The Sleeping Nymph, page 31
Left on his own, he turned to Smoky, who looked almost pathetic, all sad eyes and droopy ears.
Massimo edged closer and reached out as if to pet him but almost immediately had to snatch his hand back to evade—in the nick of time—the lightning-fast attack of Smoky’s jaws, which snapped shut on thin air.
“I knew it!” Massimo exclaimed. “You’re really creepy, you know that, right?”
But poor Smoky had already returned to his previous state of catatonic misery.
On the stove in the kitchen, meanwhile, a pot had begun to gurgle wrathfully, its metal lid banging like a pair of cymbals gone crazy. Water leaked out and sputtered over the gas flame, extinguishing it. Massimo put the bag of croissants on the table and hurried over to turn the gas off. The stove was covered in some kind of sticky, smelly broth.
“Well, that’s lunch gone,” he muttered, lifting the lid with a towel.
He yelped and tripped backwards into a bunch of chairs. Smoky had already rushed to the scene, barking his head off.
“Jesus Christ!”
Smoky lunged for his calf but missed, grabbing hold of his trousers instead and pulling furiously at the fabric until it tore. But the dog was the least of Massimo’s worries; inside that pot, partly submerged in its own broth, was a human skull, staring up at him with a look of bewilderment.
“Superintendent!” he yelled as he tried to hold Smoky at bay.
Superintendent Battaglia calmly walked over, pulled the dog aside and put the lid back on the pot.
“Do you ever just mind your own fucking business, Marini?” she muttered.
“There’s a human skull in there,” he said, his tone very deliberate.
But Superintendent Battaglia seemed entirely unmoved by his outrage.
“I know, Marini.”
“And you’re okay with that?” he spluttered.
“I had to sterilize it,” explained Blanca, who’d joined them in the meantime, wearing a look of consternation. “Smoky stole it. He was using it as a toy. He contaminated it with his scent. We had to do something, otherwise we’d never have been able to use it for training again.” She wrung her hands sheepishly. “Which would have been a pity, right?”
Massimo was speechless. He looked at Superintendent Battaglia and threw his hands in the air.
“I don’t even want to know,” he said, backing away. “You two are crazy,” he said, pointing at them both. “That must be why you get along so well.”
He turned around and stopped in his tracks. Elena was standing in front of him. She looked as if she’d just woken up; she was still in her pajamas and her hair was all mussed.
“What are you doing here?” he said once he’d regained his bearings.
His heart was racing. He realized he’d asked the wrong question when he saw her raise a single eyebrow.
“Teresa was worried about me,” she replied curtly. “And Blanca has been kind enough to let me stay. She needed a flatmate, and I couldn’t stay in a hotel forever.”
He swallowed. He was such a fool.
“How are you both doing?” he asked.
She brushed a hand over her stomach.
“Fine, but the nausea is killing me.”
“I’m not surprised with this stink,” he said.
She frowned.
“What stink?”
Massimo remembered the bag he’d brought. He picked it up and handed it to her.
“I got some breakfast,” he said.
For them.
But Elena didn’t smile as he’d hoped. Instead, she covered her mouth, all the color draining from her face, and bent over.
Pregnancy really was a magical thing, casting a spell so potent that it made the smell of human bones seem normal, and that of vanilla and sugar revolting.
Elena had just thrown up on his shoes.
74
Teresa was back at the painter’s house, staring at Alessio and Aniza’s past, at the painting where Francesco, still a child, spelled the end of his own innocence, holding a rifle too big for his little boy’s hands.
Once again, she admired Alessio Andrian’s masterful depiction of the emotions in his subjects’ faces, of the resemblance between Francesco and his sister—whose eyes, unlike her brother’s, were the color of ice from a faraway land—and of the powerful, living energy they carried in their bodies. It was such a physical painting, almost corporeal; you could feel the weight of its subjects. But there was something else, too, some element that bothered Teresa all the way to the depths of her subconscious. She wasn’t sure yet what to call it yet.
“I haven’t had a chance to thank you yet. I’ll always be indebted to you.”
She turned to Marini. The bandage on his forehead, the cut on his lip and a light bruise on one of his cheekbones were the last traces left of a war he had finally won.
“Has Elena forgiven you?” she asked him.
“No.”
Teresa took off her glasses and wiped them on her sleeve.
“Then don’t thank me yet—you never know, she might well replace you.”
He smiled.
“And I’d deserve it, Superintendent.”
“I agree.”
Raffaello Andrian called them from the hallway. His uncle was ready for visitors.
Alessio Andrian was lying in bed, but he wasn’t asleep. The pillows supporting his back propped him far enough up that he could still see the forest he was so obsessed with.
Teresa looked at him now through the eyes of the past, picturing him as a young man trying to get through a war neither he nor his companions had wanted or understood.
To Aniza, he had been a romantic hero. When the invaders had attacked, he’d risked his life to protect her. Teresa imagined their clandestine meetings, their stolen nighttime kisses, with the forest as their only witness.
