Flowers over the Inferno, page 23
Marini handed her the printout of an aerial photograph.
“The drones have come across an old derelict mountain shelter that doesn’t appear on the map,” he said. “It’s surrounded by woodland, in the northern sector, just below the tree line and before the scree. It’s the only one in the whole area. And there are signs of recent human activity in the clearing around it.”
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FOREST OF
TRAVENÌ-ABERLINZ, 1993
The sun still shone brightly enough to warm the rocks and light up the fragrant pollens of late-blooming chamomile and wormwood, but the wind that blew from the north had grown colder in the last few days, heralding the start of the season of sleep. Plants and animals had already begun to prepare, the former shedding all that was no longer necessary, and the latter thickening their coats and filling their dens up with acorns and hay.
He, too, was getting ready to face the cold. He had noticed that after it rained now, the air was much cooler, and when it blew, it made minuscule flowers blossom on his skin. He had set a few more traps, the day before, knowing that there would not be such an abundance of prey for much longer. The flesh from his catch, sliced into thin strips and laid out to dry, would help him get through darker, colder days.
He crossed the stream, leaping from boulder to boulder, and climbed deftly up the cliff on the other side, emerging into a sun-drenched clearing. It was a spot favored by predators—foxes, badgers, and especially birds of prey—because any small animal that attempted to cross it was left exposed to attack.
One of the traps he’d laid out at the edge of the woods had caught something. It was a badger, and the more it struggled to break free, the more the noose tightened around it.
Upon reaching the beast, he realized that it wasn’t as large as he’d initially thought: it was a female surrounded by her cubs, squirming and yowling helplessly at their mother’s side.
There was enough meat on the creatures to keep him fed for days, possibly even weeks; but instead of proceeding to strangle the life out of them, he found himself paralyzed as he watched. Their cries had unleashed a storm inside him, like those dark clouds that sometimes rolled in from the east and ripped young saplings from the earth.
He let the mother go and watched them all scamper back to the forest. He had never seen a cub survive without its mother. And he had a pup of his own to think about.
He looked toward the edge of the bluff where his little one was hiding, waiting for him, and saw something that scared him: a black thread rising to the sky.
He broke into a run, darting through the trees. When he reached his lair, he saw smoke blowing through the gaps between the wooden beams. He ran to the back and lifted the plank he used as a door. The room was just as he’d left it, with one exception: in his absence, the hands that occasionally—and now so rarely—pushed food and clothing through a hole in one of the walls had left a plate of food on the floor.
His little one was in the corner from which he never moved and appeared to be sleeping, a half-empty bowl of food next to him.
He went to him and tried to wake him up, but his eyes wouldn’t open. He had changed color, and his skin had gone cold. He rubbed at it repeatedly, but it refused to warm up. He called out in a howl, pinched his skin, but he was sleeping deeply. He thought, then, that it might be best not to wake him up at all, not even now that the smell of smoke was becoming stronger.
He curled up against his cub and held him in his arms where he would not be afraid and would soon wake up once more.
-63-
The only way to reach the abandoned mountain shelter was on foot. Teresa’s muscles burned with the effort, and she was panting with fatigue. Marini was right next to her, steadying her every time her knees buckled, only for her to elbow him.
“You should have waited down in the valley,” he’d said at one point, triggering a volley of insults in return.
Teresa could feel the weight of the baby’s romper in her coat pocket, the burden of the responsibility she’d knowingly shouldered when she’d decided to concentrate the search in that particular area—and nowhere else. If she had made a mistake, there was a risk they would never find him again.
The search was advancing at a brisk pace. Everyone involved was fully aware that it had been almost twelve hours since the abduction, and that the child must be getting hungry. They were pushing as hard as they could, and their heavy breathing reverberated in the air. It was like a human net, stretching across hundreds of feet of undergrowth, inspecting every shadow and every nook as it ascended.
The snow that had fallen overnight had covered any traces of human passage, but Teresa relied on what the drone had spotted not far from where they currently stood. She wondered what kind of man could live up there, among eagles and foxes and not much else, in a place where even deer rarely ventured and mountain goats thrived instead, where the howling of the wind was the sound that dominated over all others.
“We’re here,” she heard someone announce from the group that was leading the way. The column came to a halt, and Teresa walked to the front.
A clearing came into view through the trees. There was a derelict structure standing in the middle, half-blackened by an ancient fire. The wooden planks that formed the walls of the shelter had been eroded by time, and its pitched roof rested on a base of simple stone. It was an abandoned barn, the kind where people used to store hay after the summer reaping of the highland meadows.
“Back in the old days our elders knew the best time of the year to harvest timber for building homes. It will go hard and it will blacken, but it won’t burn,” said Hugo Knauss as he observed the ruin.
