Flowers over the Inferno, page 13
“So it must be something you’re passionate about,” she murmured. “Let me see.”
Massimo didn’t even have time to speak before she’d grabbed the piece of paper from him and started reading through it.
Her smile began to fade. It occurred to Massimo that they hadn’t even introduced themselves.
“Do you stock these?” he asked her. “I found most of them online and . . .”
She didn’t wait for him to finish. Her manner became abrupt.
“Take a seat over there, I’ll find these for you and bring them over,” she said.
“I’ll come with you, there’s loads on there,” Massimo offered.
The girl looked at him, her face even more serious than before.
“You can’t have them all, anyway. There’s a limit to how many you’re allowed to borrow. Now, if you’ll please take a seat . . . I’ll be quicker doing it alone.”
Massimo could easily guess the cause of the sudden change in her behavior. The list of books he was looking for included, among others, such titles as I Kill with My Bare Hands, Totems of Flesh, and The Taste of Blood . . .
“I’m not planning on killing anyone,” he joked, trying to reassure her, but she’d already disappeared behind a bookshelf.
Massimo felt strange and uncomfortable. This girl didn’t mean anything to him, and yet her undisguised revulsion had caught him by surprise. One look at the titles of a few volumes of criminal psychology and forensic psychiatry had been enough for her to decide that he wasn’t to be trusted. She might even think he was dangerous.
He thought of Superintendent Battaglia again. She didn’t have anyone waiting for her to come home either. He wondered if the loneliness bothered her, and if, like him, she searched the crowds daily, frantically looking for a friendly face.
Massimo looked down the corridor. There was no sign of the librarian. He imagined her with a peeved expression on her face as she searched the shelves for the titles he’d requested.
Perhaps he’d been looking for the wrong kind of company. There already was a woman in that town who’d caught his attention, and she wasn’t the kind to be put off by his interests. But he couldn’t go to her empty-handed. He needed to make a small offering to the goddess of destruction—for that was what she was—to calm her ire and propitiate her favor.
The thought made him smile. He checked his watch; perhaps the botanic gardens might still be open.
-32-
The thread was shiny and tough, made of material he had never seen in the forest. The people who lived in the village used it to catch animals from the lake and the river. The first few times he had seen them doing it, he’d thought there must be some kind of sorcery involved in how the fish had leapt out of the water and thrashed about, suspended in air. But then he had noticed the thread glinting in the sun, and he had understood: it was just that it had no color, like the sky on an overcast day.
He moistened the thread with his lips to slip it more easily into the tiny hole, and pulled it through. Thus stitched together, the bones rattled against each other. They looked like bits of dried wood, blackened by time. He had washed the dirt off them and smoothed the bite marks left by the rats. He had neglected them for too long, but the hush of winter had once again awakened in him the feeling that he no longer wanted to be alone.
Sometimes he felt like a fox and thought he needed a pack. He thought he had a lot in common with that tawny, fleet-footed creature: it too could adapt to the most extreme environments, surviving winter upon winter. It wasn’t fearful, but cautious. It approached humans and often followed their tracks in search of food when there wasn’t enough of it in the woods.
But other times he felt like a lynx, solitary and free, a feline with claws so sharp that they left gashes on the trunks of the trees it so effortlessly climbed. He looked at his hands, his skin as thick as wood bark. His fingernails were long and hard. Every day he sharpened them with whetstone, like farmers did with the blades of their scythes when the fields turned gold in the summer sun.
His hands hadn’t held another human hand since time immemorial.
He stroked the bones that he had threaded back into their original positions. They felt velvety beneath his fingertips and smelled of dried earth. He held them in his palm and felt as if he were caressing again what had once been a hand.
-33-
“Are you trying to bribe me again?”
Teresa Battaglia was eyeing the coffee Massimo had just placed on her desk. But he wouldn’t let her intimidate him. He knew by now that the superintendent liked to bark, but he had never seen her bite.
“Would it work?” he asked.
She flung her bag to the floor and kicked it under her desk. To say she lacked elegance would have been an understatement.
“Definitely not,” she told him. “Did you put sugar in it?”
“You can’t have sugar.”
“Whatever. What the fuck do you want?”
Massimo found her manner of speaking appalling.
“Why can’t you just ask a question without . . .”
“Shit! I’ve stained my shirt. Anyway, what do you want?” she said before he could finish. She rummaged for a tissue, and he promptly offered her one. She stared at him for a moment before taking it.
“Don’t you have a life?” she asked.
“Why do you ask?”
“Just the fact that you’re here, attending to an old lady like some sort of houseboy. Just so you know, I’m not the one who decides who gets promoted around here.”
Massimo didn’t even bother replying. He had figured out by now that this was what she needed; some tense, snappy repartee to help release tension. He let her finish the coffee.
“I was wondering why you’ve been drawing up a profile for a serial killer when all we have is a single homicide,” he said. “It didn’t occur to me the other day.”
Teresa Battaglia was impressed. For once, she didn’t look at him as if she thought he was an idiot but seemed genuinely intrigued. She eased herself against the back of her chair.
