When the Dead Awaken

by Steffen Jacobsen

Genres: Thrillers

Synopsis

Sabrina D'Avalos's father was murdered by the mafia. Now a district attorney, she wants justice, or revenge. Whichever comes first.

The Camorra, one of the oldest criminal organisations in Italy, runs Naples. More powerful, more violent and richer than the Sicilian mafia, its hold is unshakable.

When Sabrina investigates a family found dead in a shipping container, she quickly uncovers links to the Camorra - and her father.

The mafia's most terrifying assassins are on Sabrina's trail. But Sabrina is desperate to find out the truth about her father, despite the deadly risks she is taking.

Release date: August 1, 2013

Publisher: Quercus Publishing

Print pages: 432

Sample

Port of Naples, 1 September 2010

Gaetano Costa had long since ceased to notice Naples’ famous red lighthouse, which filled the cabin of his crane with white, red and green light every fifteen seconds. His eyes were fixed on a monitor, which showed the freezer container, weighing eighteen tonnes, swinging under the crane’s spreader, fifteen metres below his cabin, and thirty metres above the quay. He adjusted the joysticks that were controlling the container’s journey from the trailer truck on Vittorio Emanuele II Quay to the top layer of containers on Pancoast Lines’ newest container ship, the threehundred-metre long Taixan. Gaetano was proud of his hands and what they could accomplish. Some people had the stamina and the concentration to become the invisible link between the gigantic winch of the Terex crane, the flexible steel wires, the moving container and the pitching ship’s deck – whatever the weather or visibility – while others never mastered it.

Earlier that evening American engineers with broad smiles and thumbs-up had said goodbye to an anxious Gaetano and his equally sceptical foreman. The job required the Italians to speak and understand a kind of pidgin English, and they had nodded unconvinced in response to the engineers’ parting cry of ‘Don’t worry, guys!’

Nevertheless, Costa had to admit that the crane now worked like a dream. It was as if the American engineers in their white overalls had integrated his spine into the crane’s control systems.

It had been a good shift. A thin crescent moon sat high in the sky, the sea was black and calm, and the last container of the night hung safely below. He had the Chinese loading officer barking orders into one ear of his headset and John Denver singing in the other. When the white container with the green Maltese crosses on its sides had been delivered and secured, the ship would slip its moorings and reverse into the basin to make room for yet another of the illuminated container ships anchored on the dark roadstead of Naples like a never-ending chain of fairy lights.

Gaetano would climb down from the cabin, change, chat briefly with his replacement, swallow two painkillers for the left-sided headache which the signature flashes of the lighthouse always induced, before spending a couple of pleasant and uneventful hours at a late night café drinking coffee, smoking cigarettes, reading La Gazetta dello Sport and most likely indulging in an erotic fantasy featuring the almond-skinned waitress, Giuseppina. When the sun rose he would cycle home to his bachelor flat in Via Colonnello Carlo Lahalle.

It was by no means the first freezer container with the distinctive green cross that Gaetano had loaded on to a Pancoast-owned ship. Always late at night. Always as the last item and always when Filippo Montesi from Autoritá Portuale di Napoli, the Neapolitan Port Authority, was the harbour master on duty. The container had been delivered by an anonymous truck, which kept its engine running and drove off the moment the crane had removed its load.

The screen by Gaetano Costa’s right knee showed him the details of the container’s barcode. The consignee was an anonymous warehouse in Macao, the sender a shipping company in Hanover: two destinations that deviated completely from the normal traffic. However, the fifty-five-year-old crane operator, whose body had moulded itself to the shape of the cabin with the passage of time, had, like everyone else in the port, learned never to ask questions. The Port of Naples processed twenty million tonnes of freight every year and the freezer container represented barely a single particle in this unimaginably extensive stream of goods.

In this mighty port, the Camorra had a thousand eyes and ears, and not one container moved without its knowledge.

