Flowers over the Inferno, page 28
She did remember writing something down about the foundling wheel after her conversation with Doctor Ian at the pub. That must be what those words meant.
Her coat and her bag were inside a cabinet by the bed. She took out her diary and began to leaf through it, but though she was sure she’d written that entry, she couldn’t find it. She checked again, but the page where she’d recounted her conversation with the doctor was missing. Yet her memory of it was clear, unsullied by her spells of confusion.
“I had advised you to lie down,” said Ian, entering the room. “How are you feeling?”
Teresa had been asking herself the very same question. It was as if a stranger were coming in every now and then to take over her life for a while, leaving nothing more than hints about her visits—which, though always brief, had the power to turn everything on its head.
“Has anyone had access to my belongings?” she asked.
Ian looked at her in surprise.
“Not that I know of. They’ve been in the cupboard all along. Your colleagues put them there. Is there a problem?”
Teresa looked at her diary again.
Are you really sure someone’s opened it?
“There’s a page missing from my notes,” she told him.
Ian approached her and peered at the notebook in her hands.
“Are you sure?”
“Yes.”
“But how can you be sure the page wasn’t already missing? Or even that it’s missing at all? It’s a spiral-bound notebook.”
Teresa looked at him and didn’t know what to say. The truth was that she couldn’t be absolutely sure, because she could no longer trust her own mind.
She went to the window. It was so dark outside that it was impossible to actually see the landscape—which was a little like what was happening to her with her own thoughts. Perhaps she’d convinced herself she’d done something when in fact she’d only thought about doing it.
“Teresa, are you all right?”
“I . . . yes.”
“You’re pale. Please lie down.”
“No . . . I have to fight back.”
Ian moved closer and placed a hand on her elbow, as if to support her.
“Fight back against what?” he asked.
“I’m not exactly sure.” It was the truth. She twisted away from his grip and took a few steps as if to test her balance, physical and otherwise.
“You seem confused. Is this a regular occurrence? Memory loss, fainting, panic attacks . . .”
Teresa felt a bitter taste in her mouth.
So this was how it all began. She had expected it to take longer, but there she was, sinking, spiralling so fast she’d already lost her bearings.
But she had that note: “refer to diary.” And she had a memory, however disjointed. She couldn’t deny she was ill, but she had to believe in herself, she had to keep going at least until this case was closed.
She tried to figure out who might have wanted to destroy that entry, that handful of words indicating a possible lead—one of many that had emerged, and probably not even a particularly promising one.
But that was precisely what made the missing diary page such a crucial clue: whoever had torn it out had done so out of fear, knowing that those words might lead to a much bigger secret. But they’d come too late: she’d already sent Marini there.
But the person responsible for this had made a serious mistake: they had ripped the page out knowing that she might not even remember writing it or that it would be easy to make her doubt she’d ever written it.
They knew that Alzheimer’s disease had already begun consuming her memories. But she hadn’t told anyone about her illness. She hadn’t even had the courage to write it down in the pages of her diary.
Teresa glanced at the computer on the desk. The screen showed a page with her medical records. The program that collated them was connected to the network of the national health system, which held information on every medical test she’d ever undergone.
“Superintendent?”
Teresa felt a surge of vertigo and clung to the bed to stop herself from falling. She looked at Ian.
“Are you unwell?” he asked her.
She remembered that he’d given her an injection.
“What . . . What did you inject me with?” she asked him, her voice hoarse.
He laughed in surprise.
“Insulin, obviously. Don’t you remember?”
Teresa felt weak, but she couldn’t tell if it was from lack of sleep, insufficient food, or some kind of poison running through her veins. Perhaps it was only fear.
“You know my secret, don’t you, Doctor Ian?” she asked him, gasping for breath.
Inside the cabinet behind the doctor, Teresa’s phone rang. She didn’t move.
Ian’s expression shifted. It became remote and vaguely hostile.
“Aren’t you going to pick up, Superintendent?” he asked her.
“Why don’t you answer it, Doctor Wallner?”
He closed his pale, ice-cold eyes. He didn’t much resemble the photograph from when he’d been a young man running an orphanage. Life had altered his features, and more importantly, he had cloaked his true nature with smiles and an affectionate manner; but inside, he was the same person he had always been, and Teresa could finally see him, his true nature reflected in those eyes that lacked any trace of remorse. She thought of how much strength would be required to live your whole life wearing such a heavy mask. Or perhaps it wasn’t about strength, perhaps it was some warped sense of vocation.
Teresa thought of the moment she’d shown him her diary. He’d looked at it as if he’d genuinely never seen it before. His self-control was astonishing.
“I always thought there was a monster in this case. But it’s not Andreas Hoffman,” she said. “It’s not subject thirty-nine. The true monster is the person who stole Andreas’s life from him and killed his only companion: it’s you.”
