The Sleeping Nymph, page 5
The drawing was an enigma, a call from the past inviting them to remember. The Sleeping Nymph was the key to solving this mystery.
8
May 1945
The forest was weeping tears of ice, the occasional bloated raindrop filtering through the canopy and falling onto the foliage below in a succession of wet thuds. Down there, night dawned on night: for days there had been nothing but shadow.
Or perhaps, the man thought as he staggered onwards, the darkness had come from elsewhere, dawning inside of him like a bleak sunrise.
He had been dragging himself forward for so long that he’d lost track of time, one foot bare and the other wrapped in a boot, sinking into the undergrowth with every step he took. He was feverish, the shivers rising from his gut and through his body, making his teeth chatter to the tempo of a funeral march.
The dark resonated with rustles and anxious calls heralding the trespasser’s arrival: the cries of fear told the story of an invasion—and he was the invader. The creatures of the forest huddled close to their young and watched him apprehensively from their hiding places. They could smell the blood of the innocent on him.
Blood, all over his hands. Blood, all over his face and clothes.
Water didn’t cleanse it but only soaked it deeper into his body. He could picture the crimson drops infiltrating his pores and burrowing into his flesh.
His weary feet slowed until he came to a standstill. He had arrived at a bank of brambles that had threaded themselves into the cracks in the rock and clung onto its crow-black peak. He turned his face up to that living wall and closed his eyes. This was a good place to die. He slumped to the ground. His knees sunk into the moss, and he fell sideways onto the soil. Rolling onto his back, the man waited for his own last breath with a hand placed over his heart, its vigorous beat thundering against the night. For days he hadn’t eaten, and now he could feel his own bones under his skin. And yet the muscle inside his chest still wouldn’t give up.
In his other hand he held a painting rolled up in a leather pouch, its fire burning his fingers. The Sleeping Nymph had come to the world on a last breath of life: a curse, or perhaps an anointment.
His breathing grew lighter, his tears mixed with the blood on his body. His weary bones would finally rest.
Then, when everything in the world seemed forever lost, when perfect silence had found its way inside of him, the forest responded.
He could hear it, just as she had once described it to him.
A crackle echoed from branch to branch, scuttling up and through the tree barks. The trees creaked—the silence was broken.
It was an invisible energy, primordial sap glittering among the leaves. It pattered across the ground and slid under his body like a million tiny insects. It climbed over his fatigued limbs, entered him with an army of minuscule legs and claws that lifted him up, swept away at his exhaustion with the beating of powerful wings above his head. It pushed the end farther and farther away.
“No, no, no,” he wailed in defeat. “Please let me die.”
The forest thrummed like a gust of wind, expanding and contracting like a dark womb.
He wasn’t alone in there. He never had been. Something immense and unknown was breathing with him. He had been infected with its force, and it wouldn’t allow him to fade away.
Even as he yearned for death, the forest delivered his rebirth.
It sent him back into the world, but stripped him of his soul, and he was born again into that darkness with a scream that plunged every living thing into silence.
9
“How are you feeling?”
It was Elena who asked first. She was the stronger one. She always had been.
Just like when Massimo had left her. Twice. Just like when she’d reached out to him and gotten no answer, not even the slightest acknowledgment. Just like when she’d consciously decided that she would not forget him, that she wanted him back in her life.
How am I feeling? Massimo asked himself.
He knew the answer. I feel distant. I feel alone.
He knew the answer. I can’t do this. Whatever it is you expect of me, I can’t give it to you.
“I’m fine,” he said instead. “And you? Better?”
She nodded, cradling a cup of herbal tea. She’d done little more than moisten her lips with it, but nevertheless she held it pressed to her face, a buffer between them.
“The cramps are gone,” she said, bringing her hand to rest on her abdomen.
She was curled up on the sofa, barefoot, her hair disheveled.
The night had passed, the sun had risen, but they had yet to exchange all but a handful of words. Instead, they had sat there in silence, stealing probing glances whenever they thought the other wasn’t looking. They had lowered their eyes, then looked up again. They had opened their mouths, but no sound had come out. Occasionally, they had both stared at the wall. They hadn’t managed to tell each other much, and whatever they had been able to say had been grounded firmly in facts, not emotions.
Fatigue had eventually gotten the better of Elena, and she’d begun to feel unwell. Massimo didn’t know what to do, didn’t even know if he was allowed to touch her.
“I just need a little bit of peace,” she told him.
That was the one thing Massimo couldn’t promise her. Finally, he reached out and pulled her into an embrace, buried his face in her neck because he was too afraid to look into her eyes—and too afraid of what she might see in his. He was running away without moving a muscle.
He felt her relax into his arms and in that moment, he pitied her. She had given in so easily to him, to his brand of tyranny.
The sun edged past the closed shutters now, illuminating Elena. She looked different, though Massimo knew the change was not in her outer appearance, but inside. She was already living in the future, all of her attention focused on the child forming in her womb. While he still floundered, she accelerated forward, ready to leap.
