Sanctuary Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

  Chapter 70

  Chapter 71

  Chapter 72

  Chapter 73

  Chapter 74

  Chapter 75

  Chapter 76

  Chapter 77

  Chapter 78

  Chapter 79

  Chapter 80

  Chapter 81

  Chapter 82

  Chapter 83

  Chapter 84

  Chapter 85

  Chapter 86

  Chapter 87

  Chapter 88

  Chapter 89

  Chapter 90

  Chapter 91

  Chapter 92

  Chapter 93

  Chapter 94

  Chapter 95

  Chapter 96

  Chapter 97

  Chapter 98

  Chapter 99

  Chapter 100

  Chapter 101

  Chapter 102

  Chapter 103

  Chapter 104

  Chapter 105

  Chapter 106

  Chapter 107

  Chapter 108

  Chapter 109

  Chapter 110

  Chapter 111

  Chapter 112

  Chapter 113

  Chapter 114

  Chapter 115

  Chapter 116

  Chapter 117

  Chapter 118

  Chapter 119

  Acknowledgments

  About the Authors

  Also by Luca D’Andrea

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  1

  “Sweet Lissy, little Lissy.”

  2

  Two light knocks and these words: Nibble, nibble, little mouse! Who is nibbling at my house?

  Marlene, twenty-two years old, one metre sixty, maybe a little more, eyes a melancholy blue, a beauty spot at the edge of her smile, undoubtedly beautiful and undoubtedly scared, looked at her reflection in the steel of the safe and felt stupid. Metal, not gingerbread like in the fairy tale. And not a witch in sight.

  It’s only fear, she told herself, that’s all it is.

  She relaxed her shoulders, held her breath the way her father did before he squeezed the trigger of his rifle, emptied her lungs and focused again. There were no such things as witches. The fairy tales lied. Only life mattered, and Marlene was about to change hers forever.

  The combination was easy to remember. One. Three. Two. Then four. A flick of the wrist, then another four. Done. So simple that Marlene’s hands moved as if automatically. She took hold of the steel handle, pulled it down and gritted her teeth.

  A treasure.

  Wads of banknotes stacked up like firewood for the Stube. A pistol, a box of ammunition and a velvet pouch. Under the box was a notebook worth more than all that money multiplied a hundredfold. There was blood, and maybe also a couple of life sentences, preserved within its crumpled pages: an endless list of creditors and debtors, friends and friends of friends, all in Herr Wegener’s small, wiry, slanting hand. Marlene didn’t give it a second glance. She didn’t care about the pistol, the box of ammunition or the bundles of banknotes. The velvet pouch, though, made her hands sweat. She knew what it contained, knew its power, and was terrified of it.

  Hers was not a simple theft.

  Let’s not mince our words. The name for what the young woman was doing, with her heart in her mouth, was treason. Marlene Wegener, née Taufer, lawful wedded wife of Robert Wegener, the man they all doffed their hats to, a man with a forty-year career of contraband, intimidation, violence and murder. No one messed with a man like Wegener. No one even dared call him by his first name. To everybody, Robert Wegener was Herr Wegener.

  Even to her. To Marlene. His wife.

  Get a move on, time’s flying.

  And yet, perhaps because the ticking of the clock was turning anxiety to panic from one tick to the next, when Marlene opened the velvet case, the fairy tale once again prevailed over reality and her eyes met the deep, terrible, dark-blue eyes of tiny, angular creatures.

  Kobolds.

  It even struck her as obvious. Kobolds loved metal, cold and death: the safe, the pistol, the money, the notebook.

  A perfect nest.

  The kobolds reacted fiercely against the intrusion. They drained the room of light, trapped Marlene in their cruel little eyes, and turned her into such a savage essence of hatred that the pouch almost slipped from her fingers.

  That brought her back to the present, to the wide-open safe, the villa on the River Passer.

  In other words, to reality.

  The velvet pouch was filled with sapphires. Pressed carbon which, through a trick of physics, has learned to sparkle like a star. Herr Wegener’s entire fortune – or near enough – clutched in her hand. But no witch and no kobolds. Because, Marlene told herself again, there were no such things as witches or kobolds, whereas these precious stones were not only real, they were the key to her new life. As long as she stopped wasting time and got out of here.

  Without giving the world of fairy tales another thought, and without even considering the consequences of what she had just set in motion, Marlene tied the pouch, hid it in the inside pocket of her padded jacket, locked the safe, put the painting back to hide it, straightened up, flicked back a strand of hair that was about to fall into her eyes and left the bedroom.

  She walked along the corridor, down one flight of stairs, across the living room, through the hall with its excess of mirrors and down the outside steps. The night greeted her with a light northerly wind.

