*
Sabrina got up, put the plug in the sink, turned on the cold tap, and immersed her face in the water. She could feel bubbles trickle from her nostrils and tickle her cheeks. She stayed there until she could no longer hold her breath, dried her face and massaged her temples while she thought about her father, who would appear to be helplessly entangled in the Forlani tragedy.
Nestore Raspallo’s business card was the colour of ivory. It listed only his name and a mobile telephone number. The young man was apparently always available.
Questions without answers buzzed around her brain. For a long time she sat on the toilet seat with her head in her hands. On the back of her eyelids images from the endless day flickered by. The park at the top of the hill in Castellarano and the tall woman with the grapes, the green van in her rear-view and wing mirrors, the changing room in the department store. The dark, soaring cathedral, her father’s face, which ambushed her and stayed with her like the final credit in an emptied cinema.
She thought about young Nestore Raspallo with the light brown hair and his bow tie, and became aware of a reluctant smile on her lips. She wondered briefly what it would be like to be in love. Exhausting weightlessness? Euphoria and distraction? A foreboding of catastrophe?
She put the log in her shoulder bag and Raspallo’s business card in her pocket.
The guest house was as quiet as the grave. She tiptoed up the stairs and stopped outside room number 307. Sabrina switched on her torch, removed the solitary light bulb in the corridor and put it in a cupboard with a fire hose and a powder extinguisher. She let herself into the room, placed the bedside table and a lamp in front of the door, loaded the Walther, dragged the mattress and the bed linen from the bed to the furthest corner of the room and put her pistol under the flat, hard pillow. She slipped under the cold, thin blankets and crossed her fingers that no travelling salesman would wake the receptionist in the middle of the night and specifically request this room.
She folded her hands, said her prayers and fell asleep.
CHAPTER 15
Milan
Overnight the receptionist had been replaced by a shapeless, middle-aged woman with thick glasses and pink lipstick drawn considerably outside the natural lipline. Her colourless hair was pressed against her scalp by a Hello Kitty hairband, which Sabrina imagined might be more suitable for someone under the age of nine.
The woman watched her over her newspaper, an espresso by her elbow. Sabrina felt a pang of envy. She could have killed for a cup of coffee and a cigarette. Instead she launched into a long and imaginative explanation about why she – despite every intention to the contrary – would have to leave this fine establishment. A child. A sick child. Sabrina rummaged around her tired brain for a brief moment before she seized on … mumps.
‘Haven’t you had your child vaccinated, signora?’
There was disapproval in the oyster eyes.
‘Of course I have. Our daughter has just been vaccinated. However, the weakened virus turned out to be not so weak after all. They have recalled the vaccine, but how does that help us? Our holiday. My little girl.’
She was distraught.
The woman smiled. Or her upper lip curled, at any rate. Sabrina was mesmerized by tiny clumps of lipstick stuck to the black strands of hair on her upper lip. Like tiny unripe cherries, they swayed in the stream of air to and from the nostrils.
‘Is your daughter often sick, signora?’
Her husband’s family tended to be a little … delicate, Sabrina admitted. The woman behind the counter prepared Sabrina’s bill while muttering something about mothers-in-law.
She drove the front of the car up on to the pavement and pretended to look for something in the glove compartment for so long that even the most hopeless tail in Via Durini would notice that she was leaving the guest house. She waited until a bus, a truck and a couple of cars had driven past before she indicated right and pulled out. She turned left into Via Borgogna and onwards to Corso Monforte. Even a Camorra driver from Naples should have no trouble following her. As she joined the slow-moving, dense morning traffic, Sabrina thought about the woman behind the reception counter whom she presumed was the wife of the receptionist. Or his sister. They shared the same browbeaten expression.
