The Sleeping Nymph, page 26
“I watched a little girl climb a tree in her own backyard to celebrate the end of the war, finally free to play as much as she wanted to. The Nazis passed by as they beat their retreat, machine guns blazing. The little girl made it back to the ground to hug her mother; that’s how she died, in her mother’s arms. Now you tell me, Superintendent, knowing what you know about the workings of the human mind, how ordinary men can turn into such savage killers,” he murmured.
Teresa knew she was wading into a minefield and had to pick her words very carefully.
“After the First World War, military psychiatrists began to investigate the effects of conflict upon human behavior. They discovered that statistically, only three out of ten soldiers were efficient killers. The best all shared similar traits: they tended to be psychopaths, they lacked discipline, they were aggressive, and their private and social lives were underdeveloped.
“They would tell interviewers that the pleasure they derived from killing was not too dissimilar from sexual orgasm. They would go through the same psychological phases as serial killers do, including the dehumanization of their victims. Technically, they’re ‘hidden serial killers,’ and there are so many more of them around than you might think. During war, when murder becomes socially acceptable behavior, they get to hunt and kill with impunity.”
Mariano was watching her now with a different, more sorrowful expression on his face.
“We killed, too,” he murmured. “But we didn’t torture anyone. And we looked the fascists in the eye. That’s the difference.”
There were always two truths, Teresa reflected: the executioner’s and the victim’s. This man and his comrades had been on both sides of that divide. Teresa had felt the suffering of the local populace emanating from the pages of Father Jakob’s diary and she had felt the same suffering again now in this ageing partisan’s words, his voice choked with emotion. Each had told its own truth, which—like much of human experience—was never absolute.
Teresa remembered with a pang the plot of uncultivated land they had passed not far from here. Those unaware of its history would have been surprised to learn that it used to be the site of a concentration camp. Memorial plaques had been planted in the soil as a permanent reminder, but there was nothing else left except for grass: as soon as the war was over, the locals had picked the building apart and repurposed the materials to build a kindergarten in the village. And so from a slice of hell, a flower had blossomed. That was the lesson history taught. In time, nature always found a way to straighten out the perversions of the human spirit, burying them under new life.
Everyone loses in war, Teresa thought. The guilty and the innocent are often mixed up. Those like her, who’d come later, owed nothing but deferential silence to the people who’d experienced that devastation firsthand.
Teresa placed the photograph of the Sleeping Nymph on the table.
“I’ve come here for her,” she said. “To find out how she died.”
Mariano studied the picture.
“So this is the portrait Andrian painted up on the mountains.”
“Yes. On April 20th, 1945.”
The old man seemed lost in reverie.
“I wasn’t around then. I was elsewhere during the last days of the war, farther west.”
Teresa didn’t give up.
“But you knew that group of partisans. They were your comrades. That night someone was playing a violin in the forest where this girl disappeared. The locals say it wasn’t one of their own.”
Mariano didn’t reply, didn’t even lift his eyes off the Nymph.
“So?”
“So, tell me who was playing it. Which of your comrades played the violin?”
“Why do you want to know? You’ve all but convicted Andrian already. What better scapegoat than a red partisan? It won’t make a jot of difference if you substitute his name for another’s.”
Teresa shook her head.
“It’ll make a difference to her family. If it’s the truth you want people to know, now’s the moment to speak up,” she said.
Mariano stretched his hand out and brushed his fingers gently over the portrait. He pushed the picture back toward Teresa.
“My comrades’ names will die with me,” he repeated.
“Don’t you realize you’re protecting someone who’s probably already dead by now?”
“This girl’s dead already, too, and yet you keep looking.”
Teresa stood up, more abruptly, perhaps, than she had intended, but her voice was calm when she spoke.
“This is about justice,” she said. “I thought I would find that here.”
She’d already reached the door, when Mariano spoke again.
“I won’t give you a name, but I’ll tell you how I’d go about finding him.”
Teresa turned around.
“We’re hunters, you and I,” the old partisan murmured, with something akin to respect in his tone. “I’ll show you where to look.”
56
A foreign presence shook the undergrowth, driving the larger mammals away and forcing the smallest to take refuge in their subterranean dens.
The men from far away had come searching for traces they weren’t equipped to detect. This wasn’t their natural habitat. Their eyes weren’t trained to see. Their ears were deaf to the vibrations of the earth they trod upon: they couldn’t recognize the echoing emptiness of an ancient tomb, the distinctive ring of soil that had been dug out and moved about. Now, they were out looking for the site of a recent burial, but even if they succeeded, they would find little more than a handful of wretched remains.
The Tikô Wariö, on the other hand, knew how to discriminate. Nature could teach you how to interpret its language, but you had to spend a lifetime with it before you could truly understand it.
The arrival of the strangers was cause for fear, but it was also welcomed. It was necessary. Perhaps it would bring liberation.
