crescent moon sat high in the sky, the sea was black and calm, and the last container of the night hung safely below. He had the Chinese loading officer barking orders into one ear of his headset and John Denver singing in the other. When the white container with the green Maltese crosses on its sides had been delivered and secured, the ship would slip its moorings and reverse into the basin to make room for yet another of the illuminated container ships anchored on the dark roadstead of Naples like a never-ending chain of fairy lights.
Gaetano would climb down from the cabin, change, chat briefly with his replacement, swallow two painkillers for the left-sided headache which the signature flashes of the lighthouse always induced, before spending a couple of pleasant and uneventful hours at a late night café drinking coffee, smoking cigarettes, reading La Gazetta dello Sport and most likely indulging in an erotic fantasy featuring the almond-skinned waitress, Giuseppina. When the sun rose he would cycle home to his bachelor flat in Via Colonnello Carlo Lahalle.
It was by no means the first freezer container with the distinctive green cross that Gaetano had loaded on to a Pancoast-owned ship. Always late at night. Always as the last item and always when Filippo Montesi from Autoritá Portuale di Napoli, the Neapolitan Port Authority, was the harbour master on duty. The container had been delivered by an anonymous truck, which kept its engine running and drove off the moment the crane had removed its load.
The screen by Gaetano Costa’s right knee showed him the details of the container’s barcode. The consignee was an anonymous warehouse in Macao, the sender a shipping company in Hanover: two destinations that deviated completely from the normal traffic. However, the fifty-five-year-old crane operator, whose body had moulded itself to the shape of the cabin with the passage of time, had, like everyone else in the port, learned never to ask questions. The Port of Naples processed twenty million tonnes of freight every year and the freezer container represented barely a single particle in this unimaginably extensive stream of goods.
In this mighty port, the Camorra had a thousand eyes and ears, and not one container moved without its knowledge.
The monitor by Gaetano’s knee displayed the section of the quay between the crane tracks and the ship. Traffic was usually barred from this area during loading and unloading, but tonight was an exception: a camera crew from the British television station Channel 4 had been granted access to shoot a popular series with a breathless, globetrotting presenter.
It was the absence of a particular sound that made Gaetano mutter the word ‘no’. The missing sound made the sweat break out under his orange overalls. The ratchet-locking pin in the cable drum above the cabin was no longer transmitting its solid clicks – the spreader was in free fall. The numbers on the drum’s digital revolution counter spun faster than the eye could follow. Costa flicked open the safety cap on the emergency brake and his palm hit the red button to release the secondary locking clamps that bit deep into the oiled cable to break the fall of the runaway container.
An ear-piercing metallic sound made Gaetano Costa look up. While he muttered ‘no’ again and again, while he bashed his hand until it bled on
the emergency-brake button, he saw the fifteen-tonne trolley keel over right above his head. Sparks flew from the undercarriage of the drum housing, and the colossal construction rocked menacingly.
The white container tumbled towards its doom, condemning Gaetano Costa to certain death at the hands of the Camorra in its wake.
The presenter on the quay heard the high-pitched squeal above her and watched in disbelief as the soundman was replaced by the shipping container on the square of tarmac which he had been standing on a second ago.
The impact of the container caused her and the rest of the camera crew to jump twenty centimetres into the air, and she felt her hair stand on end. Everyone was momentarily deafened and many experienced various degrees of deafness in the days that followed.
The producer landed first on his Italian loafers and shouted in a thick voice:
‘F-u-u-ck! Did you get that, Jack?’
Then he discovered a part of his own tongue that he had bitten off, instinctively caught it in his hand, and fell silent.
A veteran of Beirut, Tikrit, The Foreign Correspondents’ Club in Hong Kong and Wilma’s Bar, the Irish cameraman was the first to pull himself together. He held the camera steady, and zoomed in on a twisted aluminium bar, a microphone, a cable and an undamaged tape recorder that were the only visible remains of the soundman. Next, the open doors of the smashed container from which white cocoons spilled out on to the tarmac through an ice-cold-hoar frost that reeked of diesel; and then a wall of perforated and rotting black bin bags from which human body parts in every stage of decomposition were sticking out. A skeletal hand ended up a few centimetres from his Converse. He held his breath as he let the camera light up every gruesome detail of the steel coffin.
Through the glass floor of the cabin, Gaetano Costa saw with a kind of gloomy joy how the elegantly uniformed Filippo Montesi tried to yank the camera from the cameraman who, without straining himself, and with the camera still securely resting on his shoulder, knocked the harbour master to the ground.
Costa, who had seen a thing or two during his time in the port, frowned. Herding Chinese workers from the Camorra’s sweatshops into a garage with rubber seals on the door, and connecting a hose from the exhaust of a trailer truck to a pipe in the wall, was generally regarded as an effective and humane way of putting down worn-out slave labour. After gassing them, every form of identification was removed from the deceased and the bodies vacuum-packed in white plastic. The containers were eased overboard when the ship was directly above the threekilometre-deep Agadir Canyon off the coast of North Africa. However, the containers didn’t usually contain black bin bags with body parts. This was a first.
*
The production assistant punched in the numbers of the Italian police, the ambulance service, the fire service and Channel 4’s news desk in Rome on her mobile, while the presenter frantically delved into her artistic persona for a suitable character who would appear both resourceful and glamorous.
The crane cabin was equipped with a small but powerful pair of binoculars. Costa put the strap around his neck, opened the door and climbed out on the ladder to the crane’s main tower. After two minutes of careful climbing, he reached the long loading outrigger above the cabin, edged his way past the trolley and the capsized cable drum, and found a suitable vantage point high above the loading deck of the Taixan. Through the windows of the ship’s bridge he could see the Chinese officers frantically waving their arms. A small circle of condensation had formed on the storm glass in front of each open mouth. The loading officer was standing on a separate gangway above the deck at the same level as Gaetano. He had his back to the crane operator and was shouting into a walkietalkie, but Costa only had John Denver’s ‘Leaving on a Jet Plane’ in his earpiece.
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.
CHAPTER 2
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. Sh
e 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.
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