Flowers over the Inferno, page 10
“Parisi, look into it tomorrow morning,” said Teresa as she pointed at the suspects’ names on the files. She was breathing with difficulty. “Just an informal chat to start with.”
“Why wouldn’t his wife mention any of this?” asked Marini.
Teresa lifted her head to look at him, but couldn’t seem to respond. Her mouth felt sticky. She felt everyone’s eyes on her.
“Superintendent?”
Faces. Nameless faces everywhere.
Her confusion mingled with embarrassment. Someone offered her a glass of water. He kept calling her Superintendent, and he seemed concerned. Teresa’s instincts told her she knew him, but his name just wouldn’t come to her.
She stuck the temples of her glasses in her mouth and began to chew on them. It was a habit she often turned to, but it had suddenly acquired a new purpose: to buy her some time and conceal her distress in the hope that the words would soon start flowing again.
What the hell is his name?
It didn’t work.
“Excuse me,” she said, getting to her feet. Her words sounded like a disjointed murmur.
She took refuge in the bathroom, closing the door behind her and locking it shut. She’d found it without having to ask for directions; that must mean she knew the place.
She calmed her breathing and looked at her reflection in the mirror: all she saw was a scared old lady.
It’s just a moment of confusion, she told herself.
But it was a lie. She knew exactly what was happening to her.
-21-
At that time of year the valley looked like a termite mound battered by torrential rains: everything churned with frantic activity, and there was an orderly back and forth of movement across the slopes. But unlike insects—burrowing deep into their nests during winter—these creatures were not hampered by the cold. From his vantage point, they resembled colorful dots scurrying over the snow.
They looked like him, but they were different, too. He often wondered what use they were. Termites were equipped with powerful jaws they used to process organic waste, clearing the way for new shoots; if not for their hard work, the forest would suffocate and die.
But these creatures devoured their own kind; they fed on the vital energy of their weaker peers. They had a parasitic relationship with other members of their own herd, something that fell outside the laws of nature, and left an unpleasant taste in the mouth—like grass that is meant for sunny flatlands but ends up growing in the shade.
He studied them. He listened to how they associated certain sounds to particular objects and he imitated them. He learned through experience. He entered their homes.
The woman moved from room to room, attending to her chores. She hadn’t noticed his presence. He followed her, ducking behind a corner every time she turned around, breathing in her scent, observing her body.
When he lost interest in her, he climbed up the stairs to the floor above. There was a baby playing in his cot. Their eyes met, and the child smiled. He looked healthy and well fed; he smelled of milk.
He walked past the baby, finding himself drawn to the bedcovers: they were thick, soft, and warm, like the fleece of a sheep. He pulled them toward himself, and in doing so woke up the cat that had been curled up on the bed. It hissed and bolted from the room.
The child shrieked in delight. The mother called its name from the stairs. When she walked into the room, she picked up her son and sat on the bed, cooing at the baby in soft, tender tones. He heard a rustle of fabric, followed by the sound of enthusiastic suckling. The mother had a mellifluous voice, like birdsong in spring.
He could hear her moving above him. The bed creaked beneath her weight and the weight of the baby she held in her arms.
Something fell to the floor, and she called it by its name. “Toy,” he mimicked, but she had begun singing again, and her voice drowned out his whisper. He had learned a new word.
While he waited, he looked at the naked sliver of skin visible through the gap between the fabric that covered her legs and her feet. It was pink and smooth. He could sense its warmth and felt a strong urge to touch it.
He brought his finger close but stopped himself.
From the door, standing completely still on the threshold, the cat stared at him with yellow, frightened eyes.
-22-
A fist between her teeth.
Teresa had spent years biting her fists to muffle her crying. She had found it an effective technique for silencing her despair when it wouldn’t do for it to be heard. It used to happen quite often—in a past life that she could never quite leave behind. She had set fire to that version of herself in a pyre of old photographs, but she was not deluded enough to think she could ever be truly free of it. All she had ever hoped for was that she would never again have to suffer so intensely, and it seemed that life had granted her wish: the pain was no longer her enemy, simply a part of who she was. Almost like an old friend. A burden she had to bear in exchange for those select memories she wanted to hold on to.
A fist between her teeth now, and she was biting hard. She had turned the tap on so that the water pouring into the sink would cloak the sound of a panic she couldn’t control. She studied her reflection in the mirror, desperate to record every single detail of what she was going through—as if by facing the moment head-on she could somehow force it to end sooner. She had hoped the wave of fear and misery would soon pass, leaving her spent but free, just with another bruise on her heart. Instead it seemed to last forever.
She looked into her own eyes in the mirror, trying to feel less alone, to witness her own disorientation and confront it. She suddenly felt a profound compassion for herself; nobody else could feel that for her. The person in the mirror had lost her bearings, and though she loved herself with a tenderness granted by age and experience, she could not be saved, not this time. It was no longer her choice.