Wallner’s lips stretched into a sickening smile.
“I am a scientist, Teresa. Scientific research requires certain sacrifices to be made.”
“You killed that child, but you wanted to get rid of them both, didn’t you? Why didn’t you go back to the shelter to make sure you’d achieved your aim?”
“Oh, but I did, Superintendent. It’s just that I only found one body. I knew what the Alpha was capable of, so I fled. He was fifteen years old and possessed the physical strength of an adult. He would have killed me.”
“So you set fire to the shelter and ran away.”
“That was the only mistake I made: I assumed that the fire would destroy all traces of my presence. As I was fleeing, I stumbled, lost my balance and fell from a cliff. I dragged myself to the village with my leg broken in three places, and I was bedridden for months. I was forced to give up mountaineering. I never got the chance to go up there again and behold my creation.”
“You’re a criminal, just like your father before you, and all those like him.”
“It has been seventy years since the end of that war, and still people like you won’t stop complaining about it.”
“Why don’t you tell that to a jury?”
Wallner burst out laughing.
“Why do you think I didn’t run away?” he asked her. “I could have left as soon as you started getting too close to the truth. But I’m seventy-five, and I have a serious cardiovascular condition. Starting a new life under a false name isn’t as easy as it was forty years ago. The truth is that I will never go to prison. It’ll take years for them to sentence me, and then there is always the court of appeals. Whatever happens, I’ve already won, Superintendent Battaglia.”
Teresa saw Parisi and the rest of the squad lined up behind the doctor’s back.
“I will make it my mission to prove you wrong, Doctor Wallner,” she replied.
He followed her gaze, and realized they were no longer alone. His expression changed completely; all his bravado disappeared. Parisi took his arm and led him away, but just as he was walking out, Wallner turned around to look at Teresa.
“There was only insulin in that needle,” he told her. “You’re not going to die, Superintendent. At least not today.”
Teresa was worried she might faint again, so she sat back down on the bed. Her knees were shaking and her breath was short. She needed a minute to recover.
“Is everything okay, Superintendent?”
She raised her head and saw De Carli.
“It’s over,” she said, as if those two words answered his question.
He nodded and smiled.
“What are you doing here?” she asked him.
“Marini sent us. He told us about Wallner. He’s on the line, he wants to talk to you.”
He handed her a mobile phone. Teresa hesitated briefly, searching for the right words to say, then took the phone.
“I got there first,” she said.
He started laughing.
“What makes you think that?”
“Statistics. You always come in second.”
She heard him laugh again.
“How are you feeling?” he asked.
Teresa thought about it.
“I’m fine,” she replied, and it was true.
In spite of everything, and against all expectations, Teresa felt alive in a way she hadn’t experienced in a very long time. She was still, and would still be, the maker of her own destiny.
She looked at her reflection in the windowpane.
She saw a woman with wrinkles, dishevelled, her face tired, her eyes moist.
That face belonged to her. It was the face of a fighter.
-80-
EPILOGUE
A light mist was forming in the Sliva gorge. It was no icy winter fog, but an unexpected breath of spring blowing over the water. It brought the scent of fresh shoots about to pierce the soil and reach toward the sun. The stream, which had been nearly still until a few weeks ago, now burbled and swirled and leapt across boulders. The ice was withdrawing from the banks and the undergrowth, like a vanquished army in retreat.
The forest was waking up a little more every day, stretching its limbs, filling with the first songs of the birds returning from the plains.
To Mathias it seemed that his and Lucia’s and Diego’s and Oliver’s lives were also starting from scratch, like the nature around them. They had learned in school about the cycle of seasons, and now he could observe its effects on the gorge, the place where it had all started, and where the first buds had now begun to blossom.
That was how Mathias pictured himself and his friends. They were no longer standing still, stuck in some awful moment from their past; they had moved on, like clouds racing in the sky, like water streaming over the pebbles, and wind moving between blades of grass. They were like plants that had been hungry for light and had finally found it.
He ran down the path, his lungs filling up with new and vibrant smells. He reached the riverbank and took the familiar route up ladders and across rope bridges. Freed from the winter frost, the wood along the path sounded different beneath his feet; it made the rounded, supple noise Mathias associated with warm weather. The water had changed color, too, resplendent now in deep green and glittering turquoise.
Down there, in that ravine that carved its way past the village, he didn’t feel alone anymore. He stopped with his face tilted up at the light blue sky, conscious of the hundreds of minuscule hearts hiding among the tree branches around him, beating in time with his own.
In that moment, the sun reached its highest point in the sky, and a ray of light lit up the gorge, unleashing a kaleidoscope of colors.
Mathias laughed elatedly and let out a yell that echoed through boulders and crevasses, and his friends responded like a pack of young wolves.
He ran toward them, past the cave and all the way to the waterfall, now thawed and free to rush onward in a cascade of rainbow-colored jets.