The monitor by Gaetano’s knee displayed the section of the quay between the crane tracks and the ship. Traffic was usually barred from this area during loading and unloading, but tonight was an exception: a camera crew from the British television station Channel 4 had been granted access to shoot a popular series with a breathless, globetrotting presenter.

It was the absence of a particular sound that made Gaetano mutter the word ‘no’. The missing sound made the sweat break out under his orange overalls. The ratchet-locking pin in the cable drum above the cabin was no longer transmitting its solid clicks – the spreader was in free fall. The numbers on the drum’s digital revolution counter spun faster than the eye could follow. Costa flicked open the safety cap on the emergency brake and his palm hit the red button to release the secondary locking clamps that bit deep into the oiled cable to break the fall of the runaway container.

An ear-piercing metallic sound made Gaetano Costa look up. While he muttered ‘no’ again and again, while he bashed his hand until it bled on the emergency-brake button, he saw the fifteen-tonne trolley keel over right above his head. Sparks flew from the undercarriage of the drum housing, and the colossal construction rocked menacingly.

The white container tumbled towards its doom, condemning Gaetano Costa to certain death at the hands of the Camorra in its wake.

The presenter on the quay heard the high-pitched squeal above her and watched in disbelief as the soundman was replaced by the shipping container on the square of tarmac which he had been standing on a second ago.

The impact of the container caused her and the rest of the camera crew to jump twenty centimetres into the air, and she felt her hair stand on end. Everyone was momentarily deafened and many experienced various degrees of deafness in the days that followed.

The producer landed first on his Italian loafers and shouted in a thick voice:

‘F-u-u-ck! Did you get that, Jack?’

Then he discovered a part of his own tongue that he had bitten off, instinctively caught it in his hand, and fell silent.

A veteran of Beirut, Tikrit, The Foreign Correspondents’ Club in Hong Kong and Wilma’s Bar, the Irish cameraman was the first to pull himself together. He held the camera steady, and zoomed in on a twisted aluminium bar, a microphone, a cable and an undamaged tape recorder that were the only visible remains of the soundman. Next, the open doors of the smashed container from which white cocoons spilled out on to the tarmac through an ice-cold-hoar frost that reeked of diesel; and then a wall of perforated and rotting black bin bags from which human body parts in every stage of decomposition were sticking out. A skeletal hand ended up a few centimetres from his Converse. He held his breath as he let the camera light up every gruesome detail of the steel coffin.

Through the glass floor of the cabin, Gaetano Costa saw with a kind of gloomy joy how the elegantly uniformed Filippo Montesi tried to yank the camera from the cameraman who, without straining himself, and with the camera still securely resting on his shoulder, knocked the harbour master to the ground.

Costa, who had seen a thing or two during his time in the port, frowned. Herding Chinese workers from the Camorra’s sweatshops into a garage with rubber seals on the door, and connecting a hose from the exhaust of a trailer truck to a pipe in the wall, was generally regarded as an effective and humane way of putting down worn-out slave labour. After gassing them, every form of identification was removed from the deceased and the bodies vacuum-packed in white plastic. The containers were eased overboard when the ship was directly above the threekilometre-deep Agadir Canyon off the coast of North Africa. However, the containers didn’t usually contain black bin bags with body parts. This was a first.

*

The production assistant punched in the numbers of the Italian police, the ambulance service, the fire service and Channel 4’s news desk in Rome on her mobile, while the presenter frantically delved into her artistic persona for a suitable character who would appear both resourceful and glamorous.

The crane cabin was equipped with a small but powerful pair of binoculars. Costa put the strap around his neck, opened the door and climbed out on the ladder to the crane’s main tower. After two minutes of careful climbing, he reached the long loading outrigger above the cabin, edged his way past the trolley and the capsized cable drum, and found a suitable vantage point high above the loading deck of the Taixan. Through the windows of the ship’s bridge he could see the Chinese officers frantically waving their arms. A small circle of condensation had formed on the storm glass in front of each open mouth. The loading officer was standing on a separate gangway above the deck at the same level as Gaetano. He had his back to the crane operator and was shouting into a walkietalkie, but Costa only had John Denver’s ‘Leaving on a Jet Plane’ in his earpiece.

