Luca nodded. “The dots were a tap, or a bang, and the dashes were a scratch.” He offered a practical demonstration on the desk, using his fingernails. “It wasn’t easy, but the boy on my right was really fast.”
Colomba thought back to the location of the specific prisoners in the shipping containers: the one to Luca’s right had slashed his wrists after being rescued; he’d been a prisoner for five years.
“How did you learn it?” Esposito asked.
“There were some words written on the ceiling of my shipping container. I could only see it when the sun shone through the air grate,” said Luca. “It was written in poop. But it didn’t smell bad anymore.”
My God, Colomba thought. How can you force a child to experience anything of the sort? “What was written?” she made herself ask.
“It said to memorize it and then erase it. Which is what I did.” A pause and then: “But I’m not sure exactly what the others were talking about. I just passed the messages on, and they were always too fast for me to be able to understand them.”
“What do you mean by ‘passing messages on’?” Esposito asked, his mouth dry.
Luca sketched figures out in the air. “There were ten of us. If you were at the beginning of the line and you wanted to talk to the last one in the line, then the people in the middle had to pass on the messages. Like in a game of telephone.”
“How did you know who the messages were for?”
“We each had a code name,” said Luca. “Mine was …” He tapped and scratched it out on the desktop. Tap. Tap. Tap. Scratch. Pause. Tap. Scratch. Scratch. Colomba tried to decipher it, but she couldn’t.
“Translated, it says ND. I don’t know what it means,” Luca explained. “I wondered if it might not be an abbreviation for Nerd. I hope it was. Peter Parker is a nerd, too.”
“And were you all in agreement not to tell anyone about the Code?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“For the others.” Luca paused and for the first time, his voice wavered uncertainly. “They would have had some … problems. With the Father.”
“The Father isn’t alive anymore, Luca,” Colomba said gently. “He can’t hurt anyone now.”
“I don’t know.”
Colomba shivered. “You don’t know if he’s dead? I assure you, he is. It’s not a very nice thing to say, but I was there when he died.”
Luca sat in silence for a few seconds, then he started talking again in a lower voice: “Sometimes I go to see the boy who was in the second shipping container. They put him in a hospital. He says that his parents never go to see him. I think that’s an awful thing.”
“Yes, Luca, this is an awful thing,” said Colomba, with a knot in her throat.
“I called him OG. With the Code. That’s what I still call him. And that’s how we still talk. He … prefers it that way. OG believes in magic, Signora Colomba. He believes that the Father can change bodies like the Shadow King. That’s an enemy of the X-Men.” Luca looked at her in the reflection in the mirror. “But I believe that he had a son and that he raised him to become just like him. Maybe more than one. But that doesn’t matter. If they do exist, I know that you will kill them all.”
5
Dante had put on an ankle-length gray overcoat over a gunmetal-gray three-piece suit with a red tie and a Borsalino hat, all of it with a vaguely retro flair to it. The only hints at modernity were the Alexander McQueen shoes with two-inch soles and the black glove sheathing the bad hand, camouflaging its deformity. Nothing that he wore was even remotely suitable for a walk along muddy trails, and in spite of his walker, he was constantly slipping and sliding.
Likewise covered with mud was the spot where Martina had been killed. Alberti helped Dante to sit down on a rock that still had a length of Carabinieri two-toned crime scene tape attached to it. The tree that had impaled the young officer had been uprooted, but Dante had no difficulty imagining her corpse dripping blood onto the snow.
“That’s not the way the Father killed,” Alberti said from behind him.
“You’re right. He was more discreet. He let the German stab the victims, then he’d dissolve their bodies in acid,” said Dante, continuing to watch the young woman’s death agonies in his mind’s eye. “Martina must have suffered terribly.”
“I could have told you so, sir, without having to come all the way out here. What’s more, the deputy captain wanted us to stay at home.”
Dante peered at Alberti from over the top of his mirrored sunglasses.
“What do you think of my brother?”
“That he isn’t your brother.”
“I’ve decided that, until proven otherwise, as far as I’m concerned, he is.” The dream of his meeting with Leo remained particularly vivid, more than all the rest.
“The DNA—”
“The DNA taken from a hair from his head left in the NOA dormitory. Don’t you think he might have planted that hair there intentionally?” Dante threw both arms wide. “And in any case, there are many different kinds of brothers. Adopted, members of a single religion, the Masons, the Knights Templar … even if I’m reasonably certain that the Knights Templar have nothing to do with this. Still, let me know if you spot anyone around who looks like they stepped out of The Name of the Rose.”
“All right, Signor Torre …” said Alberti patiently.
“To get back to Leo, do you think he’s the kind of person who’d do spectacular things just for the hell of it?”
Alberti thought it over. “He seemed very rational when I met him.”
Dante nodded, crushing out his cigarette butt and putting it in his pocket. “At least a part of him operates with a certain lucidity, otherwise he would already have been long dead. So, what does that tell us?”
“That he must have had … a motive?” Alberti asked, hesitantly.
“You’ve improved while I was away. Bravo.” He pulled himself up, gripping the hated walker with both hands. “Let’s go to the hayloft.”
