Kill the Angel

by Sandrone Dazieri

  “Okay. Ready to do another illegal search?”

  Colomba chewed on her lower lip. “I’m afraid not.”

  “Why not?” Dante asked in astonishment.

  “I don’t know the situation inside the shop. They could be waiting for us armed and ready to shoot. We need to wait for the special forces.”

  “Which means you’re willing to give up this chance to talk with the suspects?”

  “If I can put them behind bars, I’ll settle for that. After all, we’re pretty sure by now that it’s them, aren’t we?”

  “CC . . . will you let me make one attempt to figure out if the way is clear?”

  “What kind of attempt?”

  Instead of answering, Dante knocked on the driver’s-side window. Mario rolled it down. “Does Farid have a computer?”

  “Yes. He downloads movies and plays World of Warcraft.”

  “So he has a Wi-Fi connection.”

  “He just freeloads off the neighbors’ Wi-Fi.”

  “Fine. Give me the iPad.” The boy did as he was asked.

  “Do you mind me asking what you’ve got in mind?” asked Colomba, starting to get annoyed.

  Dante grinned his grin. “You’re not going to like it.”

  8

  The vaguely illegal software that Dante was using to nose around the Internet came from a very specific source: Santiago. In his old life, Santiago had been a member of the Latino gang the Cuchillos, one of the crews associated with the Italian branch of the notorious Mara Salvatrucha, also known as MS-13: he’d sold drugs, stabbed and shot people, and been sent to prison twice, once for dealing and once for murder. The second time, Dante had saved Santiago’s hide by tracking down the witnesses who had gotten him off the hook, which meant that Dante could now turn to the ex-gang member for his professional services.

  In his new life, Santiago, now almost thirty, no longer trafficked in cocaine. With the assistance of a handful of former gang members, he ran a thriving business in data. He didn’t always steal that data; sometimes he was hired to build secure systems for other criminals—protected computers, interception-proof cell phones, and so on—but he spent most of his time trying to penetrate security systems without being detected.

  When Dante sent him a Snapchat, Santiago replied immediately and established a secure communication channel via Skype. Dante took the call on his iPad using the same neighbor’s Wi-Fi that Youssef used. To capture the connection, Dante had had to creep close to the shop, but he was invisible in the darkness.

  “What’s up, hermano? Why in such a hurry?” Santiago asked grimly when he appeared on the screen. He had a pronounced but completely fake South American accent: his grandparents were Colombian, but Santiago had been born and raised in Rome, exactly the same as his parents. In the background, Dante could see two of his fellow gangsters smoking something milky white out of a plastic soda bottle. He guessed they were freebasing. They were all heavily tattooed and wore jackets with threatening phrases embroidered on them, and they were showered with multicolored lights from a garland of LED bulbs overhead. They were on the roof of the apartment building where Santiago lived. He’d set up a sort of hacking studio with a satellite connection. Up the stairwells and on many of the landings, crews of little kids stood watch. When the police came around to check up on them, they alerted Santiago and his confederates, who could squirrel all that equipment out of sight in the blink of an eye.

  “I need a quick job done,” said Dante in a low voice, speaking into the microphone of his earbuds. “I wouldn’t be bothering you if it weren’t an emergency.”

  “I know all about your emergencies. No gracias, amigo.”

  “It’s just a ten-minute job. Can you see where I’m connected?”

  Santiago tapped on a keyboard for several seconds. “Okay. Wi-Fi Home.” It was the name of the neighbor’s network whose bandwidth Youssef (and now he) had freeloaded from.

  “Aside from me, there might be other devices logging on, but I can’t see them. I managed to find the Wi-Fi password, but that’s as far as I go: I don’t have your skills.”

  “No one has my skills, hermano,” said Santiago, slightly placated. He typed at lightning speed for a handful of seconds: the sound of the keys hit Dante’s ears like a burst of machine-gun fire. “An old Mac called Home and a PC called Naga.”

  “I’m interested in the second one,” said Dante confidently. The Naga were a race of elves that inhabited World of Warcraft. “I need you to penetrate it and activate the webcam. I want to take a look around in there.”

