Daughter of Ashes, page 27
Antonio Parri stepped inside, looking awkward. He’d been the one to persuade her to get herself checked up, after he and Albert had found her on her knees in the greenhouse, staring in horror at the mosaic that had terrified them all. A kind of darkness had emerged from that soil, taking on a form none of them would ever forget.
“Everything okay?”
“Yes. Did the doctor tell you? I’ll need to take some time off, just as a precaution.”
He leaned his back against the wall.
“Would you like a second opinion? I agree with her. You can’t go on like this.”
Teresa finished tying her bootlaces and stood up.
“But you’re a doctor for dead people.”
“Yes, but I’m also interested in making sure the living stay alive, you know? And in one piece. And that you’re happy.”
Teresa started laughing, but her laugh faded almost immediately. He interpreted it as a sign of bitterness.
“They’ll catch him, Teresa. They’re practically breathing down his neck, and he definitely won’t strike again now. He knows he’s surrounded. You’re not worried, are you?”
She nodded, but letting go of the reins wasn’t that easy.
“I’m going to go home now and . . .”
Teresa fell silent. She’d been out for hours. She hadn’t warned Sebastiano. As soon as she went back, he would unleash his fury on her, and she could no longer allow that.
Parri understood straight away.
“I’ll take you to mine.” She must have looked perplexed, for he quickly put his hands up. “I swear I’m not looking for romance, or any other kind of adventure. I’m only offering friendship.”
Teresa wrapped her arms around her chest. Here it was, the new road she was supposed to take, but what she’d failed to account for was the terror that always accompanied those first few steps.
“I’ve been sorting out my parents’ old apartment. I’ve taken some stuff over already, but it’s not ready yet. Sebastiano doesn’t know.”
“If it isn’t ready yet, then surely it’s not fit for a pregnant woman.”
Teresa studied him. He seemed genuinely worried about her, but it made no sense to her that a stranger would care so much.
“What’s wrong, Inspector? What hidden recesses are you sounding out?”
“I’m trying to understand why you’re doing this.”
“Oh, I see, you’re not buying the whole friendship thing. I do appreciate your frankness in calling me a liar.”
That brought out a small smile. She had to bite her lip to hide it.
“Well, Teresa, since you’re so fond of statistics, think about this: What are the chances of you meeting a violent egocentric, a serial killer, and a pervert, all at the same time? Considering you’ve got the first two down already . . .”
This time she couldn’t help but laugh out loud, surprised by his brazenness.
“Fairly slim, I suppose.”
Parri gave her a wink. “I can assure you we’ll both be sleeping like logs tonight.”
“All right, then. Thank you.”
“Well done, young lady. I’ll come with you so you can pick up what you need.”
He helped her put her coat back on, and picked up her bag. He was swaying a little. Teresa helped him regain his balance.
“Have you been drinking tonight?”
“Well, it’s after midnight now, so technically this counts as a whole new session.”
“Why do you do it?”
“Don’t worry, it’s already fading.”
“Yes, but why?”
He stood up straighter. Disheveled, eyes puffy, he looked like he’d just been in a fistfight. But he was smiling.
“I have no excuses. No trauma, no drama. Just boredom.”
Teresa took the keys from his hand.
“I’m driving.”
50
Today
THE DOORS OF THE courthouse archives swung open. Teresa had submitted the request herself. She was convinced that somewhere in that room, kept inside a wooden box and cataloged as evidence in a murder investigation, was the map that would take her right to Sebastiano’s body.
It had been drawn with the tiles of the same mosaic she had discovered in that greenhouse twenty-seven years ago.
That night, she had seen a vision of hell. Hell was what Giacomo had had to walk through when he was a little boy, reemerging into the world as a monster. It wasn’t a landscape of the imagination, confined to the psychic realm: it was real.
As the district attorney’s staff carried the box toward them, Teresa began to perceive the telltale signs of something beginning to crack. It was the past itself; frozen for decades, but with its lid about to be lifted, suddenly on the verge of exploding.
The box was placed before them, and opened up.
Marini and the others leaned over as if they were standing at the edge of an abyss.
De Carli moved away almost immediately.
“I feel sick.”
Even Parisi had started to look a little queasy. He didn’t last very long, either.
Among the folds of a cliff whose walls looked like vertebrae, a red-haired boy, somewhere on the threshold between childhood and adolescence, sat with his back to the viewer, legs crossed, naked, arms raised toward a crucifix that glistened in the distance against the backdrop of a purple, apocalyptic sky. The boy had died and risen again in hell. His body was stripped of its flesh. He had none of the gleaming splendor of a creature brought back to life by a merciful god—only the gray pallor of a corpse, and dried-up skin that looked like it had melded with his skeleton. Flesh and bone fused together, like life and death, or love and hate.
On the flat rocky surface there was an open tomb, a canopic jar that had tipped over, rivulets of blood, a skull, the scythe that harvested life, and the ruins of an ancient civilization, represented by a handful of crumbling columns.