For the moment, the “fierce guardian” merely observed, trailing like a shadow the old huntress with red hair and her sidekick with the troubled eyes.
They were the real danger. The woman could see the path where others would have been lost. She, too, had a gift: she saw things that were hidden to most. She saw the darkness behind the light in every human soul.
And she never stopped. She never stopped looking.
57
“You’d think it’s the devil himself leading the way.”
Marini had meant it as a joke, but it didn’t quite come out that way; it was as if he’d suddenly realized, halfway through the sentence, that there might actually be a hostile and omnipotent hand directing the outcome of this story he was caught up in.
In spite of her ingrained skepticism, Teresa felt the same when she stood in front of the Trieste Conservatory and saw the name spelled out across the entrance: Giuseppe Tartini, creator of the “Devil’s Trill.”
One of thirteen historic conservatories in the country, the Trieste Conservatory was housed in the Rittmeyer building, a majestic specimen of the architectural style of Trieste, that small, glittering Vienna on the sea. At sunset, the building would acquire a warm rosy gleam, the light bouncing in fiery arcs off its wide windows, shards of reflected sky for the seagulls gliding by. It was a structure typical of the Habsburg era, and featured a neoclassical flourish of capitals and caryatids.
Inside, the last slanting light of day illuminated a series of white marble staircases leading to several floors of galleries and balustrades held up by rows of pink columns. Teresa was overcome once more by the feeling that she was following a script already written and that reached, in that very spot, its climactic denouement.
She stopped, suddenly unable to keep going. She clenched her fists in her pockets. It was strange how her mind struggled to hold together the fragments of her present but still seemed so proficient in recalling incidents from the distant past. Perhaps this was her fate: to fall gradually further into the past until she became a little girl again, and finally disappeared altogether.
“This building was the scene of a particularly bloody incident,” she told Marini, her voice barely louder than a whisper. “During the last war, it housed the Deutsches Soldatenheim, a clubhouse for the German army. It was targeted in a rebel operation that killed five soldiers. In response, on April 23rd, 1944, the Germans staged a savage reprisal.”
“Fifty-one prisoners were taken from the Coroneo and hanged along the staircase,” said a male voice, picking up where she’d left off.
They turned around to find a well-dressed young man with shoulder-length hair. His voice was devoid of any recognizable accent.
“When they ran out of banisters,” he continued, “they hanged them from the windows, down the hallways and eventually inside wardrobes. They left them dangling like that for five days, guarded by gendarmes: a warning to the city lest they ever think of defying them again.”
Teresa held out her hand.
“Superintendent Battaglia,” she said.
The man smiled.
“Luka Mendler. I’m the principal here. Welcome.”
Marini had already spoken to him on the phone to announce their visit, but he’d been intentionally vague about the reason they’d come all that way. Teresa was reluctant to give the press and the public anything else to speculate on, but the moment had come now to speak openly.
Mendler listened to her account with guarded interest.
“So you’re here to find a violinist who was playing that night while that girl lay dying,” he said.
“Not an ordinary violinist,” Teresa replied. “An exceptionally gifted one, so talented as to be able to execute Tartini’s sonata to perfection. We were told we might find a trace of him here.”
Throughout their exchange, Mendler had maintained an impeccably regal composure. Teresa had met elite musicians before, but this kind of timeless elegance was only to be found among practitioners of classical music, who tended to combine the physical build of ballet dancers with an attachment to liturgical practice. It was a fascinating mixture.
“The conservatory must produce plenty of musicians who’d be capable of playing that piece,” Marini posited.
Mendler demurred.
“Yes and no, Inspector. It would depend on what you mean by ‘playing.’ Tartini’s Violin Sonata in G Minor is riddled with dangers. To the uninitiated, they’re well hidden. On the surface, it seems an almost ‘friendly’ composition, but I assure you it is in fact one of the most technically demanding pieces of music ever created. It’s said that Tartini designed it specifically as a trap for his fellow musicians. It was his way of saying: you will never reach the heights I have reached. The Devil’s Trill is a little like evil, Inspector; it’s rather good at hiding its true nature.”
“The person who heard the violin that night was—if you’ll forgive the expression—in the business,” said Teresa. “A music teacher who graduated from the Venice conservatory. He described it as a flawless and astonishingly beautiful execution.”
Mendler’s eyebrow shot up.
“I should have liked to have heard that myself.”
“You don’t think it’s possible?”
“The word I’d use is ‘improbable.’ News of a talent of such proportions would inevitably have reached us here; yet, we know nothing of it.”
Teresa herself had wondered about this.
“The one explanation I can think of,” she told him, “is that the war must have erased its traces. People had other things on their mind back then; chiefly, survival.”
“That seems plausible,” the principal concurred. “That said, I do think it would have left some kind of trail. In writing.”
