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To my mother
Were I fire, I’d set the world ablaze,
Were I wind, I’d buffet and smash,
Were I water, I’d drown it all.
—Cecco Angiolieri (Siena, 1260–1312)
PART ONE
I
THE MIDNIGHT SPECIAL
BEFORE
The two prisoners left in the cell speak softly. The first of them used to work in a shoe factory. He killed a man while he was drunk. The second one was a policeman who lodged a complaint against a superior officer. They had fallen asleep in prison and awakened in the Box.
The shoemaker sleeps practically all day long; the policeman almost never sleeps. When they’re both awake, they talk to silence the voices. Those voices have grown louder and louder; by now the voices are constantly shouting. Sometimes there are colors that go with the voices, dazzlingly, blindingly bright. It’s the effect of the medicines they have to take every day; it’s the effect of the helmets the guards put on their heads, helmets that make them writhe like worms in a scorching-hot pan.
The shoemaker’s father was held in a prison in his city back during the war. In the cellars beneath the prison was a room where they’d make you balance on a beam, and if you so much as moved, you tumbled over into ice-cold water. Another room was so small that the prisoners could fit in only hunched over. No one knows how many people were tortured in the cellars of that building, no one knows how many were killed there. Thousands, is what people say.
But the Box is worse. From that old prison building, if you were lucky, you might still come home. Wounded, yes, raped, maybe, but alive, like the shoemaker’s father.
All you can hope for in the Box is to die.
The Box isn’t a building, and it isn’t a prison. It’s a concrete cube without windows. Daylight filters down through the grates in the courtyard over their heads, a courtyard that people like them will be able to see only once, and that will be the last thing they see. Because when they finally take you out into the open air, that means by now you’re just too sick. Because you attacked a guard or you wounded a cellmate. Because you mutilated yourself or you started eating your own excrement. Because you no longer react to the treatments and you’re no longer of any use.
The policeman and the shoemaker haven’t come to that point, though they’re getting dangerously close. Their spirits have been broken, they’ve begged and pleaded, but they aren’t goners yet, not entirely, anyway. And when the Girl arrived, they tried to protect her.
The Girl looked to be about thirteen, more or less. In the time since she was moved into the cell with them, she has never uttered a single word. She’s only gazed at them with her cobalt-blue eyes, which seem enormous in her shaved head.
She doesn’t interact with them, she remains distant. The policeman and the shoemaker know nothing about her except the theories that have made their way down the hallways of the Box. Lock a bunch of prisoners in the cruelest, most inaccessible places, split them up, handcuff them, tear out their tongues, and they’ll still find ways to communicate. By tapping on the walls in Morse code, by whispering in the showers, by smuggling notes in with the food or even in the shit buckets.
There are some who say that she entered the Box with her whole family and is now the sole survivor. Others say that she’s a Gypsy girl who’s always lived on the street. Whatever the truth, the Girl won’t reveal it. She stays in her corner, warily watchful of any move they might make. She urinates and defecates into the bucket, she takes the amount of food and water that is her due, but she never speaks.
No one knows her name.
The Girl has been taken out of the cell three times. The first two times, she came back with her mouth bloodied and her clothing torn. The two men, who thought they had no feelings left inside them, wept for her. They washed her, they made her eat.
The third time, the policeman and the shoemaker realized that this was going to be the last time. When the guards come to take you to the courtyard, the sound of their footsteps changes, the way they speak to you changes. They become more polite, to keep you from getting upset. They tell you to get your blanket and your pewter dish that reeks of disinfectant, because they are going to be given to the next prisoner, and they lead you upstairs.
When the door swung open, they tried to get to their feet to defend her, and for the first time, the Girl seemed to become aware of the two men who had shared the cell with her for almost a month now. She shook her head, then followed the guards, walking slowly.
The shoemaker and the policeman waited for the sound of the truck, the one that takes the bodies away from the courtyard after the cleaver falls—because it’s a butcher’s cleaver that imparts the benediction for your last journey. A short trip, really, just outside the walls where there’s a field, surrounded by snow and by empty space. It was another prisoner who told them about this, because he had been a member of the team that buries the bodies. He said there are at least a hundred bodies under the ground out there, and they no longer have hands or faces: the Box doesn’t want them to be identified, if they ever happen to be found. Then the prisoner who buried the dead put holes in his ears with a nail to try to shut up the voices. Now he, too, has departed on his last journey.
Twenty minutes have passed, but the policeman and the shoemaker still haven’t heard the old diesel engine chugging to life. Beneath the voices in their heads, under the screaming from the neighboring cells, there is only silence.
Then the cell door swings suddenly open. It’s not a guard, it’s not one of the doctors who regularly comes to examine them.
It’s the Girl.
