The Sleeping Nymph, page 27
There was a second’s hesitation at the other end of the line.
“What do you think?”
Massimo twitched with worry.
“I mean has anything strange happened, anything that might have scared you?” he added hastily. “Has anyone been bothering you, for example?”
There was another silence.
“No one’s been bothering me,” Elena replied laconically. “And your son’s fine, too, in case you were wondering.”
She hung up without further word. Massimo stood there with the phone at his ear for a moment longer, then swore.
Lately, he seemed to do everything wrong. It had become so difficult to pick the right words to say and sometimes they were impossible to speak aloud.
Of course he’d been thinking about his son. He thought about his son every time he breathed.
Of course he loved him. That was why he couldn’t keep him close.
Another shiver coursed through him: the feeling that danger was near.
60
The glucose meter gave its reading, like a modern-day sibyl divining the future through blood, and the insulin pen’s microscopic needle injected the medicine into the layer of fat beneath her skin.
Teresa stared down at her thighs, which for over a decade now had been the battleground she carried with her every day. Thousands of invisible perforations had turned the skin there into living armor.
Every wound is a severing of the flesh, but when the laceration heals, the skin over it grows thicker and harder than it was before. The biology of regeneration always includes an initial stage of inflammation followed by a remodeling. Over time, Teresa’s body had changed with her: it had become heavier and denser, and wider, too, settling like an anchor with every step she took. It might have looked awkward, but to her it was perfectly congenial, the physical manifestation of her continued existence in the world and an affirmation of survival.
But not all wounds were the same. The tissues of the heart, of her heart, remained frayed. The cells of her soul hadn’t been able to seal the chasm there. So she had come out of her past changed but not healed.
Now, though, something had shifted. A fresh breeze was blowing through the breach and somehow, after everything, she felt she was being born anew.
The change in her life had a name she rarely used: she preferred to call him Marini, like a teacher addressing her pupil.
It hadn’t been easy to share her past with him, but in a way, the decision had freed her: for once, she had seen herself through someone else’s eyes and she had felt compassion. Perhaps she would never forgive herself, but the guilt, at least, had become more bearable.
Her grandfather had taught her that a tree in the last summer of its life, sensing the end, will produce more fruit than usual in a final effort to guarantee the survival of the species. Like that tree, Teresa, too, was ready, before she disappeared, to give her young team everything she had in her, every last crumb of knowledge she had laboriously and passionately gathered over the course of her long career.
Teresa got ready for her solitary evening ritual: she chose the music, she dimmed the lights. When she’d walked in an hour ago, the house had seemed unfamiliar: she had felt an inexplicable sense of disorientation, as if the coordinates of her life had been altered without warning, knocking her off-balance. But the feeling had soon passed and she had been grateful for the return to normality.
She poured herself a glass of wine. It was a deep ruby red, with notes of blackberry, though Teresa had yet to find any bottle that could match for fragrance the wine her grandfather used to make in his own vineyard in the countryside. Or perhaps it was the sweetness of the memories she associated with that wine that couldn’t be matched.
She swirled the contents of the glass around and breathed in the aromas they released. Leaning against the kitchen counter, she took a sip and pondered what to make for dinner.
Every utensil on the kitchen counter and in the cupboards now bore its own name tag, as did the ingredients in her pantry. A piece of paper stuck to the fridge listed all the things she needed to do before she went to bed. Checking she’d turned the gas off was top of the list.
They were all points on a map designed for Teresa’s mind, marking out a clear path so that she wouldn’t lose her way—or at least defer that moment for as long as possible.
“All you can do is resist,” she muttered to herself without a trace of self-pity.
Her gaze fell on the immaculate dining table. Its white lacquered surface gleamed without a single scratch to mar it. Teresa couldn’t even remember the last time she’d eaten a meal on it. Usually, she used the low table in front of the living room sofa. So she knew immediately that something was wrong.
A hair, black and bristly, and roughly ten inches in length, lay lengthways across the middle of the polished surface, curling slightly, nervously inwards.
It wasn’t supposed to be there: it wasn’t Teresa’s, nor had she had any guests over to whom it could conceivably belong—unless she’d forgotten. More importantly, it seemed to have been placed there intentionally.
Teresa didn’t touch it.
She remembered the feeling she’d had when she had first walked in: the air inside had been different, carried an unusual scent. Beyond the smell of her belongings, of the plants that kept her company, of books, of the fabric of her clothes, there had been something else pooling underneath, a foreign, vaguely subterranean odor. Her subconscious had picked up on it.
Someone had invaded her territory while she was out. And perhaps they were still here.
She thought apprehensively of her service pistol. Had she locked it away in her desk drawer, or was it still in its holster, hanging from the coat rack, where anyone might reach it?
She couldn’t remember.
She put her glass down. It clinked on the counter, and that was the only sound inside the house. That was when she realized: the music had stopped.