The door had been repaired with a couple of boards, and a Carabinieri crime-scene seal announced that the structure was now under an order of judicial confiscation. Dante leaned against the cement wall and removed his dark glasses.
“Don’t you want to take a look inside?” asked Alberti, peering through the boards.
“Whatever there was to find has already been found.” Shielding his eyes with one hand, Dante gazed around. “Do you have a crowbar in the car?”
6
Colomba received the call via Signal while she was still a little over ten miles outside of Portico. She’d just ended a call with Bart, who was setting out for Rimini with her team. Bart had been drafted to redo a full examination of Villa Quiete, after the military experts had finished theirs without finding anything useful. She was certainly happy to lend a hand, but disgruntled about the lack of any advance warning and the dozens of backed-up cases she was abandoning on her desk in Milan.
“Where are you?” Colomba asked, hearing the wind behind Dante’s voice.
“At the old mill.”
“Didn’t I tell you not to go out?”
“Do you remember that you’re not my mother? In any case, I called you because we need to go to the lady carabiniere’s house. If you’ll tell me the address, I’ll try to get in on my own. Alberti will act as my lookout.”
Colomba swerved. “Just wait for me in Portico and don’t do anything fucked up.”
* * *
They all met in front of the museum, which housed the famous Roman-era Gilt Bronzes that the populace of Portico had actively defended against plans to move them to the National Museum in Rome. Colomba remembered it because her father had been one of the townsfolk of Portico who had chained themselves together as part of the protest. It had almost kept Colomba from being admitted to the officer training academy. The admissions panel took any hint of subversive family ties very seriously, even though Colomba’s father was anything but a radical. In fact, if anything, she’d
inherited from him the conservative blood that ran in the family.
The meeting between Esposito and Dante was almost a tear-jerker, because Dante actually allowed himself to be hugged. “Genius,” Esposito declared, “I was sure I’d never see you again. I mean I was really, really one hundred percent sure, you get me?”
“I came back specifically to disappoint you. And you’re a smoker, aren’t you? I just finished my last cigarette.”
“I should have known …” Esposito handed him half a pack, then went on to throw his arms around Alberti. “Damn, you got big, amigo. Give me a glass of whatever it is you’ve been drinking.”
“My God, all of you are obsessed. I’m not taking anything. I just lift weights, amigo.”
“Sure, sure, of course you do …”
Colomba sent the two of them to keep an eye on the house and update each other on the day, while she remained behind with Dante, who suddenly seemed anything but exhausted. His pupils were also enormous now. “What the fuck kind of pill did you take?” she asked him.
“Nothing.”
“Do you remember the rule, ‘No lies between us’?”
“On our way here, we ran into a crowd of amateur long-distance cyclists, all of them in their early sixties, who were pumping uphill like nobody’s business. I just asked Alberti to check them out.” Dante patted his chest under the jacket. “They’d dissolved some damn witch’s brew in their water bottles, and now my heart is racing a mile a minute.”
“You’re determined to die, aren’t you? I don’t know why I even took so much trouble to find you.”
Dante pirouetted around his walker. “Because without me your life is gray and uninteresting, CC. So, how was your meeting with Luca?”
Colomba told him about the Code and Dante lost all his giddy verve. “Hey … did that make you feel sad?” she asked him.
He shrugged. “I just started to feel jealous of a group of boys who were exchanging messages with shit.”
“Jealous of what?”
“At least they had someone to talk to. For thirteen years, all I had was the Father with a mask over his face.”
“Luca and the other boys seem certain that either the Father or his successor is still in circulation.”
“Who could be better than Leo for that spot? The son who takes the Father’s place. The best son.” Dante lit a cigarette. “So, shall we go see the lady carabiniere’s house?”
“I’m not sure about that, Dante. If Lupo finds out, he’ll declare open war on us. And after all, if there was anything useful, they already would have found it.”
“Let’s trade. I’ll explain Luca’s Code and you can accept the risk.”
“Did you know it?”
“No. But I’ve just figured it out.” Dante tapped and scratched on the car hood. “I just tapped out ciao. All right then, do we have a deal?”
Colomba’s curiosity got the better of her. “I’ll make you pay for this. But yes.”
Dante held up his good hand. “Look closely. I’ll teach you a new way of counting. I learned it from an essay by Isaac Asimov.”
“I read a book of his. It was about robots.”
“That’s like saying that Raphael drew pictures of Madonnas, but okay.” He raised the thumb of his good hand. “One.” He lowered the thumb and raised the index finger. “Two.”
“That doesn’t strike me as all that innovative.”
“Hold on, now comes the good part.” He raised thumb and index finger. “Three.” He raised his middle finger and lowered the others. “Sorry, no offense meant. Four.” Thumb and middle finger. “Five.”
“Okay, I confess that I’m lost now.”
“I’m counting in binary. It’s a language created for computers—”
“That much even I get.”