  “What do you need this for?”

  “I’m giving CC a hand,” said Dante.

  “Are you two still speaking?”

  “It’s something recent.”

  Santiago hesitated. “The last time I had dealings with her, I wound up behind bars.”

  “It won’t happen this time, I promise you,” said Dante, hoping that was the truth.

  Santiago got busy. He found the password for Naga and installed a RAT—a piece of software (from “remote administration tool”) that allowed him to take control of the operating system—uninstalled the LED that blinked on to alert users that the webcam was on, and then restarted the computer. Ten minutes later, Dante’s cursor started moving on its own, then the screen split in two, and one half was filled with an image of the interior of Youssef’s shop. “Did your boyfriend do what he was supposed to?” asked Colomba, peering over Dante’s shoulder.

  “He’s not my boyfriend.”

  “The one thing I know is that the little criminal sure isn’t my boyfriend. Anyway?” Dante turned the screen toward Colomba. “Too dark,” she said. All she could see was a black rectangle: the faint glow from the streetlamp outside couldn’t penetrate the painted plate-glass window.

  “Let’s wait for a car,” said Dante. It took ten minutes before one came by and, as it swung around the traffic circle, lit up the shop with its headlights, and another ten minutes before a second car came by, because Dante wasn’t satisfied with what he’d seen with the first one. In both cases, the webcam transmitted a sort of flash that lit up most of the shop. Dante froze the clearer image and then lightened it. You could see an armchair, the legs of a bed, and what appeared to be two white plastic barrels standing in the center of the room. Nothing had moved, but on the armchair’s left armrest, you could just glimpse what looked like the outline of a hand. Still, that wasn’t what caught Colomba’s attention; what she focused on was the outline of the barrels. She tapped her finger on the screen. “You see those?” she asked.

  “A couple of tanks.”

  “There could be gas in them.”

  “Even if there was, they’re closed, aren’t they? Otherwise they would have evaporated already.”

  “Youssef might have booby-trapped the door.”

  “There aren’t any wires.”

  “We don’t see any wires, but that’s not the same thing.” She turned to look at the Three Amigos. “Alert Central to send the NBC squad and special forces over here. There’s a suspicious building that needs to be secured.”

  “Are we just going to give up, Deputy Chief?” asked Esposito.

  “There’s nothing else we can do. I’ll give you guys the credit if we do find something.”

  “If,” said Alberti gloomily, seeing his dreams of glory crumble into dust. And they’d gotten so close.

  “I’m sorry, guys. But you did great work, I’m really proud of you,” said Colomba.

  Dante took her by the arm and dragged her a few yards away from the others. “Who did you talk to? Curcio? Santini?”

  Colomba heaved a sigh of annoyance. “Quit trying to read me, you know how much I hate it.”

  “I can’t help it. Well?”

  “Magistrate Spinelli,” said Colomba. “She confronted me with my missteps. And I don’t want to make any more. Too many people are already dead.”

  “We could figure out why if we can just get in there.” He pointed to the hand on
the armrest. “One of the two of them is in there, and he can tell us what we want to know. If you call the special forces, they’ll put a bullet through his forehead, and that’ll be the end of that.”

  “Sorry, Dante.”

  “You were the one who dragged me into this mess! And now you want to cut me out of it!”

  Colomba pretended not to hear him and went back to her partners while Dante stood there, sad and deflated. He hadn’t managed to bring her around, not with the burden of guilt she felt about the murders and the weariness weighing on her shoulders. But he had no intention of giving up, not after coming so close.

  He went over to the Three Amigos’ car and pulled open the driver’s-side door. Mario looked up at him in resignation. “What’s happening now?”

  “What’s happening is that you’re getting out,” said Dante, and undid the handcuffs with a straightened-out paper clip. It took him just a few seconds, because he’d been practicing his whole life just for that purpose. Getting free, running away. He could open locks and padlocks with a blindfold on; if it weren’t for his fear of confined spaces and suffocation, he could have pulled off most of Houdini’s routines.

