Kill the Angel

by Sandrone Dazieri

  Spinelli locked eyes with her for a long moment, then screwed the cap back onto her fountain pen. “We’ll see you tomorrow at the district attorney’s office. I’ll have your deposition typed up; that way you can sign it.”

  “When can I go back on duty?”

  “Not until the investigation is over, I’m afraid. Use the time available to think about the fact that there are positions on the police force that don’t entail the use of violence.”

  Colomba felt her cheeks start to burn red. “Are you trying to archive me?”

  Spinelli smiled, and Colomba didn’t like that smile one bit. “I’m just asking you to think it over, at least until the preliminary investigation magistrate has issued his finding.” The magistrate stood up and extended her hand. “Get some rest.”

  You go fuck yourself, thought Colomba. She shook hands and stood still, watching the magistrate go and waiting until she and her bodyguards had left the building, just as a group of Middle Eastern visitors in civilian attire entered, following the chief of police like a line of chicks trailing after a mother hen. They took the stairs that led down to the basement mosque, and Colomba, her curiosity piqued, followed them, halting at the threshold to the gymnasium. The police chief started to explain the mechanics of the shootout, his voice echoing off the cement ceiling. The Middle Eastern visitors nodded without uttering a word.

  Colomba turned to leave, and as she did so, she bumped into a cop in a dark blue tactical uniform who had appeared behind her. He was athletic, in his early forties, and had a face that seemed typecast for a razor commercial. “Excuse me,” she said, moving around him.

  “How are you?” the man asked.

  Only when she heard his voice did Colomba realize that this was the likable NOA officer, now without ski mask and armor, and she stopped. “I didn’t recognize you,” she said.

  “That’s why we wear ski masks. But I’m off duty now, or I practically am. By the way”—he held out his hand—“Deputy Chief Leo Bonaccorso. I already know your name . . . Colomba, right?”

  “That’s right. Did they question you, too?”

  “Just finished a short while ago with one of Spinelli’s assistants.”

  “Did he tell you that I fucked up?”

  “No, he said you noticed something that we ought to have seen for ourselves.” Leo shook his head. “I don’t know how it happened. And believe me, we’ve found Mafiosi who’d tucked themselves away in some absurd hiding places.”

  Colomba shrugged. “From a Mafioso, you expect it; here, not so much.” And that hole was already here the last time I visited the place. Another error they’ll lob in my direction. She pointed at the civilians taking the tour. “Who are those people?”

  “Delegations from some of the more moderate mosques in the province,” Leo replied.

  “Operation Transparency . . .”

  “That’s for your benefit, too. That way they’ll understand that you really had no alternative.”

  Colomba bowed her head. There was a moment of silence and discomfort, which Leo broke intentionally. “Were you going to talk to the people from the Forensic Squad?”

  “I’ve already talked to them, I just wanted to . . . understand what was going on.” She forced herself to smile at him. “I need to go.”

  “Would you give me your card? Maybe later, I’ll call you to find out how you’re doing.”

  “I left them at home. Sorry, I really have to—”

  Leo nodded and let her pass. She managed to slip out without seeing Santini, who was pacing around inside the building with a grim look on his face. It was only when she got out to the street that she remembered the Three Amigos had the official car. She didn’t think it was a good idea to hitch a ride with another squad car, so she headed off down the main street, taking care not to get too close to either the journalists or the demonstrators. It was getting dark, and she looked pretty different from the pictures of her that were regularly broadcast on the TV news, but you never knew. As she walked, she called Dante on Snapchat. “Tell me the latest,” she said.

  “Okay . . . we missed the boy by a hair. According to the neighbors, he parked his scooter about an hour ago, but he didn’t go upstairs. Maybe he realized that we were in his apartment waiting for him. And before you scold me again for breaking down the door, I’ll remind you that we didn’t have time to do a stakeout.”

  “I know. Any idea where he went?”

  “We’re going to try a friend’s house.”

  “What friend?”

