Kill the Angel

by Sandrone Dazieri

  Spinelli chose this moment to climb the stairs, dragging her matronly weight. “Deputy Chief, can we proceed?” she asked Colomba.

  Colomba thought fast. “Okay. But no more raids or searches without me, all right? Two hours, then we’re done,” she said in a low voice, then hung up, leaving Dante saying goodbye into empty air. Colomba followed the magistrate to the alcohol-free bar, where they sat down at a café table, after evicting two of the special troops.

  Dante lit another cigarette and leaned against the railing with his eyes closed. Two hours isn’t much time, he told himself. If he was right about Musta, though, maybe two hours was even too long. It’s a well-known fact that the little fish always wind up in the frying pan.

  5

  It was the little kid who had warned Musta, the neighbors’ five-year-old son. Musta had met him at the door to the underground garage after chaining up his scooter. The boy was playing with a plastic toy cell phone. The child had muttered something that sounded like: two men.

  “What did you say, you little shit?” asked Musta, forcing himself to come back down to Planet Earth. He was so scared, he was struggling to keep his thoughts coherent.

  “Two men were looking for you.”

  Musta had a surge of acid in his mouth that tasted of beer. “Which men?” he stammered.

  “I don’t know. They have some thingies on their tummies.”

  The child described them, and Musta understood that he was talking about bulletproof vests. “Are they still here?”

  “Dunno.”

  “Don’t tell anyone that you saw me,” said Musta, then went back where he’d come from. On foot, though. The scooter had a license plate, even if it was in his mother’s name.

  He ran across the courtyard, certain that a hail of bullets would put an end to his suffering any second. But nothing happened, and he reached the street. He forced himself to believe that the child had made it all up, but deep down he knew it was true.

  He was wanted by the police. The worst had happened.

  Allahumma inni a’udhu bika minal khubthi wal khaba’ith, Allah, protect me from filthy things. It was a phrase that his father had taught him when he was small, something he was supposed to say before going into a public restroom, but Musta found it particularly suitable for that moment. Even though it was late. He’d already done the filthy thing.

  Musta reluctantly threw away his cell phone, then took the street that led away from the row of apartment houses to the other side of the quarter, pulling the hood of his sweatshirt down over his eyes till it touched his nose. He thought of his father, wherever that asshole might be. His father’s unbudgeable certainty that they would all be judged after they died; the fact that he, Musta, wished that, like his father, he could believe in a higher being capable of rescuing him. He’d even tried to pray that morning, but the gestures had seemed cold and impersonal. He wasn’t like his brother, who even observed Ramadan. He wanted to be forgiven, but he didn’t think that was a possibility.

  Musta continued walking down the less frequented streets, avoiding the gazes of everyone who crossed paths with him, until he found himself looking at the Dinosaurs. They weren’t real dinosaurs, of course, even though that’s what Musta and his friends had always called them. They were the enormous skeletons of two apartment buildings that had begun construction years ago and never been completed, a place where boys would take their girlfriends at night for a quick hand job or, if they were really lucky, to actually fuck. Not far away was where Farid lived.

  His friend.

  The man who had dragged him into the nightmare.

  He lived in a bathroom-decor store that had long ago gone out of business, which he had taken over when the owner died. Now it contained an IKEA sofa bed with very squeaky springs, an old television set, and a radio with a CD player that always jammed. “I’m going to buy everything brand-new now,” Farid had told him just two days ago. “I want a sixty-inch television, the kind with the curved screens that I saw at Trony, and wireless speakers to hook up via Internet.”

  “I don’t have Internet at home,” Musta had replied.

  Farid had winked at him. “I’ll have it installed for you with the money from this job.”

  The job. Exactly. Just a video, Farid had said. It’ll be fun. A real laugh.

  How could he have failed to catch a whiff of that con job? What is my mother going to say when she finds out? he wondered. What is everyone going to say? There were some who’d considered him a hero, he knew that, but he was really just an asshole heading for a disastrous ending.

  Allahumma inni a’udhu bika minal khubthi wal khaba’ith.

  The bathroom-decor store was on the ground floor of an apartment building built in the sixties, its walls now swollen with dampness; it overlooked a piazza lined with a small portico covered with graffiti. Musta walked through the beat-up wooden front door next to the plate-glass window, which was now painted black, and continued down the cement hallway that led into the building’s courtyard. Midway down the hallway was the store’s back door, the only one that still worked, because Farid had welded shut the metal roller blinds in front.

  Musta knocked; he was certain none of the very few neighbors would be able to see him, in part because the lights in the courtyard had been burnt out for years. There was nothing stirring inside the shop, and he stepped aside to peer through the pane of frosted glass. The glass was designed to block prying gazes, but he had learned that if he rubbed some spit on it, he could get a glimpse of the interior, as if through a fish’s eye. In the fading light of sunset that filtered through the blacked-out plate-glass window, it seemed to him there was no one in the room. Then, scrunching his nose against the glass to increase his field of view, he caught a glimpse of Farid’s head poking over the back of the old office chair, a super-heavy piece of furniture that the two of them had carried from the dumpster where they’d found it. Now it was turned to face the wall, as if Farid were being punished. Impossible to think Farid hadn’t heard him knocking.