Lucia, Diego, and Oliver were waiting for him with their backpacks on their shoulders and a map of the mountain paths between them, ready to set out on a new adventure.
Mathias took a step toward them, then turned to glance at the forest behind him. Among all the new sounds and calls that animated the forest, there was one missing. He paused for a moment, secretly hoping to hear that presence again, to spot it somewhere among the trees, but there were no shadows left in the woods.
-81-
The old asylums for the criminally insane had been replaced by institutions commonly known as psychiatric rehabilitation centers.
Teresa hoped that the change was not purely a matter of semantics. She had to believe that the man who was waiting for her behind that door would have, at long last, an opportunity to learn how to live, rather than just to survive. Perhaps this was naive of her, but now more than ever before in her life, she needed something to hope for.
“Ready?” said Marini beside her.
Teresa nodded, and a warden opened the door.
There was Andreas Hoffman, sitting before her not with the air of a convicted killer, but of a king in exile. His throne had been usurped, his reign handed over to bulldozers and diggers that would tear it to pieces. Yet he took up all the space in the room with the majesty of a conqueror.
He was sitting on a chair, staring ahead at the bare wall with his back straight and his head held high, and with his hands—restrained by flexible handcuffs—resting on his lap. They had cut his hair and shaved his beard. He had a strikingly beautiful face that looked as if it had been carved out of some golden, luminous wood. Studying his face, Teresa understood that nothing would ever corrupt his soul, not even the blood he had shed.
Andreas existed on a different plane from theirs: a primordial place stripped clean of all hypocrisy and human iniquities. Not even death seemed to have tainted him.
Teresa was awed by the power he radiated: it wasn’t just a question of physical vigor, but of a vital energy that seemed almost tangible, and that she could feel pressing against her, even at a distance. It was that animal magnetism that Wallner had described in his diary.
But, she reminded herself, it was also a lot more than that: it was the force of leaders and kings, the charisma of commanders; it was mana, a spiritual energy that few were blessed with, and which could be used to rouse another’s conscience or indeed to crush it.
Teresa wasn’t sure whether she was imagining it all, or if the creature in front of her truly was special.
Stay calm and think clearly, she told herself as she sat across from him.
The expressionless stillness of his face was unnerving, but more impressive than that was the sway he seemed to hold on his surroundings. Wallner was insane, and a criminal, but Teresa found herself thinking that perhaps his theories on child number 39 might have been more than just the ramblings of a madman.
She’d thought long and hard about how to establish a rapport with Andreas. She didn’t think words were worth much to a creature who’d grown up immersed in the silent world of the forest and solitude. He understood words, and he could even utter a few himself, but they certainly weren’t his natural language.
Andreas communicated through the senses, just as a deer or an eagle would have done back in the world he came from. He understood the world through nature. So Teresa had followed her instincts and decided to reach out to him through the place his mind still lived.
It was time to show him the gifts they’d brought.
They put a photograph of a woman breastfeeding her baby on the table. Teresa had downloaded it from the Internet, but she was sure it would make no difference to Andreas: he would regard that child as his own, as little Markus, the heir he’d picked out for himself. Teresa was trying to tell him that Markus was all right.
Andreas had been staring at the wall since they’d arrived, but that photograph immediately caught his attention. He picked it up and inhaled deeply, filling his lungs with its scent. Before coming to the rehabilitation center, Teresa had placed the photograph next to the child. She was astonished to see that Andreas could tell.
The second gift was a sprig of mountain pine that they had picked near the mountain shelter that had been his home. Teresa watched his expression as she offered it to him: the change was minimal, a barely perceptible dilation of the pupils. The smell of that evergreen plant was the smell of his world. Andreas closed his eyes for a moment, and Teresa could see that he was there again, back on his mountain.
The third gift belonged to the nameless child. It was a scrap of fabric they had found on his remains. Teresa had had to fight to obtain permission to bring it to Andreas, but she had stood her ground until the “no” had turned into a “yes.”
Andreas recognized it. He would have recognized it among thousands of scraps. He picked it up and Teresa saw his hands shake for the first time since his life had been transformed. He ran the cloth over his face, his lips, and down to his chest, where he let it rest against his heart. His eyes closed and he mouthed a series of low sounds that Teresa couldn’t understand.
What she did know was that Andreas was rocking the baby.
That’s his flower, she thought. The most beautiful flower among all those that stopped him from looking into the inferno.
Afternoon had turned into evening. A last, scattered light still gleamed on the horizon. The distant mountains in the background reminded Teresa of where this incredible tale had begun. The air outside the rehabilitation center was effervescent and carried the early traces of a premature spring. She thought she caught a whiff of dormant buds and took that as a message of hope.
Teresa had always been a little allergic to hope, but then again, she supposed she had to believe in something. So why not believe in something good?
