The Sleeping Nymph, page 8
Teresa crouched down wearily next to him. Marini stood at a distance, but Teresa knew that he was attuned to everything she did, as always. Every day he learned a little more about the compassionate art of seeing into the invisible.
“We’ve discovered what the Sleeping Nymph is made of,” Teresa told Andrian. “Her secret has been revealed. Whose blood is it?”
She wasn’t expecting a reply, and the silence that followed didn’t surprise her. She was after something else entirely: small signs that would show her someone was still in there.
“Does it belong to the girl in the drawing? It’s hers, isn’t it?”
Alessio Andrian blinked for the first time since Teresa had begun to observe him. A natural reflex.
“I think you killed her, Mr. Andrian. Perhaps out of jealousy. Or perhaps because she resisted you. You young men would spend weeks up in the mountains. Who knows what went through your heads,” she continued.
“Superintendent, please,” Andrian’s nephew protested.
But Teresa ignored him. If she was going to get a reaction out of Andrian, she couldn’t afford to hesitate.
“Don’t you think it might be time to relieve yourself of this burden?” she asked him.
Nothing. Not even the slightest twitch.
She produced from her bag a photograph, which she placed on the old man’s lap.
“Here is your nymph,” she said.
She took one of his hands and placed it over the photograph.
“What was her name?” she asked. “Do you even know? What must her family have thought, when she failed to return? How they must have suffered. Did she pass quickly, or was it a slow and painful death? Did you watch her die?”
Teresa tried to force herself into his line of sight.
“Did you paint this with the blood from her heart?” she asked.
“Superintendent!” Raffaello cried.
Teresa found herself staring into the old man’s fathomless black eyes and felt like she was sinking. It might have seemed like Andrian was returning her stare, but that wasn’t the case. Teresa could feel him looking straight through her and at the woods behind her as if she weren’t even there.
“It’s pointless, Superintendent. We’ve been trying for years. He won’t respond in any way.”
There was no animosity in Raffaello Andrian’s words, only a keen compassion. He’s a good man, Teresa thought, who feels a genuine affection for his hostile and enigmatic uncle. She nodded as she rose to stand. Her hopes had been unfounded.
She made to take back the photograph, but something stopped her. It was Andrian.
The palm of his hand was pressing down on the picture with such force that Teresa wasn’t able to wrest it free. This was the sign she had been waiting for.
She crouched down once more. She had the impression that Andrian’s breathing had changed, accelerated. Hers, too, had started to race.
“You cared about her,” she whispered to him. “The Sleeping Nymph was a real person, and you were in love with her.”
15
Returning to the district attorney’s office, Massimo thought, was like falling back into the all-consuming commotion of life. The Andrian home and its inhabitants, on the other hand, lived as if suspended in time, like dust motes that glimmer in the light and never seem to settle on a surface.
That man had waited seventy years to do something as simple as holding on to a photograph.
Seventy years.
Alessio Andrian radiated a charisma that Massimo had rarely seen before. There was fury caged in the old man’s eyes and soundless violence coursing through him.
Massimo opened the door on the passenger side. Superintendent Battaglia was still writing in her diary, as she had done throughout the drive back. Massimo, though, had been thinking about Elena. She hadn’t contacted him all day, and he wasn’t sure whether to feel relieved or concerned. Sooner or later, he was going to have to face up to his feelings.
Teresa Battaglia clambered out of the car and looked up at the building they’d come to as if it were a living thing. Her eyes honed in on a window whose shutters were closed: the district attorney’s office.
“At some point you’re going to have to tell me what’s going on,” Massimo told her.
She pulled at his tie as she walked past him.
“Maybe you’ll figure it out yourself, Sherlock.”
They took the elevator to the third floor and found de Carli and Parisi waiting for them when the doors slid open.
“Superintendent, Inspector, good evening,” they said in greeting.
“Doctor Lona has been asking after you again,” de Carli added straight away.
Superintendent Battaglia didn’t respond and turned instead to Parisi. “The files from Ambrosini?” she asked.
The officer handed her a folder, but she didn’t even look at it and kept walking. After a few more strides, she stopped and turned around.
“You can go home now. All of you. We’ll reconvene in the morning.”
Massimo watched his colleagues take their leave but didn’t move.
At her questioning look, he gestured at the door behind her and announced: “I’ll wait.”
The superintendent jabbed a finger into his chest.
“Do you actually want to be of help?” she asked. “Then go home and sort out whatever it is that’s bothering you and come back tomorrow. We’ll have plenty to do, and I need you focused.”
He didn’t move.
Teresa Battaglia grabbed his arm.
“You really want to know who’s in there? I’ll tell you: a ruthless operator, an agent who’s never, ever understood what it really means to be part of a team, and who’ll devote every minute of every day he spends in here to testing us. We have unfinished business, him and me, and he’s come back to settle the score.” She let go of Massimo’s arm. “You must always be wary of him. Always,” she said in a low voice, “because even when it looks like he’s on your side, he’s actually laying your trap.”
