The Sleeping Nymph Read online

  “Did someone die in there?” asked Marini.

  “Not recently.” Gardini sighed. “Come with me; I’ll show you.”

  The sealed room was a laboratory equipped with instruments, most of which Teresa had never seen before. A digital microscope gave off a metallic glint under the flashing cameras, and she recognized some colleagues from the public prosecutor’s office—Gardini’s men—who were busy collecting evidence.

  “We use this equipment to conduct authenticity tests,” the art dealer explained. “For dating and valuation purposes. We have an expert who analyzes the artwork brought to us on consignment, or by people who simply wish to establish the market value of a piece they’ve inherited—or found in the attic.”

  Teresa flipped her notebook open and quickly noted down the date, time and situation, with particular emphasis on the names, physical appearances and roles of those around her. Her recurring nightmare, her most pressing fear, was that she wouldn’t be able to recognize people she knew. She noticed Marini trying to see what she was doing, so she turned the page and doodled something obscene for his benefit. He blushed furiously and retreated.

  Teresa gave her surroundings a quick once-over. Everything seemed to be in maniacal order. As she’d expected, there weren’t any mummified remains sticking out of some interstice in the wall or a hiding place under the floor.

  “Are we going to need that microscope to find the body?” Marini, back to being her shadow, whispered in her ear.

  She batted him away and looked questioningly at Gardini.

  “Give us a minute, please,” the deputy prosecutor told the forensics team.

  The activity inside the room died down as everyone except the four of them walked out. Teresa saw a pool of light that had previously been hidden from her view.

  Gardini motioned at Teresa to come closer, and she took a few steps forward. She was taken aback by something in the deputy public prosecutor’s expression, a kind of trepidation mixed with anticipation—the latter somewhat surprising to see, considering the circumstances. She followed his gaze.

  There was a table with an unframed drawing on it, laid out over a glass surface and held flat with small metal weights at each corner. It was the portrait of a woman. It appeared to be roughly fifteen inches in height and perhaps just under that in width. The paper was thick, almost coarse in appearance.

  Teresa walked up to it and when she leaned over to examine it, she found she was unable to look away. She stood like that, motionless and wide-eyed with wonder.

  True art needs no explanation, she thought to herself, remembering the words of an old high school teacher. And right here was the proof. She put on her reading glasses, attached to a thin chain dangling over her chest, and looked closer.

  The portrait seemed to spring up from the paper. There was a fullness, a three-dimensionality to it that was astonishing. It depicted the face of a young woman, a face of such singular grace that it caught you off guard. Her eyes were closed, her long eyelashes lowered onto her cheeks, her lips just slightly parted. She had an air of the exotic about her, but it would have been difficult to describe how. Her moonlike complexion was framed by her dark hair, falling down to her chest and fading out into the edges of the paper.

  It was a magnetic, sublime beauty.

  Teresa finally tore her eyes away from the face in search of other details.

  On the lower right corner of the paper was a date scrawled in shaky handwriting: April 20, 1945. But there was no signature.

  More than seventy years stood between that day and this moment now, when Teresa’s eyes basked in the result. Almost a century—yet time was not a measure that applied to this image in any way. In fact, it seemed to have transcended time, eliminated it altogether.

  Over her shoulder, Marini was barely breathing. He, too, had been ensnared by the spell the painting had cast over them all.

  “Who is it?” she heard him ask. She herself had been on the verge of asking the same thing. Marini had clearly had the same feeling that had already lodged itself in Teresa’s chest: the sensation of having come face to face with a living creature.

  “It’s the Sleeping Nymph,” replied the dealer, surveying the painting. “It was believed to have been lost, but it turned up in an attic among some old paperwork. At least that’s how the artist’s nephew tells it. He brought it to the gallery to have it authenticated, as there’s no signature. But of course it’s purely a formality; there’s no doubt that the artist is his great-uncle Alessio Andrian.”

  Teresa had never heard that name before. She couldn’t figure out why Gardini wanted her help with the preliminary investigation. What was she even meant to investigate?

  “Are you thinking it might be a forgery?” she asked him.

  Gardini let slip a smile. Teresa knew it denoted not amusement but tension, which he released with a twitch of his facial muscles.

  “I’m afraid it’s more complicated than that, Superintendent. The analysis of the drawing has thrown up unexpected and somewhat . . . disturbing results. Mr. Gortan will be able to explain it better than I can.”

  Teresa straightened her back. The inner scaffolding of her weary body creaked with the effort.

  “Disturbing?” she echoed.

  “The valuation expert was analyzing the paper and the color in order to date the work,” the dealer began to explain, “and to determine whether or not the date marked on the painting itself conforms with the parameters of the period in which it’s believed to have been created. The painting was executed with charcoal and hematite chalks. The red hue comes from hematite, a ferrous substance that produces this alluring coloring.”

  “Yes, I know of it.”