Costa saw the reflection of the emergency vehicles’ flashing lights on the facades of every building in the streets that radiated from the hub of the port. The sky was no longer empty, but covered with white clouds, like shimmering fish scales. He looked east as the quay filled with ambulances, police cars, media vans with skyward-looking satellite dishes and the Carabinieri’s cordons. He saw Mars rise above the horizon in the east and studied the red planet until it was obscured by clouds; he felt the steel construction vibrate under all the official boots. Gaetano Costa aimed the binoculars at the furthest, darkest part of the quay.

He observed the dark blue Audi A8 which rolled on to the quay between the warehouses, its lights turned off. A small, straight-backed figure got out, and through the lenses of the binoculars the crane operator watched the silhouette, his signature ivory-headed walking stick tucked under his left arm. At this distance the man’s eye sockets were pools of black ink.

Urs Savelli from the Camorra.

Gaetano Costa let the binoculars dangle from the strap and ignored the shouts from the crane tower behind him. He lit a cigarette, took a single deep drag, flicked it into the darkness and with a curse closed his eyes and let himself fall on to the container fifty metres below him.

The presenter got her second shock of the evening when Costa hit the tarmac two metres away from her. Undaunted, she carried on smiling at the camera through the mask of tiny bloodstains that covered her face.

Assistant Public Prosecutor Sabrina D’Avalos parked her old Opel behind a row of containers sheltered from cameras and onlookers, and walked across the yard to the newly erected white plastic tents where medical examiners were working on the contents of the container, making dental imprints, if any teeth were left, fingerprinting, if any fingers remained, determining cause of death, taking tissue samples and DNA profiling.

The September sun was approaching its zenith and cast hardly any shadow. The port area was quiet, even the seagulls unusually contemplative. The Taixan still lay by the quay, invaded by gendarmes in dark blue uniforms and customs officers in black. The Chinese ship’s officers were on the defensive – simultaneously subservient and furious.

Though she was only twenty-eight years old, Sabrina had already listened to the eulogies delivered for a female driver and male bodyguard, both killed by a car bomb that bore all the hallmarks of the Terrasino family. Three years ago her father had been murdered either by the Camorra, the Cosa Nostra or the ’Ndrangheta. He had been at the top of the death lists of all three crime syndicates; a political killing that remained unsolved.

From a lazy journalist’s point of view, she was the ultimate cliché – young, pretty and aristocratic – and people assumed that she would forever walk in the shadow of her famous father. General Baron Agostino D’Avalos was formerly head of the Carabinieri’s anti-terror unit, the GIS – Gruppo di Intervento Speciale. She was a member of a brand-new unit, the NAC – Nucleo Anti Camorra – created by the public prosecutor in Naples and closely watched by the media. It was yet another instrument in the never-ending war on the Camorra. This specialist unit recruited members from the Carabinieri, the national police and the public prosecutor’s office, and had unique, extended judicial powers. NAC members were usually armed and had to complete a five-month course in forensic medicine, surveillance, defensive driving, close combat and the use of weapons. Sabrina D’Avalos had been one of the first prosecutors to volunteer and she had finished top of her class.

Sabrina, however, had no intention of becoming a stereotype and fiercely defended her right to be herself. She was unmarried and had no children. She belonged to a new generation of public prosecutors, often younger women, frequently educated in the US as well as in Italy, incorruptible and extraordinarily ambitious. She spent more nights in her office at the Palace of Justice than in her flat in Via Andrea d’Isernia. In her spare time she read novels, watched black-and-white movies, danced Zumba and took evening classes in Arabic. She had also befriended a traumatized eleven-year-old boy at an orphanage.

She called the boy Ismael, which was as good a name as any.

