The Killer in My Eyes (12 page)

On the opposite side of the circle, Connor was kneeling, his face and shirt soiled with earth. Maureen assumed that the man standing behind him had shoved him to the ground.

Between her and Connor, in the middle of the clearing, stood a man with his back to her.

He was tall and solid, but not fat. His hair was cut very short, and from under the collar of his leather jacket a tattoo rose from his neck towards his right ear like ivy on a wall. He lit a cigarette and Maureen saw the smoke floating in the light of the headlamps.

He stood like that, motionless, for a while, then, as if he had only just remembered that she was there, he turned towards her. He had sharp features and an unkempt beard.

His cold, deep-set eyes were perfectly in keeping with the cruel cut of his mouth. From his left ear hung a strange earring, a stylized cross with a tiny diamond in the middle that glittered in the light as he moved his head, which he kept doing, as if nodding in reply to words that only he could hear. When at last he spoke, he had the same accent as the man who had held a knife to her throat in the Voyager.

‘Well, here we are, Chief Inspector Martini. I hope my friends didn’t mistreat you too much during the trip.’

‘Who are you?’

‘All in good time, Chief Inspector. Or can I call you Maureen?’

‘I repeat, who are you and what do you want?’

The man ignored her question. ‘Do you know where we are?’

‘No.’

‘Strange. I thought you might have recognized the place.’

The man gestured towards one of the entrances to the clearing.

‘A few hundred yards in that direction, a few weeks ago, you killed a man.’

Silence fell for a moment. The man bent his head and moved the earth with his foot as if a body was buried there.

‘Yes. We’re in Manziana forest. Strange, the way we keep coming back to certain places, isn’t it?’ He looked up again. ‘My name is Arben Gallani. The man you murdered, Avenir Gallani, was my brother.’

‘I didn’t murder anyone. You have no idea what happened.’

Arben threw the cigarette butt beyond the cone of light created by the cars’ headlamps. ‘Oh yes, I do. I was there.’

He put his hand under his jacket, took out a gun from the back of his belt and held it flat on his palm so that Maureen could get a good look at it.

‘Do you recognize this?’

‘I’ve never seen it before in my life.’

‘Oh, but you have, even if only for a moment. It was the one Avenir was holding when you shot him.’

He dropped his arm down at his side, as if the gun had suddenly become too heavy.

‘I was with him that day. I didn’t agree with the operation, and he knew it. But he asked me to go with him and I couldn’t refuse. We’re always weak when it comes to the people we love, aren’t we, Maureen?’

His gaze shifted to Connor for a moment. For the first time in her life, Maureen understood the true meaning of the word fear.

‘I’d been waiting for him in the car, but then I’d gone into the forest to take a leak. I heard all the noise, assumed that something had gone wrong, and decided to stay hidden. Then you appeared.’

He took a pack of cigarettes from his pocket and lit one. He spoke calmly, as if the things he was talking about had nothing to do with him.

‘Avenir was an impulsive boy. Too impulsive, sometimes. Maybe it was my fault. I should have kept more of an eye on him, made sure he didn’t fuck up.’

Arben paused. He was looking straight at her but Maureen understood that he was not seeing her. He was reliving what had happened that day, just as she had relived it dozens of times in her mind.

‘I threw a stone into the undergrowth to distract you. When you moved away, I came out, took the gun and hid again. I know you’ve had a few problems because of that, but that’s not my concern.’

He smiled at her, quite gently, and that was the moment Maureen knew he was crazy. Crazy and dangerous.

‘And now we come to the reason for this encounter of ours. Do you think I want to kill you? No, my dear.’

As he talked, Arben Gallani had slowly approached Connor.

‘I think it’s time you found out what it means to lose a person you love.’

Oh no.

Maureen started screaming, without realizing she was doing it only in her mind.

no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no
. . .

Arben Gallani quickly raised the hand holding the gun and aimed it at Connor’s temple.

no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no
. . .

At the contact of the cold barrel, Connor instinctively closed his eyes. Maureen saw, or thought she saw, Arben’s knuckle turn white as he pressed the trigger.

no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no
. . .

One shot and Connor’s head exploded, splattering blood and brain-matter over the car next to him, blotting out the light of the headlamps. Maureen’s voice at last welled up out of her dry throat and, as Connor’s lifeless body slumped to the ground, taking with him their dreams and plans, she screamed, screamed endlessly with anger and despair and powerlessness.

Arben turned and looked at her with one eyebrow slightly arched, an expression of sick pity on his face. ‘Nasty, isn’t it?’

Angry tears poured from her eyes as she gasped, ‘I’ll kill you for this.’

Gallani shrugged. ‘That’s possible. But you’re going to live. In order to remember. And not only that . . .’

He dropped the gun on the ground and moved lazily towards her. When he came level with her, he struck her across the face with the back of his hand. Maureen fell back, surprised not to have felt any pain, as if her entire capacity for suffering had been absorbed in an instant by the death of the man she had loved. Gallani did not even grant her the dignity of fists. He continued slapping her across the face until she could no longer see his bloodstained hands. At last the pain came. She felt her body give way, and something hot and sticky covered her swollen eyes and coloured her tears. Arben Gallani gave a nod with his head. The man who had been holding her up let her slide to the ground, where he immediately pinned her down. Two other men came and lent a hand, squatting on either side of her to stop her moving her legs.

Arben took a switchblade from his pocket and snapped it open. The blade glinted for a moment in the light, like the diamond in his earring. He bent over her and started cutting her pants away from her body. Maureen heard the noise of the material tearing and felt the cold air on her skin as the blade stripped her. Through the veil of blood and pain that blurred her vision, she saw Gallani standing between her legs. Then she saw him loosen his belt and heard the noise of his zipper opening.