All of this had been skillfully portrayed with marble tiles measuring one centimeter on each side. The only exception was the principal figure. Part of his back had been rendered using small flat pieces derived from the victims’ bones. The fragments still bore the tags the police had used to mark them as human tissue.
Giacomo had tried again and again until he’d found the most fitting combinations, the most malleable bones, the most perfect proportions. He was a master craftsman of horror, a maker of nightmares.
Marini did not give in. Face to face with that aberrant tableau, he held his nerve.
Teresa was proud of him.
“What we didn’t take seriously enough at the time,” she began, “is what’s in the bottom right corner of the mosaic. Take a look.”
“What’s that?”
“You tell me.”
He leaned closer, despite the smell that reminded Teresa of a greasy, rancid soup.
“It looks like an old phone receiver.”
The object emerged from the bottom edge of the portrait, a gray and black arc with just enough space below it—before the metal frame began—for a glimpse of numbers on a dial.
“It is a telephone, yes. A seemingly incongruous addition, though back then it was assumed the whole thing was the product of the ravings of a madman. It appears to be connected to the Lazarus figure, raised from the dead, by a trail of blood. A red thread.”
“That’s true. So is it some kind of symbol?”
“Yes, and more. While I was working the case, I met Giacomo. Or rather, he found a way to meet me. He pretended he was on Parri’s team. On the third crime scene, before the body had even gone cold, he came up to me and gave me his phone number. And I called it.”
“Who picked up?”
“Nobody. It wasn’t operational. An old account. He had given me a phone number that no longer existed. So I asked myself why he might have done so.”
“And what was your answer?”
“That he just wanted a normal life. He wanted to be able to court a woman, give her the phone number of a house he wouldn’t be embarrassed to show her, ask her out, maybe even kiss her. But instead all he was able to do was kill.”
“You still talk about him as if he were a victim, too.”
“Because nothing has changed: he still is a victim. We are all victims of someone, and at least once in our lives, we have all been someone’s executioner. Some manage to save themselves, or find someone to save them. Others succumb. Thankfully very few become what Giacomo is. And this is what he is: a boy who already felt like he was dead while his peers were thinking and dreaming of their futures. With this mosaic he showed the world what he saw when he looked at himself in the mirror. The language used by the kinds of people we call monsters is almost always profoundly rooted in childhood. I was never able to understand where his language came from, or what its source was. I never had the chance to dig deep enough into his story to find out.”
Giacomo was still on the loose, though he was being hunted with every resource at the authorities’ disposal. There had been no sightings so far, and with every hour that passed, the chances of finding him diminished. It was like he’d handed himself back over to the night from which he had so briefly emerged. He could be anywhere, he could be stalking anyone. No longer prey, but predator. Would he kill again? Maybe, but Giacomo had already reached his zenith, or the nadir of his darkest self. No fresh murder could ever measure up to the perfection he had tasted in killing Sebastiano.
“Are you still convinced that someone was threatening him?”
“You’re asking me as if you no longer believe it. Maybe you never did.”
“What do you think?”
“I can only tell you what I know, because I witnessed it: as a boy, he experienced true fear, the kind that can absolutely petrify. I saw it; I felt it inside of me. I heard him calling for his mother, for help that never came, not until it was too late. But one day, as he grew up, he stopped feeling fear—forever. From that moment on, he became the danger. And he couldn’t wait to put his newfound power into practice.”
“He killed his stepfather.”
“After he was captured, Giacomo confessed to every murder he committed. He collaborated with the authorities and walked them through every one of his crimes. Not all killers do that. I always thought it was a disturbing detail.”
“Why is that?”
“Because he was honest. He did not wear a mask, which meant that when you looked at him, you saw exactly what he was.”
“That’s why you’ve always been sure he was telling the truth.”
“Right. But it seems things have changed. In any case, it wasn’t a pleasant experience for those who had to collect his statement. Giacomo started by explaining how he had lured his stepfather into the trap, with a simple phone call. They hadn’t been in touch since he and Giacomo’s mother had divorced. Giacomo found him through the company where his step-father worked as a sales representative. He still traveled across northern Italy for work, and would have covered this city, too. Giacomo pretended to be a potential buyer. He didn’t just kill him and end things there. The whole thing was something of an initiation.”
“What about those old men? What did they represent?”
“They all stood for his stepfather, who kept coming back to haunt him in his obsessive-compulsive thoughts. It was as if Giacomo had to kill him afresh every time to keep the pain at bay. But his relationship with those men was different. He didn’t butcher them like he did his stepfather. He tried, at least, to kill them quickly. The trolling and wooing phases were based on persuasion. He would look after them in the hospital, gaining their trust and respect, even a kind of gratitude. It wasn’t difficult to learn their habits, stage a fortuitous encounter, and convince them to follow him or give him a lift somewhere. When my colleagues on the case found Giacomo’s car, they discovered a list in the glove compartment with the names of thirty-two men he’d attended to in the ward. He’d already killed three of them.”
Marini ran a hand over his face.
“What are you hoping to find in this mosaic now?”
