“But he used a truck, not a tank of gas. There’s a considerable difference in the level of preparation required.”
Colomba shut her eyes. “According to the imam, it’s all a fraud.”
“Maybe he just said that to cover for someone.”
“In the last few minutes of life left to him? He said that Hossein, the boy I . . .” She stopped, unable to go on.
“The boy who died,” Dante said for her, understanding the impasse. “And it’s not your fault, while we’re on the subject.”
“Thanks for the understanding,” Colomba said brusquely. “He said that Hossein was frightened because he knew them and was afraid of getting dragged into it.”
“Let’s just grant that that’s the truth. Then why would they have killed those people? There’s no doubt they’re of Middle Eastern origin, what interest would they have had in starting a hunt for Arabs?”
“I don’t know. There are plenty of assholes in circulation,” said Colomba.
“Roughly seventy percent of the world’s population are assholes, and most of them wear uniforms.”
Colomba mentally counted to ten before answering; this was no time to fight. “Dante . . .”
“I wasn’t talking about you. Talk to the magistrate, tell her what you know. If it’s really necessary, you can repeat in detail what I figured out.”
“It wouldn’t do a bit of good, Dante. Your reputation in the law-and-order establishment is no good at all. They wouldn’t accept your opinion even if you told them what time it was.”
“I’ve proved my reliability in the past,” said Dante, offended.
“That was before you accused the government and all the country’s institutions of being infiltrated by the CIA.”
“My words were misinterpreted.” The interview, which had been published in one of the country’s largest daily newspapers, had caused a certain amount of scandal, as well as a series of parliamentary inquiries that fizzled out. “At least in part.”
“Second of all, I have some credibility issues.”
“Aren’t you your boss’s pet?”
Colomba counted to twenty this time. “No, Dante. I’m nobody’s pet. Going back to work hasn’t been easy for me, and many of my fellow cops aren’t all that happy to see me back.”
“I did warn you, if I’m not misremembering?”
“Please, I’m not looking to start a fight. This isn’t the moment.”
Dante relaxed slightly. “You’re right, sorry. Are you sure they wouldn’t listen to you if you insisted?”
“In the long term, sure. But I just don’t know how long the long term is. In theory, all investigations into the mass murder are the jurisdiction of a task force that has to approve any operation that takes place. But can you imagine us convincing the knuckleheads at the intelligence agencies that they’ve got it wrong? And the magistrate’s not going to make any decisions without clearing it with them.”
“Then that’s tough,” Dante admitted.
“Without factoring in that if we’re wrong, not only am I going to look like a complete asshole, but so will the whole Mobile Squad, as well as my boss.”
“Okay, I get that. Still, I don’t see the problem. You’ll catch those two eventually. There’s lots and lots of you cops chasing after bad guys.”
“When you get the groundwork wrong on an investigation, then you waste a lot of time,” said Colomba. “If it turns out that the two of them have nothing to do with radical Islam, by the time we track them down, they’ll have fled who knows where. Or else they could already have killed someone else. I need something to take to the magistrate, something irrefutable.”
“Good luck with that.”
“I can’t operate from here.”
Dante felt a burning need for a good strong drink, possibly two or three, as it dawned on him just what she was asking him to do. “CC . . . are you seriously telling me that you want me to be your substitute cop?”
“No, I’m just asking you to do what you do best, which is to find people.”
“Missing people, usually, not terrorists.”
“You’re the only one who can do it with the information that we have.”
“Are you buttering me up?”
“A little,” Colomba admitted. “But believe me, if I’ve come looking for you after the way we left it last time, it’s because you’re really my last resort.”
Dante snickered, thawing a little more. “That’s not very flattering.”
“But you’re also my first choice, if I have to say so. Sometimes the two things coincide.”
Dante thought it over for a few seconds, tugged by conflicting emotions. “Well, I could take a look at Hossein’s friends,” he said reluctantly. “Focusing on the ones who aren’t in your colleagues’ sights right now, which is to say the moderates and the atheists. I think both of the ones in the video grew up in Rome, to judge from their accents. But I won’t be certain until I can meet them in person. As for evidence, well, we’ll just have to see what we come up with.”