The Sleeping Nymph wasn’t some twisted, deathly creation; it was the portrait of a love forever lost, a desperate attempt to make something that would preserve that love somehow.
She took from Marini the photographs she hadn’t yet added to the case file.
They’d had confirmation an hour ago that the fingerprint found on the Sleeping Nymph belonged to Carlo Alberto Morandini. The match with the fingerprints they had found on the photographs his daughter had kept left no room for doubt. So the violin-playing partisan had definitely been there when Andrian was painting his portrait. Perhaps he’d touched it while trying to talk the painter out of his madness, or perhaps he had wished to claim that last memory of her, too, and steal her away from the man who loved her.
She placed the photographs on the bed near Alessio’s hands. They were pictures of Cam aged seventeen, taken not too long before he’d dropped out of the conservatory to join the partisans hiding in the forests.
Teresa sat beside Alessio.
“We know Cam was with you and Aniza the night she died,” she said. “He’s the one you see when you look at the forest, right?”
Alessio’s gaze moved away from the woods—the first time that had happened since Teresa had met him—and came to rest upon that face from his past.
With great effort, his fingers, weighed down by years of immobility, crept toward the photographs and crushed them slowly in his grip.
Raffaello hurried over.
“Uncle, please,” he said, but Teresa motioned at him to let it go.
She leaned toward Andrian’s face.
“Was it Cam who killed her? How did he do it?” she asked him.
But Andrian had turned into a statue again. Teresa tried again and again to connect with him, but he had gone back to his world of memories and silence, shutting the door firmly behind him. Teresa rose to her feet with a sigh and was heading toward the door, when a framed photograph fell from the bedside table. She turned around and put it back. But as she made for the door again, the photograph fell once more.
Teresa glanced at Marini and saw that they were thinking the same thing: Andrian himself had nudged it to the floor.
It was a photograph of his nephew, Raffaello.
75
All eyes were on Blanca and Smoky as they stepped out of the police car Parisi had driven them in. They’d come to the scene of Emmanuel Turan’s murder on a delicate mission: to locate the body, and prove to all the doubters that this scruffy mutt and the girl who handled him were as exceptional as they were rumored to be. Teresa had tried to be circumspect about their talents, but there had only been so much she could do. The police’s own search teams, meanwhile, had been infuriatingly complacent about Blanca’s involvement, as if they were certain they had already won what they saw as Teresa’s eccentric little game.
“We’ve already combed through half the forest. If we haven’t found it, it means it isn’t there,” the leader of the search team had just been telling her.
Teresa was sure he was wrong, but she didn’t say anything; to contradict him now would mean telling him that he had failed, and so had his team. And she would rather set them straight with the facts.
The derisory chatter died down when Blanca placed the tip of her white cane on the ground. Her footsteps echoed in a silence that screamed, People like you don’t belong here. But the clicking of the cane, fast and sure, seemed to speak for her. And it brooked no argument.
“They’ll eat her alive,” said Marini. He sounded worried.
“She won’t let them,” Teresa replied. “Anyway, we’re here now.”
The head of the search team walked up to them. He looked furious.
“Is this a joke?” he snapped.
“Everyone knows I have no sense of humor,” Teresa replied without even looking at him.
“The girl is blind!”
“Don’t worry, my dog can see just fine,” Blanca replied from behind him.
Teresa couldn’t help but smile. It can’t have been easy for Blanca to muster up the courage to say that.
The man turned around, looking sheepish, all the belligerence draining away from him at the sight of her small, unthreatening figure.
“I don’t mean to be rude, young lady, but—”
“Then don’t be.”
He looked at Teresa and, with a nod that could have signified anything—a last-minute concession, or resignation in the face of folly—the officer walked back to join the rest of his men.
The search team’s German shepherd dogs had begun to show signs of restlessness, which turned into full-blown howls of rage when Smoky began to urinate right in front of their noses. That was his way of sending a message.
Teresa pulled Blanca and Marini aside.
“How are you feeling?” she asked the girl.
“Ready.”
Teresa tenderly clasped her arm.
“Take all the time you need,” she told her. “And don’t worry about anyone else.”
The girl nodded.
“We don’t know what the killer might have done with the body,” Teresa resumed, “but I’m reasonably sure that it’s here somewhere. It wouldn’t have made sense to take it anywhere else: it would have been too risky and used up too much energy.”
Blanca lifted her face to the sky, as if she were sniffing for wind. She seemed to be scanning the air for the trail of scents that would guide Smoky to the hidden tomb. Her clouded irises lit up with the glare of the forest, that particular mix of shadow and light that Francesco had termed “forest shade.”
“There are wild boars all over these woods: if a corpse isn’t retrieved promptly, or if it’s left unburied, there won’t be too much of it left to find,” she mused.
“Where do you want to start?” Marini asked her.
She thought about his question as she zipped her sweater and put up her hood. The wind had picked up now, blowing strands of her hair around her face in blue waves that smelled of flowers.