The time was 8.30 a.m. She had three and a half hours before her audience with Massimiliano Di Luca. She started challenging her tails, changing lanes and ducking and diving in between trucks and buses. A hundred metres before the next set of traffic lights, she slowed down. Green. Eighty metres. Sixty metres. Still green. A taxi in front of her was driving at the exact same speed. Sabrina knew that the cab driver would know to the nearest second when the lights would change. The taxi slowed down. Twenty metres: the lights changed to red. The taxi came to a halt, but she overtook it on the inside. A cast iron fence encircling a tree snatched her wing mirror; Sabrina looked left at the ashen-faced taxi driver. His mouth was hanging open. Sabrina continued out in front of the avalanche of breaking, hooting and swerving cars coming down the Corso. She turned right down Via Conservatorio and stepped on the accelerator, rolling down the window and extending her middle finger to the drivers behind her. They sounded their horns furiously. Halfway down Via Conservatorio she took a sharp left, hoping that the multi-storey car park that had always been there had not been turned into a supermarket or a cinema.
Twenty minutes later and once more dressed like a post-apocalyptic emo, Sabrina was strolling down the streets around the Albergo Merlin. In the high, bright September light she felt that she was painfully conspicuous, but no one seemed to give her a second glance. In Via Durini she found the cigarette packets and the tampon box in the gutter. None of the suspicious vehicles were still in the street, but the minibus was filling up with children and adults from a nursery school. She left the sweet wrapper with the watch behind its rear wheel.
She found a quiet Internet café in a side street, bought herself an hour online and a Coke from the zombie behind the counter, sat down in the darkest corner and – hidden by the computer screen – opened the packages.
It was the oldest trick in the book, but still good enough to be included in the latest editions. The broken wristwatches showed her the exact time the rear wheel had driven over them. She opened a notebook and chewed her pen. She had left the guest house at 08.27.30 exactly. The Ford Mondeo had left Via Durini at 08.28, she noticed. She underlined the car’s registration number and wrote a brief description of the driver. The white van had left the area at 23.47 the previous night so she crossed out its registration number. The green Fiat van had set off from Via Durini at 08.29. She had no description of the driver or any passengers, only the registration number she had already given Raspallo.
She drank her Coke and looked around. The Internet café was practically deserted. A couple of sleepy teenagers were playing Call of Duty with the deep concentration of a concert pianist.
The café’s lavatory was in the basement. It was shared by every possible gender and Sabrina touched nothing.
Raspallo answered after two rings.
‘Pronto?’
‘Sabrina D’Avalos. About yesterday … did you mean everything?’
‘Yes.’
‘Do you have a pen?’
‘Of course.’
She gave him the registration number of the Mondeo and a description of the driver and repeated the registration number of the green Fiat van.
‘Where are they?’ he asked.
‘In Via Conservatorio or in the streets around Via Durini. Possibly in the multi-storey car park in Via Conservatorio. Do you know it?’
‘Yes. Is that where your car is?’
‘At the moment, yes.’
‘Leave it there,’ he said.
‘I love that car.’
‘It’s just a car,’ he said.
‘My first.’
He laughed softly. If voices had colours, Nestore Raspallo’s voice had the same light brown shade as his hair.
; ‘You never forget your first one,’ he said.
‘Ciao,’ she said. ‘And thank you for the call log.’
‘Think about it,’ he said.
‘I think of nothing else.’
She found the large green Fiat van in front of a church on the corner of Via Cesare Battisti and Via Filippo Corridori and she had good reason to be impressed with young Raspallo’s efficiency a few minutes later.
A minibus with no identifying features stopped diagonally in front of the van, six people wearing ski masks, black bulletproof vests and black combat uniforms jumped out and assumed their positions around the van. The only source of identification on the soldiers was the reflective CARABINIERI on their chest and back. None of them spoke. Sabrina watched from the pavement opposite. One of the black figures smashed the van’s side window with a sledgehammer, stuck in an arm, opened the door and climbed in. She couldn’t see what he did next, but presumed that he – or she – continued destroying an internal window and then – to distract the now trapped Camorra – threw a stun grenade into the body of the van. There was a hollow boom, white smoke poured from every crack and the broken windows, and the van rocked on its shock absorbers.
