The Sleeping Nymph

Chapter 1
 
The sun cut sideways into Massimo Marini’s face, drawing out a blaze of color as it filtered through his brown eyelashes. He was walking with nervous steps down a street flanked by hidden gardens, kept out of sight by thick walls. Petals from the taller branches of the trees behind the walls had fallen onto the street. It was like treading on something that was still alive, a carpet of dying creatures.
     It was a drowsy, placid spring afternoon, but the roiling black mass at the edge of his line of sight announced an upheaval. The air crackled with electricity, a contagious force that made the inspector restless.
     The entrance to the La Cella art gallery was marked by a brass plaque on the coarse plaster exterior of a building from the 1600s. Reflected on the metal, Massimo’s eyes looked as twisted as his mood. He rolled down his shirtsleeves and put on his jacket before ringing the doorbell. The lock clicked open. He pushed the studded knocker
and entered.
     The day’s warmth reached no farther than the threshold. The moment he stepped through the door, a wet weight seemed to settle on him. The floor was checkered black and white, and a stairway of veined marble curved upward toward the second floor. Light filtered through some of the high windows onto a chandelier made of Murano glass, launching emerald shimmers into the semi-darkness of the ground floor. There was a smell of lilies in the air. It reminded Massimo of incense, the inside of a gloomy church, endless litanies and the stern look on his father’s face whenever Massimo—then still a child—dared show any sign of boredom.
     His head began to pound.
     His mobile phone vibrated with an incoming call and in the silence of that solemn place, the sound seemed to belong to another universe.
     He took out his phone from his breast pocket. It writhed in his palm like a cold, flat artificial heart, but Massimo knew that on the other end of the line was a real heart in which love wrestled with rage and disappointment and pain. His phone had been ringing with that number for weeks now, often several times a day, relentless.
     He ignored the call, his mouth pasty with a sickening mixture of remorse and guilt. He let the call ring out and switched his phone off. Circumventing the marble stairway, he descended a set of wrought-iron steps that spiraled ivy-like into the basement. Muffled voices floated through the gloom. A hallway dimly lit by lamps set into the floor, a door made of pebbled glass and beyond, the gallery.
     La Cella, finally. The vaulted ceiling of coarse tiles stood above a smooth slate floor. Along the walls, most of the plaster had been scraped off to reveal the original stonework beneath. Each splash of light fell precisely onto each of the pieces on display, drawing them out like jewels from the shadows. Bronze sculptures, glass vases and dazzlingly colorful abstract paintings were the characters on that spare underground stage.
     The inspector followed the murmur of voices to a cluster of people standing in the most spacious room in the gallery. A pair of uniformed policemen stood guard along the edges. Past them, Marini recognized Parisi and de Carli, both in plainclothes. Olive-skinned, muscular Parisi was talking quietly on the phone, while de Carli—as skinny and ungainly as a teenager—watched and occasionally intervened. They had become Marini’s team ever since he had requested a transfer from the city to this small local precinct. He had thought—or at least hoped—that this change in trajectory might be a way to find solace and perhaps start over. He’d ended up finding a whole lot more than he’d expected, but solace remained a fire-breathing chimera that burned him every time he reached out to grasp it.
     He walked up to his team.
     “What’s going on?” he asked de Carli.
     De Carli pulled up his jeans, which had slid down his thighs.
     “God knows. They haven’t told us a thing yet. It’s all a big mystery.”
     “Then why did you tell me it was urgent?”
     Parisi covered the phone with his hand and tilted his chin toward the opposite side of the room.
     “Because she needs us. And you.”
     Marini’s eyes searched for the person who had made every minute of his life hell over the past few months, but in doing so, had brought him back to life.
     At first he only saw her feet, glimpsed between the legs of two officers. She was wearing wedge trainers and kept shifting her weight from one side to the other; every now and then she stood on the balls of her feet to give her legs a rest.
     She’s tired, he thought. And although he had no idea why the team had been dispatched to La Cella, he knew she would be the last person to leave that day.
     Then the two officers moved and he could finally see the rest of her, standing between a bronze sculpture of a half-liquefied heart and an installation of Perspex wings hanging from the ceiling. Heart and soul, just like her.
     And determination, a vitality that sometimes threatened to crush those closest to her but always managed, at the very last moment, to pick them up and push them beyond what they thought possible.
     It also happened that she was a bit of a bitch.
     There was a raggedness to her appearance that had less to do with her age—sixty—than with some inner torment that Massimo could not yet name and that only seemed to find release in the notebook she kept permanently clasped in her hands, filling it with frenzied scrawls at every opportunity.
     He walked up to her and noticed the single blink with which she registered his arrival. She didn’t even turn around. She was holding one of the temples of her reading glasses between her lips and chewing nervously on a sweet.
     “I hope it’s sugar-free,” he said.
     She finally looked at him, though for barely a second.
     “And that is your business because . . . ?”
     Her voice was hoarse and dry, and leavened with a note of amusement.
     “You’re diabetic, Superintendent. And supposedly a lady, too . . .” he muttered, ignoring the curse that followed.
     It was a familiar game they played, one he almost never won.
     She stopped gnawing at her glasses.
     “Isn’t this supposed to be your day off, Inspector?” she asked, boring into him with those terrible eyes of hers, so adept at seeing well below the surface.
     Massimo gave her a half-smile.
     “And haven’t you just finished your shift?”
     “All this diligence won’t compensate for your recent lapses, Marini.”
     Massimo decided to avoid the minefield of a possible response. Already, she appeared to have lost interest in him. He watched her closely, this woman whose head didn’t even reach his chest but who could crush his ego in the blink of an eye. She was almost twice his age, but frequently left him behind, exhausted, well before her own energies were spent. Her manner was often brutal, and her hair, styled in a bob that framed her face, was dyed such an artificial shade of red that it was almost embarrassing. Or at least would have been on anyone but her.
     Teresa Battaglia could bark, and there were some who swore they had seen her bite, too—quite literally.
     “So? Why are we here? What’s with all the mysteries?” he asked in a bid to draw her back to the hunt—that territory, she could navigate better and faster than anyone else.
     Teresa Battaglia was staring straight ahead as if she were looking at someone, her eyes narrowed, black thoughts lodged in her furrowed brow.
     “Singular, Inspector, not plural. There’s only ever one mystery.”
     Superintendent Battaglia wiped the lenses of her reading glasses, as she did every time she was thinking. She was putting her thoughts in order.
     “Why else would we be here, if not to solve the mystery of death?”
 
