The Sleeping Nymph, page 39
She felt an excruciating sadness come over her and was forced to take a step back.
How much of his obsession had the grandfather passed on to the grandson? Had Alessandro, too, been searching for the lost icon, and how far was he prepared to go in order to find it?
Maybe he’s found it already and now he’s guarding it.
Teresa walked away toward the forest, her shoulders hunched. She didn’t even notice the shadow moving among the vegetation until she heard a twig snap, when she looked up.
At that same moment, Alessandro saw her, too—and sprinted off into the trees.
Teresa tried to keep up with him as best she could. Her pursuit was instinctive, powered by the urge to get to the truth before the others did, to look that young man in the eye and see whether or not he really did have the face of a killer.
“Stop!” she yelled, shoving off the branches that kept getting in her way.
She was tired, angry, sweaty, out of breath. She hated the burden that her flesh had become—another obstacle to deal with among so many others, both physical and psychological, that stood in her way.
Her progress became slower and more grueling with every stride until eventually she had no choice but to stop and lean against a tree, struggling for air, her ears ringing with the roar of her heart and the heavy sound of her breathing.
She realized she was alone.
Slowly, she was taken over by a sensation she’d grown accustomed to by now: the feeling that she was losing her bearings. The void was coming.
I need to go back. Back to safety.
She turned around and found herself face to face with the young man she’d seen running away into the woods. He looked pale and sweaty, despite the slight chill in the air.
He walked up to her, so close his chest touched her body.
“I’m not a killer,” he hissed, so agitated he seemed to want to bite the air as he spoke.
“Why would you be?” she replied after a moment’s hesitation.
He shook his head uncomprehendingly.
“You’re all over me for something I didn’t even do,” he yelled, right in her face.
Teresa could almost feel the sharpness of his teeth in her flesh, see them snapping at her like the metal spikes of a trap.
The young man brought his shaking hands all the way up to her neck.
“My grandfather spent his whole damn life looking for that Madonna, but he’s not the one who killed Aniza,” he said.
He looked like he was about to burst into tears.
“He wanted me to find it, he wouldn’t stop going on about it—but I let him down.”
She didn’t know how to respond.
“The Madonna?” she stammered.
She had no idea what he was talking about. She had no idea who he even was.
The young man squeezed his hands tighter.
“We’re not murderers. Neither of us. He didn’t kill her,” he repeated.
“Kill her?”
She tried to push his hands away, but he was too strong.
“When my grandfather got there, the girl was already dying and that painter had lost his mind. He was using her blood to paint her portrait . . . My grandfather said he tried to grab the painting off him and get him away from there, but it didn’t work. He looked possessed.”
“Who was it? Who was it who hurt the girl?” Teresa managed to ask.
His speech turned frantic, interspersed with sobs and furious expletives.
“Wait!” she pleaded as she finally managed to push him away.
She rummaged in her pocket for a pen but realized she didn’t even have a piece of paper at hand: in her hurry to catch him, she’d dropped her bag.
“I know this is going to sound crazy to you,” she said, rolling up one of her sleeves all the way to the elbow, “but would you mind writing down on my arm what you’ve just told me?”
He stared at her, wide-eyed.
“Are you crazy? You need to tell the others that it wasn’t me!”
Teresa wanted to scream. She didn’t have the words to explain to him how reality suddenly seemed to have disappeared from beneath her feet. But there was one thing she was sure of: whatever happened to her in this interlude of darkness, she had to make sure she left clues behind—clues she could later follow herself.
“I’m Teresa Battaglia. I’m Teresa Battaglia,” she said over and over again, but only because it was written on her bracelet.
“Superintendent!”
They turned around to see a man approaching them. The boy began to run, but he’d not gone a few yards before the earth crumbled under his feet and his escape turned into a plunge over the edge of the cliff. She watched him tumble down among a cascade of falling rocks, falling faster and faster, his arms folding into unnatural angles, one of his legs stretched out so high it almost reached his head. He was like a puppet, his limbs at the mercy of the landslide. When it was all over, he lay broken at the foot of the ridge.
Teresa felt faint. She fell to the ground, still holding her pen. She knew she didn’t have much time before it all vanished from her mind. The names had already been lost in the breeze. All that was left was the story itself.
Quickly, she wrote it all down on her skin.
The air ambulance took off, its rotor blades and engine rumbling into life.
Teresa watched its flight, feeling as groggy as if she’d come back from the dead, headbutting her way out of her own coffin.
“Do you think he was telling the truth?” Marini asked her.
Teresa had no idea. She had managed to tell Marini that the kid’s last words had been to reiterate his—and his grandfather’s—total innocence, but she was still finding it difficult to string sentences together and call things by their actual names. She was even struggling to remember Marini.
So even if it made her sound like she was obsessed, she had made him go over the twists and turns of the investigation several times, made him repeat people’s names and run through their roles in the case over and over again.
