The Sleeping Nymph Read online

  “Mommy,” he called out as softly as he could, so as not to wake the living creatures around him.

  The forest responded with a soft scrabbling sound that he hadn’t noticed before.

  It was moving all around him. He couldn’t see it. But he could sense it.

  The forest was breathing, throbbing like a single, powerful black heart, a resonant subterranean beat, to which his own heart responded by beating faster and faster.

  He clenched his fists and felt pain flare up like a flame. He lifted a hand and saw a deep cut across his palm. He watched, mesmerized, as his blood dripped onto the black earth.

  A butterfly the same color as the wolf’s bane his mother had picked that morning came to perch on his wound. Resting on his warm flesh, it flapped its wings lazily. When he reached out to touch it, it evaded him but stayed nearby, dancing in the air. The boy decided to follow it. He hoped it would lead him to the light.

  He got to where the trees started to thin out, where the sun filtered through to the undergrowth in blinding shards of light, and he was reminded of the illustrations in a book of fairy tales he used to read: Hansel and Gretel and the witch who wanted to eat them.

  The butterfly came to rest on flakes of wood that time had torn away from their bark. The boy knelt and stretched a finger out to pick the butterfly up, then suddenly drew back. Those weren’t flakes of wood. They were bones. Bones sticking out of the earth. Half of a skeletal hand reaching out of the soil, through moss and wildflowers.

  The boy screamed and began to run, unable to shake off the image of the flailing butterfly trapped in the web of what had once been human fingers.

  He was sure that he would be stuck in the forest forever, enmeshed in its malevolent web like that butterfly, when he heard a voice calling for him. He looked up. There was a slope in the distance where the light shined a little brighter and there, he saw the gradually emerging silhouette of a familiar figure.

  He responded with a desperate cry. His sister rushed to his side, her hair disheveled, her jeans stained with mud up to her knees. She’d been crying. She fell to the ground in front of him and hugged him tighter than she had in a long time, like she used to do before they began to grow apart. The boy burst into sobs. He opened his mouth as if to rid himself of the terror he felt, but no sound came out. He turned to look back at where he’d come from, but now every part of the forest looked the same again, as if it had folded itself up.

  He would never be able to find the ghost hand again. He pressed his lips shut: nobody would believe him. He let himself be picked up and led toward the light.

  He cried one final tear, for the butterfly.

  Had he known that he was being watched, he would have cried for his own sake, for the silent death he had barely escaped.

  For the Tikô Wariö can feel no pity, not even for the helpless. It must keep guard.

  4

  Massimo decided he wouldn’t go straight back home. He wanted to go for a walk first, let himself be numbed, for once, by the city’s vitality. The streets were all lit up, the chatter from the bars an enticement to stop for a glass of something cheering. The arcades around Piazza delle Erbe were swarming with the kinds of people Massimo himself had so recently belonged with. Young men in their thirties; he watched them teasing, flirting, holding in one hand a half-empty glass and in the other a cigarette—or perhaps a woman’s hand. Their world was light-years away from his.

  He walked around aimlessly, looking at glittering shop windows without really seeing what was on display. He searched for a reflection of his own image: he saw that he had changed and wasn’t pleased with the result. He wasn’t himself: he was walking when he would have liked to run; silent when he would have liked to scream; there, yet far away at the same time. He kept running away and ending up back where he’d started.

  You’re a coward, he thought, though he’d forgiven himself long ago for that particular flaw. He certainly had worse ones to worry about.

  He fished his mobile phone out of his pocket and switched it back on, a sinking feeling in his stomach as he waited for the notifications that flashed up on his screen in quick succession.

  She’d called him again. Elena never sent him any messages; she wasn’t content to consign her scorn to a few lines of text on a screen. She wanted to shove her words through the phone until they exploded in his ears. She wanted the sound of her voice to strike at his heart again and again.

  He was briefly tempted to linger amid the crowds and feign happiness, but then decided to veer into the silence of the quieter side streets. He turned a corner and almost crashed into a couple kissing beneath a street lamp. The woman laughed while the man pulled her closer.

  Massimo felt a pang of bitterness and looked away. He used to be like that with Elena, back in a time he could no longer even remember—even though he knew on a rational level that it had only been a year, not a decade.

  They had been just like that, unable to keep their hands off each other.

  And then he’d left her without even offering an explanation, because that would have meant having to explain it to himself, too, when all he’d wanted was silence. She had told him she loved him and he had left her. He hadn’t seen her or spoken to her again until a few weeks ago: a few hours during which he’d made love to her again, then left.

  He found himself standing outside his building without quite knowing how he’d gotten there. He ignored the elevator and made for the stairs. He didn’t even have a case to work on to distract him from thoughts of her; he couldn’t help but feel that it was perhaps too optimistic to think the mystery of the Sleeping Nymph could be solved seventy years after the fact.

  He climbed up to the landing outside his flat, but stopped at the last step.