“Okay, thanks. Seriously.”
“Sure, sure, don’t mention it. So how are we going to proceed?”
“My team will stay with you, they’ll help you with your research, and they’ll protect you, but if the situation gets too complicated, we’ll get you out of it, all right? I don’t want to put you at any risk.”
Dante looked at the Amigos out of the corner of his eye: an incompetent who couldn’t wait for an opportunity to come off looking good; a depressive; and a guy who didn’t know how to keep his hands to himself. And who’s going to protect me from them? he wondered. “Okay, seeing that there’s no other way. I’d have preferred to do it with you.”
“I don’t know how useful I’d be to you right now.” Colomba dried her eyes. “I just had an attack a little while ago.”
The last shreds of Dante’s armor shattered at the sound of tears trembling in her voice. “A panic attack?” he asked in a kind tone.
“I hadn’t had one since the Father died. I was hoping . . . that I was cured. Instead, I couldn’t breathe anymore . . . and I had the usual hallucinations.”
Dante didn’t tell her what he really thought. That you never get better, that once the damage has been done, once the crack has opened, there’s no way to heal it. At least that was how it had been for him; he’d always be damaged goods from now on. “Get out of it, CC,” he said. “Life owes you plenty, cash the check.”
“I can’t. I know how I’d feel if I did that and then something happened,” said Colomba in a small, faint voice. “Put Esposito on, and I’ll tell him the terms we’ve agreed on.”
“Also, could you tell him not to shoot anything that moves? Please.”
“Put him on.”
Dante did so, then stretched out on the car trunk and looked up at the blue sky. Why do I always fall for it? he wondered. It was a rhetorical question; he knew the answer perfectly well.
After the phone call, the Three Amigos went into a huddle for ten minutes or so, then they lined up facing him. “We’re not saying we don’t trust you,” said Guarneri. “We just don’t see how you can help us. That video has been under close examination since last night, and you looked at it for five minutes.”
“Didn’t Deputy Chief Caselli tell you? I’m a magician.”
The three of them stared at him, expressionless. What a third-rate audience, thought Dante. “I’m good at recognizing people. And at finding them,” he said.
“I know that,” said Esposito. “But two guys with their faces covered in a video . . . isn’t that taking it a bit far?”
“Let me tell you a secret. I’m just pathetic when it comes to faces. I have a hard time even remembering them.” It wasn’t entirely true—not since he’d become an adult, anyway—but the story sounded better this way. “You all know that I was kidnapped, right? For eleven years, the only person I ever saw was my jailer, the Father. And he always kept his face covered. I had to decipher his mood from
his body movements, and I got really good at doing it. I got good at seeing things that other people usually don’t.”
“Like what, for instance?” Esposito asked.
“You have a snake on your neck,” Dante said to him.
“Bullshit.”
“Of course it is, but you were instinctively tempted to check. Your conscious mind blocked the act before you could do it, because you didn’t want to look like a fool, but your body has a mind all its own, scattered over the thousands of miles of nerve fibers we’re wrapped in. Our movements, our postures, are influenced by all sorts of factors, such as education, environment, and age, but they’re every bit as unique as our fingerprints. If I met you again tomorrow with a hood over your head, you can rest assured that I would recognize you. In part due to the fact that you tore your meniscus playing soccer.”
Esposito’s jaw dropped. “How did you know that?”
“I can see from the way you walk. And the fact that you did it playing soccer? Well, you don’t exactly strike me as the kind of guy who does rhythmic gymnastics.”
Esposito let out a laugh in spite of himself and spoke to Alberti. “Is he always like this?”
“Always,” Alberti replied, proud to be the one who knew Dante best.
“Okay. We have three or four hours until Santini realizes that we aren’t where we’re supposed to be and summons us back to the base,” said Guarneri. “Is that enough time for you to pull off your miracle?”