La baronessa was slim, slightly below medium height, and she walked with a very straight back. She had slanted, smoky eyes beneath a high forehead. Her mouth was sensuous, but perhaps slightly too wide; her nose was narrow, but possibly a little too long, and her face always reflected her mood.

In order to eliminate any doubt that she was modern and capable, Sabrina D’Avalos wore reflective Ray-Ban Aviator sunglasses and carried a BlackBerry on her belt. She often had a mug of Starbucks coffee in her hand, an iPod headset in her ears and a nickel-plated Walther PPK – the James Bond model – with a mother-of-pearl handle, in her shoulder holster. She wore her dark brown hair in a tight ponytail so everyone could see the deep scars in her forehead and above her right cheek caused by the car bomb. She used only mascara and she followed Paloma Picasso’s edict of only wearing black, white or red, but never wore red.

The car bomb hadn’t been intended for her, but for her boss, Federico Renda, the public prosecutor for the Republic of Naples and the founder of the NAC. Sabrina, however, had been in the second car of Renda’s motorcade and had been injured by shell fragments and glass splinters.

As an assistant public prosecutor, she handled interesting cases, but not the really juicy ones that could make a public prosecutor’s career overnight. She didn’t deal with the Terrasino family, the Camorra clan that controlled Naples’ sweatshops. She had been sent to the Vittorio Emanuele II Quay today because the container had hit the already overworked public prosecutor’s office like an earthquake. All leave and holiday had been suspended and additional staff had been brought in from Rome and Salerno. Sabrina D’Avalos’s were responsible for identifying victims with surnames from ‘F’ to ‘L’.

She was from Lombardy in northern Italy and detested the dying port of Naples. After three years there she still felt like she was living in exile. Her family had been soldiers or lawyers for as long as anyone could remember. Throughout her childhood her father, the general, had been posted as the Carabinieri’s Head of Security at several of Italy’s overseas embassies, so before she turned thirteen Sabrina had already lived on every continent except Africa.

After a posting to Norfolk, Virginia, her father accepted the job as head of the Carabinieri’s anti-terror unit, the GIS, and the family was able to settle down at last. Sabrina D’Avalos had loved her new existence, life in the huge apartment on Via Salvatore Barzilai in Milan and the view across the parks. She fought with her heavy-handed brothers as an equal, and enjoyed summers spent at the family’s villa in the mountains surrounding Lake Como. And she had the opportunity to get to know her father. The general’s devotion to all his children was unconditional, but Sabrina was his favourite, and she could always be found right behind him. An old dog with his pup, as her mother would say.

Near the tents the air vibrated from the generators. Fans in the trucks ensured a low temperature and rapid air circulation inside the tents. The trucks had been provided by the United Nations Protection Force, UNPROFOR, and had last done service during the excavation of mass graves in Bosnia-Herzegovina.

Her father had often remarked that a story always found its author rather than vice versa, and now this story had found her. When Sabrina had entered the tents for the first time, she had felt ready. Now she was no longer sure. She didn’t think she would be able to contribute very much that the medical examiners hadn’t already found out.

Outside the tents, staff in blue scrubs were smoking and talking in several different languages. Twenty-five vacuum packed Chinese bodies and the remains of another thirty-five people of European descent meant that medical examiners from other European countries, Canada and the US had been flown in. She nodded to a young civil servant from Salerno. The woman was sitting cross-legged on the tarmac inhaling a cigarette, ashen-faced, like most people who had done the rounds of the tents.

She walked through an airlock and into the women’s changing room. The white plastic walls moved in sync with the breathing of the compressors. She folded up her clothes, placed them in a fibreglass cupboard along with her shoulder holster, and locked it. Two women were huddled under the showers behind a frosted plastic wall. They spoke quietly in a language she didn’t know.

The smallest coveralls were too big, but she had learned to wear thermal underwear underneath them. The temperature in the tents never exceeded 2°C, and her breath was clearly visible in the air. She tightened the strap on her breathing apparatus, tucked her hair under the hood and entered the first tent.

