Kill the Angel

by Sandrone Dazieri

  She pointed to the cabinet, still puzzled. “In there.”

  Dante set down the pan and held the cups up to the light. “Your idea of clean—”

  “How the fuck did you get in here?” she interrupted. “If you broke in, I swear I’ll strangle you.”

  “With the key you gave me, don’t you remember?”

  “That was for emergencies!”

  “This is an emergency. Come on, drink up.”

  Colomba tasted the coffee, which was so dense you could cut it with a knife. “It’s horrible.”

  “You just have to get used to it.”

  She set the demitasse, still full, on the table. “Tell me what emergency we’re talking about.”

  “I figured out who the woman we’re looking for is.”

  I’m not looking for anyone, thought Colomba. But for some reason, her mouth refused to form the words. Instead her mouth said, as if it had a mind of its own: “Who is she?”

  “Her name is Giltine.”

  “What kind of name is that?”

  “Lithuanian. Musta was right, she really is an angel.” Dante flashed her a mirthless smile over the top of the demitasse. “Only she’s a very special kind: the Angel of Death.”

  III

  “OOPS! . . . I DID IT AGAIN”

  BEFORE—1986

  Maksim had escaped like everyone else. Like everyone who had succeeded, anyway. He’d walked for something like three hundred miles, all the way to Bryansk, almost immediately leaving far behind the fellow soldiers and the civilians who had tried to follow the same route. He’d been forced to threaten the last of them with a rock, a kid who had recently enlisted. “If you don’t get out of here, I’ll smash your head in,” he’d said, and he hadn’t been kidding: what he was doing was tantamount to deserting, if not actually and technically desertion, and that was much easier to do alone than in company. The kid had run off, and Maksim was pretty sure he’d spotted tears in his eyes, but it hadn’t aroused any pity in him. If he’d been tenderhearted, he never would have wound up working in that shitty place to start with. He’d been chosen for a good reason, even though his superior officers had never told him as much. And now his superior officers could all go fuck themselves. Along the way, he’d stolen civilian clothing that he’d found hanging out to dry, and then food, and once he’d even sneaked into a house at night and stolen money, but he’d never dared to ask anyone for a ride or for help.

  If anyone else spoke to him, he’d turn his face away and go on walking. In Bryansk, luckily, he had a second cousin whom he hadn’t seen since school days, but blood is thicker than water, and so his cousin had taken him in, caring for his injuries and feeding him regularly. When his cousin had asked him what happened, Maksim told him a fairy tale about having been drummed out of the army with a dishonorable discharge for having been caught drunk on duty, and said that since then he’d done his best to get by and that he was in some trouble with the law. Nothing serious, but he would just rather not run into any overzealous OMON officers. Maksim thought it was ironic that he had to pretend he was wanted by the police to cover up the truth, but his cousin had swallowed the story. Then, with the mess that had happened, everybody had other things to think about, like finding enough food to eat.

  But his cousin was no saint, either, and now and then he’d do a little freelance work for the local vory v zakone, who, in exchange for a few rubles that Maksim promised to pay him back, managed to get him a set of fake identity papers. Without those, Maksim wouldn’t have been able to even walk down the street. In the Soviet Union of those years, still blissfully unaware that its days were numbered, it was forbidden to travel from one city to another without an internal passport, and what Maksim wanted was to get plenty more miles between him and what he had left behind, though it could never be far enough to keep away the nightmares. And so, once he got his hands on the internal passport, he departed in the middle of the night, stealing his cousin’s car while he was at it. He dumped the car about sixty miles outside of Moscow and traveled the last stretch of road with a ride he’d begged from a truck driver delivering a load of potatoes.

  At that point, he felt a little safer, though he still didn’t know how he was going to make ends meet. Maybe by getting a job as a cook in some restaurant frequented by the nomenklatura, or else as a tour guide. Learning Angliyskiy hadn’t done him much good so far, but Gorbachev had promised to revive the economy, hadn’t he?

  With the last few rubles left to his name, he spent his first night in Moscow in a rented room owned by an old woman in the Zagorodny Kvartal. He took a nice hot bath, ate the dinner that was included in the price, and then dove into his new bed and got the best night’s sleep he’d had in a long time. And it was the last one, too, because he woke up with two grim-looking bruisers in his room who looked every bit the part of cops. They were acting as muscle for an even grimmer-looking bruiser whom Maksim had hoped never to lay eyes on again. His name was Belyy, with no given name, no rank, no professional title, and he had been the boss of the Box.