  “His good buddy. The one who got him involved in some ridiculous job that I’m pretty sure has something to do with the train.”

  Colomba felt her legs almost give under her. “Are you sure?”

  “Right now the only thing I’m sure of is that I feel like throwing up because of the way Alberti drives.”

  “Don’t do anything without checking with me,” said Colomba drily. “And let me know where we’re supposed to meet.”

  “I’ll send you a Snapchat.”

  While the Three Amigos overwhelmed him with questions and objections, Dante wrote an address on his hand, photographed it, and sent it to Colomba. He didn’t know whether someone really was eavesdropping on their conversations, but considering the sheer number of crimes he was committing, he decided it was time to take a few precautions.

  Colomba saw the usual little yellow ghost dancing on her screen, glanced at the picture, and gave the address to the taxi driver she’d miraculously been able to flag down. A second later, the message deleted itself, because Dante had set a self-destruct timer on it. For a second, Colomba felt as if she were on Mission: Impossible, which Dante loved in a way that made no sense to her. There were lots of things about him that she didn’t understand.

  The address took her to a piazza lined with shops that were closed. At the center of the piazza stood the ugliest fountain that Colomba had ever seen, half-buried in garbage and covered with obscene graffiti and spray-painted tags, lit only by a streetlamp that seemed to be on the verge of flickering out. The Amigos were waiting on one of the side roads, next to the dumpsters and a bar with the metal roller blinds pulled down. Their cigarettes looked like so many fireflies. She went over to them. “What’s the situation?” she asked.

  They updated her on the things she didn’t know yet, especially about Farid, whose last name was Youssef. He was born in Tunis and had arrived in Italy with his family at the age of four, later becoming an Italian citizen. He had a criminal record with convictions for illegal possession of a weapon, fraud, burglary, and one for rape that had earned him a six-year sentence, still being appealed but almost sure to be upheld. Otherwise, his record was a litany of temporary jobs and legal complaints, almost always for small-time con games. Considering he wasn’t even thirty, it was quite a CV.

  “He lives in there,” said Esposito, pointing at one of the shops with its roller blind pulled down, under a portico. “He’s built himself a nice little home in there, in violation of the housing code. But we don’t know if he’s in there now.”

  “The metal roller blind is welded shut,” said Guarneri.

  “Right inside the main entrance, there’s a secondary door to the shop,” Alberti added. “If we go that way, they can’t see us from inside, and more important, they can’t get away.”

  Colomba studied the store some more. The darkened shopwindow made her uneasy. “Where’s Dante?” she asked.

  Esposito pointed to the car, parked at a distance of fifty feet or so. Colomba went over to it and peeked inside. Dante was in the backseat, bent over his laptop, scrolling through photographs and diagrams of terror attacks, frantically typing with his good hand and chatting cheerfully with a heavyset young man dressed like a rapper, who was handcuffed to the steering wheel. Colomba realized that this was the wanted man’s brother. Dante was much skinnier and more worn-looking than the last time Colomba had seen him, but he had the same feverish gleam in his gaze.

  The last time they’d s
een each other had been in February, in the suite at the Hotel Impero where Dante was living; it was a five-star hotel in the center of town, and it cost an arm and a leg. She had gone to take him the results of the DNA tests on parents or other relatives of missing children in Italy. Or rather, the lack of results: none of the samples had matched his DNA.

  “You shouldn’t be upset about this,” Colomba had told him. “Your parents might very well have reported you missing, but they might have died before they had an opportunity to give a DNA sample. It’s been over thirty-five years since you were kidnapped, and maybe they didn’t have any living relatives. I’ll do a further check to see if my colleagues have left anything out.”

