Flowers over the Inferno, page 24
“Is there any way we can run a toxicology test now? I want to understand how he died.”
“I could remove the skull right away to get going on that, and it would also allow us to test the tissue he took from the victims.”
“Thank you, Antonio.”
Marini called out to her from the blackened table.
“Superintendent, you might want to come and see this.”
-65-
Marini had found something among the burned objects that were impossible to identify and the remnants of the partially scorched books: a handwritten notebook, with each entry dated at the top. The last entry was marked 20 September 1993.
It was in German. Teresa’s understanding of the language was limited to what she had learned at school, and those ancient memories were of no use to her now.
“Do you speak German?” she asked Marini.
“I know a few words here and there.”
“Chief Knauss!” she called.
The chief approached them.
“I know you’re all bilingual here. Translate this for me,” she said, pointing at the diary.
“Now?”
Teresa stared at him, wondering how it was possible that he would always find something to say—even a single, insignificant word—that was bound to irritate her.
“You tell me. Would you rather take it home and settle down with it by the fireplace?” she replied.
It took Knauss a while to realize she was joking. He fished for his reading glasses in the pocket of his jacket and sighed as he put them on, leaning with his face close to the notebook.
“It looks like a diary.”
“Yes, we surmised as much from the dates.”
Teresa watched with increasing impatience as Knauss read a few lines and tried to figure out what he was looking at. She saw him turn a few pages, go back, then stop to think before he resumed his reading.
“What’s wrong?” she asked him.
“I don’t understand,” he muttered.
“Ask one of your men to help. There must be someone else here who can read it.”
Knauss lifted his gaze from the notebook.
“I can read it myself, Superintendent.”
“Then what’s the problem?”
“It’s what they’ve written in here. It sounds like an experiment.”
Teresa was no longer in the mood to make jokes.
“Read it to me,” she commanded.
Knauss ran his finger down one of the pages.
“Subject Alpha attempts to interact with Subject Omega, but the latter appears indifferent, and to have fallen into a passive state. The delay in his motor skills is now evident. He is almost always lying supine and makes no attempt to . . . wait, this part is unclear . . . makes no attempt to reach for his food ration.” Knauss stopped speaking and looked at Teresa. “Is this about animals?”
“They’re children,” Teresa declared. She saw Knauss hesitate. “Keep going,” she ordered.
“What is most surprising is that Alpha does not claim Omega’s ration as his own, but instead tries to push it toward him. I believe he is beginning to consider him a companion.”
Silence had fallen over the shelter, all activity put on hold. Everybody was listening to Knauss, who kept on reading. Teresa raised her eyes for a brief moment and saw denial and disgust on the faces around her. She was sure they had a different perspective, now, on the skeleton sitting just a few feet from them all, eternally waiting.
You can stop waiting now, Teresa thought. Someone’s finally come to save you—but it’s too late.
“I doubt the child has any conscious perception of its imprisonment. He knows no other life but this one,” Knauss resumed, “but his subconscious does, and it abandons itself to death.”
Teresa exhaled tensely. She could imagine the epilogue, picture it in her mind, but something—perhaps the tremors that rippled through her arms every time she leaned over to touch those pages—told her that the horrors contained in those entries were not yet over.
“Go to the last day,” she told Knauss.
He obeyed. Teresa saw his eyes running over the words, widening, then seeking out her own before turning quickly away. When he read out the details of Wallner’s final plan, Teresa couldn’t take it anymore. She had to leave the shed, get some fresh air in her lungs, and wait for her heart to slow down, letting the wind dry her tears before they could fall.
-66-
As soon as she’d stepped outside the shelter, Teresa breathed more easily. Marini followed her; he could never seem to tell when it was best to just leave her alone.
She didn’t give him time to ask any questions.
“Parri confirms that the remains belong to a boy,” she said. “About eleven years old. It could have been a death by natural causes; there’s no guarantee Wallner actually put his plan into practice,” she said, though she was conscious she’d only added that last remark as a way of consoling herself.
“How could anyone do that? They were just children.”
“It seems Wallner practiced the same beliefs as his father. He did not possess a conscience in the way we understand it. We should look for his body, too, around here. His might have been interred. He lived in this area long enough to raise two children, though we still have to figure out how.”
Marini looked around.
“What kind of life would it have been?” he wondered aloud.
“A difficult one, without question, but still preferable to a trial and to prison,” Teresa replied. “He must have made the occasional trip to the village, though. To stock up, to get a hold of medicines . . . Wallner was bilingual, and he perfected his experiments here. Go and find out whether anyone remembers him, even vaguely. If anyone ever saw him. We need to find out whose skeleton that is in there. He’s three or four years younger than Andreas Hoffman.He can’t have come from the orphanage.”
“We’ve discovered some photographs of Wallner, but they’re all quite blurry.”