  Son of a bitch, he thought. He wants to just leave me to stew in the shit. As anger took the place of fear, Musta opened the door, walked in, and closed it behind him. Farid didn’t move, continuing to stare at the opposite wall.

  “What the fuck are you doing? Why weren’t you answering me?” asked Musta.

  Farid’s head shuddered, but there still wasn’t any sort of reaction. Musta started to worry that his friend was too fucked up to answer, so he walked over and gave the back of the chair a good hard shove. “Would you get it through your head once and for all that the cops have identified us! Say something, goddamn it to hell!”

  The chair swung around on its hydraulic shaft, and Musta found himself face-to-face with Farid. He saw that the man was sobbing helplessly, his mouth twisted in a grimace of terror. “I’m sorry . . . I didn’t want to . . . Forgive me,” he said through sobs. He was bound to the armrests with duct tape.

  Before Musta could do anything, he was grabbed from behind in a painful grip around his throat. “I’m glad you decided to come by. You saved me the trouble of coming to find you,” whispered a woman’s voice, then Musta felt a stab of pain fill his cranium. As everything faded into shadows, he had time to think only that he hadn’t been able to tell his brother goodbye.

  6

  Mario couldn’t stand watching the whole video. He turned his eyes away from the iPad. “Turn it off, please,” he muttered.

  “Your brother is the one on the left, but you already figured that out for yourself,” Dante said without stopping the video. Time was running out, Musta’s time, but his as well. His forehead was beaded with perspiration, and he felt as if the walls were closing in on him.

  “I don’t believe it. There must be some explanation.”

  “The only one who can provide it is Musta. That’s why we have to find him.”

  The young man’s voice turned shrill again, the way it did every time his emotions got the better of him. “You want to ki
ll him.”

  “No one will harm a hair on his head if he turns himself in.”

  “People always wind up in the shit, and no one gives a damn. Someone already shot an imam today.”

  That’s exactly why we’re here, my good young man, Dante thought. He turned off the video and forced the young man to look him in the face by gently lifting his chin. “Mario, I promise you I’ll do everything I can to help your brother, but you have to help me.”

  Mario seemed to be on the verge of saying something, then he compressed his lips and bowed his head.

  “Anything can help us. Please.”

  The young man’s eyes darted toward the open window that looked out over the forest of TV antennas on the apartment building next door. It was a very rapid and involuntary movement, but it was all Dante needed. He called Alberti. “Check the window, please,” he told him when Alberti came in.

  “Guarneri already did.”

  “Not inside. Outside.”

  Alberti stiffened. “What if I fall?”

  “I’ll ask one of your partners. Out of the three of you, I have to hope at least one knows how to climb.”

  Alberti didn’t fall. He reached up as far as he could, keeping a grip on the radiator, but he found nothing until Dante forced him to actually climb up onto the windowsill. One of the cement bricks that covered the outside wall was loose. Underneath it was a plastic bag with some grass and a wad of fifty-euro notes that added up to more than two thousand euros.

  Alberti hefted the bag. “At least ten grams. Enough to put you in prison,” he said to Mario.

  “Let me have it for a second, please,” said Dante.

  Alberti handed it over, and Dante tossed it out the window.

  “Hey!” Alberti shouted indignantly.

  “It’s a stupid law that prohibits possession of a vegetable,” said Dante. “And Mario here and I are trying to work together. Aren’t we?”

  The young man nodded without much conviction. “It was strictly for personal use,” he murmured.

  “What about the money?” Alberti asked. “Also for personal use?”

  “It’s not mine. It belongs to Musta.”

  “Money he made by dealing.”

  “No.”

  Dante studied him. True, he decided. “With the work he does, there’s no money left over.”

  “He did an extra job,” Mario said reluctantly.

  True. “What job?”

  “I don’t know. He wouldn’t tell me.”

  True. “Do you know who gave him this job?”

  “No.”

  “Bullshit,” Dante panted, by now short on oxygen. “You know who it was, but you don’t want to tell me because it’s a friend of yours, or else because you’re afraid you’re going to get your brother even deeper into trouble than he is now.” He didn’t take his eyes off the young man once. “Let’s play a game. You don’t have to tell me what his name is. Just think about it.”

  “I don’t know—”

  “Hssst,” Dante interrupted him. “Just think, and that’s all. I know you’re doing it. Now listen. Does his name start with A? With B?”

  Dante went on until he reached the letter F. He stopped. “Okay, it starts with F. Check among Musta’s friends to see who it could be,” he told Alberti, who had stood there listening in amazement. Guarneri was watching from the hallway, fascinated. He felt as if he were watching a snake charmer.

  “There’s no need to check,” said Mario with a note of defeat in his voice. “His name is Farid. But he’s no friend of mine.”

  “You don’t like him.”

  “My brother talks about him as if he’s Almighty God come down to earth, but he’s an idiot.” He shook his head, waving his dreadlocks in the air. “And he’s filled his head with bullshit. Musta didn’t used to drink or eat pork. Now he doesn’t care anymore.”