The bodies had been removed from the plastic wrapping, the same stiff, white material that Camorra waste-management firms used to dispose of the toxic, non-degradable waste that suffocated Naples and her suburbs, and each sweatshop worker had been placed in a ribbed white plastic tray with a drain and a numbered tag tied to the right big toe. The Camorra had removed all fingerprints with acid and no dental records existed. The idea of the Chinese as individuals had to be abandoned.

She continued down the rows of plastic tubs.

Human trafficking and slave labour in the sweatshops where these people were worked to their deaths were crimes against humanity, but it was a dead end from a career perspective. Many previous public prosecutors and police officers had faced this prospect, and Sabrina had no intention of joining their ranks.

She squeezed through a blue plastic airlock into the European section and turned on her breathing apparatus. Whiteboards were lined up along the tent wall. Body parts in every stage of decomposition were being assembled like jigsaws in the plastic trays. Many had already been identified and Sabrina recognized most of the names. The trays contained a fraction of the Camorra’s victims over the last thirty years. Conservative estimates put the figure of those killed since 1980 close to 3,660: teachers, journalists, mayors, priests, city councillors, North African human traffickers, business owners, or any Camorrista who had challenged the sovereignty of the Terrasino family. The fact that these bodies were lying here, right now – that they had even been found at all – was pure chance.

Three kilometres off the coast of Torre Picentina, one of Europe’s biggest off-shore wind farms was being built. Transporting the colossal turbine towers, generators and blades had necessitated the construction of a bypass from Strada Statale 18 to Strada Provinziale 175, a project that meant the compulsory purchase of several small farms, market gardens and three old rubbish tips.

Sabrina imagined how the Camorra, in the nights preceding the arrival of the contractor’s machines, had tracked down and dug up the evidence of their old sins from the rubbish dumps, loaded them on to trucks and piled them high inside the white containers.

The medical examiners had been working round the clock and the number of question marks on the boards was decreasing. More and more fields had been filled in with names, social security numbers and last known addresses.

She would have liked to take the day off; have a manicure and pedicure, wash her clothes, do some shopping, pick up Ismael and take him to the zoo. However, Dr Raimondo Sapienza called her because he had discovered something unusual. The doctor from Rome supervised ‘F’-to-‘L’ identifications. Even though he was wearing the same blue scrubs as everyone else, the eminent pathologist was easy to spot. His enormous grey beard tried to escape his mask on all sides. He waved Sabrina over to his office – which consisted of a door placed across two trestles, a plastic beaker containing a blue, a red and a green dry-wipe marker pen, and a laptop. Confirmed identifications were green, doubtful were blue, and unknown were red. Gradually all the whiteboards had acquired a green glow.

‘Buongiorno, Sabrina.’

‘I was hoping to take the day off, Raimondo,’ she said.

The eyes behind Dr Sapienza’s protective glasses expressed a kind of ironic empathy. He himself hadn’t slept for three days.

‘And I would never have called if it wasn’t important, Sabrina. Or remarkable, at least. Number twenty-nine, thirty and, yes, thirty-one.’

‘Remarkable?’

‘Follow me.’

He walked over to one of the tables, and her stomach churned.

Dr Sapienza removed a thin sheet, moistened with formaldehyde, from one of the plastic trays and gestured for her to come closer. A child. A small human being the size of Ismael. A little bit of shoulder-length black hair stuck to the remains of the scalp.

‘The only child in the container, Sabrina. A boy. He’s twelve years old and has been in the bin bag for around three years. Even so, the body is relatively well preserved, as you can see. This is partly due to the plastic bag and partly due to the weight of waste on top of him, which will have forced the decomposition bacteria further down.’

Dr Sapienza pointed to a light box displaying X-rays. Below a yellow Post-It note with the number twenty-nine were two images of the boy’s hands.