But what he assumed was her way of reviewing all the evidence they’d collected so far was, to her, a vital learning exercise.
“Can you trust a person who’s used to lying every day of their life?” she said at one point.
She was referring not just to Alessandro, but also to herself.
He looked at her, his gaze veiled with a burning tenderness that surfaced in her mind a vague memory of the secret this man had carried—and that she had brought into the open.
“Maybe not,” Marini replied. “But sometimes it’s worth a try. It’s worth trying to understand the other person’s suffering.”
Trust. Sometimes it’s worth a try.
Teresa pulled up her coat sleeve and stretched out her arm.
“Don’t ask me why or how,” she murmured. “And whatever you do, don’t be too shocked.”
95
Deputy Prosecutor Gardini had arrived in the valley and delivered an official statement to the press, but even after the cameras had finished rolling, the questions kept coming. Up until that moment, the police and the local community had erected a wall around the case to keep the media at bay, but now secrecy was no longer viable. Teresa herself had pushed for the statement to be made, steering its tone and contents. The words Gardini had spoken hadn’t really been meant for the assembled journalists; they were intended for the killer.
“I won’t ask you anything,” said Marini, one hand still holding her forearm, “but you’ve got to tell me what drugs you’re on. Whatever it is, it must be pretty good stuff.”
Teresa held back a smile and allowed him to keep thinking that she’d been drugged into her current state of stupor—when in truth, the mind-altering substance that occasionally transformed her into a stranger had a medical name and a clear clinical trajectory. But she agreed with him in principle: someone should make it illegal and find a way to flush it out of her brain.
The arm she held aloft under Inspector Marini’s bewildered gaze bore a series of esoteric symbols inscribed inside a primitive circle.
Teresa was fascinated by it: her mind had somehow figured out a way to translate a story that must, in that moment, have been unintelligible to her, into this mysterious language now laid out over her arm. Her brain had fallen back on symbols buried deep in her subconscious, under layers of past experiences and more recent discoveries. Meanwhile, what few words she had written down seemed to say nothing at all.
Marini took a few photographs.
“This is really quite disturbing,” he said.
“Hmm.”
“It would help if we knew what you and Alessandro were talking about . . .”
I can’t remember, Marini, and if you still haven’t figured that out by now, then you’re in even more of a state than I am.
“About his role in Emmanuel’s murder.” I think. “And his grandfather’s role in Aniza’s disappearance.” Probably.
He rubbed at his eyes.
“The pentacle is a symbol often used in occult practices.”
“It is.”
“Has the devil got anything to do with this?”
“No. He would if the symbol were upside down, but this one isn’t. What we’re dealing with here is an ancient force. A feminine force.”
Teresa ran a hand over the diagram.
“A pentagram inscribed in a circle carries a specific set of meanings,” she explained, “which in this case have been partly modified. It’s a depiction of the female trinity, connected to the phases of the moon. Waxing moon: the Holy Virgin. Full moon: the Nymph. Waning moon: the Elder.”
“The Nymph,” Marini echoed in a low murmur. “And what about the two triangles?”
“Alchemical symbols, pointing upward for fire and pointing downward for water.”
“There’s a spiral attached to the water symbol. I’ve seen that before, in Matriona’s birth chamber.”
“Yes, on the jugs and the holy chalices. I’ve written ‘saved’ next to the water; saved from what?”
“Well, we have the fire: Hanna died in a fire. Perhaps water stands for someone else’s salvation.”
“Perhaps. These two identical symbols here, mirroring each other, are astronomical symbols for Mars,” Teresa continued. “They represent the masculine. Shield and arrow for the god of fire and war. It’s one of the modifications I was referring to earlier. In place of these symbols you’d usually find two snakes facing each other: man and woman.”
“But instead we have two men . . .” Marini remarked.
“Look at the arrow.”
“It’s pointing upward.”
“It’s pointing toward the full moon,” she corrected him. “Toward the Nymph.”
Marini looked up.
“Can you see who the characters are in this tale?” Teresa asked him.
“Three women. Krisnja, Aniza and Ewa. Or Hanna, Aniza and Ewa.”
“It’s definitely Hanna. The fire symbol under the waxing moon points to her: she died in a fire. And we know that the Elder has ‘returned.’ That’s Ewa.”
“Returned? What for?”
“I’ve no idea.”
“Considering that her body is missing, the idea that she might have returned is really quite alarming. What’s the meaning of the cross inside the circle next to the waning moon?”
“It’s the only symbol I don’t recognize, but it’s definitely connected to Ewa.”
“But you must recognize it. You’re the one who drew it.”
Teresa shook her head. She didn’t recall ever seeing it before.
“There’s an M in the middle. Matriona?” Marini suggested.
“It could be.”
“This message of yours says a lot and nothing at all.”
Teresa studied the drawing for a moment.
“Why didn’t I just write down what he was telling me?” she said, voicing her frustration.