My ass, Dante was tempted to reply. But this was his audience, and you never disappoint your audience. “Watch and learn,” he said.
3
In the hour that followed, Dante locked himself in the Amigos’ car, one of the few enclosed places that he could tolerate, provided it was not in motion. Frantically tapping at his laptop with his good hand, cursing at how slow the connection via cell phone Wi-Fi was, he sprawled out on the backseat, one foot shod in the studded Clipper boot and propped against the headrest of the front seat, the other boot-shod foot against the rear windshield.
He lit one cigarette after another, chain-smoking in utter indifference to the gathering fug that was so thick it made his eyes water, and busily trawling his way through the social networks, searching for the few names that the Amigos had given him, based on reports of Hossein’s acquaintances and accomplices from when he was making ends meet by dealing dope, before his religious conversion and adherence to the Centocelle mosque.
None of them resembled the two people in the video. Dante moved on to Hossein himself, using all the vaguely illegal software that he kept in the encrypted section of the hard drive.
His first stop was Facebook, the worldwide phone book. None of the dead man’s sixty friends had a physique compatible with the two self-proclaimed jihadis, so he moved on to a quick read-through and examination of all the content that Hossein had posted online. His Facebook page was that of a true believer. No naked girls, no wisecracks, no games, no links to pornographic groups or meet-ups. Just pictures of friends who did nothing worse than smoke shisha hookah tobacco or go swimming, and veiled women who could only be elderly relatives. Horses galloping. Flowers. Sunsets. Mosques. Koranic verses, the peaceful kind, not the kind that raved about punishing infidels.
At the bottom of the various posts published on the timeline, Dante found an exchange of messages with a cousin dating from two years earlier. Among other things, the cousin asked Hossein why he wasn’t updating his page anymore, and at the end of the post, he included his Web address. Dante copied the URL into his browser and found himself on a page that hadn’t popped up in the first round of search engines. It was a personal page on a website plastered with advertising, abandoned three years earlier, with more pictures of horses and sunsets, and another sura from the Koran about nature and its wonders. No good, he’d have to go even further back.
Alberti opened the driver’s-side door and was buffeted by a cloud of cigarette smoke. Waving his hand in front of his face, he took a seat behind the wheel. “Everything all right, Signor Torre?”
Dante looked up in annoyance. “So did you draw the short straw?”
“Excuse me?”
Dante rolled his eyes and then explained in the tone of voice you use with small children: “Did your partners send you to check up on me?”
“Why, no, of course not,” Alberti lied. “Can I ask what you’re doing?”
“I’m looking for someone Hossein no longer hangs out with. That’s one of the advantages of the Internet, it keeps everything.”
“Maybe they weren’t friends.”
“According to what the imam said before dying, Hossein had recognized them from the video. You’d have to be pretty close friends to do that.”
“Or else someone like you.”
“You’ve improved in my absence.”
Alberti’s freckles stood out more sharply on his cheeks. “So have you found anything?”
Dante turned the computer around to show him the page of the website. “Do you know what the source codes of a Web page are?”
“The instructions that give it a shape or a color and so on.”
Dante nodded approvingly. “You’re earning points upon points today. Source codes contain an assortment of information that isn’t visualized onscreen. Like the name of the creator, the program used to design the page—”
“And was there anything useful for us?”
Dante’s eyes glittered. “In our specific case, an old email address for Hossein, from a provider long since dead and buried. I’m unable to see the inbox because I’d have to turn to the Postal Police, but let’s see what pops up if we toss it into the search engines of the social networks, maybe we’ll find an account.” One of his vaguely illegal little programs allowed him to check them all at once, including the defunct or semi-defunct networks.
They had their answer just a few seconds later, and it was quite a surprise. “Myspace, well, lookie here,” said Dante. Myspace was the great pioneer of Web 1.0, and it was still avidly used by a hardcore remnant of music lovers.
“What a coincidence,” said Alberti. “I’m on Myspace, too.”
