Sanctuary

by Luca D'Andrea

  Wegener stared at him for a long time, feeling his veins bursting with rage.

  There was only one answer.

  “A puppet. Of the Consortium.”

  “So tell me: who do you have to thank for the fact that you’re still breathing?”

  “The Consortium.”

  “That’s right, the Consortium.”

  The lawyer took a business card from his leather wallet and placed it on the mahogany coffee table between him and Wegener. It had no name or address on it.

  Only a telephone number.

  When he next spoke, the lawyer’s voice was once more calm and reassuring.

  For a moment, Wegener felt scared.

  “It’s a voicemail. Leave a message. Arrange a time and place to meet. A safe place of your choice. Go there and wait. The person the voicemail belongs to might already be there, or he might keep you waiting for hours. Even days. He’s very cautious. You just hang on and wait.”

  Wegener turned the business card over in his hand. “Who is this person?”

  The lawyer stood up and buttoned his elegant jacket. “They call him the Trusted Man.”

  “And this man is . . . ?”

  “He’s not a man,” the lawyer said, looking him up and down. “He’s a weapon.” He checked his watch and pulled a face. Then he added, “And he’s also your last chance to prove to the Consortium that your goodwill can be relied on.”

  “Is he a hitman?”

  The lawyer proffered his hand.

  22

  Was it night or day?

  The blizzard had not let up. Marlene woke with a start, with an ache in her head and a feeling of nausea that made her gasp for a couple of minutes before she was able to slip out from under the blankets. It took her ages before she was in a state to go down into the Stube.

  Keller had been up for a while and was smoking his pipe, watching the embers in the hearth.

  Marlene smiled at him and, insisting he remain seated, asked where she could find the coffee, the coffee pot, the sugar, the cups and the teaspoons. There was no sugar, Keller said with a touch of embarrassment, and the cups were chipped, but Marlene still managed to make some strong, invigorating coffee.

  “I buy it in the village,” Keller explained. “Along with bananas, cartridges for my rifle and medicine for the kids.”

  “Bananas?”

  He laughed. “I love bananas.”

  “And I love your Vulpendingen, Simon Keller,” she said, clearing the cups and indicating the stuffed animals. “They’re amazing. You could sell them and buy quite a few bananas with the proceeds.” She laughed. “I’m sure people would queue up to buy them.”

  “Don’t you find them scary?”

  “Why should I? I think they’re funny.”

  One in particular, which she hadn’t noticed the previous evening: a marmot with large bat wings sprouting from its hindquarters. The marmot was bent forward as if about to perform a somersault, and there was something childish and gross about the whole thing that made her giggle.

  “Elisabeth found them funny, too. I used to make them for her. Voter Luis would say I’d end up being better than him at making them. Do you know the story of the Vulpendingen?”

  Leaving the cups in the sink, Marlene turned, puzzled. “Elisabeth?”

  “My sister. She died when she was little.”

  “How stupid of me, I shouldn’t have—”

  Keller gestured with his hand. “It’s alright, city girl. I loved Elisabeth, she was a beautiful child. And she was good. But many years have passed.”

  Marlene bit her lip. “I’ve been too nosey, I didn’t . . .”

  “So you don’t want to know why the Bau’rn used to waste their time making Vulpendingen?”

  “Of course I want to know.”

  “It’s a really funny story,” Keller began, filling his meerschaum pipe and lighting it. “Many years ago, South Tyrol was hunting land. There were forests – many more than there are now. The Bavarian aristocracy liked these mountains and woods, but above all they liked good beer and the fact that their women hated travelling.”

  A coil of smoke rose from his pipe.

  “Imagine all these counts and marquises arriving in their fine carriages, with their rifles and all the rest. They’d shoot deer, they’d shoot bears and they’d drink. After a while, though, they’d start to get bored. Beer wasn’t enough, and they’d hunted all there was to hunt. So they started saying: Why do we travel so many kilometres to go after the same animals we could just as easily kill in the woods behind our castles?”