You did write it down. You knew you were running out of time, but you’ve got the whole complicated story right here. Just read it.
“Matriona’s the only one who wasn’t present at the time of the events,” she said, lifting her arm to take a closer look at the lines she’d drawn.
“But she could be the killer we’re looking for today,” Marini protested. “And the spiral symbol is connected with her.”
“Yes, it’s possible.”
Teresa ran the tip of her finger over the lines she’d traced over her skin.
“In the beginning there was a woman, the first point of the pentacle: Aniza. Then there were two more, her descendants: Ewa and Hanna. The phases of the moon depicted in their respective sections of the diagram indicate their age and their position. At some point, Ewa came back. We don’t know where, how or why, but the water symbol is crucial here. From a stream springs salvation.
“Hanna’s fate, on the other hand, is depicted in the section of the pentagram underneath her crescent moon: fire, all-consuming. There are two men competing for the Nymph, but they’re not squaring up to each other; they’re looking at her. One of them gets there too late: that’s Cam, who leaves a fingerprint on the portrait Alessio paints with her blood.”
“Not squaring up to each other,” Marini repeated.
“I don’t think it was Cam who killed Aniza. By the time he arrived on the scene, it was all over.”
“So who did it?”
Teresa stared at him wordlessly. The riddle remained unsolved.
As if on cue, a journalist began reporting live on national TV that the police had found new evidence and that they were close to solving the case of the Sleeping Nymph.
Teresa herself had pushed for the news to be made public.
“We took a bit of a gamble there,” Marini remarked.
Teresa was worried about that, too, but she also felt that the time had come to take a risk.
“The killer first acted because he felt threatened,” she replied. “So we need to make him afraid.”
“He might try to kill again.”
“And this time we’ll be ready.”
They were interrupted by Parisi.
“We’ve had a tip-off, Superintendent. A woman called headquarters after she saw the news. Says her son told her he found a skeleton hand in the woods. The family made a trip to the valley a few days ago and the kid got lost.”
“Any other details?”
“Nothing yet, but the mother says she believes the kid: he’s been having nightmares ever since. He must have seen something.”
Teresa was looking for someone in the crowd.
“Bring them here so they can show us where,” she commanded. “Where’s Blanca?”
She spotted her among the TV crews, news reporters and police officers milling about outside Alessandro Morandini’s house. She was sitting slightly apart from everyone else, her hands buried in the pockets of her sweatshirt and Smoky’s head resting on her knee.
Teresa looked up at the sky and cursed the passage of time: it was getting dark already, but she needed one last favor.
She walked up to Blanca, calling out her name. Blanca turned her face toward the sound of Teresa’s voice and smiled. There was a streak of mud across her chin and she had a scratch on her cheek.
Teresa brushed her fingers over it.
“Parisi!” she barked. “What happened to keeping her safe?”
“It’s my fault,” said Blanca. “I get carried away sometimes. I just wanted to finish before evening.”
Teresa sighed.
“I need to ask you to—” she began.
“I know,” Blanca intervened. “I heard. I’ll be ready when the boy is.”
“It’s getting dark,” said Marini.
Blanca stood up.
“It’s always dark for me,” she assured them. “It won’t make any difference.”
Teresa took her hand.
“We’re getting closer to the truth,” she said. “We can’t stop now.”
“Superintendent . . .”
Marini’s tone was so unnerving that Teresa instinctively turned around to see what he was looking at. Her hand let go of Blanca’s, her feet began to move, faster and faster until she was running toward the woman walking toward them on Francesco’s arm.
It was Krisnja, looking at her from between her bandages, her eyes full of tears and fear.
Teresa took her coat off and used it to cover Krisnja’s head, and Marini did the same, holding it up in front of her face, just in time before the cameras started flashing all around them.
Teresa caught Parisi and de Carli’s eyes and motioned at them to get rid of the journalists while they led Krisnja toward the road.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” Teresa snarled at Francesco.
“I asked him to bring me here,” Krisnja interceded, her voice hoarse. “I just wanted to go home. I signed the discharge forms myself.”
“We heard on the radio about Sandro’s accident,” Francesco added. “We had to come.”
Teresa didn’t tell them that Alessandro Morandini’s fall hadn’t been an accident. He had tried to run away from a police officer, he had indirectly admitted his involvement in the bloody tale of the Sleeping Nymph. And he had told this girl, who now stood crying in front of Teresa, a wicked, twisted lie.
She took the girl aside, away from her uncle. Krisnja looked past Teresa.
“Where’s Alessandro?” she asked. “I want to see him.”
Teresa held her back.
“He’s just been taken to hospital, which is really where you should be.”
Krisnja shook her head.
“I’m fine,” she protested. “They’re just scratches.”
Scratches that may well leave your face scarred forever. Teresa bit her tongue, but there was one question she knew she simply had to ask.
“Did Alessandro ever talk to you about an old devotional icon?”