Though she refused to put a name to what was happening to her, she did wonder what the future would hold for her, how resilient she would need to be to face it, and how much more time she might be allowed.
Teresa finally removed her hand from her mouth. Her face was a mess. She splashed it with cold water and dabbed at it with wet paper towels. She couldn’t allow anyone to know about the terror that had gripped her; she couldn’t stand pity. She had to mask her confusion and pray that a merciful god would ensure there wouldn’t be another episode anytime soon.
There was an investigation to attend to, and a team to lead. There were victims clamoring for justice, and there was a killer to catch. The moment of weakness she had allowed herself was over.
-23-
“I wouldn’t, if I were you.”
Simone De Carli was eyeing him with his arms crossed over his chest. He was thirty, but with his sparse beard and neat, regular features, he looked a great deal younger. He was short, he looked too thin in his skinny jeans, and he had tattoos on his forearms; one could be forgiven for mistaking him for a teenager.
“What if she’s ill? She’s been in there for ages,” Massimo said.
De Carli seemed dubious.
“All the more reason to steer clear,” he replied. His voice had dropped to a whisper now. “She would have asked for our help if she wanted it. Don’t—”
Massimo knocked on the door. They could hear the sound of tap water and of paper towels being extracted from the dispenser. Perhaps Teresa Battaglia wasn’t dead after all.
“Everything okay, Superintendent?” he asked.
The door swung open and Massimo found himself staring into a pair of furious eyes.
“Do you ever mind your own fucking business, Marini?”
Teresa Battaglia was very much alive and as intractable as ever. Massimo turned toward De Carli, only to discover that his colleague had beaten a hasty retreat.
“I was worried,” he said, facing Teresa once more, “but I regret it already.”
She looked awful, like someone who’d been weeping uncontrollably. A few translucent drops were caught in the strands of hair near her ears. Massimo remembered how long the water had seemed to run as he stood listening at the bathroom door; she must have tried to hide her tears by wiping at her face with wet towels. But it hadn’t worked. He wondered what could possibly have happened to break her like that, without any warning.
“I told Chief Knauss and his men that the meeting was over,” he reported.
She glared at him.
“What made you think you could start giving orders around here?”
She pushed past him and headed down the hallway. Massimo could do little else but follow her. He was worryingly close to shouting at her, telling her to go to hell, but he was also concerned for her, though he didn’t know exactly why.
“What have I done wrong now?” he asked.
“What? Were you expecting a medal?”
“Just being ignored instead of actively humiliated would be a start.”
“Jesus Christ, Marini! I’ll tell you what, I’ll write you a little apology note so you can go home and show it to Mommy.”
“You know what? Fuck you!”
They both froze.
“I’m sorry,” Massimo quickly added, mortified.
Teresa pursed her lips in disappointment.
“What a shame, you were doing so well until you came out with that pathetic apology. You know, it doesn’t hurt to be told to fuck off, every now and then,” she said.
He didn’t quite know what to say. She seemed to have gone back to her usual self: insufferable and determined. And admittedly, she did have at least one good quality: she didn’t use her position to put herself beyond reproach—or even insults, it seemed.
“Tell Chief Knauss to put a surveillance team outside the Valent and Kravina homes,” she ordered. “Tomorrow we’ll speak to the widow again.”
“Where are you going?”
“To the city.”
“I’ll drop you.”
“No. I still know how to drive a car, in case you’ve forgotten.”
Massimo fell silent. Teresa flung open the door that led out to the parking lot. Snow had begun to fall again in fat flakes that shone in the lamplight.
“So, is it true that the killer always returns to the scene of the crime?” he asked her before she left, with a hint of irony in his voice.
It was only five o’clock, but it looked like nighttime already. Teresa Battaglia stared into the darkness before she answered him.
“If he lacks self-control, then yes. He returns to the scene of the crime. He attends the victim’s funeral, visits their grave. He phones the relatives. He even makes up excuses to meet them. Sometimes he does this to keep a tab on things, but more often, it’s his way of keeping his fantasies alive. Of savoring the death he has wrought for as long as possible, and basking in the pleasure he’s derived from it.”
-24-
AUSTRIA, 1978
The sound of the sirens was drowned out by the roar of the storm, which seemed to shake the building from its foundations all the way up to the topmost garret. In all her years of service at the School, Agnes had never seen a storm like the one that was ripping through the sky that night.