A burning itch coursed through his body. He tore his gaze away from Elena’s head, and his eyes fell on his mobile phone perched on the armrest of the sofa.
He had forgotten all about his phone—which would have been unthinkable only the night before. A new day had begun, and he hadn’t shown up at work.
He picked up the phone and switched it on. A flurry of buzzing announced the arrival of dozens of notifications. They were all messages from his colleagues. The last one was from de Carli.
“Are you dead? You’d better be. At this rate she’ll have your head on a spike anyway.”
He also had two messages telling him he had missed calls from Superintendent Battaglia. He checked the timestamp: they had come in half an hour ago.
The meeting at the district attorney’s office.
“Shit . . .”
It had come out sounding more like a moan than a curse. Elena pulled away and shifted to the opposite end of the sofa.
“Trouble?” she asked.
Massimo grimaced.
“That’s one way to put it,” he said brusquely before realizing that his tone might hurt her.
He looked up to see that it had.
“I actually forgot to go to work,” he said, hoping he was still in time to make up for it. “See the effect you have on me?”
She bit her lip.
“I wish I really were the cause of all this agitation,” she replied, “but something tells me I’m not.”
He took her hand and helped her to her feet.
“You definitely are,” he murmured. It was the truth, and admitting it made him feel better.
Elena’s expression was a mixture of relief and confusion.
“But then why?” she asked.
Massimo needed more time, but the universe seemed to be conspiring to make sure he didn’t have any.
“I need to sort this out first,” he said, “if you’re all right to spend a couple of hours on your own?”
“I’ll be fine.”
“Are you sure?”
She nodded.
He went to his room to grab a change of clothes. He couldn’t just call Teresa Battaglia and tell her he wasn’t going to come to work that day: she’d be sure to give him hell for it and then figure out he was hiding something, as she’d more or less suspected for weeks. And once she did, she wouldn’t let go until she squeezed every last drop of the truth out of him. Massimo didn’t want to lie to her, but he wasn’t ready to talk to anyone about this yet, either. So he would have to see her, do some dissembling, then find a way to get back home as quickly as possible.
“Difficult case?” Elena asked.
“A little.”
She followed him into the bathroom.
“What’s it about?” she asked.
“I don’t think it’s healthy to talk about this.”
Massimo looked in the mirror and realized he absolutely had to take a shower if he was to have any chance of tricking Superintendent Battaglia. His face bore all the traces of a sleepless night.
“Go on, tell me,” Elena insisted.
“It’s about a painting.”
She seemed taken aback, perhaps by how quickly he’d replied, or perhaps because she had expected something else.
“That’s it?”
Massimo took off his T-shirt.
“The painting is a portrait of a very beautiful woman. She’s called the Sleeping Nymph,” he said.
Elena pursed her lips.
“How beautiful?”
“Stunning.”
She lowered her eyes.
“You’re terrible. After the trouble you’ve gotten me into,” she said, glancing at her still-flat belly, “you should only have eyes for me.”
That same burning itch from before gripped Massimo again, but he willed it away. He saw her expression and suddenly realized that he was naked.
“Stay,” he said as she made to leave, pulling her back. “It’s nothing you haven’t seen before, considering the ‘trouble’ I’ve gotten you into . . .”
He would have liked to tell her that his body was his own and he could do with it as he pleased. That his heart belonged to him alone and always would. He would have liked to, but he couldn’t.
He got into the shower, and the water washed away any lingering embarrassment and unease.
“Anyway, she’s seventy,” he said after a moment, his face turned into the jet of water.
“Who is?”
“The portrait. So you’ve got nothing to worry about. The woman in it would be at least ninety by now.”
“Idiot. So what, did someone steal it? What is it that you’re meant to investigate?”
Massimo hesitated. He trusted Elena, but he really did feel that talking about death wasn’t healthy.
“Massimo?”
“It’s painted in blood,” he said, quickly capitulating. If he hadn’t, she would have kept asking. He turned the water off, took the towel she handed him and scrubbed himself dry. “We know who the painter is, but not the donor. The judge wants to find out what happened, or at least try, before he closes the case.”
“God, that’s awful. Who’s the painter?”
“Some crazy old man. Apparently, he hasn’t spoken a word in decades. He’s shut himself away in a room in his nephew’s house, living some kind of non-life.”
A shadow fell over Elena’s face.
“How terribly sad,” she said. “I wonder what happened to him.”
“That’s what we’re trying to find out.”
A few minutes later, Massimo was dressed and ready to leave. As he was about to step out through the door, he hesitated.
She had kept her eyes on him, her arms crossed over her lean chest, her teeth nibbling away at her lips. One of her incisors was ever so slightly chipped—the price paid for a perhaps too boisterous childhood game—and added an endearingly ordinary charm to her otherwise perfect smile. Massimo was amazed every time by how closely the honey brown of her freckles matched her irises and her hair. If he had to compare her to a physical sensation, it would be the feel of cinnamon powder: scented, golden, intangible.
