She could feel her breath fail her, and she fell to her knees. She hit the cement with the knuckles of her free hand until they were lacerated, and the pain, as always, helped to chase the nightmare away. A nightmare that she thought had been deleted for good.
Her eyes filled with tears, and she crawled over on all fours to Infanti’s body, pressing her fingers against his blood-smeared throat, checking for a pulse. It was faint but steady, even though the left part of his face had become a pulp of hamburger meat. Colomba repressed her retching, pulled a handful of paper tissues out of her pocket, and used them to compress the wound in an attempt to stop the hemorrhaging.
There were footsteps coming down the steps. Colomba raised her pistol. It was Esposito and Alberti.
“Deputy Chief!” yelled Esposito. “Don’t shoot.”
Colomba lowered her weapon. “We need an ambulance.”
“What the fuck happened?” asked Esposito.
Colomba went on compressing Infanti’s wound. “There was an armed man hiding in a hole. Call that fucking ambulance.”
“There’s no radio reception here. No fucking reception at all,” said Alberti, bursting into tears.
Esposito smacked him hard. “Wake up, kid! Go outside and call the EMTs, they’re right behind the Riot Police. Get going!”
Alberti ran out of the room while Esposito bent over the imam. “This man is still alive.”
“Spell me here,” said Colomba.
Esposito took her place, and Colomba stood up, discovering that she was covered with blood right up to the elbow. Don’t complain, this could have been your blood, she thought. She was still short of breath, and she was shaking. She wasn’t really there, this was just a nightmare out of her past. Like the train and like Paris.
She hadn’t really just killed a man.
The imam was holding his ripped-open midsection, murmuring a prayer. His voice was very weak, the blood spreading out in a puddle underneath him. “Help is on its way,” Colomba told him.
The imam seemed to regain lucidity and stopped praying. “Omar was a good boy. He was afraid,” he said in a faint thread of a voice.
“Omar?”
“Omar Hossein . . . the boy who shot me.”
“Was he involved with the train?”
The imam had started to pray again, faster this time, as if well aware that time was running out. Colomba repeated the question, shaking him. Beneath her fingers, she could feel the lack of flesh, the fragile bones.
“No. He was a real Muslim, but he knew you wouldn’t believe him . . . because he knew . . . the men from the video.”
Colomba felt the adrenaline surge through her. “Who are they, Imam?”
The imam’s gaze faltered. “Criminals . . . fake ones . . . it’s all a fraud,” he murmured.
Colomba shook him gently. “Please, tell me who they are.”
“I don’t know. Let me go now.” He started praying in Arabic again.
Colomba realized that she couldn’t insist. She took the imam’s hand, slimy with blood, and gripped it. “Thank you for saving my life.”
The Imam looked her in the face for the first and last time, and for the first and last time he smiled at her, his teeth red with blood. “It wasn’t me, it was Allah the Almighty, worthy is He of praise. He has a purpose for you, even if you don’t know that yet.” Then his jaw fell slack and he died.
Colomba stood up like a sleepwalker and carefully looked around at the gymnasium, transformed into a slaughterhouse, with Esposito, who continued to compress Infanti’s wounds, murmuring curses and words of encouragement under his breath. Two corpses and someone on the verge of death, blood, stench. If you’d stayed outside, maybe nothing at all would have happened, she told herself. The burnt gunpowder was stinging her skin.
Two EMTs came down the stairs with their stretcher folded, followed by a small knot of officers. They moved Esposito aside and got busy with oxygen masks and tubes.
Behind the EMTs came three NOA agents, including the friendly one, and Antioco from the Riot Police. “Holy shit,” said Antioco the minute he walked in. “What the fuck happened here?”
“We’re going to need reinforcements,” said the nice NOA officer. “People are showing up upstairs.”
“Could you hear the gunshots outside?”
The likable NOA guy shook his head. “No. There was too much noise. And it’s well insulated down here.”
The uniforms kept swarming, talking and shouting, stopping a few yards short of the bodies and cramming the stairs. Colomba clapped her hands twice to attract their attention. “Listen up! Everyone! As far as the people of the center know, the imam is still alive, understood? He’s here and he’s helping us question a suspect.”
“Why do we have to spout bullshit?” asked Antioco.
“Do I seriously have to explain that to you?”
Antioco opened his mouth to say something, then shut it again.
“Contact Central,” Colomba went on, “get the magistrate over here, but be careful what you say, okay?”
“Are you in charge of the crime scene?” asked the likable NOA guy.
“Not for much longer. But till then, you all do what I say.” She hoped that her tone of voice sounded more confident than she felt.
“Yes, ma’am.”
Colomba turned her jacket inside out and put it back on: it was disgusting, but the blood was hidden now. She ran up the stairs and looked out the front door. Behind the line of riot cops were at least fifty immigrants, and in the distance, a group of young Italians carrying a streamer from an anarchist social center. Luckily, the children had gotten out of the way. “They just keep coming,” said another of the NOA men. “But for now they seem relatively peaceful.”
Guarneri worked his way through the cordon of cops and came back in. “Everything all right, Deputy Chief?” he asked with a baffled expression.