The building was not vacant. Rusty, mismatched objects sprouting through the snow were strewn all around it next to other, newer arrivals. This, Teresa realized, was where anything stolen from Travenì ended up. Whoever it was that lived in the shelter must be a regular visitor to the village, returning here with treasures he then left outside, exposed to the elements.
She had instructed the helicopters to stay away from the area for the time being, to avoid scaring Andreas Hoffman into doing something he might not have intended. They had to do the same, make sure their presence went undetected for as long as possible.
Surrounding the shelter, interspersed among the scraps, were low totems made out of animal skulls. Bones hung suspended from the branches of nearby fir trees, chiming as they swayed in the wind, like rudimentary dream catchers.
Knauss spat on the ground.
“You’re the expert, Superintendent. What the hell kind of killer is this?” he said.
“Would you call an animal who attacks because it feels under threat a ‘killer’?” Teresa snapped, stepping away from him.
The team was waiting for the signal to storm the shed, with more men stationed in the forest to block off any escape routes. Though they’d done several exhaustive run-throughs of the plan, and of the special measures they would take to ensure the child wasn’t harmed, Teresa was more afraid of this moment than she’d been of most things in her career. She had never been responsible for this young a life, and it surprised her to notice how the value of a creature’s existence seemed to be inversely correlated to the time it had spent on earth. Her hand gripped the romper in her pocket, as if she were holding on to a thread that mustn’t be allowed to break.
“Go,” she radioed.
Moving in silence, the men at the edge of the forest closed in on the building until they’d surrounded it. Then, in a series of synchronized movements, they broke in.
Teresa counted the seconds and began to wonder why it was taking so long to secure such a small space. But she couldn’t hear any gunshots or the sound of scuffling either. There must be something else in there that was giving the men pause. Teresa could only hope it wasn’t a scene of death.
Parisi emerged to signal that the coast was clear, and Teresa sprinted to the shed.
Somehow the inside of the shed was even more chaotic than the outside. Objects of various shapes and functions had been stashed haphazardly inside the largest room; she envisioned the master of that place collecting them all without really understanding what any of them were for. Perhaps it was his way of feeling closer to the inhabitants of the village who looked so much like him but were otherwise so different, so distant. She remembered how Roberto Valent’s watch had been strapped to the effigy’s arm; at first she’d thought it must signify something, but perhaps Andreas had only put it on the wrong way around because he simply did not know any better. To him the watch was nothing but an ornament, something he had seen on the wrists of the people who lived in the valley.
A barn owl roused from its sleep flew from the mezzanine to the door and soared toward the forest beating its wings forcefully. De Carli looked down from the attic.
“There’s nothing here apart from that bird and a rat. Just a bed of hay,” he said.
“I don’t think he lives here anymore,” Teresa murmured. “Something has driven him away. Probably the deforestation of the area toward the valley.”
Teresa knew that the people of the village would never understand the way she saw Andreas Hoffman. What they wanted was a monster they could abhor, a bogeyman they could set on fire to exorcise the evil that had descended upon them. And he was a perfect fit.
She thought of the effigy made out of the first victim’s clothes, with berries for eyes. Teresa understood now why it had been facing the village: it had been an act of condemnation. Andreas saw Travenì as a threat. It is you, he was saying, it is you who are invading my territory.
The village was the catalyst for his murderous rage.
A small latched door led to a second room that was not much larger than a closet. Teresa kneeled to take a closer look. It was empty and windowless, with only a gap between the boards allowing a glimpse of the dark green of the woods. The walls were covered in markings etched into the wood, stylized depictions of animals, plants, and human figures. When she slid forward on her knees to study them properly, she noticed that one of the boards could be lifted. It was a passage to the outside world. She looked around. The untouched emptiness of that room seemed strange to her; Andreas hadn’t let himself contaminate it with the mayhem that had encroached upon the rest of the shelter. There was something sacred about that emptiness.
She emerged from the alcove and continued with her search. In a corner of the main room, there was a table blackened by flames. The walls and the ceiling also bore the traces of a fire. There were a number of books: some had been devoured by the flames and reduced to little more than cinders; others had only burned partway, as if someone had arrived just in time to rescue them.
Teresa put on a pair of gloves and began leafing through them. She was surprised to find a notebook with some basic writing exercises. The marks in it—probably letters—had been traced by an unpracticed hand. But there were only a handful of pages like this, the rest of the notebook was untouched. Sifting through the other books, she realized they were basic literacy manuals.
A slim volume fell to the floor. Teresa picked it up and saw that it was a collection of poetry. A leaf from an oak tree slipped through the pages. It wasn’t completely dry yet.
Had someone taught Andreas how to read and write? Had they spoken to him? Could it have been Wallner?
Teresa noticed Marini pausing at the threshold to another room and she could tell from his expression that whatever had caught the squad’s attention was in there.
It took courage to take those last few steps. She forced her body to do it.
The sun was filtering through the gaps between the boards. A backlit figure sat on a chair at the end of the room.