“I’ve already found it. I just needed to confirm my shaky recollections. I needed to see for myself that the telephone receiver was actually there, somewhere in his hellscape. Back then we didn’t bother too much with the phone number he’d given me. We had the bodies, we had the killer, and we had even managed to find the parts he’d removed from the corpses. There was nothing missing.” Teresa started motioning at the archive staff. “We made a mistake. An enormous mistake.”
“Why?”
“Because it wasn’t over. But it will be today.”
Teresa tore her eyes away from the disturbing, melancholy tableau and slid to the floor, her back against the wooden box. She could almost feel that figure pressing against her spine, wrenching her vertebrae apart so that it could reach between them and pluck her heart out. Soon the mosaic was covered up, plunged back into the darkness whence it had come. Teresa hoped that this time, it would stay there forever.
“Have that phone number checked. It was disconnected, but I want to know what address it was registered to.”
51
Twenty-seven years ago
PARRI HAD FALLEN ASLEEP in the passenger seat. Teresa covered him with the jacket he’d put on his lap. She’d parked in the courtyard, where nobody would bother him. She wouldn’t be long anyway; she just needed to pick up some extra clothes, enough to last her a couple of days.
The garden was like a storage depot. The light from the streetlamps shone over piles of rubble and wooden planks that had been thrown over the ground as makeshift walkways across the construction site.
It would take another couple of weeks for the refurbishment work to be completed, but once it was done, the house that had watched Teresa grow up would be transformed into a cozy nest for her and for her baby.
She turned the key in the lock and left the door open to let the light in from outside. Work on the electrical wiring was still ongoing, but the plumbing and the phone line were done. Soon she would be able to start working from there for a couple days a week, studying the case files and calling the office for the latest updates. Preparing for the exam, and planning her future. There was a nice light in there, morning to evening. Silvery from the northern side. Thick and warm from the south-facing windows.
Teresa climbed the stairs to the second floor, grabbed the bag of clothes that she had put inside the wardrobe, and stuffed a few more items inside. When would she stop feeling so rootless? Her hope was that the foundations of this house would become her own—just as they had been when she was a child.
“Did you really think I wouldn’t notice?”
Teresa felt her blood drain into a prickling fear. The boiler room, she thought.
I haven’t had the locks changed yet.
She turned around.
A fist smashed into her mouth. Splinters of broken teeth cut into her tongue. She stumbled, but managed to stay on her feet.
Sebastiano grabbed her hair. He forced her onto her knees, and began punching her head with his other hand.
“Did you really think you could leave me? Are you trying to humiliate me? Make everyone think I’m worthless?”
He was hitting her temples so hard that she started seeing double.
“Whose baby is it? Whose baby?”
He let go and Teresa fell to the floor. But not even the sight of her body lying inert was enough to placate the fury of that sorry excuse for a man. Sebastiano hit her face, her abdomen. Teresa fainted, then came to, mouth full of blood, and broken teeth strewn over her tongue. She tried to slither away from him, but Sebastiano snatched her hair again and smashed her head against the wall. The impact ignited a burst of white lightning inside her head.
I waited too long.
Teresa could think of nothing else.
I waited too long. It’s my fault.
He grabbed her by the wrist, pulled her out of the room and down the stairs. Every step was a blow to her ribs. She could feel her bones breaking.
He dragged her into the living room and left her on the floor. One last kick. Wrong—the next one was the last. Three in all, until finally, the monster stopped hitting.
She heard him light a cigarette, his breathing heavy, then sit in the armchair that had once belonged to Teresa’s father.
Between each slow drag, his fingers covered in her blood, his knuckles probably scraped, Sebastiano listened to her wheezing in agony as her throat struggled for air. He was watching her die.
There was shouting on the street, followed by laughter, and a metallic sound that might have been an empty can being kicked down the pavement. A group of young men and women, out on a lukewarm night. Was it a Saturday? Teresa couldn’t remember.
Sebastiano stood up. She imagined him peering out of the window.
More laughter on the street. Then Sebastiano’s footsteps again, now right in front of her, where he dropped to his knees. He touched her lips, put a finger inside her mouth, pushed it all the way into her throat.
He’s trying to take my soul, she thought.
But really, he was just enjoying the feeling of suffocating her. Soon there were two fingers in her throat, then three. They tasted terribly bitter. Sebastiano was wearing latex gloves.
“Not talking much now, are you? I’d like to see you try.”
Teresa gagged, her body shaking as she coughed up blood. Sebastiano cursed, and put the cigarette out on her lips.
One of the young men outside had started singing the first verse of a song. The sound soon began to fade into silence. The group was walking away.
Teresa had heard somewhere that when you were on the verge of death, hearing was the last of the senses to be extinguished. She would find out soon enough, and when she did, she hoped she could take with her the untroubled lightness of those vagabond youths, rather than the rasping lament of violated flesh. She wanted to rest her hands on her abdomen, but she couldn’t feel them anymore. She couldn’t feel the rest of her body, either.
Sebastiano brought his face close to hers. His breath carried the smell of a putrefied existence. The perfection he liked to surround himself with could do nothing to counteract the rottenness at his core.