  Maksim jumped out of bed and tried to climb out the window in his underwear, more as a point of honor than out of any real hope that he could get away, and as he expected, the two cops grabbed him and kicked him around until Belyy told them to stop.

  “All right,” said Maksim. “What the fuck was I supposed to do? Just stay there and die?”

  “I thought it was your job, and your fellow guards’ jobs, to make sure the complex remained secure, or was I wrong?” asked Belyy as he lit a cigarette, one of the kind with cardboard filters that only diehard Communists smoked.

  “From outside agitators, or if some prisoner was trying to escape. That’s not exactly what happened. Maybe you would have made a different choice, but then you’re smarter than me.”

  Belyy grabbed a chair and dragged it over to where Maksim lay stretched out on the floor, nursing his bruises. He sat down. “Oh, you’re intelligent,” Belyy said to him. “You have a brain superior to the average, good survival skills, and a spirit of improvisation: you showed that in Afghanistan. And a certain lack of scruples, which never hurts. Of all your fellow soldiers who ran away, you’re the one who did best. At least you didn’t get caught at your parents’ house.”

  Maksim was reminded of the kid he’d had to chase away with a hail of rocks. If there was anyone that stupid, it had to be him. “And so? Now what’s going to happen to me?”

  “There are seventy-five missing, including staff and inmates, who are still out there somewhere. Some of them are going to be very hard to track down, especially these days. As for the future”—he shrugged—“who can say what awaits us with these new ideas that are going around. I need a bloodhound to add to my team, a bloodhound who understands the value of a piece of prey. What do you say, could you be that bloodhound?”

  Maksim had seen the film The Godfather any number of times, in Angliyskiy, of course, so he knew very well the meaning of an offer he couldn’t refuse. So he accepted that offer, and they didn’t give him time to take a piss before loading him into one of those big black cars they drove around in. On the seat, he found a dossier with a stamp that meant top secret. Inside was a photograph of a thirteen-year-old girl. He decided that, all things considered, he’d lucked out: this little sheep would be easy to bring back to the fold.

  He was wrong about that.

  He was very wrong.

  1

  Colomba went to get dressed as a way of stalling for time and sketching out some coherent thoughts. None occurred to her, and she went back to the kitchen hoping that Dante had vanished. He was still there, with his undrinkable coffee and his stories about Lithuanian ghosts.

  “Ah, here you are,” he said when he saw her again. “I was just telling you about Giltine. The name derives from a word that meant ‘to sting’ in an ancient Indo-European dialect. According to traditional lore, she appears as either an old woman or a pretty young girl, with a scorpion’s tail in place of a tongue. She was worshi
pped around the year 1000, and her worshippers brought her offerings of black roosters or yellow flowers.”

  “Are you seriously saying that you think there’s a supernatural being who’s going around killing people?” Colomba asked with a note of exasperation.

  Dante gave her a level look of disappointment and reproof. “I don’t believe in the afterlife, CC. The duringlife is already sufficiently complicated. I just think there’s a woman who uses that name and has a predilection for natural drugs.”

  “Cyanide isn’t a drug.”

  “But psilocybin is. Musta was stuffed full of it to the ears.”

  “How do you know that?” asked Colomba in amazement.

  “Bart told me. She did it for you. She thinks that if we can find some new information, they might put you back on the force.”

  Colomba’s eyes became a funnel cloud of rage. She clenched her fists. “I think you’d better leave. Right now.”

  Dante raised both hands and took a step back, well aware that the threat was real. “First listen to the rest. I couldn’t be sure that it was actually Giltine who had drugged him. Maybe Musta had gotten high all alone on magic mushrooms, even though there were no traces of them in his stomach or his pharynx.” Colomba stepped toward him, and Dante leaped to one side. “But I managed to find the place where Giltine held Musta captive while waiting for the drug to take effect,” he said hastily. “Pretty good, huh?”

  Colomba froze, swept by an unpleasant sense of foreboding. “And how did you find this place?”

  “I did an inspection of the area with Alberti.”

  Colomba turned her back on him and went to throw herself into the armchair in the living room. Dante went after her, carrying with him the old wooden hand-cranked coffee grinder that made a noise more or less like a clogged washing machine.

  “I’m going to read the riot act to Alberti. With you, it’s pointless,” Colomba said grimly.

  “Don’t do it. He gave us a lot of help.”

  “Us? Oh, really!”

