Flowers over the Inferno, page 12
Suddenly, a man materialized out of nowhere and threw himself at the SUV with a guttural roar. He looked like the archetypal highland dweller. All they could see of his face was a long beard that emerged from beneath the hood of his cloak. He was tall and stocky, but he seemed weighed down by his clothes. His hands, protected by fingerless gloves, hammered at the metal frame of the car. Two youths stuck their heads out of the vehicle and started yelling insults at the man.
“What the hell is he doing?” said Marini.
The man threw one last, fierce punch at the car, then turned around and walked away, clearing a path through the curious crowd that had gathered to watch the scene.
Teresa tried to follow him with her eyes.
“I want to check him out,” she said. “You stay here with the kid.”
She set off at a brisk pace to try and keep up with the man. Even from a distance, the black smudge of the stranger’s silhouette through the sleet looked imposing. He moved nimbly despite his bulk, and he was not slowed down by the ice that covered the road. Teresa, on the other hand, felt as if she were skating.
They passed the town center and continued down the road that led to the old train station. Beyond that was the forest.
The man didn’t show signs of stopping, and Teresa wondered where he could be heading. She walked faster. The icy rain had thickened and the occasional solid flake had begun to fall onto the watery surface. Once they had gone past the railway, too, Teresa finally made up her mind and decided to call out to him.
“Stop!” she shouted over the whistling of the wind.
She was surprised when the stranger obeyed straight away. Until then, she had thought he mustn’t even have noticed her presence behind him, but now she realized he had known from the start.
She stopped, too, her eyes boring into the man’s back, her heart beating inexplicably faster.
He didn’t turn around but stood completely still a few meters ahead of her, his arms by his sides. He was waiting. There was something disturbing about the whole scene, and about him—something feral.
Teresa unbuttoned her coat.
“Turn around, please,” she told him. “Did you hear me?”
The man made a sideways dash and began to run.
“Hey!”
Teresa chased after him, battling the urge to reach for her gun. She saw him jump over a stockade and move forward at a swift pace. He wasn’t too far ahead, and again she had the feeling he was playing games with her; he could have easily shaken her off, but instead he seemed almost to be waiting for her. Teresa crawled beneath the fence and hurried after him.
They were following the old railway now. The tracks ran parallel to sleeper beams that had been cleaved by time and the inclement weather. Abandoned buildings dating back to the Habsburg era and immersed in a profusion of ivy lined either side of the railroad. Nature was taking back that human space, inching forward with its roots and shrubs. The forest wasn’t very far behind; it was only a matter of time before it reclaimed the ground that had been taken from it centuries before.
The stranger veered off the gravel path and leapt over a ditch back onto the path that led to town.
Teresa swore, feeling exhausted. She had to stop to catch her breath, bending over with her hands on her knees. She couldn’t give up or he would soon get away, and yet every joint in her body was begging her to stop.
You’re too old, her body was telling her.
“Fuck off!” she replied.
She straightened up and started running toward the ditch.
“Hey, I’m talking to you! Stop!” she shouted again. But right then the bed of ferns beneath her feet gave way, exposing a steep drop.
She didn’t even have time to scream. Her voice was silenced by the feeling of free fall, and though her arms flailed, trying to get hold of the shrubbery, everything seemed to be sliding down with her. She felt a pang of pain in her right hand, and pictured its flesh cut open.
But then the momentum of her fall was reversed by a sudden jerk that left her gasping for breath. Someone started yanking her up until she found herself back on the train tracks, lying on her back on the sharp-edged gravel.
When she opened her eyes, the stranger was there, towering over her, his face covered by a hood. His long beard tapered all the way down past his chest. It could have been white or blond, and there were pine needles entangled in it.
Teresa tried to get up, but the pain in her back forced her to curl up on her side. By the time she had finally managed to sit up, she was alone. The stranger had disappeared. She couldn’t tell whether he’d gone back to the village or sought refuge in the forest. She brushed her hair out of her eyes and looked around, feeling disoriented. Perhaps she’d banged her head. She ran a quick inventory of her bones and concluded that everything was in its right place. Only then did she remember the pain in her hand and looked at it to find that she was bleeding profusely from a cut on her palm. She swore, feeling old and foolish. She took off her scarf and wrapped it around the wound.
“That’s what happens when you try to play the hero: you end up on your ass,” she muttered.
She rested her elbows on her knees, still feeling unsure about standing up. Why couldn’t she have sent Marini instead? He was younger, quicker, stronger.
And better suited to this job than she was?
But the thought of being stuck at a desk, far from the frontline, issuing orders and drawing up profiles without the chance to test them in the field, was more than Teresa could bear. She refused to believe she could no longer rely on her body as she had done all these years up until now.
And that was exactly why she hadn’t sent Marini after that man. It was a last-ditch attempt to banish the idea that she might no longer be fit to be a policewoman.
“Superintendent!”
