The Sleeping Nymph, page 9
Massimo pushed the thought away in disgust. His mouth felt pasty with a sapping thirst, but he couldn’t stop looking at Elena. He took a few steps toward her and stroked her neck with one finger. She turned and let out an irritated sigh in her sleep, her lips now slightly parted, but she didn’t wake up.
Once again, Massimo thought of the Sleeping Nymph.
Why had Andrian killed her? Where had it happened? What force had led him to murder a woman who could still provoke a reaction in him, even after all this time and even in the immobility of his illness? Jealousy. Madness. An unhealthy urge for possession. Or perhaps an unequivocal rejection that had simply been impossible for him to accept.
Massimo had seen all of that before in his work. But this time there was something else going on around the edges that he still couldn’t put a finger on. He had the impression that some of the cards were missing from the table and that they weren’t related to the identity of the victim, but to Andrian himself. The man’s eyes, always fixed on the same slice of the world outside, seemed to be looking at something that others couldn’t see but that was very real to him. His gaze wasn’t simply contemplative but active. Andrian was like a bloodhound, tracking something—or someone.
Elena’s hand came to rest on her belly, still flat but soon bound to fill out with the life inside it, and though it was so dark that Massimo could barely see it, his dread drew a vivid picture in his mind.
The burning thirst in his throat intensified. There was a creature growing deep inside Elena, a stranger whose birth was bound to bring dangerous memories back to the surface. It was doing so already.
My throat . . . I can’t breathe.
He pushed the image in his mind aside and backed away in the dark. For the first time in months, he had spent the night immersed in darkness. It wasn’t something he usually did. Only Elena could give him the strength to overcome his fears, the courage to turn off the lights.
He retreated into the bathroom, turned on the tap and stuck his head under the jet of cold water. He switched on the light and looked in the mirror. His eyes were red, his pupils dilated. His face was weighed down with purple bags under his eyes. Beneath the trickles of water that ran down to his chin, he was ashen. He looked like he was about to throw up. And he would have, had he believed it would help to flush out the past.
He washed his face once more, scrubbing at it furiously, but when he looked up at his reflection again, nothing had changed.
Same eyes. Same straight nose. Same mouth. Even his hands looked the same: large, strong.
I look like him.
He gripped the edge of the sink and stared into his reflection.
“I’m not like you,” he declared to the physical presence that weighed on him, but he knew it was a lie he’d too often tried to tell himself. The truth was, he couldn’t be sure. He couldn’t know whether he was really any different from his father.
18
“Smoky, sit!”
Grudgingly, the mongrel complied. He took his paws off Teresa’s knees and sat in front of her, his wide ice-blue eyes—which lent him an air of gentle madness—fixed firmly upon her face. His fur half black and half mottled gray, he looked at once comical and a little alarming, with crooked teeth sticking out of his muzzle and an awkward goatee growing on his chin. The line that split his coat in two ran straight down the middle of his nose. His ears, upright and attuned to any sound the stranger might make, were little more than twin tufts of scruffy fur. One of his shoulders was higher than the other.
“What happened to him?” asked Teresa.
The girl scratched the dog’s back.
“Nothing. Smoky was born this way: lopsided. No one wanted him, so he ended up at the animal shelter. That’s where we found each other. He got used to me straight away and I got used to him.”
Lopsided. The term suited the dog to perfection, and Teresa liked it. She often felt lopsided, too.
The girl’s eyes, too, were the color of the sky, but a sky veiled with ethereal clouds, like pearl-white springs on her delicate face. Her brown hair fell in soft waves over her shoulders, turning blue halfway down to its tips. The absence of makeup on her face, the purity of her features, and her moonlike complexion gave her the appearance of a modern-day fantasy of the Renaissance. Teresa did wonder about the color of her hair, though.
“Tell me about you,” she began. “How did you get into—”
“Into sniffing about for dead people?” the girl interjected. “That’s what my father calls it.”
Teresa smiled. “I believe, technically, it’s called Human Remains Detection,” she noted.
“He knows, but he doesn’t care. Lots of people feel the same way he does about it.”
“And how does he feel about it?”
The girl brought a hand up to her face, as she had done several times already since Teresa had sat down in her kitchen. She was clearly nervous.
“He says it’s not a healthy hobby,” the girl replied, touching the bag with the skull inside. “Maybe he’s right.”
“I think it’s wonderful.”
Blanca Zago was a revelation. Teresa thought about the unsolved case of the Sleeping Nymph and felt a quiver of emotion at the thought of setting this girl on the trail of the unknown woman. She knew it was only a dream, but perhaps it wasn’t altogether far-fetched to imagine it might work.
“Anyway, technically, Smoky isn’t a cadaver dog; he’s more of a tracker,” Blanca explained, her voice trembling with shyness. “Tracking human remains—human body parts—isn’t the same as looking for a whole decomposing corpse. Of course, he’s trained to detect the smell of blood and bones, and he’s familiar with cadaverine, but those aren’t the types of molecules I’ve focused my training on.” She touched her face again. “Basically, if the body has been dismembered or buried, then Smoky might be able to help. Otherwise we can still give it a go, but it’ll be harder for him.”