She went to the living room, her steps heavy with fear. She thought perhaps it was her illness making her paranoid; then she saw the hi-fi was switched on but the CD player had been put on pause, its red LED blinking at her like a warning.
For a moment, she almost hoped the early symptoms of her Alzheimer’s had suddenly quickened and that the intruder who’d left its mark in the place where she felt safest might actually be her.
Her gun holster, dangling from the hook by the door, was empty.
Teresa peered into the darkness of the adjacent room: her study. There was her desk, her bag with her mobile phone inside and—possibly—her gun.
It’s got to be in there, she told herself, but it was hard to remember the specifics of such a routine gesture, one she’d repeated daily for decades now. Had she really put the gun safely inside its drawer when she’d gotten in not even an hour ago? Or was she remembering something she’d done the day before—or the one before that?
She ran through the gestures she’d need to make to locate and turn on the light switch. She would have to stretch her arm inside the dark room, not too far and just off to the right, and her fingers were sure to find their mark, but those few moments would be sufficient to make her vulnerable.
She lifted her arm but stopped halfway.
She turned around.
Now she was sure she wasn’t alone. She had heard the intruder—not inside her study but hiding somewhere else in the house.
“I’m not afraid of you,” she yelled.
There was a reply.
It was only a rustle, but it rang crisply in the otherwise total silence, as clear as a shadow upon a sunlit wall.
“Show yourself,” Teresa challenged it.
Slowly, she pulled the door to her study shut, locked it and pocketed the key.
In the corridor, the intruder replied again with the dull thud of a soft object hitting a hard surface.
It didn’t reveal itself, but neither did it flee. It stayed with her. It wanted this contact; that was why it had come.
Teresa took a few steps forward and finally saw something, little more than a slightly darker spot on the floor, an absence of light upon the parquet tiles. She could picture the intruder inside her spare bathroom, standing motionless in the glare of the street lamps filtering through the window, a dark, indecipherable mass blocking the light.
I’m not afraid, Teresa repeated, though only to herself this time.
“Show yourself,” she called out.
She would let it make the next move; she wanted to find out if her instincts were right. Something told her that it wasn’t here to hurt her, otherwise it would have done so already.
The shadow shifted and in that moment, the doorbell rang. Teresa started, and so did the intruder, knocking things over as it fled.
Teresa entered the bathroom and saw that it was empty, the window flung open. She looked outside and saw Marini running toward her.
“I saw him!” he shouted. “Are you all right?”
She gave him a quick nod and he disappeared around the back of the house.
Teresa cursed her body, which wouldn’t allow her to climb through the window and be what she still so desperately wanted to be: a real cop.
She hurried to the front door and stepped out into the yard, then ran toward the garden wall, covered in ivy, which faced the road. Nothing moved, save for a dog howling at the end of the street. There was no trace of the intruder, or of Marini. The thought of him giving chase—alone—to a possible killer made her anxious.
You don’t know that he’s actually the killer.
But she was lying to herself. She knew it was him. She could feel it.
Then someone leapt over the low wall and narrowly missed crashing into her. Teresa nearly screamed. It was Marini.
“I lost him,” he told her, straightening his jacket and shaking off twigs and leaves. He was out of breath and looked furious. “I made it over the wall just in time to see the car go. I couldn’t get a proper look at it. I lost sight of it after the turn.”
Teresa pulled herself together.
“Why are you here?” she asked him.
“Someone came by my place, too.”
“If it was the killer,” Teresa replied, “his purpose was to pit his ego against ours. Come in, I need to show you something.”
Marini followed her inside and frowned when she pointed out the hair laid out on the table.
“It’s staging. I’m sure of it,” she said before he could protest. “He put that there to send me a message, though I’m not sure what. I know it might seem a bold claim, and I know I have no evidence to prove it, but I promise you that hair did not get there by accident.”
He looked at her.
“You don’t need to convince me,” he said. “I know. I’ll call headquarters.”
Teresa nodded. She had to write all of this down. They had turned a corner in their investigation: the killer had tried to communicate with them, which meant he had a story to tell, and one that must mean a great deal to him.
But the fact that things had taken a drastically unexpected turn was confirmed a few minutes later, when she realized there was no trace of her diary anywhere. All that she found in her bag was the last page she’d written on, a brief note in which she’d tried to sketch out a basic profile of the killer.
It was as if the page had been left there to make a mockery of her attempts: you have no idea, it whispered to her, and yet it’s so obvious.
Teresa scrunched it up in her fist. She understood now what the thud she’d heard earlier had been: the sound of a notebook being slammed shut.
“He took my diary,” she said.
Marini paused in the middle of a sentence and covered his phone with the palm of his hand.
“What did you say?”
“He took my diary.”
Marini’s expression hardened. A few short remarks later, he ended his phone call.
“We’ll get it back. Don’t worry.”