Marini was by her side before she’d even heard him coming. He knelt down and put his arm around her shoulders.
“What happened? Are you okay?” he asked.
Teresa shrugged him off with a sneer.
“What a fucking stupid question,” she said. “Do I look okay?”
She saw him hesitate.
“Do you want to sit down for a little longer or shall I help you to your feet?”
“How about you stop talking? That would help me.”
Teresa tried to brush the dirt off her clothes and pick out the leaves stuck in her hair.
“Where’s Diego?” she asked. She realized with a shiver that she’d almost forgotten about the boy. “I told you to stay with him.”
“I left him with a teacher.”
Teresa swore.
“So you disobeyed an order. Do that again and I’ll send you back to the archive room.”
Marini let it go.
“Was it that man? Did he push you? I saw the two of you running,” he said.
Teresa hesitated.
“No, it wasn’t his fault. I think he helped me,” she finally said.
“You think he helped you?”
She glared at him.
“It wasn’t exactly easy to see what was happening, what with my head bouncing against the ground.”
Marini got up again and peered into the forest.
“Why did he run away? Could he be the man we’re after?” he asked.
Teresa also rose to her feet, though a lot more slowly than he had, and much less gracefully, too. At least the pain in her back had receded.
“Then why would he save me from crashing down into that?” she said, leaning over to look down at the precipice. “The killer we’re looking for has no sense of empathy. He would have stood and watched, and enjoyed it, too.”
“So I guess he was just a mountain man who was particularly reluctant to answer your questions.”
“Well, a person’s spirit is shaped by the environment they inhabit, and as my tailbone can now attest, these mountains are a hard place to live.”
Marini took a few steps forward, his eyes fixed on the ground.
“No sign of footsteps,” he remarked. “He must have walked along the ballast. I’ll run some tests, but . . .”
Teresa stared at him.
“You’ll run some tests?” she noted.
He realized his slip and closed his eyes for a moment.
“I didn’t mean . . .”
“Leave it, Marini.”
“You’re the one giving orders, obviously.”
“Yes, obviously.”
“So what now?”
Teresa brushed her trousers.
“So now you run some tests,” she told him, heading toward the road. “Do I have to tell you everything?”
When they arrived back at the school, Diego bid his teacher farewell and walked toward them.
“Shall we go?” Teresa said, smiling at him and offering him her uninjured hand. He looked inquisitively at the dirt on her clothes, but didn’t ask any questions. He did take her hand, though. Teresa noticed a white stain on her sleeve. She swiped a finger through the smudge.
“What’s this?” she asked Marini.
He shrugged.
“I’ve no idea.”
“P-Poo.”
They both turned to look at the boy.
“He’s right,” said Marini, sniffing at the stain. “It looks like bird poo.”
Teresa looked at Diego and gave him a wink.
“The perfect conclusion to a perfect chase,” she said, laughing.
-30-
Lucia was used to being alone and silence didn’t scare her. It was something else that was making her sad that morning: she hadn’t been able to meet up with her friends. Her father had left just before dawn, instructing her to clean the house and tidy up, and telling her that whatever happened, she mustn’t go outside. He would be gone for a while, perhaps a couple of days.
“Where’s Mommy?” she’d asked.
He’d told her she’d left. Lucia had accepted that simple explanation; after all, her mother had left them before, though she always came back.
She knew he would only get angry if she kept asking questions, so she desisted. She could always tell when it was better for her to keep quiet. So she would put on a brave face, turn into a strong little woman who knew how to fend for herself, and make their home into her own private castle.
But it had been an odd night. First, that stranger had rung their doorbell, and afterwards Lucia had heard her father rifling through every drawer and closet in the house. In the morning, Lucia had found all the cupboards still open, their contents spilling out onto the floor. It had taken her hours to put everything back where it belonged.
That was how she’d found the gift, underneath a pillow her father had flung into the corridor.
She had stared at it for a long time before she’d worked up the courage to touch it. She knew it was meant for her; she could tell the stranger had left it by her bedroom door intentionally. He must have snuck in while her crazed father was busy ransacking the rest of the house.
As Lucia swept the porch, the ragdoll sat there staring at her. It was a strange little thing, and that was what Lucia liked about it: it was like no other doll in the world. It had been sewn with twine, in coarse stitches that stood out on the jute fabric. Its hair was made out of horsehair and had the same lingering scent that the stranger’s visit had left in the house: a pungent but not unpleasant animal odor, the smell of nature and its cycles of life and death. Wild, warm. Lucia had breathed it all in and wondered why she’d been given that gift. She had run her hands over the doll’s dress, which was made from bits of fabric and dried cornflowers—papery, deep blue petals that a large, gentle hand, that’s how she pictured it, had stitched onto the dress, all for Lucia to enjoy. It was the same shade of blue she had seen in the stranger’s eyes when she had cracked her bedroom door open and looked out the previous night.
