Flowers over the Inferno, page 16
Teresa smiled. It seemed bizarre that a man of science should bring God into play when discussing human anatomy.
“This village was completely isolated until just a few decades ago, and people were used to struggling to scrape together two meals a day,” the doctor told her. “Some of them were farmers, but most of them loggers who survived on hunting and the timber trade. It wasn’t uncommon for women to have miscarriages during the harsher winters, or to abandon newborns who looked too weak in the churchyard of the convent further down the valley. Those were different, desperate times. Fortunately, those days are a distant memory now, but I do think that hunger is encoded in the DNA of the people of this valley.”
“I didn’t know things had been so difficult.”
“They were. Modern transport links have helped eradicate poverty, and the development of tourism in recent years has improved many people’s lives. But not everyone is willing to accept change.”
“Are you referring to the activists who are boycotting the new ski station?”
He nodded. “Transitions are never easy,” he added.
Teresa turned her glass around in her hands.
“Speaking of children,” she said, “there’s something I’d like to ask you.”
“Go ahead.”
“Was the first victim, Roberto Valent, a little cold, as a father?”
Ian frowned.
“No, not at all,” he quickly replied. “Why do you ask? Is there a new lead to . . . ?”
Teresa shook her head. She didn’t even know why she had asked him.
“It was only a theory, Doctor, and it isn’t even relevant to the case. There’s no lead. I just wanted to have a more accurate sense of what kind of person Valent was.”
“Roberto was a well-respected professional and a model husband. He spent all his free time with his wife. As for his relationship with his son, I would say it was excellent. Diego is a perfect boy.”
Teresa was beginning to understand the criteria by which the doctor made his judgments. They were rather different from hers.
“A perfect boy,” she repeated after him, nodding her head. “Just like his dad wanted.”
“Roberto even did some volunteering, did you know?”
Teresa didn’t reply. She asked him whether anyone in the village had ever shown symptoms of mental instability, increasing in severity over the past few months. He dismissed the question.
“While isolation can cause a mind to falter, murder is something else altogether, Superintendent. I’ve known almost everyone in this village from the moment they were born, and I’m certain there isn’t a single one among them who would be capable of anything like this.”
Teresa studied the crucifix around his neck. She refrained from noting that murderers were no less children of his God than saints were, and they could be born anywhere—even Travenì.
-41-
“Stay right where you are.”
Parisi hadn’t even looked at Marini as he’d spoken, concentrating on his game of pool with De Carli. He was winning fairly easily, but De Carli wasn’t about to give up, and every now and then he even made a decent shot.
“She can look after herself,” said Parisi with a smile. “If you go to her, you’ll only piss her off.”
“And it doesn’t take much to piss her off,” De Carli added while trying to work out the best angle for his next shot. He got it wrong and missed.
Massimo looked at Teresa Battaglia. Her altercation with the mayor had turned every head in the room in her direction. Marini had been about to head over to make sure that awful man knew she had back-up.
“I haven’t even moved,” he said. “How could you tell?”
Parisi shrugged, pocketing another ball.
“Because you’re not the first. We’ve all been through it, and she’s made it clear to each of us that’s not what she needs.” He looked at Massimo. “If even her own team starts to treat her like she’s weak, how can we expect people who don’t know her to do any different?”
“It’s harder for a woman,” De Carli concurred. “She has to prove over and over again that she is not on the verge of collapse, and that she has the authority to keep us all under control.”
Massimo drank a sip of his beer.
“I’m not in any danger of underestimating her,” he said. “She steamrolls over me every day.”
Parisi burst out laughing.
“It’s obvious that you’re her favorite. She ignored yours truly for almost two years before she learned my name.”
“It must be all those sweets he brings her,” De Carli teased.
Massimo grimaced.
“She’s a woman,” he said. “They usually like that sort of thing.”
“Ah!” said Parisi. “That’s exactly the kind of thing you mustn’t say. If you think of her as a woman rather than just a person, that’s already a form of discrimination in her eyes.”
Marini found that he was rather confused with regards to all that had to do with Superintendent Battaglia.
“I have to say, it’s the first time I’ve ever been made to feel sexist about an act of kindness,” he protested.
The two officers looked at each other and laughed.
“She’s your superintendent,” said De Carli. “Completely asexual. A superior being who could make your life very, very complicated—and, I should add, would be delighted to have a reason to do so.”
“So I’ve noticed. Doesn’t she have a family?”
Massimo saw the expression on his colleagues’ faces change, as if they’d suddenly been troubled by some dark thought.
“She did,” said De Carli, but his colleague silenced him with a glare.
Massimo couldn’t understand the secrecy.
“That’s it?” he asked.
Parisi pocketed another ball.
“It didn’t end well,” said De Carli, murmuring again. “Let it go.”