Tripping over the hem of her long skirt, she ran across the empty kitchen to the lobby to check that the main door had been bolted shut as she’d been instructed to do. A flash of lightning lit up the main staircase, and all at once the lights went out. She climbed to the first floor. The wind had shattered one of the windows to pieces, and rain was falling sideways into the corridor. Another fierce gust slammed into the window frame, and Agnes screamed as it exploded in front of her. She felt she was losing control of herself, of her life, of the school itself. The ground that had felt so solid beneath her feet was crumbling now, exposing an ever-growing chasm that could not be filled. The School was sinking, and it was taking Agnes with it.
She crept forward along the wall and craned her neck to look down at the courtyard. The wall behind her was bathed in the blue of flashing police lights. Someone was shouting through a megaphone to open the door. Among the unfamiliar faces dripping with rainwater, Agnes recognized Magdalena.
There’s the traitor, she thought bitterly. She should have known that the submissiveness the girl had recently displayed was nothing but a ruse; she must have been waiting for the right moment to turn on those who had trusted her. Agnes wanted to scream and rail at the girl’s ingratitude, but the storm would have smothered the sound anyway.
They exchanged a long, hate-filled look, until Agnes pulled herself together.
There was one last command to follow.
Now thoroughly drenched, she opened the door of the Hive only to realize that someone else had got there first. She ran her hand across her eyes to wipe away the drops of water that were blurring her vision. In the darkness, lit intermittently by frightful bolts of lightning, a familiar figure crouched over one of the subjects. As the man lifted the child into the air high above his head, she saw something in his bearing reminiscent of a pagan ritual. Another flash of fearsome lightning illuminated the whole room, exposing for a split second the rapturous expression on the man’s face. The windows shook with the thunder that followed.
Agnes shuddered and crossed herself. For the first time since she had been entrusted with the secrets of the School, she was scared.
She closed the door behind her, her soul shaken to the core. The banging on the front door grew louder. They were trying to knock it down. She could feel now that all was lost, but perhaps there was still hope for her. She gripped the set of keys in her pocket and hurried down the steps. She would try to get to the basement and from there, take the tunnel that led to the old stables.
She knew this meant abandoning the child to its fate, but she was also aware that the child the man had taken—the one in cot 39—was no ordinary creature.
-25-
“There isn’t a specific test for this yet, unfortunately. We’ll have to reach a diagnosis through a process of elimination and a careful evaluation of physical and psychological symptoms.”
Teresa listened as she sat in a chair that was so small it compressed her thighs. The clinic was stifling and aggressively bright; her throat burned with the instinct to flee, but she wasn’t afraid. She felt neither pain nor sorrow—only emptiness. She just wanted to go home.
“Of course there are some tests we can conduct. In any event, you should know that the rate of progression varies between individuals: it could be a few years, or it could be thirty.”
Carmen Mura had been her doctor for twenty years now, but Teresa still hadn’t figured out why she always reverted to a collective “we” in times of crisis.
The doctor pushed a piece of paper toward Teresa, giving her patient’s hand a quick squeeze.
“We’ll have to ask you to sign this consent form to allow other hospitals to access your clinical history. This is especially important if we establish you are indeed affected. In an emergency, your mental state might prevent you from explaining your situation. And we must not forget about your diabetes.”
Teresa nodded. As she took the pen Carmen gave her, she noticed that her own hand was shaking. Perhaps she wasn’t as calm as she thought. She scrawled a signature that bore only a passing resemblance to her usual one: it looked like the cardiogram of her tormented soul.
Carmen continued: “We should start with blood and urine tests, followed by an MRI scan. This will provide us with an extremely detailed image of the brain. We’ll run another scan a few months down the line to see if there have been any changes. A CAT scan might also be helpful in determining whether there is any cerebral atrophy. Are you happy with that?”
Teresa nodded. She knew that in the long run, none of it was of any use, but she couldn’t bring herself to resist.
“I do want to make one thing clear, though, and I hope you won’t mind my being direct: there is, at present, no cure for this.”
Teresa sank her fingernails into the handbag on her lap.
The doctor had finally said it. It must have required some courage, and it had taken them almost an hour of empty chit-chat to get to this point.
“Thank you for seeing me so late in the day,” said Teresa, rising to her feet.
“Do you have any questions?”
The only question she cared about had no answer. It had to do with life and death and everything in between, all the things that, within a week or a few months or a year, she was going to lose. Forever.
-26-
Lucia was already awake when the ring of the doorbell pierced the night. She was waiting in the corridor, her eyes fixed on the door. Earlier, was woken up by a nightmare and hadn’t been able to go back to sleep; she had gone to the window to look at the snow falling. That was when she’d seen the man.
She heard something tumbling to the floor and her father swearing as he threw his bedroom door open. He staggered toward Lucia with a befuddled look on his face and that smell on him she had learned to recognize; it was the scent of that smoke that made him feel good and made him burst into laughter for no reason until he would eventually pass out.