Dante went on delightedly. “And it only has two digits: zero and one. In effect, instead of being base ten, it’s base two, and it’s written from right to left and it’s positional. Luca’s Code transforms the zeros and ones into dots and dashes. After that, they just lined up the letters alphabetically and numbered them starting from one, without using the codes that are normally used in binary for letters, which are longer. Here, give me that sheet of paper …”
“There’s no need, I’ll take your word for it,” said Colomba, who was starting to get a headache. “I’ll call D’Amore and see if there’s anyone who has a set of keys.”
7
Martina’s landlady was named Floriana. She was about thirty years old and she greeted Dante and Colomba outside the front door of a three-story apartment building that overlooked a small piazza.
“A pleasure to make your acquaintance, Signorina,” said Dante, tipping his Borsalino hat and talking at machine-gun speed. “Chief Inspector Valle,” he added, borrowing his adoptive father’s surname. “This is my partner, Carelli. Deputy Captain, from the Eighty-Seventh Precinct.”
“A pleasure to meet you,” said Colomba, glaring at him. She’d read a couple of books from the series, and she’d even enjoyed them, even though she usually avoided detective books. If they were too realistic, it felt like work, and if they were too imaginative, they irritated her.
“The apartment is on the mezzanine, but I’m afraid we don’t have an elevator,” said Floriana.
Dante pointed to his walker. “Because of this? Don’t worry, it’s only temporary. And she’s the only one who’ll be going in. I’ll examine the place from outside.”
“But you’re the one who wanted to come …” Colomba said in a faint voice.
“But that doesn’t mean I wanted to go in. Go on, CC, you’re better than me at rummaging through other people’s possessions.”
Colomba turned her back on him.
“Do you know, your partner reminds me of someone?” said Floriana, leading her up the stairs.
“Whoever that is, I’m sure they’re a tremendous pain in the ass.”
Martina’s apartment was a one-bedroom with a galley kitchen. Cheap furniture, probably the castoffs of deceased old people, and in the bathroom a square mirror with fluorescent lights and two black-and-white medicine chests. It looked like one of the apartments that Colomba had rented, already furnished, when she was a rookie. It wasn’t worth paying the money to get something decent if you were just going to spend most of your time out in the street. Her boss back then was called Rovere. The Father had sent the German to plant a bomb in Rovere’s apartment.
“We weren’t friends or anything, we just saw each other when she came to pay the rent. But I was really sorry to hear what happened.” Floriana scratched at an encrustation on the jamb of the door to the living room. “I ought to rent it out again, but it seems wrong somehow. Even if there’s nothing of hers left in here.”
“Had she been living here for long?”
“A year and a half, more or less. But she was telling me they were going to transfer her soon.”
“She was going to be transferred?”
“So she told me. It’s not like we talked about it all that much, though. Here … it’s not as if she had to give me official notice.” Colomba’s intense gaze made her hesitate. “We didn’t really have a written rental agreement … I told the other officers about it. It’s not a crime or anything, is it?”
“Actually, I think it is illegal, but I couldn’t care less about that, right now.” Colomba reached out her hand and Floriana dropped the keys in it, then turned and hurried back to her shop. Colomba waited for the sound of her footsteps to subside, then she opened the wooden roller blind. Dante was chasing pigeons, laughing like an idiot. She called him with a shrill whistle, fingers pressed between her lips. He came over to the window, his head reaching almost all the way to the sill, so they could talk in low voices. “They’ve already cleared the place out,” she said. “Just like I expected.”
“Did they even take away the leftover food?”
“Is that a serious question?”
“Yes. Usually they throw away any open containers,
but I’m just hoping that Martina’s parents were too upset to do a deep cleaning.”
Colomba looked into the greasy cabinets and came back to the window.
“Do you want a complete list?”
“If you don’t mind.”
“Two boxes of salt, one coarse and one fine; a half-empty bottle of olive oil; a box of slimming herbal tea. A pack of chocolate wafers and a pound of pasta.”
“Whole wheat?”
“No.”
“Look under the burners on the stove. That’s where the interesting stuff can usually be found.”
“Why don’t you come do it yourself?”
“Because I’m so disabled I’m practically a paraplegic.”
Colomba did as she’d been told, and scraped up curls of filth and a piece of dried-out macaroni with the blade of her pocket knife. She shoved the garbage out the window and right onto Dante’s head. He shouted in disgust.
Chuckling under her breath, she shut the window and went down to hand over the keys. When she stepped out onto the little piazza, Dante was examining the piece of macaroni, poised on the nib of the fountain pen that he never used. “Does that look like it’s the right color?”
“What color is it supposed to be? It was stuck to the floor.”
“Don’t remind me.” Dante blew on it, then stuck it in his mouth and chewed on it for a couple of seconds before spitting it out.
“Can you do that again? I want to take a picture,” asked Colomba.
Dante wiped his mouth with his glove. “I’m sacrificing myself for the sake of the investigation. You ought to be thanking me.”
“You never would have put that filthy thing in your mouth if you hadn’t had some idea you haven’t told me about yet. So hurry up and spill the beans, unless you want me to hit you over the head with that dingus that’s keeping you from falling over.”
“I just wanted to make sure that Martina didn’t eat foods for diabetics. Or take medicines on a regular basis. All you found under the burners was a chunk of aspirin. No hypodermic plungers or bits of blister packs …”
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