The Sleeping Nymph, page 4
She closed her eyes for a moment, then opened them again: she was Superintendent Battaglia once more.
She had come to meet Alessio Andrian’s great-nephew—perhaps the only person who could help her to unravel the ancient mystery concealed in the lines of that painting.
The day before, the deputy public prosecutor had described this as an informal interview, but Teresa knew that they were about to subject Raffaello Andrian to nothing less than a full interrogation—albeit one that the young man had no obligation to attend and in which he was in any case to be treated for the time being as a person of interest, not a suspect.
Raffaello had found a painting doused in human blood. Perhaps he had already known the gruesome truth about it and had hoped the results of Gortan’s tests would allow him to sell it at a tidy profit. He might also have been eager to get rid of the evidence of a murder that had taken place seventy years ago. And he probably hadn’t expected Gortan to do his job so thoroughly.
Teresa knew full well that hers were just the musings of a mind that was more accustomed to darkness than light: she hadn’t even met Raffaello Andrian yet, but already she’d begun sketching out his possible characteristics, psychological profile and behavioral traits—all those things that would eventually help to make sense of the full picture. The more ineffable the detail, the more interested she was in it, for she knew that all crimes, no matter what kind, were always committed in the mind first.
She heard someone greet her and turned around in surprise. She hadn’t noticed the deputy prosecutor enter.
“Good morning, Prosecutor Gardini,” she replied. She looked behind him, searching for the district attorney. “Are you alone?”
The prosecutor nodded.
“Paolo isn’t well. I just spoke to him. We’ll have to manage without him.”
Teresa thought back to the email Ambrosini had sent her the night before—a few strained lines in which he had requested a “consultation.” She had almost convinced herself that she would be capable of admitting the truth to him, but once again it seemed that life had decided to buy her a little more time.
They made their way to Gardini’s office, where Raffaello Andrian had agreed to meet them.
“Worried about the case?” the deputy prosecutor asked Teresa.
“Of course I am. We both know we’ll never solve it.”
Gardini stopped in his tracks, his arms cradling a jumble pile of paperwork.
“You think it’s a waste of time?” he asked.
Teresa decided not to hold anything back.
“I think it’s beyond our capabilities. It’s been seven decades—and I use that word deliberately. There’s quite literally an epic dimension to this investigation. Any witnesses are probably dead by now. We don’t even know where the murder took place . . .”
The courthouse had started to come to life, and Gardini lowered his voice to a whisper.
“This is off the record, but just so you know, Judge Crespi has no intention of closing the case. He’s worried the press will get ahold of it, and should that happen, as is likely, the public will demand answers. He’ll want to have at least an idea of what happened before he considers bringing the statute of limitations into play.”
“I’ve no doubt about that.”
The deputy prosecutor’s expression relaxed.
“Let’s take it one step at a time then, shall we?” he suggested. “We can start with Andrian’s nephew. Who knows, he might have something interesting to tell us.”
Teresa pulled her notebook out of her shoulder bag.
“And the painter?” she asked.
“Never mind about him. He’s not a viable witness. I told you, he’s basically in a vegetative state. I’d like you to deal with the nephew. Ask him any questions you deem necessary.”
A bemused-looking young man was sitting on a chair outside Gardini’s office. He leapt to his feet when Gardini called his name.
Raffaello Andrian wasn’t like Teresa had pictured him. He looked more like a schoolboy than a man; he was twenty-seven, but he looked not a day older than twenty. Teresa had been steeling herself for an encounter with a canny, pushy relative, but there was something faintly cherubic about him, blue eyes widened in a permanently bewildered expression and messy brown curls falling over his forehead.
They settled into the office, Gardini at his desk—more like a repository for old case files than an actual workspace—and Teresa next to the young man. She knew she intimidated him and that she had a home advantage; she sensed immediately the authority he had already ascribed her: she could see it every time Raffaello averted his timorous gaze from hers and glanced at the deputy prosecutor’s benevolent face for reassurance. Teresa didn’t think she was that fearsome. She hid a smile behind a grimace and put on her reading glasses, ready to take notes.
“As I explained on the phone, this is not an interrogation, Mr. Andrian,” said Gardini. “There are no suspects, nor is anyone currently being investigated. We just want to find out if you have any information that could help us to understand what happened.”
“I’d be glad to help, if I can,” he replied, but even the tone of his voice suggested that he doubted himself more than anything in the world.
“At this stage of the investigation, and given that this is not an interrogation, there’s no need for a lawyer to be present, but if you’ve changed your mind and would like to—”
“No, I’ve not changed my mind.”
“Are you his next of kin?” Teresa asked.
“Yes, my parents passed away and I’m an only child. I went back to live with my uncle four years ago.”
“You look after him?”
“Me and a caretaker who lives with us. My uncle needs around-the-clock care.”
Teresa looked at him over the top of her glasses.
