Flowers over the Inferno, page 26
“When was the wheel closed?”
The abbess pointed at the book on the table.
“That’s the most recent register, and it will record the last date.”
Massimo read the entry out loud.
“18 October 1972. Female.”
“They named her Clara. She was the last foundling to ever come to this abbey.”
Massimo looked at her.
“What became of the children?”
“They would live in the abbey for two weeks. A wet nurse would be brought in from the village to feed them, and the sisters would handle everything else. During those two weeks, they would pray for the mother to change her mind and take the child back, but if that didn’t happen, the baby would be handed over to the care of the State and placed in an institute for children born out of wedlock.”
“It’s a sad story,” said Massimo.
“I wouldn’t say that. Those children were spared a far more terrible fate. But as you can see, Inspector, the child you are looking for cannot have been left in this convent—and even if it had been, it would not have crossed the confines of these four walls except to continue its life in an orphanage.”
Massimo exited the convent in Rail weighed down by a sense of oppression. Before walking away, he stopped to study the wheel. A devil’s head was carved into the stone over the mouth of the revolving hatch, its wicked gaze following Massimo no matter where he stood. It had a pair of twisting horns, a pointed chin, and gaping jaws, the tips of its fangs touching its lower lip. It was a gruesome sight, a last attempt to deter those who came there to abandon their child.
He thought of how the Church was always so strict with others, yet so quick to forgive itself.
The sense of unease that had fallen upon him refused to go away; it was a subtle but persistent sense of nausea that made his stomach churn. The thought of all those abandoned infants had shaken him deeply—even more shocking was the knowledge that it had still been happening until not too long ago.
From the moment he’d set foot in that valley, Massimo had been struck by the splendor of the natural landscape in which it was immersed. It gave the place the appearance of an unspoiled paradise, but he knew now that there were sins in its past—perhaps even in its present—that could not be forgotten. If it was indeed an Eden, it was already lost, tainted—much like the rest of the world—by what Massimo thought of as the “human stain.” But the people of Travenì weren’t ready to admit that, not even to themselves. There would have been no shame in facing up to the truth, in accepting that they lived in a flawed yet redeemable reality. Instead they’d chosen to surround themselves with an invisible wall that kept out anybody who dared doubt the righteousness of the community, and Massimo felt an urge to shout at them, tell them that by acting in this way, they were becoming accomplices to the crime. There were only a few exceptions, and they usually took pains not to voice their thoughts in public.
Except, perhaps, for one person.
He recalled Lucas Ebran’s mother, the anguish and disdain with which she’d defended her son against their questioning, and against the people of the valley.
She’d called them hypocrites. She’d spoken of all their bastard children. She’d challenged the criminal reticence that was ubiquitous among the inhabitants of the valley.
Massimo looked again at the demonic face. It appeared to be laughing at him.
No, he thought, it’s not laughing at me, it’s laughing with me.
He tried calling Superintendent Battaglia, but her phone couldn’t be reached. An idea had begun to dawn in his mind. Ebran’s mother had talked about secrets. Now, Massimo was ready to hear them.
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Parri had found traces of blende and galena—zinc and lead sulphides—on the bones and tissue that Andreas had taken from his victims. The same traces had also been detected on the food he had recently left at the skeleton’s feet. It had to be residue from Andreas’s hands.
The Osvan quarry was a lunar landscape three thousand feet above sea level, just beyond the line of the Alpine border.
Once they’d passed the forest, the police cars had followed a road that wound through stacks of pale scree jutting through the snow, and across the exposed underbelly of the mountain. Ancient riverbeds were dotted with rusting, abandoned machinery and stacks of timber that looked like fossils in the moonlight.
Below the surface of the quarry lay zinc and lead mines. A number of mining shafts had been dug at various depths, alternating with water drainage tunnels that surfaced across the border. According to Chief Knauss, those tunnels had been used to transport supplies and military equipment during the two world wars.
After a cave-in decades ago had compromised its structural stability, the quarry had been shut down, and the whole site abandoned due to rising extraction costs and falling demand. The administrative offices and the workshops where the ore had been refined were enormous, drab constructions typical of the Fascist period, their straight lines, smooth surfaces, and confined spaces indicating a fixation with grandeur manifesting itself—in the midst of that natural landscape—as a blight on the face of the earth.
The entrance to the mine was blocked off by a wire fence. The chain that had once fastened it to a set of hooks embedded in the rock had fallen to the ground, corroded by rust. A line of footprints in the snow led into the darkness beyond.
Teresa ordered the fence pushed aside and peered into the gloom. She shone her flashlight into the tunnel, illuminating a set of railway tracks inside.
“The temperature in there is constant throughout the year, around nine degrees, with humidity levels at ninety-eight percent,” Knauss informed her.
De Carli and Parisi arrived.
“Have you brought what I asked for?” she said.
“Yes, Superintendent.”
Teresa checked that she’d turned her phone off, before putting on her fluorescent yellow vest and a hard hat mounted with a headlamp. This time, she would be the one to take the lead.