  She did not stop.

  She got into the grey Fiat 130 and drove away. The villa disappearing in the rearview mirror. The passing street lamps. The gold wedding ring thrown out of the window without a trace of regret. The sleeping town. The scrapyard. A brief halt and, thanks to an envelope stuffed with money, the Fiat 130 became a cream Mercedes W114 with new number plates, papers all in ord
er, brand-new tyres and a full tank.

  Then, without so much as a farewell thought, she was off again, heading west.

  Apart from the first snowflakes, everything was going according to plan. At least until the roadblock a few kilometres from Mals. A real pain in the neck.

  At the end of a series of bends she had just started along, Marlene glimpsed a van, its rotating beacon switched off, and a couple of carabinieri who looked as if they were freezing to death. Or falling asleep. Or maybe slyly waiting for someone or something.

  Herr Wegener had eyes and ears everywhere. Even among officers of the law.

  So: Should she try her luck or change route?

  If it had not been for the fear and the tension, Marlene might still have been able to protect her plan from unforeseen occurrences like this. But the tension, the fear and the increasingly heavy snow made her brake, reverse and turn onto a back road, setting off a new chain of events.

  The back road led her to another, even narrower, winding one, which went through a sleeping village and brought her to a crossroads (left or right? heads or tails?), then further on, with the snow piling up around her, layer upon layer.

  And when the car started to skid, the young woman with the beauty spot at the edge of her smile decided to carry on anyway, with one eye on the road, which kept climbing, and one on the map – on which, needless to say, this stretch wasn’t marked. Damn them and their useless maps!

  That wasn’t true.

  The map may not have been precise – none of them were. But inaccurate? It was 1974, and by 1974 man had already left his prints in the dust of the moon, so a map could hardly be inaccurate. Marlene should have just pulled over, switched on the light inside the car, taken a couple of deep breaths and checked. Things would have turned out differently.

  But Marlene did not stop.

  Her anxiety was now compounded by the incredulous realisation that she was well and truly lost.

  Step on it, but gently, she told herself. Keep going. The road will take you somewhere sooner or later. A village, a shelter, a lay-by. She would even have been happy if the road had widened enough to let her do a U-turn, drive back the way she had come, and brave the checkpoint: anything, just to put a stop to this new, remorseless sequence of events and take back control of her own fate.

  It was not to be.

  Maybe it was the snow, maybe she couldn’t take her eyes off the map, but suddenly Marlene felt the Mercedes lose traction, swerve abruptly to the left, spin around and . . . take off.

  It was terrifying: the headlights sweeping the blackness, the swirls of dark snow, the gaping precipice, the tree trunks, motionless and in perfect focus.

  The impact was violent, the explosion of pain stifled by the screech of ripped metal. Yes, this time it really was an infernal lament, all too similar to the creaking of the witch’s door.

  Marlene cried out the name of God. And as the black, nameless mountain loomed over her, her cry turned into a gasp. The last thing she invoked, though, was love. Love, which had driven her to betray the most dangerous man she’d ever met. Love, which had a name.

  “Klaus.”

  Marlene’s last word before the darkness.

  3

  It was nearly dawn, but had it not been for the clock, nobody would have noticed. The snowfall had turned into a blizzard. No light outside, only white mist.

  No light inside the room, either. The crystal chandelier seemed not to illuminate anything, merely to draw a shapeless patch on the floor.

  Staring at it for too long was likely to bring on horrible thoughts. Both the man and the woman avoided doing that.

  It looked too much like a bloodstain.

  Apart from the ticking of the grandfather clock and their breathing, there was silence.

  The woman was sitting in an armchair, as stiff as a tin soldier, hands clasped on her clenched thighs, features frozen in a grimace that made her look ten years older. She was wearing a kind of uniform, with a knee-length skirt and a white apron, and her hair was gathered in a plait. But for her scowling (or frightened?) expression, she would have been beautiful.

  Her name was Helene, and she had been the housekeeper at the villa on the Passer for more than five years. She hadn’t bitten her nails for at least twice as long. That was one of the first lessons she had been taught at the home economics school in Brixen where she had learned the basics of the job. A good housekeeper’s hands, her teachers had said, are her calling card. They must be perfect. Always clean and well cared for. At the start, not biting her nails had been almost as hard as giving up smoking, but then she had got used to it. For years, it hadn’t even occurred to her to go back to her bad old habit.

  Until the screaming had started.

  What kind of man could let out such screams?

  It had taken her no more than a moment to relapse. She had bitten, she had nibbled, and when her teeth had sunk into the raw flesh, she had dropped her hands back down to her lap and twisted her apron nervously.

  Then she had started again.

