Kill the Angel

by Sandrone Dazieri

  It was a concluding phrase designed to elicit approval, and there was a thunderous burst of applause marking the end of the lesson. Dante moved over into a corner of the courtyard and exchanged a few words with the students who thronged around to shake his hand and ask for an autograph, which he provided, pretending that it gave him no pleasure. Idiot Degli Uberti came back with the forms for Dante’s payment. A drop in the sea: he really ought to go back to trying to track down his missing children. As he thought about how badly he wanted a decent espresso, and by “decent espresso” he meant one he’d made for himself, his eye happened to light on three people who were just then entering the courtyard. One of the three was someone Dante knew. It was Alberti, whom Dante had met while Alberti was a rookie in the serious-crimes squad. The two others could only belong to the same squad: Colomba’s squad.

  The thought of her gave Dante the usual mix of contrasting sensations, but he maintained a neutral expression when the three of them stopped in front of him. “Do I need to call my lawyer?” he asked.

  “Don’t worry, Signor Torre,” said Alberti, reaching out to shake his hand. “How are you?”

  Dante looked down at Alberti’s hand but showed no sign of reaching out for it. “Whatever it is you want, I’m not interested in giving it to you.”

  “Deputy Chief Caselli needs help,” said Alberti.

  Dante made an effort to remain impassive. “In her capacity as a policewoman?”

  “Well, yes.”

  “Then that’s not my cup of tea, so if you don’t mind . . .”

  In preparation for leaving, he reached out for his cell phone, which he’d left on the countertop that he’d used to sign the autographs, but Esposito was quicker than he was and snatched it away, holding it an inch away from his face. “We’re very sorry. Either you call her, or I’ll use your nose to dial the number.”

  Dante glared at him with contempt. “Do they hire gorillas in the police force?”

  Guarneri lowered his colleague’s arm. “Forgive him, Signor Torre, he didn’t go to a parochial school and learn from nuns the way I did. Still, this is urgent.”

  Dante realized that the three men were not only exhausted, having been through something bloody and cruel, but also extremely worried. Dante’s annoyance was immediately transformed into curiosity, and he lit a cigarette, indifferent to the prohibition against smoking. “First tell me everything,” he said.

  2

  Two hours after the shootout, the Centocelle Islamic center was in a state of siege, with armored trucks closing off the streets and officers in riot gear cordoning off the entire perimeter. A hundred or so demonstrators were clustered on the sidewalk on the far side of the street; a dozen of them had been taken off to the hospital; fifty were in handcuffs; and an unknown number were roaming the neighborhood, setting fire to dumpsters and shattering shopwindows. Colomba didn’t know who had put out the truth about the imam—it could have been any of the uniformed officers who’d had to handle the situation, or even one of the EMTs—but word had spread like flying shrapnel from a bomb among the demonstrators, producing angry shouts and sobs of grief.

  And violence.

  The uprising had been sudden and unexpected, and Colomba, like all the officers present, had found herself with a helmet on her head, holding a riot club, ready to ward off attackers. She hadn’t been outfitted like this since her first years in the police, when she was assigned to keep public order at the stadiums, resisting the soccer ultras in military formation who were armed with crowbars and Molotov cocktails. Back then she hadn’t hesitated to crack heads open, but now she found herself faced with the wretched of the earth, people in despair who believed the police were guilty of a crime that was covered by immunity; matters were now less straightforward.

  When the demonstrators retreated, Colomba found herself drenched in sweat, her billy club smeared with blood. She threw it to the ground and went to take refuge in the nonalcoholic bar, listening to the news on an old radio. The guerrilla fighting wasn’t going on only in Centocelle but in many Italian cities where the police had raided Islamic centers and mosques. There was no counting the injured, and by now the number of arrests had risen into the triple digits. There were also platoons of self-proclaimed citizen-defenders of the fatherland and its soil making the rounds, hunting down anyone who wasn’t white-skinned, and groups of refugees taking up defensive positions, armed with clubs and metal bars, to fight off those vigilantes. If what the terrorists had been trying to do was unleash civil war, Colomba mused, they were succeeding; once again she keenly missed Alfredo Rovere. Rovere, who had been her boss at the Mobile Squad before Curcio, who’d been capable of creating order in the midst of chaos and had known how to make her feel safe even in the most challenging moments. Too bad Rovere had been murdered by the Father, and that before he’d died, he had manipulated her into dragging Dante into the investigation. Had Rovere done the right thing, had the ends justified the means? Colomba hadn’t been able to figure that out. That’s the problem with the dead: you can’t look them in the face and thrash things out with them, you can only make your own inner peace, and Colomba wasn’t very good at doing that.

  As she felt increasingly eager for something strong to drink or a word of comfort, the joint chiefs of staff of the state police came striding through the crowd barriers, with the magistrate Angela Spinelli leading the way. Colomba was about to walk toward her and greet her, but Santini, who was also in the group of new arrivals, darted forward and, without a word, dragged Colomba to the back room behind the counter, among the crates of soft drinks and flats of canned Arab food. He shut the door and leaned against it, as if making sure she couldn’t run away. “I told you not to fuck things up!” he said, his face beet-red with rage.