  “Until a few decades ago, painters used pure hematite in their work, but nowadays it’s mixed with natural or synthetic waxes. By testing for the presence of these waxes, it’s possible to determine whether a particular piece is recent, or older. The problem is that our expert found something else. He couldn’t identify what it was, so he sent some samples to a lab for further testing.”

  “And what did they find?”

  It was Gardini who answered, his eyes fixed on hers, the halogen lamp throwing deep, dramatic shadows on his gaunt face.

  “They found blood, Superintendent.”

  It took Teresa a few moments to understand what he was getting at. She had always thought him to be a practical, sensible man, but it sounded like he’d let himself get carried away a little. She caught Marini’s eye: he looked as baffled as she felt.

  Teresa turned her gaze back on the deputy public prosecutor. She tried to think of a tactful phrasing for what she wanted to say, but ultimately knew she’d end up with the most straightforward one, as was in her nature.

  “Prosecutor Gardini,” she began, “there are a thousand ways in which blood might have ended up on this drawing. Perhaps the artist cut himself by accident and his blood mixed with the color. Perhaps someone had a nosebleed. Usually, the simplest explanation is also the one that’s closest to the truth.”

  Gardini stayed silent, but the way he looked at her was already an answer of sorts. Teresa removed her reading glasses.

  “Do you suspect someone was killed in order to make this painting?” she asked him, unable to conceal the note of incredulity in her voice.

  Gardini remained impassive.

  “It’s not a suspicion. I am sure of it.”

  Teresa looked at the portrait again, at that pale face caught in a seemingly endless exhalation. A last breath: perhaps the nymph’s sleep was the eternal slumber of death.

  “Why?”

  Gardini leaned sideways onto the table and crossed his arms over his chest.

  “It’s not just ‘a few’ drops of blood we’re talking about,” he told her.

  Teresa felt a numbness spreading across her face, as she did every time she knew she
was about to hear a piece of bad news.

  “How much?” she asked.

  He picked up a file from the table and handed it to her, giving her a minute to leaf through it.

  “The Sleeping Nymph is made out of blood, Superintendent,” he told her. “The tests revealed traces of human cardiac tissue on the paper.”

  Teresa finally understood, but it was Gardini who voiced what she was thinking.

  “Alessio Andrian painted it by dipping his fingers in someone’s heart.”

  Cardiac tissue. Human cardiac tissue. Hands entering a ribcage and fingers dipping into a heart. The scene forming in Teresa’s mind was a cameo of folly.

  “Mr. Gortan,” she said, turning to the art dealer. “Are you reasonably certain that the author of the painting is Alessio Andrian?”

  “I conducted further tests myself to verify the findings and I can confirm, without a shadow of a doubt, that it’s authentic.”

  “And how have you arrived at this conclusion?”

  Gortan’s lips stretched into the kind of smile reserved to the uninitiated of an art so noble that ignorance of its rules was inadmissible, to be tolerated purely out of politeness. This man, Teresa realized, considered himself nothing less than the high priest of an elite cult, and conducted himself as such. She had been wrong to think of him as a merchant.

  “What makes me so sure of the attribution of the work?” Gortan retorted. “Every single detail. The choice of paper, the color, the handwriting for the date, but most of all the quality of the line: the pressure, the angles,” he explained, gesturing gracefully with his hands and spreading wafts of delicate perfume in the process. “It’s the overall quality of the composition, what I would call ‘the artist’s hand.’ That is his true signature. It’s unmistakable. This painting is Alessio Andrian’s Sleeping Nymph.”

  He certainly had no doubts. His face was flushed with genuine enthusiasm.

  “I must admit I don’t know the artist, nor had I ever heard of the Sleeping Nymph until today,” Teresa conceded.

  The art dealer’s clean-shaven face quivered with the passing shadow of a grimace so fleeting that Teresa wondered if she’d imagined it.

  “That doesn’t surprise me,” said Gortan. “Andrian isn’t a painter for the masses but for a small and, if you’ll forgive me for saying it, rather select circle of connoisseurs. But all those who’ve had the rare privilege of seeing his work have remarked on its extraordinary artistic essence.”

  Teresa was intrigued. Who exactly was this man, Alessio Andrian?

  “What do you mean by ‘rare privilege’?” she asked.

  There was a gleam in Gortan’s eyes now, something seductive in his manner—the manner of a man who knows he is the custodian of a remarkable story.

  “Andrian stopped painting in 1945, Superintendent. He was only twenty-three. His works are numbered one to ten,” he explained. “The portrait of the Sleeping Nymph is believed to be his last, number eleven.”

  Teresa noticed that he referred to the woman in the painting as if she had really existed.

  “Did he use a model to paint her?” she asked.

  Gortan shook his head.

  “Nobody knows.”

  “Maybe he stopped painting because of what happened when he finished it,” Gardini suggested.

  “I suppose you’ll find that out for us, won’t you?” the dealer replied.

  Teresa opened her notebook.

  “What’s it worth?” she asked.

  “Before the blood was detected, I would have said three hundred to three hundred and fifty thousand euros. But now . . . who knows? Maybe even twice as much.”