“From the riverbank, or wherever there’s any water,” she replied firmly. “Wild animals tend to take their food to where they can also drink at the same time. Does anyone have a map? Could you check, please?”
The men sprang into action like gentleman courtiers. Teresa smiled.
“We’ll have to divide the area into squares measuring ten by ten,” Blanca continued. “The dogs must cover every inch of it, down to the smallest nooks and crannies. The surface of a burial site will look different from its immediate surroundings. The soil will be darker, softer, more uneven, with plants ripped out or torn. If the vegetation has already grown back, it’ll be thicker than it is elsewhere, even if it’s just grass.”
They marked out the zone of interest on a map, measuring approximately half a mile square, and stretching from the spot where Emmanuel Turan had been killed all the way to the bed of the river Wöda. That was where they would start.
“How long do we have before Lona gets here?” Marini asked quietly.
“Not long enough,” Teresa replied. “We should prepare for the worst.”
“The wind’s died down,” said Blanca.
She asked for her backpack and pulled out a vial. Marini leaned toward Teresa.
“Is that talcum powder?” he whispered.
“Shush. Let her be.”
The girl tipped a little of the fine powder onto the palm of her hand and let it trickle through her fingers. It was so light that it caught even the slightest whiff of a breeze.
“Which way is it blowing?” she asked.
“Northeast,” Marini replied.
She nodded and crouched beside Smoky. That dog was so much more than a companion who made the day-to-day difficulties of Blanca’s life a little easier to bear; he was a living extension of her being, an extra sense with which to experience the world—and an inseparable part of her beating heart.
“Moving against the wind makes the job of a search dog easier,” Blanca explained, straightening up. “They’ll follow the ‘scent cone’ all the way to its source. We might detect molecules coming from quite a distance, if we’re lucky.”
She folded up her collapsible cane and stuck it in the back pocket of her jeans. Teresa tried to imagine what it must be like to walk about in total darkness along the rough floor of a forest, with the constant fear of losing your foothold and the unsettling feeling of never knowing who or what might be behind the next step—the edge of a cliff, or some treacherous obstacle. Flanked by Smoky and surrounded by all those officers, Blanca wasn’t in any danger, but maybe that was the hardest part of it all: to trust others enough to place your fate in their hands.
Teresa had a theory about why Blanca put her cane away during searches: she wanted to dig into the seething universe around her with all of her other senses—go in so deep that she could feel its presence with the desperate clarity of someone drowning. One night when they were having one of their chats, Blanca had given her a rather illuminating example.
“Have you ever looked for something using just your hands, without being able to see?” she’d asked Teresa. “Your keys inside your handbag, your handkerchief. You know they’re there, but you could look for hours and never find them. Your fingers rake through dozens of different objects all cluttered in that tiny space and you can hardly tell what’s what.”
Teresa had nodded. It happened quite frequently, in fact, especially when she was in a rush.
“But take just one quick glance inside and within seconds, you’ll find what you’ve been looking for. Your senses will have taken down the coordinates and plotted a new map. And do you know why that happens?” she’d asked. “It’s because you think you know what’s around you, but actually all you have is a likeness, and not even a very accurate one at that.
“You don’t know much about shape, about proportions, weight and surface area. You only find out about these things when the image goes dark and your eyesight deserts you. I had to learn to see with my hands, with my ears and with my nose. By using my other senses, I’m able to see things that are beyond most people’s reach.”
She watched Blanca now feeling for the straps on Smoky’s harness and following him into the depths of the forest, along the imaginary border of the grid they had drawn on the map. To give her something solid to hold on to, the squad had roped string between the trees, dividing the search zone into sections. But death followed no borders and all they could do was hope that the dogs would be able to catch its scent wherever it may be, even on the back of the quickest of breezes.
“Look how thick the forest is, all these brambles and hollows and crumbling slopes . . . They’ll have to be better than everyone else if they’re going to find the corpse here,” muttered Marini.
“They are better than everyone else,” Teresa replied.
“What if we’re looking in the wrong place?”
“I’m sure it’s the right place. The victim was elderly and small, his body shrunken with time, but still, he was an adult male. The killer couldn’t have carried him too far and I don’t think he’d have taken him out of the forest, either. Why would he? It’s the perfect hiding place.”
“There’s no doubt about that, considering how badly the search has gone so far. But maybe it’s just a matter of time.”
“Time is just about the only thing we don’t have right now.”
Teresa turned around to look at the road. She was concerned that Albert might turn up at any moment and throw all of their plans into disarray.
Marini seemed to read her mind.
“So Lona’s like that because you rejected him.”
Teresa shook her head without looking at him.
“He’s like that because it’s his nature. I paid a heavy price for my freedom. He was offering me a shortcut, which would have only brought me back to where I’d started and was so desperate to get away from. He was just another man obsessed with control. He still is. The psychological abuse he inflicts is no less repugnant than physical violence.”