Dante handed him the laptop. “Go in with your user name; that way I don’t have to create a new one just for me, and I can rest my hand.”
Alberti did as he was asked. His page was called Rookie Blue, and it contained a hundred or so musical samples that he had composed late at night. He continued to think of being a policeman as a temporary gig and believed that sooner or later, he’d be able to devote himself to composing as a full-time activity. Composing but not performing; he was embarrassed to be seen onstage. Alberti clicked on one of the pieces, and the electronic music filled the car. “Do you like it?”
Dante was horrified by the music. “Weren’t we in a hurry?”
“We can leave it playing in the background.”
“No.”
Alberti turned the music off and went onto Hossein’s page. “He hasn’t logged in for four years,” he read.
More or less since he’d had someone take the picture of him with the Black Panther beret that was decorating his page, decided Dante. “His old life,” he said.
“Why didn’t he delete it?” Alberti asked.
“He probably didn’t even remember he had it. He signed up with an email address that’s dead now, and he never even saw the alerts from Myspace. What else is there?”
“Well, let’s see,” said Alberti, and he started scrolling down through the page while Dante sprawled out even more expansively, lighting the last cigarette in the pack: it wasn’t bad having an assistant. “Aside from the picture of himself, Hossein put three dance mixes online. Do you want to hear them?”
“Absolutely not.”
“And he’s linked to a bunch of DJs. Arabs, Americans . . . should I check them out?”
“Only if we’re really desperate. Any Italians or anyone living in Italy?”
“Mmm . . . three or four.”
“Let’s take a look at th
em.”
“Two of them are DJs I know. Not super-famous or anything, but they’re good. Do you want—”
“No. What else?”
“One of them is a dilettante. He hasn’t even put up a track to listen to. There’s just a video from last year. He lives in Rome.”
“Let’s see,” said Dante, sitting up.
Alberti clicked on the video, which had been filmed by a cell phone with a shaky hand: it showed a dozen or so people dancing to techno music at what looked like a private party in an apartment. A slender young man in his early twenties was writhing in front of the camera lens, with a DJ’s headphones on his head and a bottle of beer in one hand, not very halal at all. Dante ran the video forward slowly, concentrating on the young man’s hands and head.“That might be him,” he said.
Alberti straightened up so quickly that he bumped his head on the car roof. “And that’s how you tell me?”
“It might, I said. Try to find out who he is.”
Alberti practically jumped out of the car and went running, and soon the Three Amigos were glued to their phones, calling in favors from colleagues near and far. They were able to learn that the dancing DJ, who called himself Musta on the page, was in real life Mohammed Faouzi, the son of Hamza Faouzi and Maria Addolorata Piombini, an Italian citizen born in Rome twenty-five years ago. He had priors for a brawl while in a state of intoxication, possession of narcotics with intent to deal, and tagging his alias on a city building. No suspicious associates flagged—no common criminals, much less Islamic extremists.
Dante studied the mug shots on his iPad.
“Are you convinced now?” asked Esposito.
“For now, I know as much as I did before,” Dante replied.
With the help of social services, they found out where Musta worked; the Narcotics Squad filled them in on where he’d been picked up for dealing hashish; and it turned out both locations were in an outlying neighborhood known as Malavoglia. The four of them crammed into the squad car that reeked of cigarette smoke and drove across Rome with the siren blaring and the windows wide open, so that Dante could feel the wind on his face, in spite of the fact that the weather was looking nasty. He kept his eyes shut and both hands clenched around his seat belt, whining whenever the car went faster than twenty-five miles an hour, and forcing the others to pull over every couple of miles so he could stretch his legs and calm down a little. In the meantime, he studied Musta’s presence on the social networks, increasingly doubtful that the young man could have ever so much as dreamed of killing anyone. He couldn’t read people’s minds, especially not off a photograph on Facebook, but still, he couldn’t imagine this kid pushing a remote-control button to activate a cyanide-spewing device.
Kill the Angel Page 8