  There was a woman waiting for him, sitting on a suitcase with her eyes closed and her back leaning against the door. She looked exhausted, but also like she was steeling herself for a fight. She was thinner than he remembered, even though it had only been a few weeks since the last time he’d seen her, a short span of time that seemed nevertheless to have consumed her, as if the very act of breathing had torn her slowly apart.

  It has nothing to do with time.

  “Elena?” he called out.

  His voice came out choked, little more than a stutter, but her eyes snapped open, quick as a trap. They looked at each other without saying a word, their bodies taut and weighed down with awkwardness. Elena rose to her feet with a sigh that could have meant anything: tiredness, irritation, relief. Regret.

  Massimo swallowed painfully. There were no words that could rescue him now.

  “I don’t know what to say,” he murmured. “I . . .”

  Elena walked up to him. Massimo thought she was going to slap him, but she just sank her face into the crook of his neck. It was like an electric shock to the senses, a wave of feeling crashing into his skin.

  Massimo opened his mouth, but she covered it with her cold, trembling fingers.

  “I don’t know how to tell you, either, so I’m just going to say it,” she whispered. “I’m pregnant.”

  5

  April 20, 1945

  Whatever happened that day, the mystery has been left undisturbed for more than seventy years.

  Reminder: check newspapers from that era.

  Tomorrow, 8:30 a.m.: meeting at the district attorney’s office with Raffaello Andrian, the painter’s great-nephew.

  Girl with dog standing at the corner of the gallery and the square. Blue hair. Strange feeling. Have I seen her before?

  Marini: he’s got a secret eating away at him.

  Teresa closed her diary, her head resting against the window of the office she shared with Marini. She had watched him walk away until she’d lost sight of him in the darkness.

  He’s running from something. The kid had settled into a new life, but something was stalking him. Even his body had changed over the past few weeks: it was leaner, more strained, more alert. Restless. They had something in common, Marini and her: they both kept secrets.

  She pushed the arms of her glasses between her lips and stared out into the night, pierced here and there by street lamps and headlights. She couldn’t tear her eyes away from the darkness.

  She rubbed at her cheek absentmindedly, and the bangle on her wrist tinkled. It was a simple silver band with an inscription: Your name is Teresa Battaglia.

  Her doctor’s mobile phone number followed—not a husband’s, nor a son’s, nor a relative’s. It was a message she had left for herself, she who had never needed anyone to rescue her.

  She drew the curtains over the darkness outside, and it was like shaking off a torpor that had weighed on her body and her mind.

  Her work desk consisted of a polished surface with a computer screen and a keyboard. Over the past few months, it had changed with her, adapting itself to a world in which Teresa had had no choice but to reshape herself into a more methodical, more reflective, perhaps even a more disciplined form.

  She sat down and placed her diary on the desk. She retrieved the key to the filing cabinet from under her keyboard, opened one of the drawers and looked inside.

  It was like setting a box of fireflies free, dozens of numbered Post-it notes like colorful wings that fluttered to the touch and carried useful information. Yellow for work-related notes: what her job was, how to switch a computer on, how to turn it off, how to use the telephone, how to call a taxi, the name of the person she shared an office with . . . Green for her personal life and the necessary rituals of diabetes. The message on note number one was a troubling reminder: check your bracelet.

  These were her clues th
rough a daily path that might at any moment turn unfamiliar and impenetrable.

  The last few lights on the floors above were being switched off. She could hear her colleagues making their way down the stairs, their voices a distant hum moving farther and farther out of reach, like her dreams. She was going to miss this place.

  She took a deep breath and tried to concentrate on the Alessio Andrian case and the portrait painted in blood. She was going to meet the artist’s great-nephew the next day, and perhaps she’d find out a few more details about the story that had brought the Sleeping Nymph all the way to her.

  A new case was waiting to be solved, and more lies were waiting to be told. Hiding her condition meant deceiving everyone: her team, who believed in her infallibility as an article of faith; Gardini and the district attorney, who insisted on assigning all the most complex cases to her. The victims. The families of the victims.

  She had to put an end to this farce before it was too late, before the illness eating away at her memory drove a wedge between her and all that she loved. Teresa had made her mind up weeks ago, but something kept holding her back. Even earlier that day she’d hesitated at the district attorney’s door, until he had flung it open as if he’d expected to find her there.

  “I have a case for you,” he’d said.

  And so the enigma of the Sleeping Nymph had arrived to put off the inevitable, the only clue to a crime no one even knew where to place. As for when it had happened, the hypothesis was fairly simple: April 20, 1945, just a few days before the end of the war.

  All Teresa had to work from was a beautiful and morbid portrait, some unidentified blood that was bound to lead nowhere, and an old man of unsound mind who had once been a partisan and had perhaps killed someone during the war. Maybe the victim was an enemy combatant whose corpse Andrian had torn apart in the throes of madness.

  He dipped his hands into the dead man’s heart to draw the girl, she thought to herself. Blood is a powerful symbol. It is life that flows through us, warm, healing, transformative.