 
Chapter 2

“Cold case.”
     That was how Deputy Public Prosecutor Gardini had described it not even an hour ago when he’d summoned her to La Cella. Two words, followed by something Superintendent Teresa Battaglia had heard him say countless times before: “I want you and your team on this.”
     Cold case. Teresa had been relieved to hear that; it meant no killer on the loose to hunt down, no potential further victims to save, no immediate threat. Only the echo of something that had happened long ago and somehow resurfaced now.
     She could handle it. She was not going to lose control of this case, and even if she did, there would be no harm done—except perhaps to her ego.
     You’re a fool if you think they won’t notice what’s happening to you.
     What was happening to her had a name so powerful it could crush her, but Teresa had not retreated from the word on her medical record, had not stepped aside and let it take over her world. Instead, she had locked it away where all our most terrible fears like to settle: in the depths of her soul—and in the diary she always carried with her. Her paper memory.
     Massimo Marini was another problem in an already complicated situation. He kept looking at her as if he suspected something, as if he had access to her thoughts. She found it difficult to keep him at arm’s length; in fact, his closeness had started to feel normal, almost welcome, and she had begun to worry that this urge to seek each other out might become a dangerous habit for them both.
     Prosecutor Gardini emerged from a room that had been cordoned off. He looked anxious, as always. A lanky man with permanently disheveled hair and a scruffy tie—as if he’d just been swept over by a gust of wind—Gardini was an accomplished magistrate who worked himself to the bone, his appearance symptomatic of the unrelenting rhythm of his life.
     He was accompanied by a noticeably tanned man of rather eccentric appearance. His brown hair had been lightened by the sun along the sides of his head, leading Teresa to deduce that his tan, too, must be natural, the kind people who practiced outdoor sports tended to get. There was a certain elegance about him, a refinement reflected in the clothes he wore, classic cuts in vibrant colors: flamboyant yet entirely tasteful.
     Teresa leafed through the most recent notes in her diary but found no description of the man. Her memory was not failing her: they had never met before. But she did have an idea of who he might be.
     Gardini walked toward her, holding his arm out for a handshake. They had been friends for many years, but work was work and they had to act in accordance with their respective positions.
     “Thank you for coming, Superintendent. I’m sorry to have troubled you at the end of your shift,” he said, addressing her in unusually formal fashion. “This is Gianmaria Gortan, the owner of this gallery. Mr. Gortan, this is Superintendent Battaglia. I intend to put her in charge of the investigation.”
     Teresa smiled briefly.
     “This is Inspector Marini, my right hand,” she said.
     They all shook hands. Teresa noticed that the art dealer’s palm was clammy. A hint of unease that clashed with the polished image he projected.
     “It was Mr. Gortan who called us in,” Gardini was saying. “We have a rather unusual case here.”
     He hadn’t given her any kind of hint, but Teresa had spent the past few minutes watching the forensics team in the art gallery going in and out of a room she hadn’t yet seen. A camera attached to a photodetector was clicking incessantly, its powerful flash piercing the dim light. If this was a cold case, then something wasn’t quite right. The volume of resources and personnel that had been deployed did not square with what she’d expected to find; no one really cared about deaths that had happened a long time ago. After the blood dries up, Justice is never in any rush to strike her sword: the scales of her balance remain suspended, and her blindfold falls just loose enough for her to look around and find fresher tragedies to set her hounds on.
    “Did someone die in there?” asked Marini.
    “Not recently.” Gardini sighed. “Come with me; I’ll show you.”