Arben then lay down on top of her. She felt the weight of his body, the roughness of his hands parting her legs, the pain as he thrust himself violently into her. Maureen took refuge in the memory of the beautiful things she had had and had now lost forever. The pain of that loss anaesthetized her temporarily against the physical pain she was feeling now. The man couldn’t take anything from her, because everything was already dead inside her. As the thrusts rocked her, the strange cross-shaped earring continued moving rhythmically a few inches from her face, glittering in the light of the headlamps, glittering, glittering . . .

Fate at last took pity on her, and she fainted. Before everything went dark, Maureen Martini found herself thinking how much it hurt to die.

More darkness.

She was lying on sheets that felt slightly rough and, from the lingering smell of disinfectant in the air, she guessed that she was in a hospital. Her face felt strangely constricted. She tried to move her right arm, and heard the clinking sound of a drip knocking against the pole supporting it. With difficulty, she lifted her other hand to her eyes. She ran her fingers over what she realized was a bandage, held in place by a big Band-Aid. From somewhere in the distance, she heard voices whispering. That was immediately followed by footsteps, and then her father’s voice, full of an anxiety that not even affection could conceal.

‘Maureen, it’s me.’

‘Hi, Daddy.’

‘How are you feeling?’

How am I feeling? I’d like to disappear forever in the darkness.

‘I’m fine,’ she lied. ‘Where am I?’

‘In the Gemelli Hospital.’

‘How long have I been here?’

‘They brought you here in a terrible state, and kept you under sedation for two days.’

‘How did you know where to find me?’

‘When they abducted you, your lawyer, Franco, was at the window and saw everything. He immediately called the police. Unfortunately he couldn’t get the licence number, so all they could do was search for the model of car he described. Then the phone call came in . . .’

‘What phone call?’

‘A man with a foreign accent called your station and told them where they could find you.’

All at once, she remembered Arben Gallani’s voice whispering, ‘
Nasty, isn’t it?
’ after the noise of the gunshot. And that cross-shaped earring swaying and sparkling in front of her eyes as he . . .

She asked the question she had been dying to ask, stupidly hoping as she did so that none of it had been true. ‘What about Connor?’

‘I’m afraid Connor is dead. The US Embassy has taken care of all the formalities. His body will be transferred to the United States in a few days’ time. I don’t suppose this is any consolation to you, but . . .’

‘What?’

‘Connor has already become a legend. A legend that will live forever.’

Maureen had to make an effort not to scream.

I don’t want him to live forever. He was entitled to live his life and spend it with me.

And along with that thought came the terrible awareness that she was the cause of everything, because the day she had fired at Avenir Gallani, she had also killed Connor with the same bullet. She turned her head aside in order not to show the invisible tears she was weeping under the bandages, which became soaked with them. She wept in silence for herself and for that wonderful young man who had touched her life just long enough to say goodbye. Then her body yielded to the pain of it all, and even the tears ended.

‘When will they take the bandages off?’ she asked.

A second voice, a low one, joined Carlo Martini’s.

‘Chief Inspector, I’m Professor Covini, the Consultant Ophthalmologist here at the Hospital Gemelli. You’re a strong person, so I’m going to be extremely frank with you. I’m afraid I have some bad news. It’s quite likely you had a congenital weakness you weren’t aware of, but the shock you suffered has caused what in medical terms is called a post-traumatic adherent leukoma. In layman’s terms, irreversible damage to the corneas of your eyes.’

It took a moment for what the doctor had said to sink in.

Then anger took hold of her, more violently than any man could ever possess her.

No.

She wouldn’t allow it.

She wouldn’t allow Arben Gallani to deprive her, not only of her sight, but also her revenge. Her voice, a voice she finally recognized, emerged from her mouth through clenched jaws.

‘Am I blind?’

‘Technically, yes.’

‘What does “technically, yes” mean?’

Maureen was glad not to see the expression on the doctor’s face that would corrrespond with his tone of voice.

‘There is the possibility of a surgical intervention, in other words, a transplant. It’s a recognized procedure with a reasonable success rate. In your case, unfortunately, there’s a problem. I’ll try to explain how it works. The cornea of a donor is always a foreign body to the eye that receives it. That’s why we have to use an appropriate cornea, in other words one compatible with the genetic type of the recipient. If we don’t, then when the new cornea is implanted in the receiving eye and isn’t recognized by the organism, we get the reaction that’s commonly called rejection. We’ve discovered from blood and hystogenetic tests that you’re a tetragametic chimera.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘It means you’re the product of two eggs and two sperms. In other words, two different eggs from your mother were fertilized by two different sperms from your father. At a very early stage in their development the two embryos fused, giving rise to a single embryo in which two genetically different types of cell coexist. Unfortunately, in your case there exists a very severe problem of compatibility. In simple terms, there’s only a very tiny percentage of people who share this characteristic.’ Professor Covini paused briefly. ‘As I said, that’s the bad news.’

‘You mean after all that, there’s actually some good news?’

‘Yes, there is.’

‘I called your mother in New York,’ her father said at this point. ‘When I told her what had happened and explained your condition, she immediately got in touch with an acquaintance of hers, a doctor named William Roscoe. Right now, for someone with your pathology, he’s the best man in the world.’

‘That’s the good news I was referring to,’ Professor Covini said. ‘From a scientific point of view, it’s all highly complex, so I’m not going to bore you with facts you’d only find incomprehensible. The one thing that matters is that there is the possibility of a transplant. Professor Roscoe is one of the greatest experts in ocular microsurgery and has made incredible advances in embryonic stem-cell research. Unfortunately, you’ll have to go to the United States because here in Italy, thanks to the laws banning the use of stem cells in assisted fertilization, an operation like that is forbidden. The Professor and I had a long conversation on the phone, and what emerged from that is something not so much rare as unique.’