When the Dead Awaken

by Steffen Jacobsen

  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.

  ‘Does she have a name?’

  Dr Sapienza pointed to the nearest board.

  ‘Lucia Forlani, née Maletta. Born 12 February 1973 in Castellarano.’

  ‘Never heard of it,’ she said.

  ‘It’s a small mountain village in the north of Reggio Emilia. I went there once on a school trip,’ he said. ‘Napoleon stopped by in 1801.’ Dr Sapienza pointed to something in the middle of the tray. ‘And that’s Number thirty-one, as it were.’

  A third, tiny skeleton lay protected by the woman’s pelvic bones. The baby inside the woman had turned and was engaged with its head down and its back facing left. Ready and waiting for departure –
for contractions that never came.

  The sturdy grey cable strips with which the woman’s wrists had been tied were indestructible. Dr Sapienza had arranged her arms in front of her pelvis so the bones of her hands were spread protectively across the remains of the foetus.

  Sabrina’s breathing apparatus hissed.

  ‘An eight-month-old foetus,’ Dr Sapienza said.

  ‘Cause of death?’

  ‘Unknown.’

  ‘Cover them up,’ Sabrina said.

  ‘The woman was lying beside the boy. We’ve concluded that they’re mother and son; the DNA profiles match up. There is no doubt.’

  Dr Sapienza sat down in his office chair and started typing.

  Out of the corner of one eye Sabrina noticed a burst of light. She turned around, but saw nothing unusual. It could have been anything. A torch, a hiccup in the steady rhythm of the generators that powered the fluorescent lights. The blue figures moved methodically around the trays. Some were assembling cadavers as if they were shards of pottery from an archaeological excavation; others photographed the bodies or took tissue samples for microscopic or spectroscopic analyses. Others still were carrying trays of test tubes to the freezer where the samples would be stored until DNA tests could be carried out.

  A man walked slowly past the whiteboards, taking notes. He had wedged his mobile between his shoulder and his ear. Sabrina frowned. She thought the use of mobile phones inside the tents was strictly prohibited. For the time being the Vittorio Emanuele II Quay existed in a state of emergency. No identifications could be leaked to the public until the next of kin had been informed.

  ‘I thought you would want to see this,’ the forensic pathologist continued. ‘We’ve cross-referenced lists of missing persons from our Interior Ministry, the Red Cross and Interpol in Lyons. Lucia Forlani is listed as missing. As is her son, Salvatore. They were last seen entering a lift in Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II in Milan on 5 September 2007.’

  ‘Who was the last person to see her?’

  ‘No idea.’

  ‘Education, relatives, addresses? What are you saying, Raimondo? What else have you got for me?’ she demanded to know.

  ‘Nothing! That’s the problem.’

  He pointed at the screen over his shoulder. It displayed the Interior Ministry’s authoritative and confidential list of missing persons, which was updated daily. The cursor blinked next to ‘Forlani, Lucia / Maletta, Lucia [35 – Castellarano] & Forlani, Salvatore [12 – Milan]’. Their names were followed by the acronym ‘MIPTP’, an address in Milan and the name of the case officer to whom all queries should be directed: Nestore Raspallo.

  ‘Grazie,’ she said and closed her eyes. The smell, the undulating tent walls overwhelmed her. The fifth of September 2007 – three days before her father was killed.

  It had become a habit to date everything from the death of her father. A rather unhealthy habit, according to her therapist. Sabrina had smiled without saying anything, but had visualized the therapist in freefall from his office window to the pavement five floors below. The problem wasn’t her father’s death. It was the haunting, restless thirst for revenge that lived on.

  MIPTP.

  ‘What does that mean, Sabrina?’ Dr Sapienza said. ‘How the hell do you expect me to do my job when all information is classified?’

  ‘I’ll take care of it, Raimondo. Forget about it.’

  ‘Forget about it, forget about it – I’m paid not to forget, Sabrina, but to remember. All victims are entitled to someone who does that.’

  She blushed. ‘Of course they are, Dr Sapienza,’ she said quietly. ‘MIPTP – Ministero Interno Protezione Testimoni e Pentiti – is a programme for the protection of witnesses or their relatives. People who have helped the police solve organized crime. Do you understand?’

  ‘So she’s a witness?’

  ‘Or she’s related to a witness. Dear Raimondo, few things in this country are hermetically sealed. The Vatican’s antique porn collection perhaps, but even they aren’t as impenetrable as witness protection programmes. That’s why we have the odd breakthrough every now and again, despite everything. You can’t blame the programme just because some remorseful Mafiosi, i pentiti, choose to compromise their new identities and resume their old, sinful ways.’

  ‘A couple of bottles of vodka and I’ll be prepared to overlook these intolerable restrictions,’ the giant said amicably. ‘But someone ought to know, Sabrina. Some-one needs to know that they’ve been found.’

  Sabrina, who knew that Dr Sapienza never touched alcohol, smiled and squeezed his shoulder.

  ‘Of course. Someone will be told. I’ll make sure of it. Personally. Subito. Grazie.’ She walked up to the whiteboard, found a sponge and erased the names. ‘I don’t want to see those names here again, Raimondo,’ she said. ‘And call me the moment you know how they died.’