“What happened? What did she do?” Marini asked, feeling increasingly baffled.
Parisi placed his cue stick on the pool table.
“Superintendent Battaglia does have a family. We are her family.”
De Carli copied him.
“We might never say it to her face, but we’ll always be there for her.”
Massimo was struck by their responses. He looked at the superintendent and wondered how she had managed to earn that kind of devotion. She seemed unaware of the reactions she induced in those around her, or perhaps she simply didn’t care. In any case, he thought she seemed terribly lonely. That, more than anything else, was what stuck in his mind, for he could sense that loneliness was not a condition she was involuntarily subjected to, but something that she stubbornly sought out. Parisi and De Carli guarded her secrets. They had made it clear to him that he shouldn’t ask too many questions, and that he’d do better to avoid the subject altogether. Massimo wondered again what might have happened to her family. Beyond her caustic wit and difficult personality, he could see there was a profound, sensitive humanity to her. He had noticed it while watching her deal with little Diego Valent, and again every time he saw her lay eyes on a victim. Like that boy they’d just interrogated in the hospital. She was deeply empathetic, and that same quality caused her pain.
Parisi put his hand on Massimo’s shoulder.
“Another beer?” he offered, smiling.
Marini nodded.
“One day you’ll understand,” said De Carli, turning his focus back on the game.
“Understand what?” Massimo asked him.
“Why we care so much about her. It’ll happen to you, too.”
-42-
FOREST OF
TRAVENÌ-ABERLINZ, 1988
The late afternoon sun warmed the crooked boards of the mountain shelter, releasing the aroma of old timber—a mixture of honey and hay. The forest, swaying in the warm breeze, shone with a bright, iridescent green. Spots of shimmering light floated among the blades of grass—diligent insects and feathery pollen. The birds sang their melodies from dawn to dusk, before the crickets took over with their chirping.
The child learned about the world through a gap in the beams supporting the wall, opened up by time and the alternation of hot summers with harsh winters. His tiny fingers stuck out on the other side where they twirled in the air, free at last. The animals of the forest had learned to recognize them and no longer feared them. Sometimes they would come close enough to lick them or to brush their fur against them. He would seek out those moments of searing contact and feel just beneath their skin the beating of a heart like his own.
The first time he’d felt that, on a night two springs before, he’d been surprised. He had pressed his body right up against the wall so as to push his arm as far out as he could through the gap. He had learned to identify life by placing the palm of one hand against the chest of a deer, and the other against his own. He had felt it pulsating in time with the night, accompanied by the hooting of owls and the rush of water in the stream. He had stayed like that for a while, looking at the sky while the creature grazed on the other side of the wall.
By now he had become familiar with the motion of the stars and the moon, the geography of the world above his head, the dance of time and of the seasons, the alternation of life and death in the forest.
Through that gap he had watched animals being born, but also going to sleep forever, and being consumed until they became one with the soil. He had watched the females choose their mates and wondered where he had come from.
He twisted a piece of string between his fingers, made a knot, and lowered it through the gap. Resting his ear against the wooden boards, he listened to the light hopping steps of the lizards that came to bask in the sun. It took a while to find the right moment, but he had time to spare, and the fox had taught him how to be patient. He jerked at the string and the knot tightened around a lizard. He pulled it toward him and through the gap. The tiny animal writhed almost weightlessly in his hands. Cradling it in his palms, he stretched his arms out toward the darkest corner of the room.
That corner where no light could ever reach was where the creature that had recently been keeping him company always chose to hide. It was scared of the outside world, though there was no reason why it should be. He would protect it, just as he had seen mothers do with their young.
He called out to it with a low sound, but it didn’t emerge from its hideout. He tried again, throwing morsels of food at it, but even those weren’t enough to lure it out of the darkness.
He placed the lizard on the floor and made it run backwards and forward on its leash of string. Finally, he heard the rustle of something moving.
A little hand appeared from the dark.
-43-
Teresa had been authorized by the regional chief of police to move her team to the police station in Travenì. Conducting the investigation from within the village would save time and resources. But the truth was that she felt another attack was imminent. Death wasn’t done with that place yet. Teresa was sure of it.
She had let some air into the room and made up her bed with the sheets and blankets Chief Knauss had passed around. After a hot shower, she’d injected herself with her dose of insulin and unpacked the few personal belongings she’d brought from the city.
Outside the window, the streetlights in the courtyard illuminated the heaviest snowfall Teresa had seen in years. She stood watching the large flakes fall, looking for a sense of peace she hadn’t felt in a long time. She remembered the winters of her childhood, the houses buried almost to the roof in downy banks that the wind sculpted into waves, the toboggan slides down the hills, the tussles on the snow, and the benevolent weight of the crystals coming to rest upon her upturned face.