“What if it’s another red herring?” said Knauss.
Teresa had been asking herself that same question ever since she’d decided to concentrate all their efforts here, but she kept thinking they had nothing left to lose—there were no other leads to follow.
She stared into the darkness again, at those footprints leading into the belly of the earth. Perhaps they were old. Perhaps they belonged to someone else. And still, the only sound they could hear from the depths of the tunnel was the monotonous dripping of water.
“I told you,” said Knauss, spitting on the ground. “He wouldn’t have made it all the way here.”
“Make him shut up,” Teresa whispered to De Carli.
“We’re wasting our time, I . . .”
Teresa—who was shorter than him, weaker than him, and yet determined to emerge victorious from this new confrontation—grabbed him by the lapels of his coat.
“You didn’t tell me about the protesters, you didn’t tell me about Ebran, and you didn’t tell me about these tunnels,” she said, her voice quiet but shaking with rage. “You’re lucky, Chief Knauss, that I don’t have time to deal with your incompetence right now. But rest assured, that moment will come. I truly hope we find what we are looking for when I walk in there, because that would mean three things: one, that we’ve rescued the child; two, that we’ve caught the killer; and three, that we’ve shown once more to those who need to know how utterly superfluous you are to the police force.”
She let go of him in disgust.
A sudden wail broke the silence that followed her outburst. Teresa heard it over the ringing in her ears and the sound of her own furious breathing. She turned to face the quarry again, and heard it once more: it was coming from inside the black tunnel.
“That’s the sound of crying,” said Parisi.
It was the sobbing of a tired, hungry child. Teresa quickly zipped up her vest and prepared to go in.
“You have your answer now,” she told Knauss.
De Carli handed her the sheets she’d asked him to print out. She folded them carefully and put them in her pocket, ignoring the tremor in her hands.
“Superintendent!”
A woman was running toward them, illuminated by the light towers. She’d arrived just in time.
“Who told her?” asked Knauss.
Teresa motioned at De Carli to pass her another vest.
“I did,” she answered.
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“Superintendent, I hate to agree with Knauss, but the last thing we need right now is a frantic and terrified mother to deal with,” Parisi said softly. “What if things get out of hand? What do we do then?”
Gloria Sanfilk came up to them, her hair—wet with the snow that had just begun to fall—sticking to her sunken cheeks. The expression on her face was not what Teresa had expected to see: it was neither distraught, nor exhausted, but burning with a heat that could have easily melted the glaciers that had laced those mountains for thousands of years.
“Is my son in there?” she asked.
“Yes,” Teresa replied.
“Are you going to get him?”
“We’re going together. Would you be up for that?”
Gloria nodded without a moment’s hesitation.
“No. Absolutely not,” said Parisi. He was worried, but Teresa was sure there was no other way. All of them—Teresa included—had to be ready to sacrifice something, to risk all that they held dear, if they were to succeed.
“I will go to my baby!” said the mother, as if to make clear to all those present that the matter was not up for discussion.
“It’s about safety, Gloria,” Knauss intervened. “Yours and Markus’s.”
They heard another wail coming from the tunnel. Gloria flinched, then took a step toward the blackness.
“My son is calling for me,” she said. “Don’t you see? He’s calling for me.”
“Gloria . . .” said Knauss in a murmur.
The woman turned around and sought Teresa’s eyes with her own.
“I can feel him, right here,” she whispered, bringing her hand to her chest, “and I know he can feel me, too.”
Teresa didn’t doubt it. She knew the nature of that bond—ineffable, arcane, primal—better than anyone else. It was an enigma as old as mankind, perhaps older still. And from the moment she’d arrived on the scene, the scar that marked her abdomen had begun to burn, the force of that connection suddenly resurfacing through her body.
Teresa nodded. “Give her a vest and helmet,” she ordered.
“But, Superintendent . . .”
Teresa silenced Parisi by placing a hand on his arm.
“I’m relying on you to keep everyone in check,” she told him, with an eye on the clearing outside the entrance to the mine. It was crowded with police, army, and search and rescue vehicles, all lit up by light towers. Two ambulances had also just pulled up.
“When we come out, nobody shoots. Understood?”
Teresa summoned De Carli to her side and squeezed his arm as well.
“Don’t forget he’s a victim, too,” she reminded them.
“I won’t forget,” De Carli replied, “but if he hurts you, I . . .”
“No one’s going to get hurt, so long as you lot don’t make a mess of things.”
Parisi laughed, but he was visibly nervous.
Teresa let them go.
“Are you ready?” she called out to Gloria, who was shivering. Gloria nodded.
“Stay a couple of steps behind me, and if I tell you to do something, do it immediately.”
“All right.”
Teresa looked into her eyes.
“Even if I tell you to run away,” she said. “Got it?”
“Yes.”
Hugo Knauss pulled her aside, and for a moment, Teresa couldn’t help but admire the courage it must have taken him to do that.
“She’s a civilian,” he objected. “Do you realize the risk you’re taking? She’s not trained for any of this.”