She looked anxious now, like she didn’t quite know what to do with herself. She had probably never felt so out of place.
Massimo fingered a lock of her hair and gently pulled her toward him.
“I’ll be back as soon as I can, and then we’ll talk. We’ll really talk,” he said, forcing his mouth to smile. “You stay here and unpack your things.”
“Are you sure I can stay?”
“You must.”
Her mouth tensed, too—not in an expression of happiness, but with the strain of yet another reconciliation. He saw her waver as she waited for something that didn’t arrive.
Making compromises again, Massimo thought. When will you decide you’ve had enough?
“If you need anything, call me,” he told her. “If you don’t feel well, call me right away.”
“All right.”
As he closed the door behind him, he watched her wave goodbye.
His phone vibrated in his breast pocket, pulling his mind back to practical matters. De Carli’s name popped up on the screen: Superintendent Battaglia, he said, was meeting the coroner assigned to the case.
“Parri’s found something. Battaglia is heading over to meet him. Guess whose name she’s cursing to high heaven? That’s right: yours! Hurry up, unless you want to end up on the autopsy table, too.”
10
The Institute of Forensic Sciences, situated on the basement floor of Block 9 of the public hospital, was known as the morgue. For Antonio Parri, who ran it, it was much more than that.
Parri had turned the detritus of death into a vocation, and that place, which most people found so oppressive, benefited from his compassionate (though often misunderstood) cheer. In his eyes, the rigid bodies shut inside the morgue’s cold chambers were but manifestations of life in another form and harbingers of secret messages that he was capable of deciphering.
Teresa found Parri in his laboratory. He had his hands on his hips and was leaning over a table. On the laminate tabletop lay the Sleeping Nymph, lit up by a desk lamp. Antonio wasn’t examining her: he was admiring her, his face rapt as if he were looking at a real woman, flesh and bone. Teresa couldn’t blame him. It was hard to remain unaffected by the Sleeping Nymph. The brutality and mystery of her origins imbued her with an arcane appeal. The painter’s hand had been kind, infused the curves of her face with soft and gentle texture, but there was also a subtle passion running through his work, flowing down from her countenance all the way to her pristine neck and the hollow of her throat. You could sense the desire throbbing beneath the surface of that stillness. It was as if the palm of Alessio Andrian’s hand had claimed her skin. He had captured on paper a moment of ecstasy, of eternal release. The artist’s gaze was a lover’s.
Teresa cleared her throat. Antonio gathered himself, pulled his glasses down his nose and smiled.
“Come in, come in,” he welcomed her.
Parri was a small, rather skinny man. As far as Teresa knew, he always wore the same clothes: jeans, a button-up shirt and a light oversized jumper. The colors and the thickness of the fabric might change, but that was his uniform, to which he added an unbuttoned lab coat when he was working.
His eyes were such a pale blue that under the light, their color seemed to drain into the whiteness of the cornea. His pupils were two black dots in the midst of that icy pallor and were always fixed on his interlocutor. He was a few years older than Teresa, yet he had the air of a young man. Not even his mop of straight white hair could do anything to dispel that illusion, and the unruly lock that kept falling over his forehead added a touch of mischief to his appearance.
“What do you think?” she asked, walking toward him.
“She’s extraordinary.”
Teresa laughed. “Do you mean the painting or the girl?”
“Both. Surely you see it, too.”
Superintendent Battaglia stood behind him, peering over his shoulder. They were quiet for a time.
“It’s just a painting,” she finally said. “Nothing more than a few lines and some color. And yet . . .”
“And yet it makes us feel something.”
“When did you get so emotional about evidence?” she teased.
Antonio turned to look at her, his arms crossed over his chest.
“What if I told you it’s a lot more than that?”
Teresa felt one of her eyebrows shoot up.
“Meaning?”
A polite knock on the open door interrupted their exchange. Teresa turned around to find a worried gaze that could barely hold hers.
“Ah, Inspector Marini,” she said. “I’d just about given up on seeing you today.”
“Please forgive the delay, Superintendent.”
Marini walked in, greeting Parri with a nod. His demeanor was that of a man who knows he has no excuse. Teresa had been so worried that she could’ve smacked him out of sheer relief.
She took a closer look at him. Even his golden tan and crisp blue shirt couldn’t conceal the evidence of a sleepless night, and it obviously hadn’t been some kind of amorous encounter that had kept him awake. She could tell by the lost look on his face. Massimo was afraid.
“I called you. Twice,” she snapped.
“There was a problem I had to deal with.”
“Just the one? If you go on like this, you won’t have a problem, you’ll be the problem.”
“I—”
“Not now, Marini.” Teresa cut him off, turning toward Parri again. “Doctor Parri has some information he was about to share.”
The coroner looked at each of them in turn—first Teresa, then the inspector, then back to Teresa again.