The back doors were twisted off their hinges with crowbars and three Carabinieri jumped inside. A few seconds later they reappeared with two dazed-looking men who were pushed against the bonnet of the van, had black hoods pulled over their heads and their hands tied behind their backs with white plastic ties.
The patrol cars from Milan’s Polizia Municipale pulled up next to the minibus and uniformed officers started dealing with the crowd of onlookers in the street. The prisoners were thrown inside the minibus, the black-clad soldiers got in, closed the doors and the minibus drove off.
The whole incident took only a few minutes.
Her mobile rang.
‘Happy now?’ Raspallo asked her.
‘Please tell me they weren’t just a couple of builders or windsurfers.’
‘Windsurfers? What are you talking about?’
‘Nothing. Who were they?’
‘Not your usual handymen, certainly. The back of the van was filled with guns, cameras and electronic surveillance equipment …’
‘Uh-huh?’
‘And an extensive dossier on you which someone is reading to me right now. Hold on.’
Sabrina stared at the pavement until Raspallo returned.
‘Several excellent pictures of you. Your address in Naples. Telephone numbers, e-mail addresses … and the IP address of your computer. They’ll definitely have hacked it by now. Interesting area you live in,’ he commented.
‘Yes, very.’
‘And you’ve befriended a boy in an orphanage in Via San Tommaso d’Aquino?’
‘Ismael, yes.’
She was beginning to wish she had simply shot the two men herself.
‘I suggest you alter all your routines and any habits until this is over. And get yourself a new mobile right now.’
‘How long can you hold them?’
‘Given the guns and the bugging equipment? A long time. If it proves problematical to charge them, we’ll have them convert to Islam.’
‘Did you find the Mondeo as well?’
‘Of course.’
‘Are you in trouble?’ she asked.
‘Why?’
‘Over this.’
‘I was only doing my civic duty by passing on an anonymous tip-off to an old friend in the Carabinieri,’ he said. ‘Two suspicious vehicles with armed men had been observed by alert citizens.’
Nestore Raspallo sounded remarkably laid back.
‘Goodbye, then. And thank you,’ she said.
‘You’re hoping this will wake up Urs Savelli, I presume,’ he said. ‘Lure him down from the mountains?’
‘Yes, if that’s where he is.’
‘That’s your … plan?’
‘That’s a grand word for it. But I have to know what happened to my father.’
‘I understand.’
For a long time she pressed her mobile against her ear waiting for comfort, advice, brilliant ideas, but nothing more was forthcoming. She looked at her phone and dropped it in between the bars of a sewer grate.
If Sabrina had been in possession of superhuman powers, she might, by lifting her head and turning it slightly to the left, have recognized a face in a taxi parked by the kerb a hundred metres away. The taxi driver, who had sworn at her an hour ago in Corso Monforte, had watched the arrests from his car. Five minutes earlier the last of the four-man strong surveillance unit from Naples had met with the same fate. The Ford Mondeo’s driver had been stopped in a side street to Via Conservatorio where he had been driving around hoping to find Assistant Public Prosecutor Sabrina D’Avalos again. He had had the presence of mind to hit the speed dial for the coordinating surveillance leader in the taxi and mutter a few words into the mobile before his side window was smashed and he was dragged out by his hair.
The taxi driver then called Urs Savelli.
‘… Yes?’
‘It all went belly up,’ the taxi driver said.
‘Why?’
The driver lit a cigarette.
‘I’m not sure,’ he said. ‘I think she must have been on to us for a long time. Since yesterday. She must have alerted them. It was the GIS. There’s just me left now.’
‘One young woman against four armed men,’ the voice said. ‘The maths simply doesn’t add up, my friend.’
The taxi driver closed his eyes. He would have preferred a string of curses and threats to Savelli’s flat, monotone whisper.