  “Are you saying that this kind of morbid detail can cause an exponential increase in the value of a painting?” Marini inquired.

  Gortan gave him a look of disdain, which irritated Teresa.

  “No, Inspector. What I am saying is that the value of a painting, and indeed of any work of art, is linked inextricably with its history, the human element that comes with it. Alessio Andrian’s story is undeniably unique, and this latest piece of the puzzle can only add to the fascination.”

  Teresa stopped writing.

  “What story?” she asked.

  “Andrian’s nephew is currently abroad on a business trip but will return tonight,” Gardini interrupted. “We’re meeting him tomorrow for an informal interview. There’s no one better positioned than him to tell us the story.”

  “Given the circumstances, I’d rather find out now,” Teresa persisted.

  “Andrian was a partigiano, a freedom fighter during the war,” Gortan interceded. “He made his paintings while hiding in the mountains, in between German raids. When the war ended, his comrades couldn’t find him. They thought he was dead.”

  “But?” Teresa prompted.

  “But he’d actually ended up in Yugoslavia. A family from Bovec sent word out to the Italians across the border that they’d found another Italian in the woods behind their home. The man was in such terrible shape that at first Tito’s militias thought he was dead. It was Andrian. It had been two weeks since he’d disappeared. No one ever found out what he did during that time.”

  “They didn’t ask him?”

  “Andrian never came to his senses to tell the story.”

  “So he died?”

  “No, but he went mad. And he never painted again. He never spoke again, either. Ever.”

  Gortan fell silent.

  “He took the secret to his grave,” Marini mused.

  “Not quite,” said the prosecutor, catching Teresa’s eye. “Andrian is still alive, but he’s lived in a vegetative state for almost seventy years now.”

  He paused for a moment as if to give them time to prepare for what was to come.

  “He isn’t ill, he never has been. But he’s chosen not to walk. He’s chosen not to speak. For seventy years. Whatever happened to him after he painted the Sleeping Nymph, he chose to die a living death. He’s a breathing corpse.”

  3

  The child hid in the woods, his chest heaving with every breath. He could still see past the edge of the forest from where he was, all the way to the meadow dotted with daisies and dandelions. Every now and then their colors were veiled by a swift-moving shadow, but the frothy clouds were always quick to disperse.

  He turned his back on the light and ventured farther into the scented forest. The shouting grew more distant behind him.

  The forest was silent in its welcome, a silence that slowed his steps. It was like walking into a church: the same chilly gloom, the towering vaults, the pungent smell of the resin leaking from the tree bark like wax from votive candles.

  He shivered, the T-shirt under his sweatshirt soaked with perspiration. He found a recess among the roots and branches, a safe hiding place where he could shelter, and crawled inside. He rested his chin on his knees and prepared himself for a long wait.

  He could hear them calling his name. His instincts urged him to respond to their calls and put an end to the cruel joke he was playing on them, but something else kept him firmly ensconced in his den: a furious sort of love.

  His parents’ cries echoed each other like the verses of a fearful song, interleaved with moments when the stranger’s voice rose above the others. He listened more closely whenever that happened and tried to interpret her tone: Would he hear the indifference she’d recently reserved him, or had his sudden disappearance reawakened her affection?

  The stranger: his sister. When she’d started to change, to grow up, something between them had snapped, and now she was the target of his resentment. He wanted to make her afraid of losing him. He wanted her to love him again as she used to.

  So he had decided to vanish.

  He drew back deeper into his hiding place. He tore out a fern and began picking at it compulsively. He realized when he sniffed
his nose that he’d been crying again.

  A churning in the fronds above his head startled him. He dried his eyes. Something was moving up there, in the depths of the emerald dome of the forest, twitching and then falling still again.

  He let out a whimper when he remembered what he’d told his sister that same morning.

  It’s not true that vipers have their babies up in trees, he told himself. That was a lie you made up to scare her.

  He sat completely still.

  But was he really sure of it? Vipers have their babies up on tree branches so they can drop them into the world and not get bitten.

  He felt something slither into his collar and scrambled to his feet with a yelp, tearing his sweatshirt off and breaking into a run.

  He wanted to go back home now, back to safety. He didn’t care anymore about his wounded pride, his betrayed affections. He wanted his mom’s kisses and his father’s laugh. Even the stranger no longer seemed so hostile, so unpleasant.

  But the shoots and brambles kept snatching at him, and no matter how he struggled, he couldn’t cut through them. They gripped his arms and curled around his legs. The forest wanted to imprison him in the wet breath of its darkness. He could feel that breath on him now.

  His eyes sought out the light of the meadow, but all he could see was blackness. The trees seemed more crooked and imposing, the undergrowth more tangled.

  He knew he was lost. The cold enveloped him. He realized he was only wearing a T-shirt now. His arms were ravaged with cuts, gashes on his skin from the thorns. His face was also smarting, as it would after a day spent in the summer sun.