She spoke as if she were forcing the words out through her lips. For a moment, neither of them said another word—and then they both burst out laughing.
“I know, it’s all very weird,” Blanca whispered, petting the dog. “I wouldn’t want to seem crazy.”
Teresa shook her head.
“Not in the least,” she said. “How did Smoky learn? Go on, I’m not here to judge you.”
The girl bit her lip.
“We started off with some basic scents, like teabags and things like that. First, we focused on imprinting and detection. Then we moved on to more interesting molecules.” She took a deep breath. “We used my sister’s placenta.”
“What . . . ?”
“I know it sounds awful, but a placenta carries eighty percent of human scents. It was an opportunity I couldn’t pass up . . .”
Teresa didn’t ask her how she’d gotten hold of the placenta and was glad she hadn’t invited Marini to join her for this meeting. He would have made a show of outrage and ruined everything.
“I imagine it must be like a game for Smoky,” she said.
The girl clapped a hand on her knee and the dog leapt onto her lap. She squeezed him to her chest with a tenderness that moved Teresa.
“Their sense of smell is so important to them,” she explained. “They have formidable noses and they need to use them. Scent detection can be a stimulating and fulfilling activity. We have some friends who’ve joined us in this adventure, so we have a good time. But it’s serious work and difficult, too—though we don’t expect to be paid for it.”
Teresa understood why Ambrosini had been so insistent that she include Blanca in her team. The girl was clearly very bright and—according to what the district attorney had told her—extremely professional, too, despite her age (she was only twenty) and reserved manner. Blanca and her peers’ detection abilities had already been noticed and put to good use across the border. But Blanca and Smoky were the best of the bunch.
Put her to the test and she will surprise you, Ambrosini had texted Teresa from his hospital bed.
Teresa had certainly had her misgivings on her way to this meeting, starting with the human skull, which now seemed to be staring right at them from its sheath of see-through plastic.
“Smoky practices on bits of pork,” Blanca explained. “Sometimes we use vials of synthetic scent, chemical stuff you can order online. But molecules you get from dead people, like cadaverine and putrescine, leave a heavy environmental footprint.”
The young woman sought Teresa’s hand and held it in hers. Teresa could tell she was trying to gauge her reactions.
“If you’re after traces of human blood, you’re going to have to use human blood,” she murmured. “If you want to find the remains of a corpse, you’re going to have to use parts from another corpse, fresh or otherwise. It may not be ethical. And it isn’t legal. But there’s no other way.”
It certainly wasn’t legal, but it wasn’t unusual, either. Ambrosini knew it and so did Parri, who’d not had any particular qualms in assisting with the theft of the skull from the forensics laboratory. After all, the skull had been evidence in a case now closed and would otherwise have been disposed of.
“Who supplies you with your . . . teaching aids?” she asked.
Blanca wrapped her slender fingers around Teresa’s wrist.
“Do you really want to know?”
Teresa imagined the girl counting the beats of her heart. It was Blanca’s way of identifying her interlocutors’ emotions.
“Don’t worry, I’m not easily shocked,” Teresa replied.
Blanca paused for a moment, then released her gentle hold on Teresa’s wrist.
“We have a few friends who supply us with blood,” she explained. “We also have a source in the hospital—you know, for any internal tissue, amputations, that kind of thing . . . And there’s a guy in a funeral home who gives us cadaverine every now and then.”
“How does he do that?”
“It’s nothing too complicated or invasive. All he does is put a piece of cloth under the corpse’s neck in the first few hours after death. But I guess some people would be horrified even to think about it.”
“Those people should remember that one day this might help to retrieve someone who’s vanished and put their killer in prison.”
Blanca smiled gratefully.
“Yes, sometimes it works.”
Teresa watched the young woman sipping on the tea she had brewed for them both in the tidy kitchen of her humble but immaculate apartment. She was only twenty, but already she was fending for herself.
“Why have you been following me?” Teresa asked.
Blanca slowly lowered her teacup. She was obviously embarrassed.
“You noticed,” she muttered.
Teresa couldn’t understand how the young woman had done it, and that made her even more fascinating. For Blanca Zago was blind. Visually impaired, to be precise: her world was made of fog and shadows, and she was a tracker.
“If I hadn’t, I’d probably be better off looking for another job. You had me worried for a minute there!” she said.
“I’m sorry. I just wanted to know who I’d be dealing with. I get anxious when I have to meet someone new.”
“Do you live here alone?” she asked, though she knew the answer already.
Blanca bowed her head.
“I’ve been looking for a flatmate to split the rent, but no one’s replied to the ad yet.”
She didn’t seem particularly eager to open up her unusual world to a stranger, but everything about their surroundings—the signs of wear on the few items around and the general absence of anything but the bare necessities—indicated that she had no choice. Teresa was sure that it had nothing to do with her disability but was entirely down to an objective dearth of financial resources.