  “Because of their wives.”

  Keller slapped the table with his hand. “But they could have sent their wives away from their castles and done the same thing there as they were doing here. Don’t you think?”

  “I imagine so.”

  “A peasant heard them and realised that if the Bavarian counts stopped coming down to South Tyrol, there would be trouble. They brought a lot of money with them, they were wealthy. So he waited until they were full of beer and started telling them about a terrible creature that prowled the mountains.”

  “The Vulpendingen!” Marlene exclaimed, amused.

  “A very rare creature that only left its lair on the night of the full moon. And only when the night of the full moon coincided with the day of the devil.”

  Marlene frowned. “What’s the day of the devil?”

  “Friday.”

  “But . . .”

  “The wealthy Bavarians weren’t taken in by the story either. So the peasant, who was much more cunning than them, produced one of those” – Keller pointed to the forward-leaning marmot – “and offered to be their guide. He took them all over the mountains until they were exhausted and then said, ‘There it is! Shoot! Shoot!’ But they could never manage to hit one. It was a real challenge, and the rumour spread. More and more noblemen arrived. And since they didn’t want to look bad in front of their friends . . .”

  “They started buying Vulpendingen in secret.”

  “So that they could take them back to their castles as trophies, while continuing to shower the peasants and hunters with gold.”

  Marlene clapped her hands. “You said Voter Luis had the gift of the gab, but you, Simon Keller, are his worthy son. I hadn’t heard a story told so well in years.”

  “It’s just something silly to pass the time,” Keller protested. “Actually, it’s time to feed the kids then put the water on to boil.”

  He laid down his pipe and stood up.

  “I can help you, if you like,” Marlene said.

  Keller looked her up and down. “It’s not a job for a city girl.”

  “But I’m not a city girl. I was born and raised in a maso. It was much further downhill than yours, but I can milk a cow, make butter, wring a hen’s neck, and I know just how smelly pigs are.”

  Keller did not smile, but looked at her with his piercing eyes. “You have the hands of a city girl.”

  “All that was a long time ago, when I was a child. Then life took me to other places. But I remember everything my mother and father taught me.”

  “Pardon my insolence, but to me you’re still a child. A child who needs to build up her strength.”

  This time, Marlene did not give in. “I learned many things in the maso, Simon Keller. Above all, I learned to show gratitude. Please, let me help you.”

  And that was how Marlene got to know the kids.

  23

  It was more than a wind.

  The Wehen was a wind that gathered snow, turned it to ice and used it as a sharp weapon. Not for nothing was the word Wehen used as a synonym for “distress.”

  The Wehen greeted Marlene and Simon Keller.

  Once out of the Stube, they descended the unsteady wooden staircase. It led them to ground level, which the snow had raised by at least a metre and which Marlene saw was very steep and treeless.

  They walked quickly, she close behind him, hugging the wall of the maso and huddling
as much as they could to shield themselves a little from the intensity of the storm. Halfway around the house, they paused to allow Keller to clear the icy mounds outside a small wooden door. They had arrived.

  Marlene wrinkled her nose. It was very warm and very smelly. It’s a pigsty, she reminded herself. It can’t very well smell of lavender.

  Her parents had kept pigs, too, and Marlene remembered their cries whenever her father bled them to death for speck and ham to sell at the market. Even if she covered her ears, those bloodcurdling screams, sounding almost human, haunted her for days. Her father noticed, and, when the time came to slaughter the pigs, he would send her to Tante Frida and Onkel Fritz to spare her nightmares.

  Later, the pigs disappeared. They were too expensive and did not bring in much money. A small van spluttering exhaust fumes arrived and took them away.

  From then on, her parents used the old pigsty as a hen coop, but even though they constantly poured quicklime over the place to disinfect it the stench remained.

  “Wait,” Keller said, going down a steep staircase until he vanished into the darkness. “I don’t want you to hurt yourself.”