  The young man rubbed his wrists, then his aching nose. It had swollen and was the color of an eggplant. “Thanks.”

  Dante slapped his shoulder. “Don’t wander away, please. I don’t want those three knuckleheads shooting you.”

  “You know who I’m most afraid of? The woman. The bald guy might throw a punch, but she . . .”

  “You’re right. I get scared of her sometimes, for instance, right now. Come on, get out of there.”

  Mario got out, and Dante slipped behind the wheel. Up till now, the things he’d done had escaped notice because the cops were arguing among themselves, but when he started the engine with the car keys that were still in his pocket, Colomba ran toward the automobile.

  Dante slammed the door and backed up. “What the fuck do you think you’re doing?” Colomba asked him through the closed car window.

  “Sorry, CC,” said Dante, short of breath, then jammed down on the accelerator.

  Colomba was forced to let go of the door handle to keep from being dragged along, and she watched in horror as the car headed straight for Youssef’s shop. “Fuck! No!”

  Dante remained behind the wheel even as the automobile slammed into the metal roller blind. He’d fantasized about jumping out of the door an instant before, like Bruce Willis, but his sheer terror had kept him from even trying. He limited himself to sliding down the seat, half-unconscious, covering his head with his hands. The roller blind was old and rusty, and when the front of the car hit it at twenty-five miles per hour, it flew out of its runners and smashed the plate glass behind it, then tumbled forward. It shattered the rear windshield of the car that was now halfway into the store, and it knocked over a shelf stacked with DVDs, which slammed down onto the computer that they’d used to spy on the interior, shattering its screen. Dante was hit by the airbag, which was covered with glass shards, and a piece of metal the size of a bar of soap just grazed his head, cutting his scalp.

  He threw open the car door and slid to the ground, where he was immediately grabbed by Colomba as she pulled him to his feet. The Three Amigos aimed their weapons into the store, ready to fire if anything moved. Colomba couldn’t do the same; her handgun had been confiscated.

  “What the fuck have you done!” Her green eyes swirled with concern and anger.

  “I’ve taken responsibility, the way you were afraid to,” Dante murmured, careful to move his lower lip—which was cut and painful—as little as possible.

  “You took responsibility for everyone! Including the people who live here.”

  “And nothing bad happened, did it?” Dante replied. Then he walked in, his feet crunching over the glass, indifferent to the weapons leveled behind him. A gust of chemical odor reached his nostrils, and for a fleeting second, he thought he might have been wrong, that he really might have caused a gas leak that would destroy the neighborhood, but the smell was acid, not cyanide.

  Holding his breath and dripping blood, Dante crossed the room and hurried over to the armchair that he’d seen in the video. The man who was sitting there seemed to be fast asleep, his head between his arms, which rested on a small oval wooden table. Dante froze.

  Too late.

  Colomba grabbed him again. “Get out of here,” she said, and shoved him toward the shattered plate-glass window, while the Three Amigos shouted at the seated man to put up his hands and get down on his knees. Dante ran out to catch his breath while Colomba took another step toward the man, who remained motionless. She put a hand on his shoulder, and that was enough to make him slide to the ground. The man rolled over on his back, overturning a small basin of acid that sizzled as it came into contact with the floor.

  By the light of the streetlamp, Colomba and the Three Amigos saw that the man no longer had a face.

  9

  Outside of the shop, a small crowd had gathered, attracted by the sound of impact. They kept trying to peek inside no matter how much Alberti pushed them away and shouted for them to stay clear. Colomba and the two other Amigos were looking down at the corpse, taking care not to tread on evidence or puddles of the acid that had dissolved the flesh on the man’s face, revealing the skull that lay beneath. The most awful things were the eyes, which had turned into something that resembled scrambled eggs.

  “He hasn’t been dead long,” said Esposito, who’d had more than his fill of corpses. “A couple of hours, tops.”

  “While he was shaving with a bowl of acid?” asked Guarneri.

  “It’s a shave that lasts forever, you ought to try it.”