“No one told you anything?”
“No . . .”
Just then the EMTs emerged with Infanti fastened to the stretcher. Guarneri’s eyes opened wide. “But—”
“There was a shootout, and the imam was caught in the cross fire. But the people outside can’t know that.”
“Was it us?”
“No, but try explaining that to them.”
The stretcher left the room and moved out through the crowd; the chattering grew louder, little by little, until it turned into a single word, repeated rhythmically by one and all.
Rafik. Rafik. Rafik.
Colomba heard the imam’s voice echoing in her head. It’s all a fraud.
Rafik. Rafik. Rafik.
“They saw him go in and haven’t seen him come back out,” said Guarneri. “Pretty soon all hell is going to break loose.”
“It already has,” said Colomba, and as she said it, she was thinking of the imam’s hand and that last grip.
“What should we do?” asked Guarneri.
Forget about everything, thought Colomba. Go the hell home. But she was alive, and she had a debt to pay. “I’m going to ask you to do something that has to remain in this room, between the two of us. It’s . . . outside the rules. I’ll assume full responsibility for it, all right?”
“Whatever you say, Deputy Chief. And I know I’m speaking for the whole squad when I say it.”
Colomba caught her breath. She still had time to stop. But she didn’t stop.
“You need to find another person,” she said. “His name is Dante Torre.”
II
BACK ON THE CHAIN GANG
BEFORE—1987
The man who used to be a policeman watches the file footage on the tiny television in the kitchen. It’s an old black-and-white portable set with a rabbit-ear antenna, and every time a truck goes past the tumbledown house in Poltava, the picture flickers. Even so, the man recognizes the roads that lead to the Box, filmed from a low-flying helicopter. He even manages to make out the walls from a distance, before a plume of black smoke obscures the image and interrupt
s the broadcast. It’s just pure chance, he tells himself. A matter of bad luck, made worse by human stupidity. No one can have wanted such a slaughter to take place, not on purpose.
The thought is so upsetting that the man who was a policeman starts hearing voices again, starts seeing dancing prisms of bright colors. He shuts his eyes and puts both hands over his ears. He knows it won’t do any good, but doing it still gives him a little relief. Lights and sounds, whispers, dazzling colors, fragments of memories, and images of a place he’s never seen all windmill through his mind. He starts panting. He drops to his knees and takes his head in his hands.
That’s how the Girl finds him. “Get up,” she tells him, laying a hand on his shoulder.
The prisms fade behind the man’s eyes, and the voices fall silent, as they always do when the Girl is with him. The man who was a policeman gets back to his feet and smiles, and as always, the Girl doesn’t respond. She just stares at him with her enormous eyes. Her hair has grown back, and now it frames her pale face with its bloodless lips. “Here, eat this,” she says, handing him a paper bag. The bag contains bread, two tins of meat, and a few withered apples.
“What about you?” he asks.
She shrugs. She’s not hungry. She’s never hungry.
“I saw the explosion on TV. All those people killed . . .”
“Don’t think about it,” she says, her expression unchanging. She takes off her overcoat, and now her figure, skinny and strong as a steel wire, can be seen. She hasn’t changed since the Box, apart from her hair: the same androgynous shape, the same rigid posture. And she still seldom speaks, only the bare minimum necessary. When the shoemaker cut his own throat, she said only that not all the birds managed to survive outside of the cage. “But you’ll make it,” she added. “Because I need you.”
The Girl sets her overcoat down on the edge of the chair, folding it carefully; then she picks up the tool chest from the floor and sets it down on the table. She reviews its contents, and then, with precise and delicate gestures, she selects a pair of pliers. The policeman’s stomach knots at the sight, and the taste of the bread turns acid in his mouth. He feels like a coward not to raise any objections, but he knows that nothing would stop her even if he tried. And after all, they need money, and the work that the Girl has found is the only kind that fugitives like them can do.
The Girl opens the door to the broom closet, and her shadow looms over the face of the man locked in there. He’s in his underwear, bound to a chair with duct tape. He has duct tape over his mouth, too, wrapped in tight coils around his neck. One eye is a red hole of encrusted blood; the other is wide open in terror. His bladder empties in a spasm and his underwear is drenched.
The Girl pays no attention to the stench of urine and sweat and grabs his left hand. The bound man tries to jerk his arm away, but he can’t. He moans something incomprehensible. The ex-policeman, who has remained in the kitchen, guesses at what the man is saying. He wants to know why, what do they want from him?
“It’s too soon for questions,” the Girl told the ex-policeman. “He’s still not ready to answer.”
“To me, he seems more than ready,” he replied. “Don’t you even want to try?”
“It’s too soon.” The Girl never changes her tone of voice, not even with him. Not even when she has to explain things to him that are as obvious as how to break the will of a human being.
The ex-policeman doesn’t know where she learned it, just as he has no idea how she managed to survive the execution in the Box and free him. She succeeded, and that’s that, the ex-policeman has no option but to believe in her. Obey her and hope for her mercy.
The Girl takes the pinkie finger of the bound man’s left hand and places it between the jaws of the pliers. The man moans louder. He throws himself upon her pity with his inarticulate groans. The Girl slowly shakes her head.