Her pajamas are covered with blood and there’s a spatter of red on her forehead. She seems oblivious to the fact. In her hand, she holds a large bunch of keys that used to belong to the guard who escorted her out of the cell. The keys, too, are soaked with blood.
“It’s time to go,” she says.
At that instant, the sound of the siren rips through the air.
1
Death arrived in Rome at ten minutes to midnight aboard a high-speed train from Milan. It pulled into the Termini Station, came to a halt at Track 7, spilling out onto the platform fifty or so passengers with only scattered pieces of luggage and travel-weary faces, who hurried off variously to catch the last metro or stand in line for a taxi. Then the on-board lights switched off. Strangely, no one emerged from the Top Class carriage—the pneumatic doors failed to open—and a sleepy conductor opened one of the doors from outside and boarded the car to see if there was anyone still aboard, perhaps asleep.
That was a bad idea.
His disappearance was noticed after about twenty minutes by an officer of the Railway Police; he’d been waiting for the conductor to have a beer at the café run by Moroccan immigrants, which was where they ended their shifts. They weren’t friends, exactly, but after running into each other on the rails repeatedly, they’d discovered they did have a few things in common, like their passion for the same soccer team and for women with generous derrieres. The officer climbed aboard the carriage and found his drinking buddy curled up in the gangway connection between the cars, staring blankly and clutching his throat with both hands as if trying to throttle himself.
A gush of blood had is
sued from his mouth, leaving a puddle on the skidproof floor mat. The officer decided that this was the deadest dead person he’d ever laid eyes on, but still he placed his fingers on the man’s neck to feel for a pulse he knew he wouldn’t find. Probably a heart attack, he guessed. He would have continued his examination of the train, but there were rules to be observed and bureaucratic hassles to sidestep. He therefore hurried back down onto the platform and called the Police Dispatch Center so they could send out someone from the Judicial Police and notify the magistrate on duty. He therefore didn’t see the rest of the carriage and what it contained. He would have needed only to reach out a hand and slide open the frosted glass door to change his own fate and that of those who would arrive after him, but the thought never even occurred to him.
The inspection fell to a deputy chief of the third section of the Mobile Squad—what everyone but the police called the Homicide Squad—a woman who had returned to duty after a lengthy convalescence and a series of misadventures that had been the topic of endless discussions on all the talk shows for months on end. Her name was Colomba Caselli, and later on there were some who considered her arrival to be a lucky break.
She sure didn’t.
2
Colomba reached Termini Station at a quarter to one in a police-issued vehicle. Behind the wheel was Patrolman First Class Massimo Alberti, twenty-seven, who had one of those faces that always seem boyish even when they’re old. Alberti had freckles and fair hair.
Colomba, on the other hand, was thirty-three years old in her body but a few years older in the green eyes that changed hue with her mood. She wore her black hair pulled up on the back of her neck, which only emphasized her jutting cheekbones, almost Asian in appearance, the legacy of who knew which distant ancestor. She got out of the car and hurried to the platform where the train that had come in from Milan was standing. Waiting next to it were four officers of the Railway Police: two sitting in the ridiculous electric-powered two-seater that the police used to get around inside the station and the other two standing next to the coupling buffers. All four were young and all four were smokers. Not far away, a few rubberneckers were snapping pictures with their cell phones, while a small crowd of a dozen or so cleaning staff and EMTs were talking in undertones.
Colomba displayed her badge and introduced herself. One of the officers had seen her in the papers and put on the usual foolish smile. She pretended not to notice. “Which car?” she asked.
“The first one,” replied the highest-ranking officer there, while the others lined up behind him, almost as if using him as a shield.
Colomba tried to peer through the windows but couldn’t see a thing. “Which one of you has been aboard?”
There was a round of embarrassed glances. “One of our colleagues, but his shift ended, so he left,” said the one who had spoken first.
“He didn’t touch anything, though,” said another. “He just looked inside. So did we, from the platform.”
Colomba shook her head in irritation. A corpse meant being up all night, waiting for the magistrate and the medical examiner to finish their work, and an endless array of documents and reports to fill out: she wasn’t surprised that the officer had gotten out while the getting was good. She could have lodged a complaint with his superior officers, but she didn’t like wasting time, either. “Do you know who this is?” she asked, pulling on a pair of latex gloves and sky-blue plastic shoe covers.
“His name is Giovanni Morgan; he’s a member of the train crew,” said the highest-ranking officer.
“Have you already informed his family members?”
Another round of glances.
“Okay, let’s just forget I asked.” Colomba nodded to Alberti. “Go get the flashlight from the car.”
He left and came back carrying a black metal Maglite a foot and a half long, which, when needed, worked better than a truncheon. “Do you want me to board with you?”
“No, wait here and keep the rubberneckers clear of the train.”