  Hands. Mouth. Nails. Teeth. A small pang of pain. Apron.

  And then all over again.

  Helene had exchanged just one look with the man who stood leaning against the large fireplace nobody ever used. A single look, but it said all there was to say.

  His name was Moritz. Early thirties, rings like bruises under his eyes and an automatic in a holster concealed by the jacket of his dark suit. Usually he looked wonderful in that suit. He had paid a fortune for it, but it had been worth it. That was what he would tell himself as he looked in the mirror in the morning and knotted his tie or gave his brilliantined hair a final touch, and it was confirmed by the looks the women he passed in town gave him.

  Now, though, in this dawn, with or without his dark suit, Moritz would have felt as twisted and ungainly as a scarecrow. Because, when he had caught his reflection in Helene’s eyes, he had glimpsed something that had terrified him. An expression like so many he had seen since he had become a member of Herr Wegener’s circle. The expression of a victim.

  And that was not good.

  Not good at all, because Moritz was a simple man who divided the world with the toss of a coin. Victim or executioner? One metre ninety, over ninety kilos, and with a natural tendency to violence, Moritz had never experienced a victim’s fear. Until the moment he had seen himself reflected in Helene’s eyes and he, too, had wondered: What kind of human being can let out such screams? And how long can he keep it up before he goes completely mad? But also: What’s going to happen to us?

  That was why he had stopped looking at Helene. Or at the stain on the floor.

  Too many questions, far too many questions.

  Moritz hated questions. Because you couldn’t break a question’s nose. You couldn’t fire a bullet into a question’s heart (and one into its head, just to be safe) and silence it forever. Questions were like those persistent, disgusting insects with their big, hungry, relentless jaws that could cause even the strongest castle to come crumbling down.

  Silence. Moritz wished there could be silence.

  He wished he could ignore the screams and disappear for a few minutes. Just long enough to chase away the bad thoughts. He wished he could go out into the garden for a smoke. Or else have a small glass of brandy.

  But orders were orders. For someone like Moritz, orders cut the heads off question marks. They marked the boundary between what you could do and what was forbidden.

  Orders made everything much simpler, and he was a simple man. They also made disobedience much more exciting. And to be completely honest, that was what had got him into trouble.

  So Moritz stood there, motionless and stiff in his dark suit, leaning against the unlit fireplace. Listening to the screams and feeling the weight of the automatic dragging him down to the ground, to the shapeless stain on the floor.

  Helene, on the other hand, had a more complex view of the world. Things were not just black and white, obedience and transgression,
victims and executioners. There was a whole sea of greys to navigate. It didn’t take much to turn an order into a suggestion, and suggestions weren’t traps, they always offered a way out. Her duty, for example, was to the villa, not to her employer. The villa and her employer were two separate things.

  That was a way out.

  When she decided she had had enough of the screams, Helene stood up abruptly and left the room, as silent as a ghost.

  4

  It was dawn now. He did not so much see it as feel it in his bones. He could not have done otherwise. The windows overlooking the garden were shut. A single lamp, broken but still working, lit up the disordered room. Wardrobes flung open, drawers pulled out, blankets and clothes ripped, an infinite number of papers, items of jewellery, paintings and books (except for one) on the floor, innocent victims of his rage.

  In the middle of the room, all stucco and velvet curtains with gold trimmings, Herr Wegener sat on the unmade bed, aware that if he did not stop screaming and start thinking in a lucid, rational manner, every conquest that had led him to be what he was would turn into a heap of shit, a monument to wasted effort.

  His self-control was something he had boasted about for years. His steady nerves, his composure, had led him to rule over what he had secretly dubbed “the Empire.” An Empire ready to make the big leap – this was the plan, anyway – the leap that would allow him to go from being a man to whom people took off their hats to a man in whose presence they were obliged to genuflect.

  In that icy dawn, however hard he tried to regain self-control, it remained an illusion.

  This was because Wegener could not bring himself to believe what his steady nerves, his composure, were telling him. That there could be one explanation and one only: Marlene.

  Impossible. Marlene would never betray him. Marlene was his wife. Marlene was the woman he loved. Above all, Marlene was a woman, and it was unheard of for a woman to screw over someone like him. Or maybe yes, maybe there were women in the world capable of doing something as daring as that, but Wegener was certain Marlene did not belong to that category. Not even as a joke.

  The steady nerves, the composure, disagreed. They kept repeating it over and over.

  It was her, it was her. Marlene.

  The steady nerves, the composure, had proof. For example, there was no sign of a break-in at the villa, not on any of the doors or windows. He had checked them himself. No sign of forced entry. Nobody had come in or gone out. Which meant that whoever had committed the burglary had the keys, knew the layout, was familiar with the routines of the house.