In the past few hours she had been deliberating whether to stay on this case. She could feel she was no longer able to push her body to the limits of what this investigation required. Of course, it would continue to do her bidding despite everything: her unreasonable demands, the many indicators of her ill-health, exhaustion, fear. The soreness in her muscles, the cold, the heat, the lack of sleep. The problem was that she just didn’t want to ask all that of her body any longer.
But at the same time, it wasn’t solely Teresa’s decision to make. The voices of the victims rang in her ears throughout the day, and only grew louder at night. They would not allow her to rest until the killer was found, the cycle of death broken.
Like a weary fighter, Teresa pulled the curtains shut over her memories, her own private needs. It was her way of picking up her weapons and getting back to her feet. From her bag, she took out a brand-new diary she’d bought that morning. She tore the plastic wrapper off and opened it, running her fingers over its pages.
The time had come to reorganize her daily life, to become even more methodical than before, and learn to be her own guardian. She would write down the salient moments of her life; she would start with that night from her past, until she would arrive, one day, at the future—for she wanted to record the dreams she had yet to realize, her ambitions, her plans, and everything else for which there was still room in her life, no matter how much time fate decided to assign to her. She also wanted to test her memory in the days ahead and see whether she would forget any of the things that happened to her. She was not going to surrender to the idea that she was sick.
On the first page of the diary, she wrote down the word she hadn’t yet been brave enough to say aloud: the name of the illness that had maybe—just maybe—begun its attack on her mind.
The price of writing it down was having to admit it into her life. It was officially part of it now, a character in her story; and yet her lips still refused to breathe life into that sound, as if by letting the word lie sleeping silently between the pages of that diary, she might somehow postpone her punishment.
Two raps on the door startled her. She closed the diary, but immediately opened it again to erase the word in a feverish swipe. She wasn’t ready to face it just yet.
She opened the door to find Marini leaning against the frame. He smiled at her, holding a bag of cookies. This was becoming a bad habit of his.
“You haven’t had anything to eat,” he said.
Teresa took the cookies and read the label. Just as expected.
“They’re for diabetics,” she protested.
“Fine, I’ll have them back then . . .”
Teresa held them fast.
“I let you go home for just a few hours and instead of minding your own business, you go and buy me cookies?” she asked.
He didn’t reply.
“When will you stop craving my approval so badly? It’s pathetic. I’m not your mother,” she said, though without animosity. She had begun to find him rather sweet. Irritating, but sweet.
“You’re my boss. And you’re good,” he replied.
“So I’ve been upgraded! Just yesterday I was still a glorified fortune teller.”
“I never thought that.”
“Really? Well, maybe you should have. Our investigation is at a dead end.”
She would never forget the smile that formed on Marini’s face; it wiped out days’ worth of fatigue and tension.
“We have a name, Superintendent. And it matches the profile you came up with.”
-44-
Lucas Ebran, thirty-nine. He lived with his mother in a village in the valley, off the road that led to Travenì. At the age of thirteen, he had set the school bathrooms on fire; more recently, he’d had an argument with the neighbors. They were convinced he had killed their cat. Their dog had also disappeared after being seen with him. They suspected Ebran because they thought he was odd, and they’d begun to fear the unhinged looks and the silences with which he responded to their greetings.
“Pyromania and potential animal abuse. Good work, Parisi,” said Teresa.
“His father was a hunter,” the officer added. “He killed himself with a gunshot in the mouth when his son was a teenager. Lucas was the one who found the body in the basement.”
Teresa tried to imagine how traumatic that must have been, especially at that delicate time in life when we are on the cusp of maturity, but still carry inside the impulses and insecurities of a child. She pictured him walking down the stairs that led to the basement, smelling the scent of death, opening the door into the darkness, and finding his father’s maimed body.
“What does he do?” she asked.
“He’s unemployed. He knew the first victim: he worked as a bricklayer on the site for the ski resort. He was fired two weeks before Valent’s death for his inability to complete any of the tasks assigned to him, no matter how simple.”
Teresa felt her whole body tingle with an excitement she had to keep under control.
“His psychosis wouldn’t let him,” she said distractedly.
Parisi continued, “He’s been spotted lurking on the edge of the woods, spying on people’s homes. Someone’s been worried about him harassing their teenage daughter. We’re looking for him now.”
Teresa could feel the whole squad looking at her as they awaited her response. She was about to make a decision that could change a man’s life. Ebran was either a savage, bloodthirsty killer, or just a misfit who lived on the fringes of the community, completely harmless.
Maybe someone else poisoned the cat, and the dog had simply run away. Maybe Lucas Ebran had acted out as a teenager because he’d suffered from his father’s abandonment, and he detested his neighbors because he felt the weight of their judgment. He spied on other families because he envied them and would have liked to know some of that warmth himself, and he liked to stare at beautiful teenage girls because he’d never had a girlfriend in school.