“Who’s the man who’s always with you?” Blanca asked, her cheeks lightly flushed with embarrassment.
Teresa couldn’t help but smile.
“I think you must mean Inspector Massimo Marini.”
“I call him ‘starchy.’ He always smells like fresh laundry.”
“I think so, too, you know. He’s such a perfectionist that I expect he sends his whole wardrobe to the dry cleaner’s every week.”
“I don’t like him. He seems a little . . . stiff.”
Teresa couldn’t think of a more appropriate description than that.
“I always tell him he’s got a broomstick up his ass,” she joked.
Blanca burst out laughing but quickly turned serious again.
“I know people like him,” she said, drumming her fingers rhythmically on the tabletop.
Teresa studied her.
“What do people like him do?” she asked.
The girl placed a kiss on Smoky’s little head, letting her lips linger more than was strictly necessary.
“They judge,” she breathed in response.
Teresa leaned toward her as if she were about to make a confession.
“It’s true that Marini is a bit like that,” she said gently, “but he’s not all bad. And I have a great time teasing him. I expect he’ll be very jealous of you. He’s only just carved out a place for himself on the team and your arrival will unsettle him. He always wants things to be just so; he’ll find it difficult to adjust.”
Blanca lifted her face.
“Adjust to what?”
“To the total disregard of rules and regulations that your presence shall inevitably entail.”
The girl smiled. She looked so lovely when her expression wasn’t veiled by anxiety.
“He doesn’t know that Smoky practices on smuggled bones?” she asked.
“I haven’t really told him anything yet. But you know what? I can’t wait to do so. He’ll go crazy.”
They both touched the skull. Teresa thought she could almost spy a comical expression in its slightly raised brow ridge.
“It might help to dispel its baleful aura if we give it a name,” she said.
Blanca picked it up and turned it over in her hands, stroking its skeletal dome.
“We’ll call him Mr. Skinny,” she announced after she’d pondered the matter.
Teresa nodded. She liked the sound of “Mr. Skinny,” too.
19
At dawn, the valley awoke beneath a cloak of dew. Condensation shone in glimmering droplets, softening tree bark and sliding down the plumage of birds. It was a gradual awakening that followed its own mysterious rhythms, marked by birdsong, cadenced pecking and a leisurely tiptoeing in the undergrowth.
The moisture had resurfaced the verdant scents of nature as if there were sap suspended in the very air. Even the gurgling of the river seemed sharper in the light of day.
The village was already stirring with quiet activity, and the smell of coffee wafted out of a solitary cafe.
Its patrons conversed in muted tones—all except old Emmanuel: the village madman was re-enacting a dance of distant origins, but he was putting his own spin on it, his footsteps shaky with age and alcohol, and the effects of the illness that had never allowed his mind to develop into adulthood. He was so small that he looked like a child. A child with wrinkles all over his face and a smile that resembled the keys of a piano. He was holding a scrunched-up newspaper, waving it about like a messenger electrified by the news he brought. The headline declared the rediscovery of a lost painting.
“Nothing stays hidden forever,” he croaked through a volley of coughs, the stink of almost a century’s living on his breath. “Soon enough it’ll come afloat, like the skeletons in the cemetery when the River Wöda floods. And it’ll smell just as bad.”
Nobody paid heed to his words. Or almost nobody. There was someone there who had been observing him for a long time.
Someone who carried the wrath of the Tikô Wariö within and who understood that old Emmanuel wasn’t crazy.
Old Emmanuel knew.
20
The building that housed police headquarters was a block of concrete arranged into sharp corners and perpendicular planes. It was gray as stone and devoid of any decorative elements, with rows of identical windows lending it an air of efficiency and with pillars standing upright like forbidding watchmen. It was as austere as a fortress and a little depressing, too.
But the atmosphere inside its hallways was altogether different: the steady back and forth of police officers and clerks breathed life into the place and imbued it with an air of a machine at work, which was precisely what Massimo liked about it. In there he always knew what to do, how to channel his thoughts to constructive effect.
The office he shared with Superintendent Battaglia was empty. He was shocked; it was the first time since they’d met that he had arrived to find she wasn’t already at work. He knocked on Parisi and de Carli’s door and stuck his head inside.
“Anyone seen Battaglia?” he asked.
“Good morning to you,” said de Carli, his eyes fixed on the coffee he was stirring.
“Yes, good morning. So, have you seen her?”
“Not yet,” Parisi replied. “I know she stayed late last night, though, so maybe she’s sleeping in.”
Marini wouldn’t have believed it even if he’d seen it with his own eyes. He stepped inside, closing the door behind him.
“Do you know how her meeting with Lona went?” he asked Parisi. Usually, the man was up-to-date on every word uttered within these walls.
His colleague drank his coffee in a single gulp.
“Didn’t she tell you?” he said when he was done.
“We’re talking about Battaglia here.”
Parisi shrugged.
“I don’t know for sure, but it seems it was one–nil to her this time.”