“You refer to him as your uncle, but he’s actually your great-uncle, isn’t he? Your grandfather’s brother,” she remarked.
“Yes. I’m sorry.”
“That’s fine, I just wanted to clarify how exactly you’re related.” Teresa scribbled a few notes before posing her next question. “Have you been advised that anything you say may be used against you in a court of law, and that you have the right to remain silent?”
“Yes, they’ve told me.”
“I must also warn you that should you make any statement concerning the actions of a third party, you shall be considered a witness in relation to said actions.”
“I understand,” said Raffaello Andrian, practically breathing the words out.
Teresa looked into his eyes and repeated the point to make sure he was clear on the possible consequences.
“What that means is that whatever you say could also be used to incriminate your great-uncle. Do you understand?”
Raffaello Andrian nodded, and Gardini handed him a piece of paper with the standard declaration he was supposed to make. Raffaello read out the oath, tripping over the words.
“Right, let’s get started,” said Teresa. “Just to be clear, Mr. Andrian—please be honest. I can tell you from personal experience that lying about things or omitting the truth—even details that might seem inconsequential to you—never yields the desired outcome. It complicates things, and they certainly never end well.”
Andrian looked at Gardini.
“I understand.”
“First question: Did you know that the portrait had been painted in blood?”
“No.”
“Now that you do know, do you have any idea whom that blood might belong to?”
“No.”
“Has your great-uncle ever told you anything that would lead you to suspect him of having committed a crime, or broken the law in any way?”
At this, Raffaello Andrian finally looked at her directly. There was something akin to disbelief in his eyes, as if Teresa had asked the wrong question, but his expression was also burdened with something that she interpreted as pity.
“I . . .” he began, reaching for the right words. “I haven’t once heard him speak, not once in twenty-seven years. No one has.”
“Never?”
“Never.”
A young man who makes the decision to confine his own body in immobility, who vows to keep from uttering a single word, forever, no matter what. Until that moment, Teresa hadn’t thought it possible.
A breathing corpse. That was how Gardini had described him.
“What’s the name of his condition?” she asked.
“There isn’t one. Our family has consulted a number of specialists over the years, but none of them has ever been able to make a diagnosis.”
“As far as you’re aware, for how long has Alessio Andrian been like this?”
“Ever since May 9, 1945, when he was found in a forest just across the border. It was Yugoslavia back then, now it’s Slovenia. That’s what my father told me.”
“That’s almost twenty days after he painted the Sleeping Nymph,” Teresa mused, “and no one has any idea what he did in that interval. Tell me what you know.”
“I know the story well. My father used to tell it to me like it was a bedtime story. He started the moment I could understand it and kept telling it until just before he died. But I wouldn’t know where to begin.”
“You can begin wherever you want. From the title of the painting, for example.”
“My father gave it that name. He swore he saw it in his uncle’s room once, when he was little. It was during a rare spell when Uncle Alessio seemed aware of his surroundings. He was looking at the painting, and my father thought he saw his lips moving, though no sound was coming out.
“After that, for the rest of his life, my father would tell people he’d felt the name forming in his own mind in that moment. The memory of the Sleeping Nymph stayed with him forever. He used to say it had bewitched him. But the painting itself disappeared somewhere in the house, and no one knew where.”
“Where was it when you found it?”
“In an alcove up in the attic. I discovered it while moving some old junk I wanted to get rid of.”
“So, Alessio Andrian must have left his room on at least one occasion in order to store the drawing up there.”
“No one saw him do it.”
“Why do you think he hid it?”
“I don’t know, but when he noticed that my father had been watching him, Uncle Alessio had some kind of terrible fit, howling and huffing like a wild animal. He clawed at anything he could get his hands on and flung it against the wall. He ransacked his own room and broke all the windows. My father was so upset that he never stepped foot inside that room or spent another moment alone with his uncle again.
“The Sleeping Nymph has always haunted our family history. Yes, my father had caught a glimpse of it, but no one was actually sure it existed. Eventually, collectors became obsessed with it.”
“You weren’t lying when you said you knew the story well,” Teresa pointed out.
Raffaello’s face fell.
“Some families have epic stories of love and adventure to tell their children or reminisce over when they get together at Christmas. I guess the Andrian family has the Nymph and my uncle’s madness,” he said.
Teresa decided to move on to a different topic.
“Alessio Andrian was a partisan,” she said.
“Yes, he was in the Garibaldi brigade.”
“Where was he deployed?”
“First in the northernmost valleys of the Karst region, and then, toward the end of the war, in the Canal del Ferro valley. His unit used to move around all the time—that’s what his comrades told my grandfather and my father. They camped in the woods, came down to the villages to recover and then set off again.”
Teresa and Gardini exchanged a glance: perhaps they had an answer now to the question of where this had happened; though, admittedly, the area Raffaello had described was vast.