  Marlene did not have to wait long. The light came on almost immediately, along with the grunting of the pigs and blasts of a sickly sweet stench. Then she heard Keller’s voice. “Come, the kids are anxious to meet you.”

  Nine steps down.

  Marlene had thought that all masi were built the same way but Keller’s was an exception, first because of the absence of a clock, and now because of its pigsty.

  It was not so much a matter of its unplastered walls, built with big, coarsely cut stones, or the depth of the sty, or even the beams on the ceiling, so thick and dark that they also seemed to have been carved from rock.

  It was the overall dimensions that were astonishing. The pigsty was huge.

  “Look,” Keller said, raising the lamp above his head to show her the inscription he had mentioned to her earlier: 1333. “See? I wasn’t lying, the maso is very old.”

  Marlene looked around, bewildered. “I’ve never seen a pigsty like this before.”

  Keller beamed. “And you’ve never seen such beautiful pigs, my dear.”

  Now that her eyes had grown accustomed to the dim light cast by the lamp, Marlene noticed that the place was divided in three. Behind her, there were the nine steps that led outside and some sacks of feed thrown against the wall. To her left and right, she could see the pigs rooting about in wooden pens. Before her stood an iron grille, the bottom rising out of the straw-covered rock floor and the top embedded in the ceiling, forming a kind of cage.

  A little door was cut into the metal, fastened with a sturdy padlock. The inside of the cage was shrouded in darkness.

  Seen one, seen them all? Marlene shook her head. Like hell she had.

  “Meet the kids,” Keller said, pouring the contents of one of the buckets into the trough in the left-hand pen. “These are the boys. See? I have to feed them first, before the girls, otherwise they start screaming. And you should hear them scream. Boys, don’t be rude, say hello to our guest.”

  The three boars, so fat that their eyes were practically covered in lard, did not deign to give her a second glance. Marlene went closer to take a better look. They were strange. Just like the females in the other pen, the males were spotted. There were large black spots all over their bodies. This, too, was new to her.

  Piebald pigs?

  “Are they sick?” she asked Keller.

  “A normal pink pig can’t survive at such a high altitude,” he explained. “The ancient peoples bred dark pigs that were stronger and could survive the cold, but they didn’t provide enough meat. That was a big problem, so they decided to try cross-breeding. That’s why you get the black marks. Come closer, they aren’t dangerous. Allow me to introduce Franz and the Doctor. The shyer one is Kurt.”

  Marlene blinked. “The Doctor?”

  “That’s right.” Keller pointed at two little dark marks around the animal’s eyes. “Those are his glasses. He’s a bit unfriendly, he thinks he knows more than anyone else. Kurt and Franz, on the other hand, are smugglers. Look at Kurt’s paws. See how black they are up to the knee? He’s wearing cowboy boots. Don’t laugh, he’s shy but also extremely vain, so you might hurt his feelings. Anyway, he and Franz are partners in crime. Both outlaws.” He put the empty bucket down on the floor and smiled. “They smuggle cigarettes. Don’t you believe me?” He took a handful of tobacco from his supply and dropped it inside the pen. The two pigs rushed to it, grunting and squealing. “They love it.”

  Marlene couldn’t help laughing. Down here, Simon Keller seemed different. Less formal, happier. As if he were more at ease with animals than with humans. His eyes glistened like those of a child at Christmas time.

  “And these are the girls,” he said, turning to the pen on the right. “Mountain girls, much better behaved than their friends over there.”

  Indeed, when he tipped the bucket over the trough, they approached less frantically, although they did not exactly stand on ceremony.

  Marlene decided to play along.

  “Do these young ladies have names?”

  “This one’s Maria, like the mother of Our Lord. That one with the black eye is Birgit, she likes to get into scraps” – here, he jokingly mimed a punch in the face – “but she’s a distinguished lady. See her well-cared-for nails? And that one’s Helene, she’s a bit fussy. The one over there at the back is Gertrud. She was so funny when she was born, she used to love running up and down the pen and rolling in the hay. Now she’s old. See how tame she is?”