Teresa’s eyes lit up and Mendler smiled at her eagerness.
“The conservatory only moved to this building in 1954, but our library holds all the old archives, too, brought here from previous sites. You will surely find what you’re looking for there—assuming this violinist protégé of Lucifer’s really did exist.”
Teresa’s enthusiasm waned when the doors of the Levi library swung open before her. It wasn’t the opulence of the room that struck her, nor the vastness of the musicology section, nor even the ancient artifacts Mendler was now talking them through.
The old archives were, in one word, enormous.
“We’re still working on indexing everything,” the principal explained.
The conservatory’s trove of documents hadn’t yet been digitized. That could only mean one thing: she would have to call Albert and beg for more resources to be funneled into their search. And he would never agree.
Teresa stood still. Marini turned around and caught her eye, and she could see that he shared her misgivings.
The sun sank into the Adriatic Sea and a cold shadow fell over the room.
Their hunt, for now, would have to stop there.
58
April 20, 1945
The music of the forest changed. The sound of a violin floated among the beech and spruce trees, over the ridge and all the way to her.
Aniza shivered, and not from the evening chill, but from the feeling that she was being watched.
She had never liked him. The way he looked at her made her uncomfortable, as if he believed she belonged to him, and her heart wasn’t already entirely Alessio’s.
The melody seemed to walk on human legs, moving east to west like the wind, sometimes almost fading into nothingness before returning with even greater force.
Aniza pictured the violinist playing his instrument as he wandered the forest he’d come to know so well. She pictured him thinking about her. Under the enchanted moon, he yearned for her, and she knew it, and was repulsed.
Her hand dropped to her belly, cradling it in a gentle embrace. Her lips whispered sweet words of comfort to her baby while her eyes scanned the line of trees for signs of Alessio. More than ever before, each beat of her weary heart seemed to count down the moments until she would see him again.
The music stopped. The silence that followed was unusual. It was as if the forest itself had stopped breathing.
There was a shaking among the branches, and it wasn’t because of the wind.
Aniza hadn’t expected his face to emerge from among the trees. She looked past him, concerned that Alessio might soon also appear and that their secret would thus be revealed, but there was no trace of him yet. So she smiled and held out her hand.
“Why are you here?” she asked in the language of her ancestors.
The embrace with which he replied was so strong that it took her breath away. So strong that it hurt.
59
Teresa Battaglia had no choice but to lay down arms for a day. It wasn’t something she enjoyed. She never liked to let a headwind slow her progress.
Massimo had watched her frustration pull at the corners of her mouth, her back straightening in a burst of defiance that collided with Albert Lona’s brusque denial. It had been too short a phone call; Massimo was sure the district attorney hadn’t even let her finish before refusing her. He wasn’t interested in facts, or in the progress of their investigation. All he seemed to want was to see her fail.
Once again, Massimo found himself wondering what unfortunate history they could possibly have shared and yet again, he failed to come up with an answer—though there was a theory now slowly taking root in his mind. But he quickly pushed it away as he climbed up the stairs to his apartment.
For Massimo, too, it was never easy to go back home when there was still a case to be solved, to act as if there wasn’t a heart sitting in a fridge in the morgue, waiting to be reunited with the body it had been torn from. To pretend that the characters of this dark fairy tale from the past had never actually existed—although they were, of course, perfectly real.
Besides, ever since Elena had come back into his life only to vanish again, he had found it harder to return to an empty home every day. Even exhaustion wasn’t enough to dull the sense of melancholy.
The landing outside his front door was dark. He made a mental note to change the light bulb the next day, but that thought was quickly drowned out by the crackle of shattered glass under the soles of his shoes.
He realized straight away that someone must have broken the lamp on the ceiling.
It wouldn’t have been too big a deal had his door not been the only one on this floor.
It still wouldn’t have been too big a deal had someone not nailed a human heart just yesterday to the sign at the turn in the road that led to the very village in which Massimo had been conducting a police investigation.
He backed away until he reached the top of the stairs, faintly illuminated by the light from the floor below. He took out his phone and put it on flashlight mode. Ignoring the urge to draw his gun from its holster, he pointed the flashlight into the darkness and surveyed the gloom.
There was no one there, but still Massimo’s heartbeat sped up.
The dark surface of his front door shimmered as if it had turned into liquid and it seemed to be oozing down the sides.
He walked up to it cautiously, glass creaking beneath his feet again.
“Shit.”
It was covered in a dark red substance dripping to the floor, congealing into thin streams on its way down. It was odorless, or perhaps Massimo’s senses had frozen. There were partial footprints across the floor all the way to the elevator.
He searched instinctively for Elena’s number in his phonebook. It took him two attempts before his fingers got the sequence right.
“Are you okay?” he blurted out the moment she picked up.
