The Sleeping Nymph, page 28
“Where to?”
“He was obsessed with the mountains. They were his greatest passion, right up until the end. They used to go on treks together.”
“I’d like to talk to your son.”
The woman burst into bitter laughter.
“So would I. I haven’t heard from him in two years. The last time I tried to call him, I got an automated message saying his number was no longer in use. Of course, my son had forgotten to inform me.”
“I’m sorry.”
The woman shrugged.
“He doesn’t hate me. There’s never been a problem. It’s just . . . he’s like his grandfather. Other people are nothing but shadows in their lives. Just shadows passing by.”
Teresa glanced at Marini. His expression was strained.
“Did your father ever talk to you or your mother about the war?” she asked the woman.
Maddalena stubbed her cigarette out in an ashtray and lit another.
“Only when he wanted to remind us of our insignificance. We could never understand, that’s what he used to say. Unlike him, we’d never had to fight for our freedom.”
“What happened to his violin?”
“I’ve no idea. It wasn’t among his possessions when he died.”
Teresa asked her if she had any pictures of her father to show them. The woman looked up and exhaled a cloud of cigarette smoke, wishing perhaps she could just as easily expel the rancor that was still eating away at her.
“I removed all traces of him from this house,” she replied. “I put them in a box in the attic for years, locked away with all of my resentment until I could finally bring myself to get rid of it. The only photo I didn’t destroy is the one you’ll find in the cemetery.”
Teresa did go to the cemetery. She saw the tomb overrun with weeds. She saw the bare, desolate flower vase. Finally, she saw Cam.
And she recognized him.
63
Francesco was in his woodshed, stacking logs with the energy and vigor of a much younger man. He didn’t turn around as Teresa approached, though somehow, he seemed to know who it was, walking up to him.
“The forest is overrun with your people,” he said, using a handkerchief to wipe the sweat off his neck. “They’ve been out looking for Emmanuel from dawn till dusk, but still they haven’t found him.”
Teresa watched him moving blocks of wood about, his gestures seemingly effortless. She hadn’t been able to tell from his tone whether or not the presence of the police displeased him. He didn’t seem surprised by the temporary impasse in which the investigation was currently languishing. It just meant that the forest—with its crevasses, its muddy plateaus, and its screes that could collapse into landslides at a moment’s notice and drag you hundreds of feet from where you had just been standing—was doing its job: protecting what was concealed inside it, like a single giant trap guarding everything that dwelled inside it.
“You lied to me,” said Teresa, sitting on a bench carved from the trunk of a pine tree.
At that, Francesco finally turned around, one hand on his side and the other clasping his handkerchief. His gaze flitted between Teresa and Marini, but he never looked down. He pulled out his axe from a stump and sat down.
“It’s not very courteous to turn up at someone’s house and accuse him of being a liar,” he said without acrimony.
“I don’t pay courtesy visits when I’m working,” Teresa replied in similarly mild fashion. “Besides, I was simply making an observation. Am I wrong?”
Francesco didn’t reply.
Teresa showed him a printout of a photograph of a middle-aged man with hair still as thick and curly as it would have been in his youth. It was a portrait of Cam, the likeness she’d found on his tomb.
“He didn’t change much, did he?” she remarked.
The expression on Francesco’s face shifted. He looked alarmed, as if he’d come face to face with a man who’d returned from the dead to drag him down to hell.
“His name was Carlo Alberto Morandini,” Teresa continued. “You might not have known that, but you do know that he was a partisan and that he was somewhere in these mountains during the dying days of the war. He was the one who gave you the rifle you fired at the German soldier’s cart that day.”
Francesco made no attempt to take the printout Teresa was showing him.
“How did you figure it out?” he whispered.
“I recognized him. Alessio Andrian painted him. He painted the whole scene. He was watching you that day. It was Cam who gave you the rifle, wasn’t it?”
Francesco nodded, his elbows resting on his knees and his hands clasped together in front of his mouth. Teresa gave Marini a knowing look.
“Why did you lie to me about what the Germans did? Why didn’t you tell me that they executed a Resian man?” she asked Francesco.
Francesco bowed his head.
“Because I was ashamed,” he confessed. “It’s been seventy years and still the shame won’t go away. They carried out the execution to punish us for the shot I fired at the German soldier, though nobody knew that at the time. My sister Ewa and I never told anyone what had really happened and an innocent boy died without even knowing why. They butchered him, right there in front of us, and we never said a word.”
“You made a pact,” Teresa suggested.
Francesco looked away, and right into the past.
“Yes,” he murmured. “We made a pact. A terrible pact.”
64
March 1945
The arrival of the Germans was announced by the roar of the engines that powered their trucks up the hairpin turns. The exhaust fumes rose through the gorge and reached the first village, heralding an event that would forever alter the landscape of that little world that had so far escaped the war unscathed.
Francesco saw them rounding the last turn, but he didn’t yet know why they had come. They seemed different from the soldier who drove the cart up the valley every Thursday to fetch bread from the bakery. These soldiers looked angry.