“Is anyone here, really?” Teresa retorted.
“Superintendent . . .”
“She won’t come to any harm.”
“How can you be so sure?”
“Because I’ll be in the way.”
Teresa returned to Gloria’s side. Together, they entered the tunnel.
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The damp, persistent sound of dripping water echoed across the rarefied air inside the tunnel, an eerie accompaniment to their footsteps. The walls, shored up to prevent further cave-ins, were lined with rivulets of water that ended in puddles on the ground. Beneath the soles of their feet, the gallery stretched for more than half a mile onward and was connected to other galleries by passages and cavities called drifts. At one time, they had been employed to transport ore between tunnels, but now they were traps that could open up and swallow them whole at any given moment.
Teresa listened to the sound of her own breathing and of her forceful heartbeats beneath the safety vest. But all she really wanted to hear now was that wailing from before, which had since gone quiet.
The cone of light from their flashlights shimmered before them, bringing the shadows to life. And just as Teresa was beginning to wonder how much further they would have to descend into that inferno of rock and water, the wailing picked up once more, as if to answer her question. It was close. Behind Teresa, Gloria let out a soft moan, an instinctive response to her baby’s call.
The tunnel started to curve and slope downwards. Teresa hadn’t brought a gun, as she didn’t want to run the risk, in case they were attacked, of losing her cool and harming the child by mistake. But without it she felt helpless.
They heard a sullen grunt issuing from somewhere in the darkness, and stopped walking. It was a half-human, half-animal sound, and for a moment, it made their blood freeze. It was impossible to describe. It filled them with terror and seemed to turn their bodies into dead weight.
Slowly, Teresa turned around. The sound had come from a small tunnel to her right. The light from her headlamp shone upon a figure crouching a few yards from where they stood, facing away from them. It was Andreas Hoffman, holding a bundle in his arms. He was trying to put something in the child’s mouth. When he saw the gleam of the torch, he turned around.
The shaft of light hit him square on the face, and at last Teresa could see his eyes. They really were as blue as David Knauss had described them. But they were green, too. Andreas’s eyes were heterochromatic.
She put her hands in the air and hoped that Gloria, standing behind her, would do the same. He growled, like a wild animal. As far as Teresa knew, he could speak a few words and was able to copy other people’s speech when necessary. But it was obvious that in that moment his instincts had already taken over.
Very slowly, Teresa removed her helmet with the headlamp and put it on the floor so that the light wouldn’t bother him but would continue to illuminate the alcove he was hiding in.
The baby let out another cry, and Andreas attempted once again to feed him what looked, to Teresa, like a thin slice of meat. He seemed to have forgotten about their presence, as if he had suddenly found something more important to do that required his full attention. Teresa could tell that he was scared, but what Andreas feared most wasn’t their presence: it was the fact that the baby wouldn’t eat.
“No,” she told him softly.
He looked at her again. He had high cheekbones and regular features, framed by a beard and long hair. He looked younger than he was, though life outdoors had roughened his skin. He was tall, and even though he was wrapped in a mutton coat, Teresa could tell that he was physically fit.
With measured gestures, and alert to his reactions, Teresa brought out the pieces of paper she had been carrying in her pocket. Slowly, she bent down until she was kneeling, and spread them out in front of him.
She knew that Andreas had learned the basics of language. But while he might be capable of understanding some of her words, she doubted they would be sufficient to explain. Andreas’s world was not like hers; it was made of silences, the howling of the wind, the calls of wild animals. She had been obsessed with the problem of how to communicate with this creature, how to connect with a mind that was so unique, and finally she had understood—or so she hoped—what she had to do. Everything he knew he had learned by observing the natural world, which had been his home until that day—that was the language Teresa had to use to connect with him.
Andreas studied the pictures that had been placed at his feet. They showed females of different animal species suckling their young: a vixen, a doe, a wild sow, and a woman.
Teresa saw him look at her and at Gloria, then back at the bundle he held in his hands.
“Take a step forward and unzip your vest,” she whispered to Gloria. Gloria did so, showing no trace of fear. Her breasts, swollen with milk, stretched at the fabric of her sweater. Their message was clear.
He noticed them, and spent a moment studying them. His eyes showed no hint of emotion, but Teresa could sense the deep sorrow that a sudden realization was causing him: he could not keep the child he had chosen as his own. She could feel his pain, his loss, his fear of being alone once more.
She stretched her arms toward him, ready to receive the child.
She remained in that position, praying he wouldn’t interpret it as a threat. Parisi and the others were hiding in the shadows behind them, watching the scene, ready to act.
She closed her eyes, her hands shaking, her mind straying to the past. She wondered what it was like to be a mother. Throughout their lives, neither she nor Andreas would ever be able to touch that sacred, inviolable mystery. She felt a profound empathy for him—a killer, a victim, a man, a child—all at once. Alone, like she was. Accustomed, like she was, to being self-sufficient. Until one day some part of him had dared to want something else, something more. Now that he had found it, would he be prepared to part with it?