On the doll’s face there was nothing else but two purplish berries that served as eyes; the man who’d made it hadn’t bothered to give it a mouth. And like its maker, the doll was expressionless. Lucia thought it might have something to do with the way he spoke—she’d heard him while she’d been eavesdropping.
Lucia had picked up a felt tip pen and drawn a mouth on the doll’s heart-shaped face, wishing its maker would also smile, just like the doll was doing now.
The wind changed direction, making the doll’s dress billow, and carrying its scent to Lucia. It was almost like a summons.
“I’ll be quick,” said the girl. “Then we can play.”
She scrubbed even harder at the floorboards on the porch. The blood had seeped into the wood, and not even the rain and the roar of the storm had managed to wash it away.
-31-
Massimo had begun to find it strangely alienating to return to the city every night after spending his days immersed in the wild, solemn landscapes of Travenì. The evening traffic was disorienting, and the cars’ headlights made him feel like an animal caught in the middle of a busy road.
At first, he tried to blame it on tiredness, on endless shifts merging into one another, leaving only a few hours for rest.
But he wasn’t convinced. It was as if his body had found a new equilibrium on those mountains and was having trouble readjusting to day-to-day life at a lower altitude. He had become accustomed to vertiginous heights and open spaces, to gales that tore the skin off your face, and the sudden warmth of crackling bonfires. There was a savage beauty in that world that awakened the senses from the hibernation of domesticated life.
Massimo entered the apartment he struggled to call home for a quick shower and a sandwich made out of the few provisions he had left in the fridge. He changed into something more comfortable, put his sneakers on, and went out. The public library wouldn’t close until later in the evening, so there was still time to go for a walk and explore the town center. That small provincial town had all the features—both good and bad—of a proper city. But everything was on a smaller scale, shrunken down to a more bearable size, small doses that couldn’t kill you.
Massimo felt lonely, but also somewhat liberated. The landscape of that wintry evening, with the skeletal silhouettes of trees outlined against the sky, resembled his life in that moment, stripped of all that was superfluous, like a bare tree trunk, a vessel for the vital sap that would nourish fresh shoots when the time was right. Massimo had turned into the skeleton of his former self. He had left everything behind, abandoning his comfort zone of routines, control, and certainties.
And Teresa Battaglia had figured it out. She had seen through him like nobody else had ever done before. He’d found it unpleasant, and slightly depressing, to realize that he wasn’t so complicated after all.
He didn’t know why he kept thinking about her, but she had recently become the focus of his every thought and action. She was an affliction, but also a formidable motivation. He had seen how her entire squad gravitated toward her, and now he understood what caused it: her vital energy. People could feel it in her, and they were attracted to it. Teresa Battaglia had the rare gift of making those who stood by her feel stronger. Except that in his case, she also made him feel terribly inadequate.
Teresa Battaglia and the feeling of inadequacy she awakened in him were the reason for the walk he was taking in the freezing cold. Massimo was determined to close the gap that he knew separated him from her, and he was going to do it exactly as she had suggested.
The library was situated in a seventeenth-century building overflowing with marble and chalky stuccos. It was warm inside, and a scent of wood emanated from the boiserie and the desks lined up in the center of the reading room. The smell of paper, the gentle rustle of pages being turned, and the soft light were like anaesthetics against the stirrings of the human soul.
He browsed several sections of bookshelves, glancing every now and then at a piece of paper in his hand.
“Can I help?”
Massimo turned around and came face to face with a pretty young woman wearing a badge on her shirt that identified her as a library employee.
“Thank you, I didn’t expect it to be so difficult to find my way around,” he told her.
“That’s what I’m here for,” she replied. “We hold over a million texts in this library, including books, journals, and media.”
She sounded like someone in an ad, but Massimo thought she was cute anyway. He noticed she wasn’t wearing a wedding band or an engagement ring.
He smiled at her.
“Then you must have come to my rescue,” he replied, making an effort to turn up the charm as he spoke.
He had no trouble interpreting the girl’s response: she was definitely interested. Perhaps he was interested, too. He didn’t know anyone in town. He’d spotted a charming bar just around the corner; maybe he’d ask her out for a drink after work, one of these days.
“You’re not from around here, are you?” she said, smiling at his look of surprise. “It’s the accent,” she explained.
Massimo made a face, deciding to play along.
“Is it really that obvious?” he asked.
She shook her head and her fair curls bobbed against the delicate planes of her temples.
“Not too much,” she told him.
The girl gestured at the list in his hand.
“That looks long,” she said. “Please tell me you’re not one of these college students who constantly fails to graduate,” she teased.
Massimo laughed.
“I’m not.”
“So it’s for work?”
He hesitated. Did he really want to talk to this girl about murders and eyes that couldn’t be found?
“Let’s just say I’m doing some research,” he answered.
She blinked, and her long, golden eyelashes fluttered.