  She turned on her heel and headed for the exit.

  Raimondo Sapienza looked after the straight-backed prosecutor with melancholic eyes and shrugged. He liked her, and was saddened by the permanent twilight in which she seemed to exist.

  The man with the mobile turned and looked after her as well, but without much interest. A few minutes later he stepped out into the sunshine, lit a cigarette and walked behind the nearest stack of containers, which the Carabinieri were using as part of their cordon. He stopped, unzipped his coveralls and started to relieve himself. Making sure there were no curious onlookers nearby, he took the mobile he had used to photograph the names of the victims, put it inside a polystyrene box, sealed it with tape and threw it over the containers.

  CHAPTER 3

  Like everyone else, Sabrina D’Avalos had to wait her turn in the queue outside the office of Federico Renda, the Public Prosecutor of Naples. Roughly every fifteen minutes, she moved one seat further to the right on the marble bench, and the next person in the queue behind her moved from the wall to a seat on the far left of the bench. The tall, carved mahogany doors at the end of the archway were guarded by two Carabinieri in combat uniform armed with machine guns. In Naples the Palace of Justice was always a potential war zone. To her right was a young civil servant she vaguely knew. The young man had loosened his tie and was alternately typing furiously on a laptop balanced on his knees and leafing through some papers. It was well-known that Federico Renda gave short shrift to anyone who was ill prepared.

  The young man was eventually swallowed up by the tall doors and emerged ten minutes later, visibly downcast. Sabrina smiled at him and got up, summoned by a curled index finger. The finger belonged to one of the matrons in Renda’s anteroom.

  ‘Would you like to go straight in,’ said the woman in the floral dress.

  It wasn’t a request.

  She walked through the dappled green light that filtered through the inch-thick bulletproof glass in the windows. The walls were lined with polished mahogany panels, the path to Renda’s desk as long as a penitential walk. The thick Persian carpets silenced her footsteps, but Renda had heard her anyway. The public prosecutor’s salt-and-pepper hair was combed straight back from his forehead and his brown eyes were even darker than she remembered. As always, Renda was wearing a well-pressed, dark suit with a waistcoat, a white shirt and a discreet tie. A pair of reading glasses was lying on his desk and his hands rested on the arms of the wheelchair. The same bomb which had bestowed on Sabrina her scars and an occasional and irritating tinnitus had paralysed the public prosecutor from the waist down.

  Renda shied away from media attention, and gossip about his private life was unthinkable. Quite simply, the man had sacrificed too much, and was regarded almost as a saint. Sabrina knew that he was unmarried and had no children. This ascetic way of life was something he shared with many other senior lawyers committed to a lifetime of fighting the Mafia.

  Sabrina regarded Federico Renda as a good boss. He had no favourites and was equally blunt and impatient with everybody. He nodded in the direction of a low chair and Sabrina sat down, crossed her legs
and folded her hands in her lap. Her shoulder holster bumped against her ribs and she nudged it aside with her elbow.

  ‘Buongiorno, dottoressa. How is it going?’

  ‘We’ve nearly finished my area of investigation,’ she said. ‘We’ve identified a journalist and two young trade union members. There is a North African man in his thirties whose identity we haven’t been able to discover.’

  She shifted in her chair.

  ‘In addition, an unexpected discovery was made among the other body parts. Quite remarkable, in fact. I’ve just come from speaking to Dr Sapienza.’

  She fell silent and was annoyed with herself: unexpected and remarkable. Great …

  Federico Renda smiled graciously, though his eyes showed no desire to join in. He gestured for her to continue. Most visitors were aware that the public prosecutor would prefer it if they would manage to come somewhere close to speaking faster than he could think.

  ‘A thirty-five-year-old woman and a twelve-year-old boy. Mother and son. The woman was eight months pregnant,’ Sabrina went on.

  Renda leaned forwards.

  ‘Lucia and Salvatore Forlani. They’ve been missing for three years,’ she said. ‘The woman is from Castellarano, and the boy was born in Milan.’

  ‘Do you know the town?’ he asked.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Reggio Emilia in the Apennine Mountains,’ Renda informed her. ‘It has a well-preserved city wall and a convent school for the daughters of wealthy families. Napoleon camped near the town in …’

  ‘1801,’ she said. ‘Yes, so everyone tells me.’

  The public prosecutor smiled faintly.

  ‘The Forlani tragedy,’ he said, leaning back and hooking his thumbs into his waistcoat. ‘You can be forgiven for not knowing the details, signorina. Circumstances forced us to play down the affair as far as the media was concerned. Defence of the Realm Act, for one. Whatever that means.’

  ‘I understand.’

  She looked directly behind Renda, at the only photograph in the office: his obsession, L’Artista, the woman whose car bomb had put him in a wheelchair. The image was poor, the woman a blurred figure in an underground car park. The prosecutor had picked out the image from a CCTV camera, had it enlarged and mounted in an aluminium frame. A permanent reminder of the need for constant vigilance, Sabrina presumed. The woman had been caught mid stride: dark clothes, sunglasses, a dark baseball cap pulled down over her eyes. The figure had stayed on the borderline between light and shade; the most difficult conditions for the CCTV cameras.