  Heedless of the chatter, Gertrud had her snout in the trough, lapping up Keller’s slop. She seemed focused rather than tame.

  “But don’t even think about letting her out. She ran away once. Really. She climbed those steps as fast as a weasel, and out she ran! Out into the mountains. I didn’t think I’d ever see her again. If she’d gone into the woods, she might have found food and turned wild, but up in the mountains? There’s nothing there but rock and ice. But guess who came back home three days later and still on top form?”

  “Gertrud the fugitive.”

  “Precisely!” Keller said. “Gertrud the fugitive. She’s the oldest here. I should have turned her into speck and sausages years ago, but I can’t bring myself to do it. It would have been like slitting the prodigal son’s throat. Not exactly the right thing to—”

  A gentle jingling sound.

  The pigs fell silent.

  Keller broke off halfway through his sentence and turned to the grille.

  To the darkness.

  The jingling sounded again. A soft peal.

  “Who’s that?” Marlene whispered.

  Not what. Who.

  “Oh, her,” Keller said. “She’s my little Lissy.”

  24

  Keller undid his greatcoat, which he had kept buttoned until now despite the stifling heat in the pigsty. Beneath it, he was wearing a canvas bag over his shoulder. A hunter’s haversack. He unfastened the buckles and took out a plastic bag. It was stuffed full and looked as if it must weigh a good few kilos.

  He asked Marlene to hold it. “Little Lissy is spoilt,” he said. “She’s a real princess, doesn’t like the same food as the others.”

  From one of the shelves, he took a bowl the size of a basin. Marlene stared in disbelief. The bowl wasn’t made of steel, but of silver. Simon rubbed it with a cloth until it shone in the light of the oil lamp. Then he took the bag from her hands and emptied its contents – a repulsive-looking gloop – into the bowl and carefully stirred it until it became a homogenous mash that reminded Marlene of slightly runny polenta. Finally he rinsed his hands in the pigs’ drinking trough, dried them on his greatcoat and slapped himself on the thigh. Only then did Marlene speak.

  “Lissy?” she said. She had instinctively dropped her voice.

  “Like the Emperor’s princess,” Keller said cheerfully.

  “Sissi?”


  “Lissy,” he corrected her as he approached the iron grille with the bowl in his hand. “We say Lissy, not Sissi.”

  Marlene had never thought about it, not even when she had seen the film. Yet the Bau’r was right. Sissi was Romy Schneider, all made-up and captured on celluloid. Maybe at the Habsburg court, the real princess, the one who was assassinated, was also called that. But here, in South Tyrol, they spoke dialect. And in dialect, the diminutive “Sissi” was mangled into “Lissy.”

  “Lissy,” Marlene repeated.

  Keller put the bowl on the ground, took from his canvas bag a steel glove, the kind used by butchers to avoid hurting themselves, and put it on. He opened and closed his fist. Satisfied, he loosened the top button of his shirt, the only piece of white in his clothing, and took from around his neck a thin chain with a key at the end. He inserted it in the lock of the little door and opened it.

  The door opened with a squeak (Nibble, nibble, little mouse! Who is nibbling at my house?) that set Marlene’s teeth on edge.

  Keller put the bowl with the slop inside the grille and closed the door again. The key disappeared under the shirt, the glove into the haversack and the haversack under the greatcoat.

  But he had not finished yet.

  From a pocket in his waistcoat, where a gentleman would have kept his watch, he took out a little bell and rang it. The sound was a twin to the jingling that had interrupted their conversation. Keller began to murmur, “Sweet Lissy, little Lissy . . .”

  Suddenly, the darkness turned liquid. Marlene felt weak. She staggered backwards until she brushed against the pen with the males, but they did not react. They were silent, their snouts pointed in the direction of the metal grille.

  Marlene coughed, but in vain.

  “Sweet Lissy . . .”

  The light from the oil lamp could no longer hold back the darkness, which spread across the walls, causing them to sway as if they were the curtains in front of a stage.