Massimo had never heard her sound so distressed. He thought he saw her hesitate for a moment as she stood in front of the door to the office. That wasn’t like her, either. Teresa turned around to look at him one last time. Behind the forced smile on her face, Massimo glimpsed an emotion that he wasn’t able to decipher but that was powerful enough to twist her features. The superintendent gave the door a single, firm knock and then, without waiting for a response, she went in.
For Teresa, crossing that threshold and breathing the same air as that man again meant letting the pain back in to finish what it had started more than thirty years before.
The room was plunged in semi-darkness, while stray rays from a copper-colored sunset filtered through the lowered venetian blinds, standing like bulkheads against the outside world. Albert Lona was sitting behind a computer screen, his hands knotted in front of his mouth. The bluish light from the monitor accentuated his features. He hadn’t changed much. The passage of decades had merely left a few streaks of white in his hair and strengthened his figure as if time had layered itself over him like armor.
He ignored her. Teresa was sure that he wasn’t even going to offer her a seat. She would have to stand, exposed to his silent judgement, with her excess weight, the goodbyes from their youth still etched into her face, the fatigue from the end of her shift, the exhaustion of a body that had too often been punctured by the needle of an insulin pen, the bags under her eyes, her anger. And the scar on her abdomen pressing against her clothes as if to say: Remember me?
Of course Albert remembered.
He decided that the moment had come to acknowledge her presence. He raised his eyes—nothing more. If she had allowed herself to hope even for an instant that thirty years would have been enough to cool his hatred for her, to freeze it into a controlled and more muted hostility, that glance was enough to show her just how wrong she was.
Albert was here to destroy her.
“You’ve changed,” he said.
At the sound of his voice, she briefly, instinctively closed her eyes.
“Fire away,” she replied.
She knew he wouldn’t let her go until he’d tasted at least the first few morsels of his revenge.
He surveyed her body, mortified it with his slow examination.
“I do wonder how you’re still able to do this job,” he said, his hands still interlaced but now with one finger pointing at her rounded form.
Teresa didn’t take the bait. This was not the time.
He stood up and walked around the desk, a cruel beast camouflaged in stylish clothes and a cultured manner.
“When I give an order,” he said slowly, in his soft cadence veined with traces of an English accent, “I demand to be obeyed. When I tell you that I will see you, you will come running. When I tell you that you will do something, you will execute. That is what I expect.”
He leaned against the desk, his manicured hands gripping the edge like claws.
She looked at his face again and realized she was no longer afraid of him. He was a reminder of excruciating pain, but that was all it was: pain.
“Do you want me to say yes, my lord?” she asked. “Is that what you want?”
He tilted his head to one side in appraisal.
“I am beginning to realize that Doctor Ambrosini has left behind a department in disarray,” he remarked. “I sense it may be necessary to start from scratch, on firmer ground. I will have to get to know everyone here, test their proficiency and see how we might encourage fresh synergies. Set up a new system. Starting with your team.”
In the face of this odious threat, Teresa smiled. Heading for the door, she turned around.
“I’m pleased to see you haven’t changed at all,” she noted.
He raised an eyebrow.
“Are you really pleased?”
“Yes. It’ll make it easier to fight you.”
16
Teresa had stopped going out after dark months ago. When evening fell, her life wound down with the sunset and she withdrew into the cocoon of her home. She was scared of getting lost, of being unable to find her way back, of wandering around, confused and afraid, pleading for help from strangers.
But that night she went out.
The taxi was waiting for her outside headquarters and she climbed in, clutching a piece of paper with an address on it. She was following the instructions Ambrosini had given her from his hospital bed, but for the first time since she’d known him, she wondered if she would have been better off disregarding her friend’s polite and detailed instructions.
The taxi dropped her off in a neighborhood on the outskirts of town and close to the university, where new residential buildings and a few commercial blocks had cropped up over flat fields. She had arrived at a student dormitory.
Her footsteps echoed in a courtyard lined with racks of bicycles of all shapes and sizes, in various colors and states of disrepair. Some were missing their wheels, their rusty frames still clasped in padlocked chains no one would ever open again. From a flat on the first floor came the muted bassline of an indie rock song and the sounds of young people talking. Every now and then the door of the flat would open onto the terrace outside and the haze that muffled the sounds from inside would briefly clear.
The elevator was broken. A notice signed by the building manager announced its imminent repair. It was dated three months ago. Someone had crossed out the signature and replaced it with the dickhead.
Teresa climbed the four flights of stairs to the floor she was heading for, taking as much time as she thought she needed to avoid being out of breath when she reached her destination. But it was no use. By the time she got there, she was out of breath anyway.
The whole floor was silent.