His sister, Ewa, grabbed his arm and pushed him toward their house, but before they could go inside and hide behind the door, the trucks had already surrounded the village. One by one, the soldiers stepped out from beneath the tents on the backs of the trucks, moving as swiftly as a pack of hungry wolves. They were armed, and they were looking at the villagers as if they saw them as something less than human.
This war, Francesco thought, is a strange thing indeed. An imaginary line drawn by a stranger somewhere far away now marked the boundary between brotherhood and hate. Friends and enemies were made on the basis of which side of that border they happened to be born on.
He realized that these soldiers had come because of the shot he had fired. They would tell him off now, and his father would be angry with him. He looked at Ewa and trembled, but his sister gripped his hand harder and placed a single finger on his lips.
You swore, Franchincec, she was telling him. They had sworn they would keep quiet.
The soldiers searched every home and gathered everybody—men, women, children and the elderly—in the main square. Their weapons were pointed at the villagers’ heaving chests. Their leader—so striking, Francesco thought, in his uniform—barked a series of orders at the mayor, Gilberto Turan. Gilberto wasn’t entirely unacquainted with the soldier’s dry, jagged language and replied in a mixture of fear, unfamiliar words and pleas in Italian.
Nobody was hiding any weapons, he said. Nobody had fired any shots at any Germans.
Francesco lowered his eyes, which had now begun to sting with tears. And even when it all began, he kept his gaze firmly on the place where his fingers intertwined with Ewa’s, the seal of a pact that must never be broken.
The foreign wolves surrounded the lambs and selected the one they would sacrifice. Gwén had only just turned fifteen, and in a few days he was due to take the few cows they still had left up to the highlands for pasture. He would return to the valley at the end of the summer. He had never touched a rifle in his life.
Francesco looked up and spotted Aniza in the crowd. She was peering into the forest, her face a mask of anguished expectation, as if she thought someone would turn up at any moment and save them all.
The children of the valley had never known what war was really like, not until that moment.
Francesco discovered that day that it had a very specific smell—of blood, of metal forged into weapons, of beatings that sliced people’s flesh open. Of the foreign scent of the invaders, of leather boots so heavy they crushed the flowers they trod upon.
The war sounded like the rattle of machine-gun fire, like a strange snarling language, like empty cartridges crackling against stone. It sounded like the hysterical sobs of a mother, the quiet weeping of a father, a boy crumpling to the floor onto a bed of crushed crocuses. It sounded like the last tremor in his limbs as he lay cradled in the arms of a woman who had no air left in her lungs to cry. It sounded, too, like the teardrop falling to the ground from Gwén’s red-stained face: Francesco heard it clearly, or maybe what he heard was the sound of the innocence being ripped out of his soul to mix with the blood that soaked the earth.
The first shots fired from the forest startled the wolves. Suddenly, the partisans erupted from the trees, spraying bullets everywhere. The village descended into chaos.
Amid all the noise and the shouting, Francesco felt himself being lifted into the air. Aniza had picked him up, Ewa clinging to her skirts. There was a man with Aniza whom Francesco had never seen before, and would never see again. He had a red bandanna tied around his neck and his fingers, wrapped around his rifle, were stained with paint. He was protecting them as they fled, ushering them far away from there, to a place where they could hide. He didn’t stop shooting until they were safe.
Inside the granary, Aniza watched through a gap in the planks as silence once again fell upon the village, while Francesco, his vision blurred with tears and the salty tang of his runny nose upon his tongue, watched Ewa. He saw her purse her lips and the subtle gesture with which she tucked under her skirt the treasure they’d stolen from the German soldier.
That treasure was filthy now, soaked with blood and human life.
65
Massimo listened to Francesco’s account with his heart throbbing in his throat, lodged there like a bullet refusing to budge.
The old man seemed to be seeing the echoes of a painful past flash before his eyes.
“I think I remember now,” he whispered. “One of the partisans helped us to escape the crossfire that day. He came straight for Aniza. For us. It must have been him. It must have been Andrian.”
He covered his face with his hands.
“I will never forgive myself for not speaking up. What happened to Gwèn will haunt me for the rest of my life,” he said, sounding angry now. He looked down at his upturned palms. “His blood is on my hands; I can feel it there. But I swear that rifle wasn’t supposed to be loaded. It was meant to be a game. I was aiming at the German soldier as a game.
“Ewa and I spent a lot of time in the fields outside the village. That’s how we met that partisan. He let us play with his rifle whenever he’d had a few glasses of grappa and was in a good mood. But he was never reckless. He always took the bullets out.”
“But not that day,” Superintendent Battaglia urged him.
Francesco looked at each of them in turn.
“I still can’t remember whether or not I saw him do it that day,” he said. “But the rifle did fire a shot and the shot grazed the German soldier. And then Gwèn was slaughtered. Because of a scratch. Because of a game.”