‘I know, signore. What would you like me to do?’
‘Did she drive directly from Naples to Milan?’
‘She made a stop in a mountain town along the way. Castellarano.’
‘What did she do there?’
‘Nothing, signore. Looked at the shops and buildings, that kind of thing. Sightseeing.’
‘Did she speak to anyone?’
‘No.’
‘No one at all?’
‘Well, to some woman in a park. They exchanged a few words. It didn’t look like they knew each other.’
‘Do you have pictures of the woman?’
‘Of course.’
The taxi driver wished, more than he had ever wished for anything, that the pictures of the woman and the assistant public prosecutor in the park in Castellarano were good and clear.
‘Do you think you’re capable of staying put until I or other competent people turn up in Milan?’
‘I think so. Thank you.’
‘Don’t thank me yet.’
CHAPTER 16
Lake Garda
The wind changed direction on the hour. Rather than rise along the lake towards its northern shore, it turned 180° and started blowing towards the southern shore of Lake Garda. The water was choppy with white horses playing on the surface. Long waves with foaming crests rolled down the middle of the lake. These white horses merged into larger groups as small waves started to form, following the wind.
An unbroken band of heavy clouds lay across the mountains, which only a moment ago had been unobstructed: the föhn wind had arrived, the sun had disappeared and someone had switched on the colossal weather machine of the Alps.
From the old stone house outside the town of Saló, halfway along Lake Garda’s western shore, he had an unhindered and fascinating view of the changing weather that played out in the valley of the lake every day.
The rain started battering the windows.
Urs Savelli put down the mobile phone, looked at the thick anthropological book that lay open on the long table and tried to concentrate on the rapid steps that characterized a Sorgin Dantza from the town of Lasarte-Oria. It was a monster of a Basque dance: fierce, forceful and acrobatic. It demanded a certain level of concentration, and that had just been broken. Following a single, young and inexperienced assistant public prosecutor wasn’t a difficult task, one would have thought.
‘
No idiots,’ Don Francesco had said.
It was easier said than done.
Savelli sat on the table, dangling his legs over the edge. His heart was no longer in the dance. He was wearing the traditional white Basque dance costume with a red cummerbund. Under Generalissimo Franco a red cummerbund, proof that you had killed at least one member of the Guardia Civil, meant life imprisonment – if you were caught – or a bullet to the back of the head.
‘Castellarano,’ he muttered to himself.
Lucia Forlani had been from Castellarano. And it was hardly a coincidence that the irritating assistant public prosecutor had stopped in the mountain town.
He had never been there himself, but seemed to remember it featuring in Napoleon’s campaign.
*
The house, like all of Savelli’s secret homes, had been chosen with care. It was built at an elevation of eight hundred metres and the metre-thick stone walls ensured a pleasant temperature in both summer and winter. His years of isolation meant Urs Savelli had poor tolerance of temperature extremes. The basement prison cell seemed to have installed a thermostat in his brain that switched off his thinking when the temperature rose above 23°C or fell to below 10°C.
He got up, went over to the windows and traced the journey of a raindrop down the pane with his fingertip. He looked out across the lake, which was almost invisible now. His claustrophobia stirred and he started a series of breathing exercises. Spending three years in a cell measuring 1.5 metres by 2.5 metres had also instilled in Savelli an inextinguishable need to have an unbroken view to the horizon.
He didn’t know how old he was. His best guess was that he had been in the cell from the age of seventeen until he was around twenty years old.
Urs Savelli’s earliest memory was waking up because he was cold. Snow covering an empty landscape outside windows he was barely tall enough to look out of, a naked room and a kitchen with a table, a bench and a stove, which had been cold to the touch. It must have gone out long ago. On the bench lay a skinny woman dressed in black. Old far beyond her years. He had tugged at her, tried to wake her up, but her arm was as stiff as the branch of a tree.
When the Dead Awaken Page 10