  Colomba went back to Dante, standing on the sidewalk: he was holding a tissue to his head to stop the bleeding, leaning against the shop wall to brace his wobbly legs. His elegant suit was torn in two places, his panama hat black with dust. “Which of the two of them is it?” she asked him.

  “The master of the house. Farid Youssef,” said Dante confidently. “A terrorist died while brewing up a new batch of gas. Hurrah.”

  “That might actually have happened.”

  “No. This is a murder, CC.”

  “It could have been his accomplice.”

  “Or else Musta is about to come to the same end as his friend. Let me take a look around the crime scene. We might yet be able to save that idiot’s life.”

  “The task force will take care of it.”

  “You told me yourself that if you get off on the wrong foot at the beginning of an investigation, then it’s bound to drag out longer than it needs to. Do you think those geniuses you work with are going to be willing to take into consideration the idea that Musta is in danger? Or will they prefer to wait until somebody finds him in a ditch somewhere with the Koran in one hand?”

  “You still aren’t satisfied? What’s it going to take before you calm the hell down?” asked Colomba with a note of irritation.

  Dante pressed the tissue against his lip, which had started bleeding again. “The truth. And Musta can give that to me, if he doesn’t die first. Let me try, what do you have to lose? A mess is a mess, no matter what, right?”

  Colomba hesitated for a long moment, until it dawned on her that now she really had nothing left to lose. However absurd it might have seemed, Dante’s reasoning did make a certain amount of sense. “Before long, my colleagues are going to be here. Don’t let them catch you inside.”

  Dante took a deep breath and galloped into the shop, shoving past Alberti and Guarneri as they tried to stop him. He took a quick look around the room and immediately noticed the copy of the Koran that peeped out from a shelf, the only book present. That didn’t fit with what he knew about Youssef, and he imagined a mysterious hand adjusting the scene. And the same hand adding the two plastic canisters, which, he felt sure, contained the chemicals needed to produce the lethal gas. A perfect scene of the crime—who’d have any remaining doubts except him?

  He
went over to the corpse. He didn’t want to touch it barehanded, so he pulled a pair of disposable gloves from a cardboard box that had rolled onto the floor. As he put on the gloves, he noticed that they were emanating a scent. He sniffed more closely, and it smelled of oranges and dried leaves. Some chemical product? It seemed too artificial to be a normal cosmetic. But he was sure that nothing else in the room had the scent. Even though he smoked like a chimney, Dante had an extremely acute sense of smell.

  Cursing at how little time he had, he searched the dead man’s body. He didn’t find anything useful, but one of his gloved fingers stuck ever so slightly to the dead man’s wrist when he touched it. Dante did it again, producing a faint smacking sound.

  Adhesive. Duct tape.

  Someone had taped the man to the chair and then freed him before killing him, to judge from his posture and the absence of marks on his body. Whoever it was had known what they were doing.

  Dante looked rapidly around, while in the distance, the sound of sirens started to become audible. He saw a pair of gloves like the ones he was wearing crumpled up in a corner. On the fingertips, he made out some dark stains. He sniffed at those, too. The smell of oranges, but underneath, another, more pungent odor.

  “Get out, Dante!” Colomba shouted from the street, where she could see flashing lights approaching. Dante grabbed one of the stained gloves and stuck it in his pocket, then came rushing out as the police sirens became deafening. Mario, standing at the corner of the sidewalk, looked to be on the verge of taking to his heels. Reluctantly, Dante shook his head at Mario: I can’t spare you what’s about to happen. I’m sorry. The young man settled down, leaning back against the wall.

  “Did you find anything?” Colomba asked as she watched the squad cars approach.

  Dante showed her the glove. “This.”

  A look of horror appeared on Colomba’s face. “You meddled with a crime scene?”

  “I drove a car into your crime scene, I don’t know if you’ve forgotten that fact. In any case, I only took one. And I used this hand to pick it up, I didn’t contaminate anything,” he said, raising his bad hand, wrapped in black leather. “If you want, you can put it back later.”