Teresa could only make out its silhouette. Marini broke one of the boards with a kick, and light poured in.
Nobody moved a muscle. There was only a whorl of dust in the air, shimmering in the sun. Teresa sensed Knauss’s presence beside her.
“God . . . It’s a human corpse!” she heard him say.
They saw before them an ancient, time-worn skeleton. Its bones were covered in dust and had blackened in certain spots.
Upon it were the body parts that had been taken from each of the victims. At its feet were the leftovers of a recent meal.
“That’s not quite accurate,” said Teresa, wishing for once that she didn’t have the kind of experience to know better. “It’s the corpse of a child.”
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Another child.
Two children whose stories we don’t know: one of them has grown up to be a killer, while the other has no name, only a skeleton. The third child has been taken from his mother and is somewhere in this forest right now, god knows where.
Children: they seem to be at the heart of this merry-go-round of death and hope. Children who survive, who fight back, who learn to love in spite of everything.
It is a celebration of life, a feeling that has spread through me since I first arrived in this valley.
A celebration of life and its ability to endure.
There is no force stronger than life, and we are at its service.
Antonio Parri was analyzing the skeleton and compiling a report on his findings. They had not yet moved the body from the position it had been found in.
Teresa stood to one side and watched the coroner at work. She knew that his inventory of the bones would be accompanied by detailed observations on the surrounding environment, a geographical and topographical analysis, and his conclusions on the nature of the remains. It would require him to spend hours studying the smallest parts of what had once been a human being.
But Teresa didn’t have that kind of time. Parri knew that, so as soon as he could, he would provide her with any information he was able to glean from a preliminary morphological examination.
Teresa doubted it would be of any great help in finding the missing child, but there was not much else she could do at that stage other than hope. It had been almost fifteen hours since the abduction, and though they continued to search with every tool at their disposal, they had yet to find any trace of the child or of Andreas Hoffman.
At last Parri turned around and invited her to come closer. Teresa did so, though she stopped at a good distance from the remains. She tried to picture the child they had belonged to. It was a painful exercise, but not one she wished to avoid, she needed that pain to keep her going, to continue the search.
“It is possible that the body was repositioned over time,” the coroner explained. “I doubt it was ever interred. The spinal cavity is clean. The longer bones present traces of animal bites that date to a time after the corpse was reduced to a skeleton.”
Teresa nodded. Perhaps the body had never been buried because Andreas was not acquainted with the idea of religion, not even in a primitive sense. Or perhaps he still considered it a living being. A meal had recently been left at the skeleton’s feet: a piece of charred meat, pink on the inside, and some walnuts still in their shells.
“You will have noticed that someone has pierced holes into the bones and tied them together with fishing line,” said Parri.
“He was trying to piece it back together, to keep it intact for as long as possible,” said Teresa softly.
She did not feel any revulsion, but only a deep sorrow for the person who had done this, who had tried desperately to put those remains back together and bring them back to life. Someone whose understanding of life and death differed from theirs. Someone who, in his own way, and despite everything he had been made to suffer, had loved that child, and continued to love what was left of it in the world.
Teresa didn’t see anything morbid in this act, but interpreted it instead as a sign of devotion, the poignant expression of a need to keep the object of his enduring affections close. Where they saw only bones and broken remains, Andreas could still glimpse the spark of a fierce bond.
“Do you think he knew him well?” Parri asked.
Teresa looked at the coroner.
“He loved him. I’m certain he’s not the one who killed him. He tried to bring him back to life.”
“If it is true, as I believe it is, that the remains have always been left exposed to air and to moisture, the corpse must have decomposed much faster than it would have had it been buried,” the coroner resumed. “Bearing this in mind, and noting the absence of corpse wax and of desiccated fleshy tissue, I would estimate the passing to have taken place twenty to thirty years ago. But I won’t be able to provide you with a more exact timeframe until after the lab tests and x-rays.”
It had happened a long time ago, Teresa thought, perhaps too long to hope they might ever find out whose body it was.
“Can you tell me age and sex?” she asked.
“The forehead is flat, the pelvic cavity and the pubic angle are narrow. I’d say a Caucasian male. A young one.”
Teresa kept her eyes on the corpse.
“How young?”
“The second molars weren’t yet fully grown.”
She felt a wave of nausea rise to her throat. This confirmed what she’d been thinking the moment she’d set eyes on those bones. She had measured them in the time it had taken her to blink and had immediately realized the truth, her stomach cramping at the knowledge.
“No older than twelve,” the coroner continued, “though based on an initial measurement of the bones, I’d say ten or eleven. I haven’t detected any signs of trauma.”
Neither of them spoke for several moments.
“I’ve already extracted a few samples to test for biological anomalies,” Parri resumed, handing a box with the samples to an assistant. “I’ll have them sent to the lab immediately so we can get some answers quickly. We’ll need a few more hours here before we can move everything.”