  Dante hadn’t even bothered to look at her. In a black leather jacket and a pair of combat boots, curled up on the sofa next to a cold, empty fireplace, he looked like an overgrown punk rocker. At dinner he’d left everything untouched but the wine, and he’d barely spoken. “You can check and recheck twenty times, nothing’ll change,” he’d replied grimly, without taking his eyes off the sky outside the window overlooking the terrace. Even if there were skylights and large windows, sometimes Dante still felt like he was suffocating. “My identity isn’t going to come out,” he’d said. “The Father did a good job of erasing all traces of who I really was. Almost a good job, seeing that I stayed alive and he didn’t.”

  “Has it ever occurred to you that you might not be Italian?” Colomba had asked.

  “My brother had no trace of a foreign accent when he called me. And I’m good at recognizing accents, even the faintest one, even if they’re whispering the way he was.”

  Colomba had stifled her annoyance as Dante brought back up the chief topic of their conversations. The phone call had come in immediately after the completion of the investigation into the Father, placed to Dante’s cell phone from a phone booth. It had been impossible to trace the caller, and Colomba and the magistrate had agreed that it was nothing more than a prank call in exceedingly poor taste. That had been everyone’s conclusion except Dante’s. “The accent of a man you talked to on the phone for two minutes, never to hear from him again, nor had he ever reached out to you before that.”

  “It was my brother. And he has all the answers that I need,” Dante had replied, staring into the distance.

  “The Father had just died, and you’d come close to dying yourself,” Colomba had said. “If he’d told you he was Santa Claus, you would have believed him.”

  “I’m not that suggestible.”

  “Then tell me why he would have called you after all these years. Not to tell you anything, just that he existed and was glad that you were alive.”

  “To warn me.”

  “Against what?”

  “I don’t have any idea.”

  “Maybe you don’t have a brother, either.”

  “He wasn’t lying. I’m good at spotting lies.”

  “But you’re not infallible! Sometimes you fixate on an idea and you don’t want to listen to reason.”

  “That’s because often I’m right. Almost always, I’d say, compared with my counterparts.”

  “Including me,” Colomba had said, putting a good face on things.

  Dante had looked at her with a grin, which this time was very unfunny and very cruel. “Especially with you, CC.”

  Colomba had done her best not to get irritated. Dante had one of the most brilliant minds she knew, but he was always on the verge of a psychotic break. She didn’t touch him, knowing that he wouldn’t appreciate it, but she did speak to him in an understanding tone. “Dante, I know this is hard.”

  “Hard? We saved ten kids who had been locked in a shipping container for years! There ought to be a line out the door to help me find out who I am. Instead, the only people standing outside my door are the ones who want to hire me to find their cat. I can’t even go back to where I live.”

  “So you want to be treated like a hero?”

  “Why not? Don’t we deserve it?”

  “We were treated that way for a month. Settle for it.” In those few weeks, Colomba’s phone had never stopped ringing. The policewoman on administrative leave who had saved all the children was a sought-after guest on every television show. She had always turned down those invitations, just as she had turned down the offers of an espresso at cafés from strangers, or discounts at stores. She wanted to move on, to get past it. In contrast, Colomba realized, Dante was stuck at that point.

  “I don’t know what life I’m supposed to live now, CC. I don’t know why my brother never called back, I don’t know why there are no matches between me and any other missing child. All I know is that it’s no accident. Someone’s still covering the Father’s tracks.”

  Colomba had leaped to her feet in exasperation, knocking off one of the high heels of the only pair of fancy shoes she owned, and which she stubbornly insisted on wearing every time Dante invited her to dinner at his hotel. “Dante, there’s no evidence of any kind to corroborate your ideas. Nothing! You were kidnapped in the seventies, what good does it do anyone to keep the secret now?”

  “Then why doesn’t whoever murdered Hoffa confess? It’s been forty years since then, and his body still hasn’t been found. Or the passenger plane that went down off Ustica. Who shot it down? Why won’t they tell us?” Dante had retorted in the most annoying tone of voice he could muster.

  “Those things are different.”

  “Of course, because this is about me.” He had looked at her with the expression he wore before packing himself full of pills to help him sleep, or else to keep him up all night. “I don’t know why they would do it, and I don’t know why my identity is so important. I know I’m right. But I don’t know how to prove it.”