“I see you’ve been studying,” she muttered, picking out a sweet from her desk drawer. She threw it at him.
“Isn’t that what you wanted?” Massimo replied, catching it.
She started laughing.
“I don’t want anything. I can solve the case myself. I was just giving you some advice on how you could get better at this.”
“Yes, and I took your advice. Now, can you please answer my question?” he insisted.
She made a vague motion with her hand.
“Ritualism. Mutilation. Staging. Need I continue? It looks . . . it looks like the start of something.”
“The start of what?”
She looked at him as if it were obvious.
“A trail of death,” she said.
Massimo sat down in front of her.
“Do you think he’ll kill again?”
She seemed to hesitate.
“I do,” she finally answered. “That’s why I haven’t been sleeping and I jump every time I hear the phone ring. It will happen.”
Massimo had expected that reply, but there was still something sinister in hearing her say it out loud.
“Then what are we still doing here?” he said.
“What would you have us do? Comb through twenty thousand hectares of woodland? Search hundreds of homes and question thousands of people? Because that’s what we’d have to do, you know.”
“So there’s no way to prevent it,” he said.
“There might be, if he makes a mistake.”
“Will he?”
“Now you’re asking me to look into a crystal ball and take a guess.”
“I’m asking you how good he is.”
She shook her head.
“He isn’t good, he’s savage. But is there really much of a difference between the two? I don’t know. Would you call a wolf that catches its prey good, or would you say it was just being itself?”
Massimo remembered the conversation they’d begun in the woods behind the Kravina home.
“You’re saying that’s the way he is, and he can’t do anything about it,” he said. “You realize how wrong that sounds, don’t you?”
She smiled. She looked tired, or perhaps she was just bored of listening to someone she regarded as a novice, and not even a particularly talented one at that.
“Maybe the truth is they see the world more clearly than we do,” she said in a low whisper. “They see the inferno beneath our feet while we stop to look at the flowers. We are lucky that we have a veil between us and the world, but their past has robbed them of that filter. That doesn’t mean they’re right to kill, of course, or that I’m justifying what they do.”
“So what does it mean?”
“That in some distant past, they suffered, and their suffering has made them what they are. If there’s anyone who should know what that means, it’s me.”
It was the first time this woman had told him anything remotely personal, the first time she had offered a glimpse—however hazy—into the history of her own life. Massimo grabbed the lead she’d thrown him, knowing that she would soon regret doing so, and pull it right back in.
“What do you mean, you should know?” he questioned, unable to stop himself.
But she seemed lost in altogether different thoughts.
“Because I can see beyond the flowers, just like they do. I can see the inferno,” she murmured.
Her words faded into silence. The ticking of the clock on the wall behind them seemed to say that the time for confessions was drawing to a close.
This was the moment Massimo had been waiting for. He pulled the gift he had bought her out of his pocket and put it on her desk.
He saw her frown. Teresa Battaglia slipped on her glasses and brought her face close to the little sprig with pointed, leathery leaves, heavy with red berries.
“In Japan they call it Nan-ten, or sacred bamboo. It has ceremonial functions in Buddhist temples. Here we call it nandina. It’s evergreen and it grows in gardens.”
The superintendent raised her eyes to his.
“It’s not a woodland plant,” she said.
He nodded, satisfied.
“The eyes for the effigy came from a garden in Travenì,” Massimo confirmed. “If we can figure out which one, maybe we can trace the killer’s footsteps.”
“And find out whom he’s been watching,” Teresa went on. “Whom he’s yearned for.”
-34-
Lucia didn’t like disobeying her father, but one thing that bothered her even more was to be separated from her friends in a time of need.
She had received the secret signal to gather at the creek: two rings of the telephone, followed by a pause, and then another ring. It was reserved for emergencies.
She had dressed and gone out without giving much thought to the possibility that her father might come home while she was gone. Opening the front door, she had been greeted by a fairy tale landscape with a touch of eeriness about it: the fog was so dense that it had altered the features of the world beyond recognition. It got into her mouth, made it feel sticky with the taste of something damp, rotten. Lucia realized that if there was someone hiding in that whiteness, she wouldn’t be able to see them until they were close enough for her to feel their breath on her face.
She walked quickly to the center of Travenì. The streets were deserted, and she could barely make out the lights inside the homes and restaurants. It was no time for tourists, and as for the locals, they were all staying indoors where it was warm. Lucia followed the main road that cut the town in half until she reached the square with the small church and the medieval clock tower. This was the spot where brave knights had repelled the invading Turks. When the teacher had told them that story, Mathias had asked whether there were any bones buried in the ground there. The whole class had laughed at that, and the teacher had told him off for asking such a morbid question. Lucia didn’t know what “morbid” meant; she’d had to ask Diego. Mathias had told her that his obsession with bodies—living or dead—disgusted his father, too, and that one day his father had called him a “psychopath.” It meant that your mind didn’t work right. But Lucia didn’t think there was anything wrong with Mathias.