Massimo could almost feel the crushing weight of the man’s guilt. And he could also feel that something about this tale still remained hidden, buried so deep that it was little more than the dark outline of a shape he couldn’t yet make out.
“That partisan called himself Cam,” said Superintendent Battaglia. “Did you know that?”
“No. We weren’t close. It wasn’t really a friendship. We were. . . a diversion, to him.”
“Did you know that he was an exceptional violinist and that he had performed the ‘Devil’s Trill’ for the mayor of Trieste?”
The horrified look on Francesco’s face answered for him.
“So he was the one in the woods that night,” he whispered.
“We still need to determine whether or not he was involved in Aniza’s disappearance,” the superintendent replied. “But we’re sure he was somewhere in the forest: the partisan camp wasn’t far off, anyway. He must have been the one playing the violin that night. But it remains to be seen whether or not he was also the one who murdered Aniza and hid her body. What might have been his motive? Obsession? Sexual compulsion? Perhaps he assaulted her and when she tried to resist him, he lost control.”
Francesco closed his eyes.
“If he was the one who hurt Aniza, then my silence killed two people.”
His hands were shaking in his lap and Massimo could feel that tremor boring its way into his own gut, infecting him, too, with its pain.
He understood how Francesco felt. He knew.
He looked away in search of some kind of relief, a way to forget about the superintendent for a moment, and that old man who was still trapped in his own past. If only he could lose himself in the wild scents of the forest. He had to find a different perspective, or else he would go mad. It was as if he had reached a point of no return—regarding Elena, regarding his life. It was the kind of moment when you realize that nothing will ever be the way it used to be. The rift Massimo had created was like death: irreversible.
It was imperative that he should banish Elena from his heart, push her far from the reach of his violent hands. But instead there was a chain that bound them—a chain made out of his own DNA. The child’s umbilical cord was like a knot that tied them both together.
He closed his eyes for a moment. He took a step back, then another and another until his slow retreat turned into flight.
66
When she looked up to find Marini gone, Teresa was stunned. She saw him turn around to glance at her one last time before getting into the car. Then he turned on the engine and fled as if his very survival depended on making his escape.
She kept looking even after he was long gone, vanished out of sight behind a turn in the road. She thought of the expression on his face, which was enough to convince her that there was no more time left to lose. She had to find out what it was that had been eating away at him. She had to figure out how to save him.
The explanation she was looking for wasn’t in his file, which she had been sent before his transfer to the team. She hadn’t been surprised at the information she’d found there: she had expected the flawless CV, the high marks and the immaculate disciplinary record, all the glittering trophies of a man destined for a stellar career. Massimo Marini’s success so far was the result of a hard-fought campaign for personal redemption.
The sparkle had begun to fade as Teresa had read further down the page. She hadn’t been prepared for what she’d found there: the sanitized description, couched in legal terminology, of a tragic event that had likely affected every single moment of Marini’s life thereafter.
And yet Teresa had the feeling that something was missing. There had to be more to this than what she had read in his file, something unresolved: not just grief, but anguish, too. Guilt.
She scrolled through the contacts in her phone until she found the number she was looking for and made the call, grumbling to herself as she waited. She had never enjoyed calling in favors, knocking on people’s doors and telling them, “I’ve come to you because you owe me.”
But she would do it for Massimo.
“It’s a big ask,” said the voice at the other end of the line once she’d explained what she needed.
“So it can’t be done?” Teresa replied, meaning something else altogether.
She heard a sigh.
“It can’t be done, and I shouldn’t do it. But I will.”
She hung up and clambered back down to the village, where the search teams were still scouring the forest for traces of an elusive corpse that was missing its heart. The time had come to throw Blanca and Smoky into the mix.
Inevitably, she had to call headquarters and explain to an appalled de Carli that Marini had decided to run away, so someone had to come and fetch her. She knew—she was certain, in fact—that Officer de Carli wouldn’t breathe a word of this to anyone except Parisi. That was how their circle worked: a circle of trust, of honor, of shared values best described as a form of “belonging.” She smiled, in spite of everything, at the thought that these were the same values that had governed the lives of medieval knights. And it was her responsibility to lead her young, strong, zealous knights (even when they were as troubled as Marini was), never mind the fact that she could hardly speed up her walking pace without running out of breath.
She checked the time on her mobile phone while all around her the hunt continued in a flurry of men exchanging tired commands, walkie-talkies croaking out truncated words, excited dogs relieving their weary colleagues and maps laid out over the hood of the car, their corners curling up in the wet wind brought by another change in the weather. One of the maps broke free of the hands that had held it down and fluttered into the air before falling at Teresa’s feet. She picked it up and studied the grid someone had drawn upon it with a red marker.
She gave it back to its owner and watched him return to his colleagues’ side, his boots caked all the way to his knees with mud.
“Teresa.”
She turned around.
“Doctor Lona,” she replied.
Albert was huddled in his expensive coat, his neck wrapped in a scarf the same color as his eyes: like the surface of a lake on a rainy day.