  “Maybe you just want to be right, Dante.”

  “Why? So I can give some meaning to what happened?”

  “For example.”

  Dante had shaken his head. “Cracker-barrel psychology. The truth is that you’d agree with me if not for this damned need you feel to get back into uniform.”

  Fuck, so he knows, she’d thought. “Who told you that?”

  Dante had waved his bad hand dismissively. “Do you think I need someone to tell me? I’ll give you a hint: your aperitifs with Curcio are getting to be a little too frequent. When were you planning to tell me about that?”

  “Tonight, but you were already in a bad mood.”

  “And you know I wouldn’t approve.”

  “Dante, it’s My. Own. Fucking. Life. I don’t need you to approve or disapprove,” she’d blurted out, unable to hold her tongue. But behind that irritation was a sense of guilt. She knew that Dante would see her decision as a kind of betrayal. “What do you think I’m supposed to do? Be a housewife?”

  “Go ahead and take orders from the same people who tried to sandbag the whole thing.”

  “They’re not the same people.”

  “Upstairs they are. The ones who make the decisions are dirty, and they’re in collusion.”

  “There is no upstairs, Dante.”

  Dante had gotten up to make himself an espresso. It was something that he did ritualistically, hand-grinding the correct number of coffee beans, cleaning the machine every time. He sent for different varieties of coffee from all over the world, and the places he lived invariably smelled like roasteries. “When I was certain that the Father was alive and everyone else insisted he was dead, do you know how many times people told me I was paranoid?”

  “You can be paranoid and still be right sometimes.”

  He’d compressed his lips. “You want to believe that everything’s fine because you’re too cowardly to call your life into question,” he’d said in an unusually vicious tone. “You’re just as obtuse as all cops are.”

  Colomba had picked up the broken heel and headed out the door. From her car, she had tossed the shoes into the first trash can and driven home barefoot. In the days that followed, they had exchanged messages, made peace, but neither of them had been able to
overcome the barrier that had sprung up between them. Colomba, for that matter, had other problems on her hands with her return to duty and the uneasiness that she felt about her fellow cops’ attitudes toward her.

  She felt like someone who’d recovered from a fatal illness only to return to ordinary life around people who’d already mourned her and moved on. When she felt lonely, something that happened frequently, she sometimes thought of calling Dante or just going over to the hotel, but she could never do it, because she was afraid Dante wouldn’t understand. And so the months had passed and the wounds had festered.

  ° ° °

  Dante saw her through the car window and hopped out, as agile as a rubber toy. The old disagreements seemed to have been forgotten. “CC!” he shouted. “Your hair is longer . . . and you’ve put on, what, two or three pounds?”

  “It’s just the clothing,” she lied. Since she’d gone back on duty, her diet had gone straight to hell. “Whereas you’re skinny as a needle.”

  “I live for art and I live for love. Shall we hug, shall we shake hands? Punch each other in the nose?”

  Colomba wrapped her arms around him impulsively, and it was like hugging an electric cord. “It’s good to see you,” she murmured.

  He felt as if the air around him had suddenly lightened, as if a vise he hadn’t even realized existed had just loosened. “Same goes for me. I’ve missed you,” he said sincerely.

  Colomba couldn’t manage to say that she felt the same way. “What were you looking at?” she asked instead.

  “Just a few updates on international terrorism. I’ve discovered I know too little about it. Did you know that the claim of responsibility is a collage?” said Dante, all excited.

  “A collage?”

  “A collage of communiqués and martyrdom videos from recent years. As well as an ISIS propaganda video, the line about women and crosses.”

  “Maybe they just copied.”

  “Or else someone was curating every slightest detail to make it look credible. And cover up their real intentions.”

  “Let’s keep our feet on the ground, Dante. We’re here to arrest two murderers. They’ll tell us why they did it and how deeply they’re involved.”