She found the apartment she was looking for and checked once more the number she’d written down. Inside her bag was a package bearing a most unusual gift. She sneaked a dubious look at it and wondered yet again whether Ambrosini had realized, when he’d tasked her with this delivery, that it could come at the expense of her career.
She knocked and almost immediately heard a rustling behind the door.
The door opened slowly, cautiously.
Standing on the other side was a girl with blue hair and the ugliest dog Teresa had ever seen. Teresa stood transfixed for a few moments longer than it was polite to be, then looked away, embarrassed by the obvious way in which she had stared at the young woman. But she quickly pulled herself together.
“Did you bring the thing?” said the girl, looking slightly intimidated and patting the dog’s head as the creature eyed Teresa with suspicion.
Teresa reached for the package and the crinkling of the cellophane wrap drew their eyes—both the girl’s and the dog’s—to Teresa’s hands. The superintendent found herself wondering which of them the gift was meant for.
Inside the package, marked with a tag that Parri had carefully erased, was a bone. A human skull.
17
Massimo couldn’t sleep. As the hours of the night stretched out before him, he kept his eyes fixed on Elena’s back. She was sleeping on his bed, lying on her side. He was leaning on the door, watching her.
She’d been asleep already when he’d arrived. He’d lingered in the office, letting all of his energies and thoughts unspool until he felt empty inside, all in a bid to avoid thinking of the unborn child he feared—and the woman he loved but couldn’t stand to have by his side.
He’d disobeyed Superintendent Battaglia and waited for her in the office. Her expression when she’d returned from her meeting with Albert Lona had been impassive and had stayed that way during all the hours they had spent working in silence at their respective desks.
That was how she’d punished him for defying her orders.
But Massimo had caught the tremor in her lips, the falter in her step, her pallor; how could he possibly have left her alone after suddenly seeing her look so fragile and so lonely? Her past was a mystery that no one, not even de Carli and Parisi, ever spoke about. Massimo had heard rumors of a marriage that had ended in tragedy—but what kind of tragedy?—and a life that had thereafter been devoted to solitude and work. To saving people, but never to saving herself. Clearly, the new district attorney had something to do with that past.
Elena stirred in her sleep. The way her hair fell over the white pillows reminded him of the Sleeping Nymph. His eyes followed the long line of her neck, traced an imaginary path from between her shoulder blades down to her buttocks, and back again.
He thought of Andrian and the mysterious girl in the painting.
Killing a woman you profess to have loved. Erasing from your life the very source of its light. It was a contradiction in terms, and yet it happened every day. Too often we romanticize stories of love turning into tragedy—and it is always the women who die. Women who were used and abused, abandoned and doomed. Women who were unable to recognize evil because it stood right next to them. How hard it was to see it clearly when it wore the face of the person who was supposed to take care of you.
Massimo remembered the story Superintendent Battaglia had told him about the first case she’d ever solved shortly after joining the police force. It had been a crime of passion, the details of which Massimo couldn’t now recall. Superintendent Battaglia had interviewed the killer at length, and the things he’d told her were like a sticky swamp that mired the soul. Those words had infected Massimo like toxic sludge.
“They’d been questioning him for twelve hours and he hadn’t shown the slightest sign of cracking,” he’d heard her say with the absent look of someone remembering the past. “Then I came in. I was the only woman there, barely in my twenties, new recruit. I didn’t even know whether to sit or stand.”
Massimo had waited in vain for her to continue unprompted.
“And did that change anything?” he’d finally had to ask.
“It changed everything—as my boss knew it would. He’d sent me in there on purpose.”
“What happened?”
“He asked after me.”
“Who did?”
“The killer. He wanted me. So I spent the next few hours alone with him, listening to his story. He told me every single detail. You must be wondering why he suddenly would have decided to collaborate, after all, but that would be the wrong question. It wasn’t about collaborating at all.”
She’d looked right at Massimo then, and in her eyes he had seen rage.
“It was all a sadistic game to him, another act of violence perpetrated on another. He forced me to relive with him every moment of the crime he’d committed. He described each point in such precise and morbid detail that I could have sworn I could smell the reek of blood.
“That man had stabbed his partner in the neck twelve times—one for every year of their relationship—before lying down beside her in their marital bed. He lay there as the life ebbed out of her, listened to her heartbeat slowing down until it stopped altogether, feeling the warmth of life leaving her body forever. He waited for hours—silent hours spent in one last horrifying embrace before he finally let go of her.”
Massimo had felt a wave of nausea, which hadn’t escaped Superintendent Battaglia.
“You think it can’t get any worse than that?” she’d asked him as she unwrapped a sweet she then didn’t eat. “Well, it does. The worst part was the way he answered the only question I managed to ask him: Why?”
The killer’s answer still rattled in a low growl at the back of Massimo’s mind.
Because there is no feeling more satisfying than to hold your woman in your arms as she dies. In that moment, she is truly yours. That moment is true possession, true power.