Still, the thought that there might be the remains of an ancient battle beneath her feet scared her that day. She sped up, taking the road that led from the city center to the twin lakes of Flais and through to the border. She didn’t go that far, though, and stopped at the fork in the road near the railway station. Somewhere in that mist was the path that led to the statue of the Austro-Hungarian grenadier.
Lucia used the sound of her footsteps to guide her. When she heard the crunch of gravel beneath her feet, she followed that noise all the way to the slope. The higher she climbed, the thinner the fog became. The outline of the bronze statue emerged from the heavy air like a gargantuan shadow. Over on the other side of the promontory were the woods and the trail that led down into the gorge.
Through the haze of fog, Lucia spotted a scarf wrapped around the statue’s neck. As if by magic, her fear dissipated. She took the last few meters to the statue at a sprint and reached the top of the hill with her breath singeing her throat. The world at her feet looked like a low-lying cloud.
The shadows became sharper. Some of them were moving, flying onto the grenadier’s shoulder; others waited on the edge of that realm of grey and evanescent shapes, standing still around her like a circle of guardians.
That was when she first heard the ticking, vibrating through the air like a volley of pebbles thrown onto the gravel, then falling quiet.
Lucia wasn’t alone. She turned around and peered into the mist, its shape and consistency shifting endlessly. The noise picked up again, then quickly died down. It was coming from the statue, just a few steps from where Lucia stood.
It was the sound of teeth. Chattering teeth.
Lucia looked closer at the outline of the monument and noticed the figure crouching at its base. She had never seen that familiar form so hunched, filthy, and thin, as if it had been missing from the world not just for a day, but for weeks.
“Mom!” she shouted, running to her. She huddled against her and hugged her. But she was cold, and she smelled different.
“Mom?” Lucia called again but received no response. Her mother’s teeth kept chattering.
Lucia swept her mother’s hair away from her face, and as she did so, her own mouth fell open in a silent scream. Her voice, sucked back inside her body, failed her.
Down in the gorge a few meters below, Lucia’s friends were shouting, too, but she didn’t even have time to wonder why.
-35-
There were police cars keeping watch outside the local hospital in Travenì. Teresa and Marini had just arrived in town when they received the call from Hugo Knauss, informing them that a woman had been found severely disfigured and in a state of shock.
The victim was Lucia Kravina’s mother. The little girl’s father could not be reached; Lucia herself had been the one to find her.
An ambulance had been sent from a village at the foot of the valley, but when the on-call doctor saw the severity of the woman’s injuries, he had called for an air ambulance to take her to the hospital in the nearest city. They were waiting for the helicopter now.
“She hadn’t been home since the day before, but her disappearance wasn’t reported,” Knauss told Teresa. “The family had been on the social services’ radar in the past because of the parents’ addiction problem. But it looked like they’d recovered from it. At least the mother had.”
“And the girl?” asked Teresa.
“Doctor Ian is looking after her.”
Teresa remembered the elderly village doctor. It was a relief to know that the child was with him.
“Has the mother said anything?”
“No. She was catatonic when I saw her, and I can understand why. She must have been through hell and looked the devil himself in the eye. Jesus Christ.”
Teresa agreed.
“Yes, Melania Kravina has seen the face of the devil,” she said. “That’s why it’s so important that we talk to her. She’s the only one who can describe him to us.”
Knauss scratched at his head beneath the rim of his hat. He seemed reluctant to encourage that line of thinking, in case Teresa really did mean to pester the seriously injured woman.
“She’s been heavily sedated,” he muttered. “The doctor who saw her first said they’ll put her in an induced coma as soon as she gets to the city hospital. It might last for days, possibly even weeks. Do we have that kind of time?”
They didn’t.
The noise of the approaching helicopter’s rotor blades was becoming deafening. A dazzling light illuminated the landing pad, and the snow began to swirl in the air. Teresa watched the stretcher being wheeled out; there was a respirator attached to Melania Kravina’s mouth, her face covered by a sterile mask for facial injuries. Teresa saw her vanish into the helicopter, which took off before its door had even closed.
She became conscious of Marini observing her.
“You knew he was going to do it again,” he said.
It wasn’t a question. Yes, Teresa had known and now felt responsible for what had happened.
“There are so many inconsistencies,” she said. “He’s been acting like a serial killer right from the start, and yet he let her live. Why?”
“Maybe she ran away.”
She glanced at him.
“He bit her nose and her ears off,” she said, whispering so that the curious onlookers who had begun to gather at the hospital wouldn’t hear her. “You can’t run away from that kind of savagery. He’s lucid, but he leaves traces behind. He behaves like an animal when he attacks, but there was something graceful in the meticulous way he positioned the first victim’s body. This time, he didn’t do anything like that. Roberto Valent was a forty-three-year-old male. Lucia’s mother is a twenty-three-year-old woman. Serial killers choose their prey in keeping with very particular fantasies, which is why their victims always have certain shared traits. But I see nothing like that here. He appears to be acting randomly, but that’s not true. It can’t be.”