“It’s not the photos I’m worried about, but how the people of this valley understand the concept of cooperation.”
“Why would they care about protecting a criminal who might have made a few trips to the valley some thirty years ago?”
“That’s not it; they’re protecting themselves, the community, the group, its collective stability. Individuals don’t matter.”
“I’ll be back as soon as I’ve found out more.”
Teresa glanced at the sun; it had already begun to set. Parri’s assistant emerged from the building, carrying a metal box that held the skull they had just extracted.
From a distant point in the forest, on a slope that faced the clearing with the mountain shelter, several flocks of birds took flight in unison as if startled by the sound of a bullet, though none had been fired. The sky above the treetops briefly turned black.
Teresa couldn’t move. A familiar sensation held her rooted to the ground where she stood, her eyes fixed on that distant spot. She could feel that she was being watched, and she knew he was the one watching. Andreas was hiding up there and observing them all. Why was he still lingering there, where he risked getting caught?
The answer to her question was being carried out past her, sealed inside a small steel coffin.
She finally understood what Andreas was protecting from the advance of the outside world: not his lair, but the only human relationship he’d ever known. He had somehow sensed what was being taken away from him.
“He became violent because he felt threatened by the expansion of the construction site,” she said. “He was afraid they would take away his companion. That’s what drove him to kill.”
“But that little boy’s been dead for decades,” Marini protested.
Teresa looked at the spot on the mountain where the birds had flown from. That was where the baby was.
“I don’t think he truly understands what it means to die,” she said in a soft voice. “Sure, he knows about life and death, but only in terms of cause and effect—he’s learned that by observing nature. But as for what happens next, the question of whether it is possible to come back from a kind of sleep that consumes the flesh . . . That’s something he can only imagine, just as we do, just as humans have done for millennia. He was simply trying to wake his companion up. But now he’s not alone anymore. He’s found himself a cub.”
-67-
The search party was now concentrating its efforts on the stretch of sloping ground that Teresa had indicated. The men worked relentlessly, refusing to take any kind of break as they climbed toward the peak in ever tighter formation. Not a grain of sand could have slipped by them without their noticing.
The orders were to halt their advance as soon as they sighted the target and wait for Teresa to reach them—she was worried about how Andreas might react to feeling surrounded, and she needed to figure out a way to communicate with him. She had moved from her earlier station at the bottom of the valley to a helipad that had been set up on some flat land further up the mountain.
The temperature was rising and the sky remained clear. All she could think of was the child. He’d been wearing heavy winter clothes when he’d been abducted, with a Babygro to shield him from the chill. But while he might not suffer the cold, he must certainly be hungry and thirsty by now. How would Andreas cope with its incessant crying?
She kept going back to Wallner’s diary. It had stopped in September 1993, and Teresa couldn’t bring herself to imagine what had happened next. There was only one thing she was sure of: child Omega had died, while child Alpha had survived and had continued to live in what he considered his lair, near the source of the only human contact he’d ever experienced in his life, and which time had reduced into nothing more than a skeleton.
Her mobile vibrated in her pocket. It was Marini calling from the Travenì police station.
“Any news?” she asked.
“Nothing. I’ve had the archives searched in full. No children have gone missing in the valley in the last thirty years. There’s no sign of any missing person’s report. I also called headquarters in the city and ran a search at the public library. There’s nothing in the newspaper clippings from that period, either.”
Teresa feared that the mystery of Omega’s identity might never be solved. But perhaps there was one more path they could try, running beneath the surface of those seemingly flawless, immaculate lives.
“I think I know someone who can help us,” she said. “Wait for me.”
She hung up. The helicopter’s blades were already in motion; she signalled at the pilot to wait for her. The aircraft took flight with Teresa on board, and from the air she could see the true face of the forest: an ocean of green and white, of towering waves and fathomless depths. Andreas and the child were down there somewhere, both equally terrified, and both in need of help.
-68-
The whole village seemed to have gathered at the cathedral, as if Travenì itself were kneeling at the altar. Gloria Sanfilk and Mathias were in the front row, praying for Markus’s safe return home. The church was ablaze with votive candles, the air heavy with hundreds of breaths, incense smoke, and the musty odor of age-old friezes.
“Why do you want to talk to him?” whispered Marini.
Teresa hadn’t yet shared her thoughts with Marini. She had spent the past half hour on the phone with Parisi, who was updating her on the search party’s progress.
“You stay put,” she said. “He’ll be more at ease if I go alone.”
She let her eyes roam over the downturned heads until she spotted the man she was looking for and walked up to him. He was sitting with his elbows on his knees and his forehead resting against his clasped hands; his eyes were closed and his feathered felt hat lay on the bench next to him.
“Doctor Ian?” she called out softly.
He looked up at her in surprise.
“Can we talk?”
“Of course.”
Ian crossed himself, quickly kneeled, and followed her out to the churchyard.