  “So he’s no good, this Farid.”

  “That’s right, but Musta swore to me that the job was clean.”

  True. Or at least he’s sure of it, thought Dante. “Do you have a picture of him?” he asked.

  “In my cell phone. Your partners took it away from me.”

  Dante got the phone back and had them take the young man’s handcuffs off so he could use it. None of the cops tried to prevent him or objected, making it clear to Dante that the imminent threat of torture was over for now.

  Mario scrolled through his photos, extracting one with his brother and some other guy between them: curly hair, light-colored eyes, skin darker than Musta’s, an inch or so taller, and a few years older.

  A minute later, Dante would rush down the stairs and out into the open air at last, taking the steps so fast that he stumbled repeatedly, cursing as he descended, tears streaming from his eyes. Five minutes later, he’d be lying on his back in the mangy grass of the little park with his face turned up to the dark sky. But for a fleeting instant, he felt a wave of excitement so powerful that it canceled every unpleasant sensation, every shred of fear.

  Farid was the second man in the video.

  7

  Colomba waited for Angela Spinelli to finish writing in her notebook with her fountain pen. It was maddening how slowly she wrote, her headful of white hair with pale blue highlights bowed over the table in the alcohol-free bar. “I think I’ve told you everything there was to say,” she said impatiently.

  The magistrate leaned back in her chair, making the backrest creak. “There’s a question that I’ve been wanting to ask you ever since you returned to active duty, Deputy Chief Caselli. It doesn’t strictly pertain to the investigation, but there’s something I need to understand.”

  As long as you hurry up, because I’ve got work to do. Colomba couldn’t keep from thinking about Dante and the Three Amigos and the messes they could make. “Go right ahead.”

  “Why are you still on duty?”

  Colomba maintained an impassive expression. “I skipped the end of my shift.”

  “Don’t try to pretend you don’t understand the question, because I’m older than you are.”

  “This is my job, we’re in the middle of an emergency, there’s not much more to say.”

  “There’d be a lot more to say, actually. You did an inspection in a train full of dead bodies, you ran the risk of dying of gas inhalation, and instead of taking some time off for yourself, you chose to go back on duty. Doesn’t it strike you that you’re overdoing it a little?”

  “Are you calling me a workaholic?”

  “Not exactly,” said Spinelli without going into any further detail. “This isn’t the first time you’ve used your weapon.”

  “No.”

  “How many shootouts did you have before being transferred to Rome?”

  Colomba compressed her lips. “Just one. I shot at an armed robber when I was in Drug Enforcement in Palermo.”

  “After that, in the course of just one year, you were involved in two criminal explosions—one of which took the life of Rovere, who was at the time the chief of the Mobile Squad—and in the shootout during the liberation of Dante Torre, where two other criminals lost their lives and an accomplice was wounded. Then there was today.”

  Colomba’s eyes turned as dark as swamp water. “What are you driving at, Signora?”

  “That there was a watershed in your life. Before and after the case of the Father. And that the policewoman you used to be now has to deal with the policewoman you are today. I can’t imagine that anyone could survive the kind of traumas you’ve been subjected to without carrying that weight. A weight that you seem to overlook.”

  “I’m not overlooking it. But it hasn’t blurred my good judgment. I’ve been examined and evaluated.”

  “Taking even just one human being’s life is traumatic and unspeakable. There are first-rate psychologists at the service of the Rome police department, but you haven’t even hinted at wanting to ask for their help.”

  So that all my fellow cops could assume I’m crazy. That’s the last thing I need. “Beca
use I don’t need that help.”

  Spinelli grimaced in disappointment. “Do you know where the man you killed got that shotgun, Deputy Chief?”

  Colomba was caught off guard by the change in subject. “No.”

  “About six months ago, a man who attended this center murdered his wife. He confessed to the crime and was sentenced for second-degree murder after an expedited trial. The shotgun belonged to him, legally owned, registered to his name.”

  Colomba was startled by the news. “I performed that arrest. But I didn’t know about—”

  “Did you execute a search in the murderer’s apartment?” the other woman interrupted.

  “Yes. There was no shotgun, otherwise it would have been confiscated.”

  “In fact, it remained hidden all this time in the cubbyhole in the mosque. Did you order a search for it?”

  Colomba rummaged through her memory. Had she? The man had strangled his wife to death; could it be that she hadn’t even thought of checking whether he possessed any firearms? “I don’t remember. I’d have to review the reports.”

  “It’s only been six months.”

  “I don’t remember, I told you!” Colomba had raised her voice and made an effort to be calm again. “I had just returned to duty, it was a pretty . . .” She stopped.

  “. . . difficult time?”

  Colomba dug her fingernails into her palms: the last thing she needed was a fight with the magistrate. “I was still getting used to being back.”

  “But you might have made a mistake. Precisely because you needed to get used to being back.”

  “I can’t rule it out entirely,” said Colomba. “It wouldn’t be the first mistake I’ve made, and it won’t be the last. But I didn’t make any mistakes today.”