‘Bone age?’ Sabrina D’Avalos said.

‘Yes. Bone formation in the carpus says twelve years. That matches the distribution of adult and milk teeth. A handsome little boy. Very handsome, in fact.’

Dr Sapienza replaced the sheet over the boy.

He took a step to the left. Number thirty. Another sheet.

‘A woman. We have spectroscoped her hair. Counted the rings, so to speak. And we’ve identified her via dental records from a dentist in Milan.’

Sabrina D’Avalos nodded.

‘She’s thirty-five years old,’ he said.

The teeth in the tray were white as chalk, intact and even.

‘Does she have a name?’

Dr Sapienza pointed to the nearest board.

‘Lucia Forlani, née Maletta. Born 12 February 1973 in Castellarano.’

‘Never heard of it,’ she said.

‘It’s a small mountain village in the north of Reggio Emilia. I went there once on a school trip,’ he said. ‘Napoleon stopped by in 1801.’ Dr Sapienza pointed to something in the middle of the tray. ‘And that’s Number thirty-one, as it were.’

A third, tiny skeleton lay protected by the woman’s pelvic bones. The baby inside the woman had turned and was engaged with its head down and its back facing left. Ready and waiting for departure – for contractions that never came.

The sturdy grey cable strips with which the woman’s wrists had been tied were indestructible. Dr Sapienza had arranged her arms in front of her pelvis so the bones of her hands were spread protectively across the remains of the foetus.

Sabrina’s breathing apparatus hissed.

‘An eight-month-old foetus,’ Dr Sapienza said.

‘Cause of death?’

‘Unknown.’

‘Cover them up,’ Sabrina said.

‘The woman was lying beside the boy. We’ve concluded that they’re mother and son; the DNA profiles match up. There is no doubt.’

Dr Sapienza sat down in his office chair and started typing.

Out of the corner of one eye Sabrina noticed a burst of light. She turned around, but saw nothing unusual. It could have been anything. A torch, a hiccup in the steady rhythm of the generators that powered the fluorescent lights. The blue figures moved methodically around the trays. Some were assembling cadavers as if they were shards of pottery from an archaeological excavation; others photographed the bodies or took tissue samples for microscopic or spectroscopic analyses. Others still were carrying trays of test tubes to the freezer where the samples would be stored until DNA tests could be carried out.

A man walked slowly past the whiteboards, taking notes. He had wedged his mobile between his shoulder and his ear. Sabrina frowned. She thought the use of mobile phones inside the tents was strictly prohibited. For the time being the Vittorio Emanuele II Quay existed in a state of emergency. No identifications could be leaked to the public until the next of kin had been informed.

‘I thought you would want to see this,’ the forensic pathologist continued. ‘We’ve cross-referenced lists of missing persons from our Interior Ministry, the Red Cross and Interpol in Lyons. Lucia Forlani is listed as missing. As is her son, Salvatore. They were last seen entering a lift in Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II in Milan on 5 September 2007.’

‘Who was the last person to see her?’

‘No idea.’

‘Education, relatives, addresses? What are you saying, Raimondo? What else have you got for me?’ she demanded to know.

‘Nothing! That’s the problem.’

He pointed at the screen over his shoulder. It displayed the Interior Ministry’s authoritative and confidential list of missing persons, which was updated daily. The cursor blinked next to ‘Forlani, Lucia / Maletta, Lucia [35 – Castellarano] & Forlani, Salvatore [12 – Milan]’. Their names were followed by the acronym ‘MIPTP’, an address in Milan and the name of the case officer to whom all queries should be directed: Nestore Raspallo.

‘Grazie,’ she said and closed her eyes. The smell, the undulating tent walls overwhelmed her. The fifth of September 2007 – three days before her father was killed.

It had become a habit to date everything from the death of her father. A rather unhealthy habit, according to her therapist. Sabrina had smiled without saying anything, but had visualized the therapist in freefall from his office window to the pavement five floors below. The probl. . .