  Despite the violence inherent in the act, Teresa couldn’t see any kind of homicidal fury in it. Instead, she thought she glimpsed a more visceral urge, a passion pushed over the edge and into the arms of insanity.

  She knew why Gardini had tasked her with leading the initial investigation: he trusted her instincts.

  “You have an elective affinity with the dead,” he’d told her one day.

  The dead always had a lot to say about the final moments of their lives, but this time there were no glassy eyes in which Teresa could search for the shadow of the killer. There were no hands that had tried to resist, to mount a last-ditch defense, tearing pieces off their aggressor in the process. The blood-soaked nymph rested in a slumber no one could ever wake her from, and her secret slept with her.

  Teresa opened her diary again and leafed through it in what had now become an essential evening ritual. She scanned her own mind to work out if and when she’d lost her way.

  She came across the riddle she’d been working on, though she hadn’t had much time to think about it yet. Solving riddles had become a way to get through her spells of confusion. She’d found that the exercise could bring her back to the world whenever she felt something inside her slipping away. It had started as a necessity and had since become an enjoyable habit.

  The police are preparing to break into a house to arrest a criminal. The only clue they have is his name: Adamo.

  When they enter the house, they find a mechanic, a firefighter, a doctor and a plumber all playing cards.

  Without a moment’s hesitation, they arrest the mechanic.

  Why?

  The notebook slipped through her fingers and rustled to the floor. Teresa crouched down and stretched her hand out to retrieve it from beneath her chair.

  As she straightened up, grabbing the edge of the desk for support, the notebook fell open on a page she’d filled in a few days ago. The note on the page, written in her wispy handwriting, rooted her to her chair.

  Girl with blue hair and an ugly dog standing at the bus stop outside the district attorney’s office. I have a feeling I’ve seen her before, but she left very quickly. She looked nervous.

  Teresa didn’t remember seeing her, nor making a note of it, but for once it wasn’t this little black hole of forgetfulness that bothered her.

  It was the girl with the blue hair again. Teresa had run into her at least three times now, and always in a different place.

  Just a coincidence, she told herself. Or maybe someone out there had begun to follow her.

  6

  The forest was finally at peace. The family had left, taking that overly curious boy with them. The child was a troubled creature with a heart full of anger who had laid eyes on something he should never have seen. And yet, surprisingly, he had kept quiet about it.

  It had been a long wait. The strangers had lingered until sunset, too close, too reckless. They hadn’t noticed that someone was watching them.

  The sun had sunk behind the purplish ring of the mountain peaks and twilight unfurled into the darkness like a nocturnal flower. Already, the light from Venus shone in the west: its name was both Lucifer, the morning star, and Vesper, the star of the evening. It appeared at this time of year in a delta of cobalt blue between two peaks.

  The villages in the valley lay sleepily under its diaphanous light. The church tower with its roof of larch shingles and a weathervane instead of a cross reached toward the sky above the tapered trees.

  Past the meadows, past the edge of the forest, footsteps rustled softly in the undergrowth, accompanied by the singing of a little owl. The footsteps followed a path invisible to the untrained eye, winding through white-flowered shrubs and clumps of wild mint. As the path began to slope, the steps turned into a light trot, all the way to the grave.

  The night was fragrant and fell like a soft shroud over that scene of death. The bones, now exposed, gleamed with lunar whiteness against the black earth. Flowers with their petals folded against the night adorned the remains that had emerged from the recesses of the valley. A series of torrential spring showers had eroded the earth and brought to light the secret the forest had been keeping.

  “Skrit kej,” a sweet voice whispered.

  To keep a secret.

  The watchful figure of the Tikô Wariö had returned to the forests of the valley, just like in the stories the elders used to tell around the hearth. “He who keeps guard” had neither face nor body of its own; according to the legend, the great custodian, the fierce protector would take over the body of whoever invoked his help: a human in the shape of a boy, a woman, an old man.

  And now, someone had called for him.

  “Tikô Wariö. Tikô Bronô. Te k skriwa kej,” a singsong voice called out.

  A pair of patient hands started digging to cover those other buried hands with darkness and quiet.

  7

  Teresa was standing at the window looking out at the world with the feeling that she wasn’t really there—that she was actually at a different window, her eyes scanning a different courtyard, the light belonging to a day already gone by.

  All night she’d wondered whether her suspicion that she was being followed might actually be a new side effect of the illness. Phobias, paranoia, manias: Was this what the future held for her until Alzheimer’s disease erased every last emotion and memory she had?

  The district attorney’s offices were still deserted. The corridors of the courthouse had just been mopped. The silence was punctuated by the dry ticking of a clock.

  Teresa kept her eyes firmly on the courtyard within the walls of the late nineteenth-century complex. Marini was late, and his phone was off; she had the feeling he wasn’t going to turn up. She’d developed a sixth sense concerning anything to do with him, a protective instinct that was perhaps the prelude to a more obvious emotion. But she knew that it would do her no good to think of him that way: this was not a good time to get attached to anyone—she should be preparing instead to give everything up, say her goodbyes and disappear.