‘Marco di Spinelli, a prisoner in Buchenwald? You’re kidding.’
‘Your words, Signor Marconi, suggest that you’re of the opposite impression, despite all your earlier neutrality.’
‘Look at Marco di Spinelli, Signor Sadestatt. Does he look like a man plagued by his past in a concentration camp, degraded by the Nazis as they murdered people on an industrial scale? Does he look like a man who now, after fifty years, still needs pills to be able to sleep just an hour a night? Does he look like a man who has been subjected to the most awful of medical experiments?’
Arto Söderstedt had actually been forced to pause for thought there. For an instant, the distinguished commissioner, usually such a marvel of self-restraint, had revealed the basis of his obstinacy.
It was personal.
In one way or another, it was personal.
‘Your father?’ Söderstedt had asked rashly.
‘My entire upbringing,’ Marconi had replied, fixing him with his gaze. ‘My entire childhood in a nutshell. They can’t sleep. They can never sleep.’
Söderstedt had been silent. He had waited for Marconi, who continued with a composed but trembling voice.
‘Buchenwald was Nazi Germany’s biggest concentration camp. Towards the end of the war, there were practically only non-German prisoners there. The German Jews, those who hadn’t been subjected to medical experiments, had already been shipped off to the extermination camps in Poland, and Buchenwald was becoming more and more a camp for foreign prisoners. My father was an Italian Communist. The Nazis, they were studying the movement of blood through muscle mass by watching it… live. Dissection of living right arms. Without anaesthetic, of course. He lived with that dissected, rotting arm hanging at his side for almost a year before units from the 3rd US Army reached Buchenwald on the eleventh of April 1945 and opened the gates.’
Arto Söderstedt had observed him. It was hard to digest.
‘I’m sorry,’ he had said meaninglessly.
‘Me too,’ Marconi had replied, fiddling with various papers on his desk. ‘And so my experience tells me Marco di Spinelli was never held prisoner in a concentration camp. I’d bet my life on it.’
‘You’re right, of course,’ Söderstedt had said. ‘It was just an idea.’
‘Complete your line of reasoning anyway,’ Marconi had replied; he was back to his old self once again.
‘Someone who kills an eighty-eight-year-old concentration camp survivor by hanging him upside down and poking about in his brain with a metal wire is, by definition, a fascist. I think my colleagues in Stockholm assumed a bit too hastily that the Furies were out on some kind of mission. That they’re liberating women who’ve been subjected to violence. I think they actually seem quite fascistic. Even if they are women.’
Marconi had nodded. Then he had said: ‘There’s a way in.’
Arto Söderstedt had watched him as he leaned forward over the drawing of the palazzo they had unrolled on the desk. Only then did Söderstedt start to see just how intricately mapped each of the rooms in the palace were.
‘We really do know every single nook and cranny of Palazzo Riguardo,’ Marconi had continued. ‘It’s from here that the activities which destroy our country and our continent are organised. Marco di Spinelli’s business is, quite simply, market economics in its purest form. An unregulated market economy holed up in a palace where the greatest artists in the West have, over the years, adorned the corridors of power. It’s great, consummate beauty; it’s education; it’s a sense of history – and it’s pure, brutal power.’
Arto Söderstedt was starting to understand why the palace was so well documented. Marconi and his men understood the entire mechanics of the operation – they just couldn’t stop it.
‘The palace was built a bit like an onion,’ Marconi had made a sweeping gesture over the sketch. ‘With the difference that the palace has a heart. The heart is Marco di Spinelli’s office. You have to go through layer after layer to get to it. When the Perduto family built the palace during the sixteenth century, they were facing threats from all directions. The palace was constructed like a series of surrounding walls. It’s not something you notice as you tread its corridors, but the fact is you’re crossing drawbridge after drawbridge, and they can be raised so quickly that you’d fall right down into the moat, if you’ll forgive the metaphor. Despite the fact that the palace seems so open and roomy, there is just one way out of each of the layers, and by each of those doors is a closely watched and quickly raised drawbridge. Trying to make your way through the layers by these doors is pointless. But there’s an alternative route. We call it “the strait gate”.’
Söderstedt had given a short laugh. ‘“Enter ye in at the strait gate: for wide is the gate, and broad is the way, that leadeth to destruction, and many there be which go in thereat: Because strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it.’”
Marconi had given him a quick glance. A fleeting smile had passed over his face, and he had nodded. ‘Matthew, 7:13. It really is narrow, and few have ever found it. It’s the ace up our sleeve. If ever we need to get in there quickly.’
Now, on the veranda, Söderstedt watched Marconi’s digital line snake its way through the palace on the map on his computer screen. It stretched out into the dark Tuscan landscape like the light trails left behind by fireflies. He imagined it was forming some kind of illegible text.
Once Marconi had finished drawing his line, Söderstedt had asked: ‘What do you think Marco di Spinelli did during the war?’
Marconi had put down his pen and stared at his Nordic colleague.
‘It’s obvious,’ he had replied. ‘He was a Nazi.’
As though conjured up by the simile, a cloud of fireflies swarmed into the garden, performing a dance that remained visible long, long after they had disappeared. A magpie’s nest of light which he couldn’t blink away, making it impossible to distinguish Marconi’s narrow gate.
Arto Söderstedt sat there for a good while, staring out into the nothingness and trying to read the fireflies’ writing. He studied it for so long that the text slowly faded before his eyes. Until eventually, only Italo Marconi’s pale line was left. It snaked right across the drawing, like a child’s shaky pencil line through a comic-book labyrinth.
He could imagine how the Erinyes, perhaps even at that very moment, were sat hunched over the exact same drawing, pointing at the exact same line. They were coming, he could feel it. Suddenly, it felt as though the garden began to quiver. From the corner of his eye, he saw a shadow slip behind a tree. Then another. Until all of nature seemed to be awash with shifting shadows, the trees themselves in movement, the forest approaching.
Arto Söderstedt shuddered and tried to shake off his unease.
Who were they, these unrelenting figures from the forgotten depths of mythology?
Civilisation thought it had tamed them a few thousand years earlier.
They crept up on their victims. With great precision, they drove their increasingly petrified prey towards the designated murder scene. When they got there, their victims would be meek, shaken to the very core of their beings. They caused the forgotten, repressed depths to tremble, and then they hung their victims upside down and drove a terrible nail into their brains.
By that point, they had already scared their victims senseless.
All other than Leonard Sheinkman. He had spoken to them. Calmly and quietly.
It was as though he had been waiting for them.
As though he had been waiting for them for a very long time.
As though he had known that, sooner or later, they would be coming.
What had he been waiting for? Was it something he had seen in the concentration camp? Was it his own betrayal, which Paul Hjelm had described after having read his diary? His double betrayal?