  Colomba stood there looking at him with a defiant expression. The air was redolent with MSG glutamate and cilantro, but it seemed like gunpowder to her. “And just how am I supposed to have fucked up?”

  “Are you seriously asking me? You treated Infanti like a mental defective; you acted all high-handed with the Riot Squad!” Santini swept the tabletop clear, knocking to the floor an old calculator that split in two, tumbling out its batteries. “Thanks to your brilliant intervention, Infanti now has a hole in his face, and there are two dead bodies that we can’t even take out of here without deploying the special forces!”

  Colomba lost a moment of her life. A second before, she had been looking at a crack in the tiles; a second later, she had the lapels of Santini’s trench coat clutched in her hands. “That’s right!” she shouted into his face. “There are two fucking dead bodies, and I could have been one of them!”

  “Get your hands off me.”

  She ignored him. Instead, she went on shouting, unable to stop herself. “I had to kill a person, you get that? I killed a twenty-year-old boy! And you come in here to shout into my face! What kind of a piece of shit are you, anyway?”

  Santini shoved her away, knocking her against a couple of cartons of pasta. “Get your hands off me, Deputy Chief!” he said in an icy tone. “And keep your voice down. The last thing I need is for the others to figure just how crazy you really are.”

  Colomba bounced back onto her feet as if spring-loaded, ready to go at him again, but a smidgen of self-awareness held her back. She stood there staring at Santini, clenching and releasing her fists, her breath hissing out between her teeth, jaw muscles clamped tight. “There was a fugitive from justice hiding in the basement with a shotgun. And you’re saying that’s my fault?”

  “You know why he was hiding?” said Santini, as if talking to an idiot. “Because he had a six-year-old verdict against him for dealing narcotics that had been confirmed by an appeals court! If you hadn’t stuck your nose in, Hossein would have remained out on the street, and maybe he would have done something stupid. But he wouldn’t have shot Infanti and the imam. And we wouldn’t have an open revolt on our hands out front.”

  “There are riots going on all over Italy,” sa
id Colomba. “It was Operation Finetooth that got people worked up, it wasn’t me.”

  Santini heaved a sigh of annoyance. “Now cut it out! Do you want to fix the world? Go be a missionary, then. On the police force, we have rules.”

  “Oh, like you’ve always cared a lot about the rules, have you?” Colomba muttered as guilt took the place of her anger.

  “I’ve been walking the straight and narrow since they put me back on the Mobile Squad, Caselli. I learn from my mistakes.” Santini lit a cigarette. “But you just keep coming up with new ones.” He expelled the smoke through his nostrils, and Colomba thought of a dragon out of a fairy tale. A bony dragon with a mustache. “What the fuck happened to you, if you don’t mind my asking? You’ve always been a thorn in the ass, but in the old days, you must have known how far you could take things, otherwise you would never have risen through the ranks. Now you’ve turned into a punch line.”

  Colomba felt herself blush and hated herself for doing it. “Have you said everything you needed to say?”

  “One last thing: no one is going to want to take responsibility for what happened here, least of all the people who sent us. Hossein’s death isn’t a problem for anyone, but this dead imam runs the risk of turning into a diplomatic case with the Islamic religious communities. It would all have come down on Infanti if he hadn’t been shot, but now they’re going to do all they can to make sure he’s portrayed as a victim and not the idiot that he is.”

  “Which means I’m in deep shit.”

  “Very good. So be careful what you say to Spinelli. Unless you can safely claim that Hossein and the imam wanted a holy war and that they attacked you in the name of the caliphate, you’re better off pretending you can’t remember a thing because of the shock.”

  “I’ll just tell the truth.” Colomba chewed at her lower lip while the imam’s words replayed in her head: It’s all a fraud. “Are we sure that the deaths in the train are connected to Islamic terrorism?”

  “Didn’t you see the claim of responsibility?”

  “Anyone can claim to be a soldier of Islam, but it’s not always true.”

  “I’m begging you, don’t starting coming up with weird things,” said Santini in exasperation. “The bomb squads have found three more gas tanks on three different trains. Who could have done such a thing, in your opinion, if not fucking ISIS?”

  “Why didn’t they kill anyone?” Colomba asked, stunned.

  “Because we managed to stop all rail transportation in time. They probably planted them all at the same time, last night or the night before, while the trains were in the yards at Milan’s Stazione Centrale. But for now, that’s just a hypothesis.”

  “Is there anything on the surveillance tapes?”

  “No. Surveillance in the train stations is leaky as a sieve; the very best they can manage is to keep the bums out. But why are you starting to have doubts about the perpetrators?”

  Before Colomba could dream up an answer, the little yellow Snapchat ghost appeared on her cell phone, alerting her to a call. There was only one person she knew who used that app, the same person who had downloaded it onto her phone whether or not she liked it, because it encrypted all calls. That’s why it was so widely used by drug dealers and by teenagers up for a little sexting. “This is a private phone call,” she told Santini. “So, do you very much mind giving me some privacy?”