“Any news? Have you found him?” he asked.
Teresa went straight to the point.
“No, no sightings yet,” she replied.
Ian closed his eyes for a moment and let out a worried sigh. He seemed tired and suddenly older.
“We found this in an abandoned mountain shelter,” said Teresa.
She showed him Wallner’s diary, preserved in a transparent sleeve.
Ian looked at it.
“What is this?” he asked, putting on his reading glasses.
“It’s a log,” Teresa explained. “It relates to an experiment conducted on two children who were kidnapped and held captive on these mountains.”
Teresa watched the blood drain from his face.
“Here? In Travenì? That’s not possible.”
“We know the identity of one of the two children: he is the killer and the kidnapper we’re looking for. But we have no information on the other child. I hoped you might be able to help us with that.”
“Me?”
“Has any local woman ever asked you to perform an abortion on her? It would have been around thirty years ago, but I know this is not the kind of thing one tends to forget.”
“I’ve never done anything of the sort. I would have never agreed to it!”
“I don’t doubt that, Doctor, which is why I believe that the woman—assuming there was such a woman—must have borne the child and found some other way to get rid of it.”
“How?”
“By handing it over to someone who could guarantee no one would ever find out what had happened. Do you remember any foreigners passing through the village around that time? A German speaker, perhaps?”
Ian looked grave.
“Everyone here speaks two languages, Superintendent, often three. We’re half-bloods, we’re proud of our identity, and though I know we can seem brusque in our dealings with outsiders, I can assure you no one would ever have given their child away, especially not to a stranger. We don’t have that kind of monster in Travenì. As you can see, we’re all God’s children here.”
“That’s not what you said at the pub the other night,” Teresa pointed out. “You told me people would abandon their children sometimes. And sometimes they wouldn’t even give birth to them.”
“Those were starving, desperate people. They cannot be blamed. Anyway, that was all a very long time ago. A distant and harrowing past.”
“Perhaps the echoes of that past have lasted longer than you thought?”
“No, I don’t think so, Superintendent,” the doctor replied, looking grim. “You must do everything you can to find that child, to bring some kind of justice—earthly or divine—to bear on the monster who took him away from his mother. But you are wasting your time down here. You won’t find your man, or the key to bringing Markus back home, among these people and their stories.” He gestured toward the church. “Now, will you join us in prayer?”
Teresa looked up at the golden crucifix that shone from the top of the slate roof.
“I pray by doing my job, Doctor,” she replied, putting the diary back inside her shoulder bag. “I must return to the search now.”
“God be with you,” Ian said in farewell, touching his hat.
Teresa watched him walk away, his shoulders looking more stooped than she remembered.
Marini walked up to her.
“Did you get the answers you were hoping for?” he asked.
“Not yet.”
“So what now?”
“Now we dig deeper.”
-69-
The darkness was like a wet void absorbing the rhythm of their heartbeats. It had been a long time since he had last heard the sound of another breath near his own.
The air down there smelled of soil. The rock walls oozed water, a constant dripping that complemented the baby’s wails. He had brought the child to a safe place, a place where the hunters who were following their trail would never be able to find them. He knew that the dark could be scary, and he held the child pressed against his chest, so that it could feel his warmth and be reassured by his presence.
In time he would teach him that there was nothing to fear about the night, about small spaces, tall peaks, and secret nooks—but first he must learn how to silence the child’s cries. He had seen the women in the village do it and tried to imitate the way they would rock their arms back and forth, their gentle cooing—though the noises that issued from his own lips sounded more like gruff howls.
He dipped a piece of cloth in water and brought it to the child’s mouth. The boy sucked on it greedily. Though he couldn’t see his face, the child had learned by now to recognize his voice and would stop crying when he spoke.
Those tears stirred something in him, inside his chest, where the muscle that pumped life through his limbs beat faster and faster. It was a new sensation, something that urged him to cradle the baby in his arms and shield it from anything that might frighten it. He knew that every creature on earth had been a cub once—and that included him. He wondered who had soothed his tears when he was little, who had chased away his fears, whose face had leaned over his bed at night and watched over him as he slept.
He couldn’t remember, and he felt alone again.
-70-
What if we never find this child, or what if the forest gives us back nothing more than his lifeless form? What will become of me then?
I’m afraid, so afraid that all my other fears have disappeared. I can cope with anything, but I can’t cope with losing another child.
The search had continued until sunset, but had yielded no results. It had been twenty-four hours since the abduction. Teresa did not see how it was possible for Andreas to come as close to them as he had—close enough to watch them at work—only to seemingly vanish, leaving no trace, not even a trail that the dogs could follow. How could he move around so often and so fast when he had the child to carry? Teresa was almost sure he wouldn’t have left the baby behind, hidden in some secret recess; Andreas knew the perils of the forest better than anyone, and he wouldn’t put the young life he was taking care of at risk.