Colomba notified Central by radio that she was proceeding with her inspection, then, just like the officer who had preceded her, she tried to find a pulse on the conductor’s neck and, just like the officer who had preceded her, failed to do so: the dead man’s skin was clammy and cold. While she was asking Central whether the medical examiner and the magistrate on duty were almost there, she noticed a strange auditory undertone. She held her breath and then realized it was the sound of at least half a dozen cell phones all ringing at the same time, in a cacophony of trills and vibrations. It was coming from the other side of the doors to the luxury compartment, where the seats were upholstered in real leather and the passengers were served precooked meals that bore the name of a celebrity chef with a show on TV.
Through the milky glass, Colomba glimpsed the bluish lights of the cell phone screens, casting long, pulsating shadows. Those couldn’t possibly all be forgotten devices, and the only explanation that came to mind seemed too monstrous to be true.
But it was true. Colomba realized it when she forced the sliding door open and was assailed by the stench of blood and excrement.
All the passengers in Top Class were dead.
3
Colomba darted the beam of the flashlight around the interior of the carriage, illuminating the corpse of a passenger about sixty years old, in a gray suit, who’d wound up on the floor with his hands between his thighs and his head thrown back. The blood that had erupted from his throat had covered his face like a mask. What the fuck happened in here? she wondered.
She slowly moved forward, careful not to set her foot down on anything. Behind the first corpse was a young man with his shirt unbuttoned and snug-fitting white pants smeared with excrement, sprawled sideways across the aisle. A drinking glass had rolled up to his face and was smeared with blood that had oozed out of his nose.
To Colomba’s left was an old man, still seated, his face impaled on the metal tip of the walking stick that had somehow wound up in his mouth; his dentures bobbed in his lap in the midst of a gob of blood and dried vomit. Two Asian men, wearing the uniform of the refreshment crew, were sprawled, one over his serving trolley, the other over the knees of a woman in a skirt suit and five-inch heels. She was every bit as dead as the two men.
Colomba felt her lungs contract, and she took a deep breath of air. Now that she was getting used to it, she noticed amid the general stench a strange sweetish after-odor that she couldn’t quite identify. It reminded her of when she was small and her mother would try to bake a cake but inevitably wound up burning it in an oven full of smoke.
Colomba made her way to the far end of the carriage. A passenger in his early forties was sprawled out in a Superman pose, right fist thrust forward and left arm draping the side of his body. Colomba moved past him and took a look in the bathroom: a man and a woman, the man wearing the orange overalls of the cleaning staff, were slumped on the floor, their legs intertwined. As the woman had fallen, she’d hit the back of her head on the sink, and the edge was smeared with blood and hair. Just then someone called Colomba on her radio. “Your driver wants to know if he can board the train,” Central crackled.
“Negative, I’ll contact him directly, over and out,” she said in an almost normal voice, then called Alberti on his cell phone. “What is it?”
“Deputy Chief Caselli, there are people here who were waiting for passengers . . . they say they were supposed to be aboard this train.”
“Wait.” Colomba opened the door leading back to the rest of the train and took a look at the first-class carriage. It was empty, and so were the carriages behind it. To make certain, she made her way all the way back to the last car, then retraced her steps. “Were they in Top Class?”
“Yes, Deputy Chief.”
“If you’re with them, move away. I don’t want them to hear.”
Alberti obeyed, moving up until he was next to the locomotive. “What happened?”
“They’re all dead. All the passengers in the first
car.”
“Oh, fuck. How could that happen?”
Colomba felt her heart skip a beat. She had moved as if in a trance, but now it dawned on her that none of those poor bastards all around her had any visible injuries, except for the old man impaled on his walking stick. I should have just turned and run the minute I saw the conductor.
But it probably would have been too late even then.
“Deputy Chief . . . are you still there?” Alberti asked, worried by her prolonged silence.
Colomba shook herself out of it. “I don’t know what killed them, Alberti, but it must have been something they either ingested or breathed in.”
“Holy Christ.” Alberti was on the verge of panic.
“Keep calm, because you have an important job to do: don’t let anyone get near the train. Not the Forensic Squad, not the magistrate, at least until the NBC squads get here. If anyone tries, arrest them, shoot them, but don’t let them get aboard.” Colomba could feel the cold sweat dripping down her spine. If this is anthrax, I’m already done for, she thought. If it’s nerve gas, I may have a chance. “Second thing. You need to find the officer who boarded the train and get his address from his fellow officers, because he needs to be put into isolation. None of the other officers can leave, either, especially if they shook hands, shared a cigarette, anything like that. Same thing for the relatives who are there. If they had any physical contact with you, then they have to be detained.”
“Should I tell them the truth?”
“Don’t even think of it. Tell Central to track down all the onboard staff, anyone who might have had any contact with the passengers. But first get the decontamination squads over here. Tell them by phone, don’t use your radio, or you’ll unleash a wave of panic. Have I made myself clear?”
Kill the Angel Page 1