  Santini threw both arms wide. “Why, perish the very thought, of course, be my guest!” he blurted out in irritation. “Just remember what I told you, though.” The policeman left the room, and at that very moment, Colomba realized that, under his rude manners, he really was worried about her. That was something she hadn’t expected, and it caught her by surprise. She shut the door behind him and sat down on a crate of Lidl soft drinks. “Thanks for calling me, Dante,” she said into the phone.

  “It’s not like your men gave me an option,” he replied in an icy tone. “Next time why don’t you just call me directly?”

  “Would you have picked up?”

  “I can’t guarantee I would have.”

  “So then you see why I had to do it.”

  There was a second of embarrassed silence.

  “Are you doing all right?” he asked eventually, remembering his manners.

  No. “Sure, sure, I’m fine. But I need your help.”

  On the other end of the call, Dante sat down on the hood of the Amigos’ squad car, which was parked on the street that ran past the university. The three of them were a short distance away, watching the female students going by and rating them, by and large on the size of their breasts. “Yes, that much I’d figured out, CC,” he said, using his usual nickname for her; it came naturally to him. Then there was another moment of silence.

  “Have you seen the video claiming responsibility for the attack on the train?” Colomba finally asked.

  “I haven’t had time.”

  “Then you’re probably the only one within a radius of a thousand miles. Would you mind watching it?”

  “Right now?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you mind telling me why?”

  “They told you about the imam, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “He said something that got me worried. That’s all. Take a look at the video, then call me back, please.”

  Dante heaved a weary sigh. “At your service,” he said, and ended the call.

  Someone knocked at the door, and Colomba said to come in. It was an officer there to tell her that the magistrate was ready to meet with her now. Colomba said that she needed a couple more minutes, and the tears rolling down her cheeks were sufficient justification.

  In the meantime, Dante had crossed his legs in the lotus position and opened the iPad that he carried in his book bag.

  “What the fuck are you doing?” asked Esposito, taking his eyes off the girls for a second. “A voodoo ritual?”

  “Hush. Let him work,” said Alberti, one of Dante’s biggest fans.

  Dante put the earbuds in his ears and started the video. A few seconds later, it became clear to him why Colomba had asked him to watch it, and after a minute, he was sorry he had agreed to. He ran it through two more times, then a third time in slow motion with the sound turned off.

  “So give me your considered opinion,” said Colomba when Dante called her back.

  “It’s just a preliminary analysis . . . and actually, the video wasn’t all that clear . . .”

  Colomba felt her lungs tightening. “Come on, spit it out.”

  “Okay. There’s something fishy.”

  Colomba let out a long sigh. Shit, she thought. “Like what?”

  “The two of them. They speak Arabic poorly, you can understand that by the way they pronounced the names of their tutelary deities. Fingernails, calluses, and shape of the hands suggest heavy, unqualified menial labor. They don’t have the expertise to manufacture the gas.”

  “Maybe someone gave it to them,” said Colomba.

  “It was produced in a home lab, so I imagine here in the country. If they had purchased it on the black market, they would have selected more powerful products that are easier to manage, like nerve gas or C-4.”

  “Bart thinks so, too. She was in charge of examining the bodies from the train.”

  “Then there’s no doubt about it.” Dante had the highest respect for the scientist. “They have only rudimentary levels of education, and they have low incomes, as we can observe from their undistinguished clothing and the sheet they hung up, of the lowest quality. Many jihadi martyrs and suicide bombers share this characteristic. But not the clandestine cells, who plan to stay in business for a long time and usually come from the upper classes. There are lots of engineers among their number, and nearly all of them have college educations. The cannon fodder, on the other hand, is made up of penniless wretches like these two.”

  “Which means they have a boss who manufactured the gas and taught them how to move.”

  “A strange boss.
A boss who entrusted them with a communiqué instead of handling it himself. It’s one thing when we’re talking about martyrdom videos; it’s quite another if you’re talking about programmatic manifestos. As long as they’ve been issuing those, it’s been the bosses who do the issuing. And there’s another question, a much bigger one,” said Dante in a cautious tone of voice that was anything but customary with him. “Every religion has its characteristic gestures, but many of them involve the bow or the prostration, as in Islam, where the prayer consists of a series of very clearly defined movements that make up the Rak’a. You get to your feet, you sit back on your ankles, you prostrate yourself—”

  “Dante, please, I’m in kind of a hurry.”

  “Okay, okay. A believer doesn’t have to give a lot of thought to the way he moves when he’s praying, it becomes an automatic movement. And automatic movements tend to be repeated even outside the usual context. When someone who was brought up as a practicing Catholic says the words ‘I pray something happens,’ they’ll often put their hands together as if actually praying. When he thinks of the Almighty, a Muslim tends to bow, deeply or just slightly depending on his faith, even though we’re talking about micromovements here.” Dante lit a cigarette from the butt of the previous one. “Those two praised Allah, the prophet, and the caliph, but when they did so, they stood as stiff as broomsticks. There was no instinctive gesture being censored. They’re as fake as Monopoly money. I can’t say why their boss chose them, but it certainly wasn’t for their faith. And that makes me question their boss’s faith as well.”

  “Maybe they were radicalized in a hurry. Like the guy in Nice.”