The Canal del Ferro—the “iron canal”—was a rugged river valley flanked by steep mountain slopes that were covered in tangled scrubland or boulders and scree, and dropped to the valley floor like giant stage curtains. It was a millennial formation that owed its name to the trade of iron and other metals between the Roman Empire and the mines in Styria and Carinthia. The area was sparsely populated, just a few towns perched on the regional road that ran parallel to the motorway all the way to the border with Austria.
It’s a start, Teresa thought. They could rule out the northern end of the valley and concentrate for the time being on where it began. Beyond those mountains was Slovenia and the little town of Bovec, where Alessio Andrian had been found. There were plenty of paths and mountain passes that could lead a man across, even on foot.
All the information they had gathered so far seemed to cohere, but at this point it was highly improbable that they would find a living witness who would still remember a partisan who had also been a painter. They would have to rely on indirect testimony.
“What can you tell me about the day your great-uncle was found?” Teresa asked.
Raffaello swallowed.
“A family in Bovec found him in the woods near their home,” he began. “He was severely malnourished and burning up with fever. Tito’s militias had recently patrolled the area, but when they saw him, they assumed he was dead. A lumberjack and his wife took him in and looked after him. For days he hovered between life and death, and eventually his fellow fighters came to retrieve him.”
Teresa felt a stirring of the instinct that had so often led her to the singularities that could solve a case. It responded like a physical sense, both to the sudden darkening of the young man’s expression and the heightened pitch of his voice. The air in the room was saturated with the markers of reticence: Raffaello Andrian was telling them things he would have preferred not to share. Whatever they were, he was ashamed of them, though he had looked right into Teresa’s eyes as he’d spoken. It was his body’s way of trying to conceal his embarrassment.
“Why did Tito’s men think he was dead?” Teresa asked him.
She was watching the boy so closely that she would have noticed the slightest variation in the rhythm of his breathing. Gardini stood beside them like a statue.
“Because of the state he was in when they found him, I suppose. It was . . . bad.”
“So bad that he looked like he was dead, you said?”
“That’s what the family was told.”
There it was again, that tremor in his voice. Like a crack.
“Like he’d been killed?” Teresa demanded.
Before the response, there was a pause.
Teresa was aware that memory was a process not of reproduction but of reconstruction. In order to remember, the mind reconstructs what it has been through, and in doing so, sometimes unknowingly inserts elements completely removed from reality. This is a response not only to stress, but also to suggestion and to any preconceived notions a person may have formed about a given situation—all factors that can impair the recall process by causing the brain to step in and fill the gaps with false memories.
A memory is nothing more than a single clear moment recorded fortuitously by the mind and surrounded by many others, all out of focus.
This phenomenon fascinated her now more than ever before.
“So? Did he look like he’d been killed?” Teresa insisted.
The boy responded in a whisper.
“Yes. Yes, like he’d been killed.”
Teresa leaned toward him.
“Let me ask you one more time: What condition was your great-uncle in when he was found?”
The boy lowered his eyes.
“I can’t describe what I never saw,” he murmured, “but I can tell you what his comrades told the family.”
“I’m listening.”
“The people of Bovec were scared of him.”
Teresa took her glasses off.
“Something about him disturbed them,” she deduced.
The boy looked up again. His eyes were wet.
“They were afraid of him. They called him ‘child of the devil.’ Naked and red all over, he looked to them like a newborn demon.”
“He appeared to be fatally wounded, but he wasn’t,” Teresa muttered. “He was covered in blood, but it wasn’t his own.”
“No, it wasn’t.”
In the ensuing silence, Gardini let out a sigh that denoted the release of tension. They’d learned more than they’d hoped for.
“My uncle is a good man,” Raffaello Andrian quickly added, as if to make up for the truth he had just revealed.
Teresa wanted to reassure him but couldn’t bring herself to lie. Even good people could make mistakes. Even good people could kill.
“One last question,” she said. “Can you remember the names of any of your uncle’s fellow fighters?”
The young man shook his head, but Teresa was satisfied.
“I think I’m done,” she told Gardini.
The deputy prosecutor nodded and turned to Andrian.
“If you were planning on selling the Sleeping Nymph, I’m afraid you’re going to have to put it off. We’ll have to confiscate it for a while.”
The young man’s eyes flashed with emotion.
“I would never sell it!”
Teresa was surprised by his sudden vehemence. Until that moment, he had been completely docile, a frightened child.
“Forgive me for asking,” she said, “but why?”
Raffaello Andrian shot her a look resembling a challenge, as if he’d been injected with a fresh dose of courage.
“My uncle was holding it when he was found. For days he wouldn’t let go of it, even though he was unconscious. I don’t know what the significance of that drawing is for him, but one thing I’m sure of: I won’t let go of it.”
You don’t know, but you have a feeling about what it might be, Teresa thought. And she had a feeling, too.