“It’s too soon,” she says. She snaps the pliers shut and gets ready for the long night ahead.
1
The guy was an idiot. He dressed like an idiot—with those loafers worn without socks and the cuffed trousers—he had the face of an idiot (a bronzed idiot, just to make things worse), and as if all that wasn’t enough, he talked like an idiot. Dante Torre restrained himself from telling the idiot to his face and followed him, feigning enthusiasm, through the front entrance of La Sapienza University, a vast thirties-era facade that concealed the much older buildings housing the various departments. Dante held his breath until he emerged into the central courtyard and had the open sky overhead once again. He took an enormous deep breath and the idiot, aka Associate Professor Francesco Degli Uberti, holder of the chair of contemporary history, turned to look back at him. “Everything all right, Signor Torre?”
“Certainly, I’m fine. You were saying, Professor?”
“That the students are very happy to have a chance to meet you.”
A group of students was walking in their direction, laughing and shoving each other. Dante turned sideways and raised both arms in time to avoid any physical contact. The book bag that he was carrying in one hand spilled sheets of paper and pens out onto the cobblestones. The idiot bent down to help him. “Wait, let me give you a hand.”
Dante hastily grabbed a sheet of paper before the other man could even graze it with his fingers. “Don’t worry, I can take care of it myself.”
“It’s no problem, glad to help.”
“I can do it myself,” Dante said in a hard, peremptory voice.
The other man shot to a standing position. “Excuse me.”
Dante made an effort to smile. “It’s just that . . . I have a system . . . all my own for my things,” he improvised. God, he felt like shit.
He had spent the night tossing and turning at the thought of this meeting, getting out of bed every twenty minutes to down something: coffee, pills, vodka, water, cigarettes. He’d managed to get to sleep only around dawn, and then he’d dreamed he was inside a cave that grew increasingly narrow: he kept on walking until the ceiling had sunk so low he couldn’t go on—something that he wouldn’t have done in real life, not even under anesthesia—and then, when he turned around to leave, he found that the way back had been replaced by a solid rock wall. At that point, the Father’s voice had echoed out, ordering him to cut off his bad hand, and Dante had awakened, vomiting onto himself a stream of acid puke that reeked of alcohol.
It could have been worse, he’d thought as he’d smoked a cigarette, still on his back in bed—he could have vomited onto himself and gone on sleeping, dying of suffocation the way John Belushi had. Instead, he had stripped the sheets from the bed and stuck them in the bathtub of the hotel suite and done his best to eliminate the stains. He didn’t want the housekeeper to know what had happened, but the result had been a tremendous mess, with smelly, drenched sheets left to flutter on the balcony in the hope that they might dry. Luckily, it was a bright, sunshiny day, as Dante could tell by the burning in his eyes, despite his mirrored lenses.
The idiot, in the meantime, had asked him a question and was waiting for him to answer. Dante searched through his auditory memory for the idiot’s most recent words: Dante’s studies. Fuck, what a pain in the ass. “I never even finished high school,” he said.
“Really? I never would have thought so, hearing you speak. In the sense that you seem much more highly educated,” the idiot specified.
Dante continued looking around, measuring the dimensions of the courtyard, the entrances, the emergency exits. The walls seemed unpleasantly close to him, the background noise too piercing and loud. He was sweating so much his underclothes were damp. “I studied on my own, but I’ve had no formal education.”
“I imagine that would be because of the kidnapping, right?”
I imagine that would be because of the kidnapping, Dante mentally echoed in a mocking tone. And in your opinion, what else could it have been? You idiot. “Yes. When I escaped, I was almost eighteen, and I still hadn’t finished elementary or middle school. That
was already pretty complicated; I was the only one who wasn’t either a child or an elderly illiterate.”
“Escaped from the silo where the Father had you locked up, right?”
“Exactly. While, for you, studying is a family tradition, right?”
The idiot smiled. “My uncle is the dean of the department of political science, and my father teaches at Lausanne. Did you recognize the surname?”
No, I recognized that without a push from a relative, you’d be scrubbing toilets for a living, certainly not pontificating as an associate professor. “Sure. An illustrious surname,” he said instead, keeping the stiff smile plastered on his face. What he wanted to do was take to his heels; the sweat had dripped down to his calves. He wondered if the other man could tell, and hoped he couldn’t. He was wearing a black suit, and black tends to conceal sweat stains. Aside from that, he wore a white panama hat and a pair of studded steel-toed Clipper boots, and with his long fair hair hanging down his neck, he looked a little like David Bowie at the time of Let’s Dance, only taller and skinnier.
“Here we are, then,” said the idiot, pointing to fifty or so seats lined up in front of a table with a chair and a microphone. Behind the table was a paper blackboard, the kind that looks like a giant notepad, with a blue felt-tip pen hanging on a string. “As you requested, we’re all set up outdoors. We just hope people show up, with what just happened—”
“We’re a long way from the station,” said Dante brusquely.
“Well, there’s no telling if those lunatics are done planting bombs.”
“If that’s the case, then one place is just as dangerous as another, isn’t it?”
Kill the Angel Page 5