Teresa didn’t doubt it, but she thought by then it might be too late: too late to rescue her memories and preserve the secret of what was happening to her. It gave her another reason to hunt this killer, but now he was equipped with a powerful weapon to use against her. He might even think he’d dealt her a fatal blow. Whoever had taken her diary hadn’t done so by accident; they knew exactly how important it was to Teresa. Which could only mean one thing: they had been watching her all along.
Marini took out his car keys.
“They’re sending a team over to gather evidence,” he told her, “but we can’t sit around doing nothing. We need to go back to the conservatory to do some research and we need support. Parisi and de Carli are on their way.”
Teresa frowned. Parisi and de Carli had only just come off their shifts—as had Teresa and Marini. Marini guessed what she was thinking.
“Don’t tell them to go back home. They won’t. And no, I didn’t run it by the district attorney.” He gave her a reassuring smile. “They’re coming because of you. I am here because of you.”
61
The night was fading into a perfectly clear dawn. The creamy marble facades of Trieste shone like mother of pearl under the gleaming sky. A couple of squawking seagulls were out already, gliding over the unruffled surface of the water. A ship swayed on the horizon; behind it, the blurred silhouettes of oil tankers rose like mirages on a backdrop of cobalt blue.
The library of the conservatory was already filled with light and the section that housed the old archives was abuzz with activity, the rustle of paper like a labored breathing rising from the piles of ancient tomes. The smell of paper, of expensive wood and of the silk that covered the walls mixed with the everyday scent of coffee from the vending machine in the corridor.
Luka Mendler had brought in his most zealous students for a rather special treasure hunt. Which of the institute’s former pupils had possessed a talent as prodigious as Giuseppe Tartini’s? Which name, out of hundreds, belonged to the only man capable of producing that unparalleled execution of the “Devil’s Trill’?
The answer lay buried somewhere among those thousands of pages.
Marini, de Carli and Parisi, too, were sitting with the students and poring over piles of books. Teresa glanced at them every now and then and felt deeply indebted. She knew they were here for her, and not just because Marini had told her so: she could see it in their eyes, feel it in the rage coursing through their bodies. They were there because they wanted to protect her.
They had just heard from headquarters: the intruder had left no trace at all in her house. He had been prudent. Even in his escape, he had made sure not to step outside the pavestones. He hadn’t left a single mark.
Except for the hair. Parri was already having it tested, but this would take time and Teresa sensed they didn’t have much of that left.
The killer had also splashed a bucket of paint the color of blood over Marini’s front door.
It was a perplexingly incongruous detail.
You don’t rip a man’s heart out of his chest but then use paint to try to scare the people who are hunting you down.
They seemed like the actions of two entirely separate personalities, the former altogether brutal, the latter only superficially cruel. But what were the chances that the murder, the blood on Marini’s door and the stranger’s visit to her home were unconnected incidents?
“I think I’ve found him!” someone yelled, and the cry spread through the room like the burst of excitement that had generated it.
The young woman who’d spoken up was now beckoning Mendler over. Teresa joined the principal and together they read through the page the woman was pointing at.
It recorded a date and the details of a special function: July 29 1943, concert for the fascist authorities. It was the date of Mussolini’s sixtieth birthday and this was the way the local mayor, who’d been appointed by the regime, had seen fit to celebrate the occasion. A student of the conservatory had performed a solo: Tartini’s Violin Sonata in G Minor.
A shiver ran down the back of Teresa’s neck as she read the student’s name: Carlo Alberto Morandini, born in 1928. He would have been seventeen when Aniza disappeared.
Later, someone had crossed his name off the page in an act of damnatio memoriae, though this hadn’t erased his existence entirely. A note in the margin of the page explained what had happened: in September that same year, Carlo Alberto Morandini had joined the partisan resistance.
62
Carlo Alberto Morandini, code name “Cam”—Cam, or Kam, another name for Ham, son of Noah, who cursed his son and all of his descendants. Cam had been dead for fifteen years.
Teresa had anticipated this, but still it felt like crossing the finish line too early. All that she could hope to gather now were the memories of those who had known him best.
But the woman she had come to see, huddled before her in a matted wool sweater, put a swift end to her hopes.
“I barely knew the man,” she muttered distractedly, folding and unfolding the edge of her sleeve over her forearm. “He was a stranger who came home occasionally and sometimes remembered to look at me. But it wasn’t often he did that.”
Teresa pitied her.
“He was still your father,” she said.
Maddalena’s eyes darted up to hers, signaling anger—not at Teresa, but rather at that missing parent, the absence of his love clearly still a heavy cross to bear.
“I can tell you what the back of his head looked like better than I can describe his face. I can hardly remember the sound of his voice,” the woman continued. “Even on his deathbed, he wasn’t interested in seeing me. My son was with him, though: the male descendent, the only person he seemed to care about.” She lit a cigarette, her hands shaking. “He used to take him away for days on end.”