  Dante told her all about the outing to the Dinosaurs, and Colomba listened with a mixture of incredulity and horror: breaking and entering was the last thing she needed right now.

  “Musta must have thought that Giltine was the real Giltine before he died, and that’s why he talked about an angel.”

  Colomba focused on her respiration as if she were about to fire a high-precision rifle. “How could Musta have known her name?” She didn’t like thinking about Musta. Especially about his death. The sound of rotten fruit when his head exploded, the heat of his blood on her face.

  “She told him and Musta recognized the name,” said Dante. “He played World of Warcraft with Youssef, and Giltine is one of the characters, even if she’s a little different from the traditional character.”

  “How many characters are there in that game?”

  “I don’t know, hundreds. Why?”

  “How do you know that he was talking about Giltine and not another character?” said Colomba.

  “Because this isn’t the first time Giltine has killed someone. Hold on a second.” Dante ran into the kitchen to get his bag and extracted a sheaf of papers. He started laying them out in a long curving line along the floor, the way he always did when he was trying to organize his thoughts. “At first I didn’t know where to get started,” he explained. “I was looking for anything that might be a common thread in rituals, drugs, murders, and terror attacks. Then, puff, I found the right hook.” He laid a sheet of paper down next to the door, then curved around and continued in the opposite direction. “A nightclub in Berlin that burnt to the ground. The Absynthe, on Friedrichstraße.” He picked up one of the pieces of paper. “August, two years ago, around six in the morning. Seven dead, including the owner, Gunter Keller, known to his friends as Gun. Traces of psilocybin were found in the blood of all the victims. Before dying, one of the customers managed to speak about a woman who shoved him into the flames. And he said that before she did it, she told him her name was Giltine. If your fellow cops didn’t have such itchy trigger fingers, Musta would certainly have confirmed the name.”

  Colomba thought back to the young man’s wild, hallucinatory eyes. And as soon as she glimpsed him, she saw him die. Splat.

  “Here we have other cases,” Dante went on, continuing to scatter papers across the floor with a smile that grew increasingly strained. “In the waters off the Greek island of Zakynthos a year and a half ago, a small shipowner’s yacht hit a reef and sank with a dozen people aboard, including crew and passengers. The engines malfunctioned and fire spread through the bilge. The rescuers were unable to get anyone out, everyone went down with the ship, even though many of them were first-class certified swimmers, and there were life jackets as well as a dinghy. The helmsman’s corpse tested positive for psilocybin and rye ergot fungus.”

  “Was there a woman involved there, too?” asked Colomba.

  “So it would seem. Her corpse was never found, and no one was able to reconstruct her identity. But at least three eyewitnesses reported her presence. Strange, don’t you think?” Dante hung a Xerox of a page from a newspaper over the handle of a French door. “This is from the Stockholm Aftonbladet, the largest daily paper in Sweden. Three years ago, in Gamla Stan, the Old Town of Stockholm, a truck making food deliveries plowed through a crowd of people watching an open-air concert. Ten dead, and before the police could get there, the driver committed suicide by slashing his throat with a box cutter. Just think: he tested positive for psilocybin and psilocin, like Musta. When relatives and friends were interviewed, they insisted he’d never taken drugs before.”

  “Let me guess. Was there a woman in the passenger seat?” Colomba asked sarcastically.

  “No. But the night before, he’d picked one up. In the last text he sent a friend of his, he was eagerly anticipating the impending sex. The next day, he slaughtered a crowd of people while higher than hell.”

  “You can never tell what’s going on in people’s heads.”

  “I usually can. And as far as I can tell, so can Giltine. But let’s go on.” He waved another piece of paper in the air, then laid it down in the seemingly never-ending spiral. “Valencia, Spain. An armed robbery that ended badly. Four years ago. The father, the mother, the doorman, and two children were killed. When the police arrived, the armed robber committed suicide by jumping out the window. He tested positive for ergot fungus. His girlfriend said that she was certain he was seeing another woman. Who was never successfully identified.”

  Colomba was getting lost in the rushing stream of words. “Dante, Jesus, slow down. You’re overwhelming me here.”

  He gave no sign of even having heard her. “Marseille, an apartment house collapsed after a natural gas leak three years and a few months ago. Twenty dead. Several neighbors saw a woman leave the building immediately before the explosion. Of course, the tenants of the apartment where the explosion originated were stuffed to the gills with LSD. And then—”

  Colomba leaped to her feet and emptied her lungs in a bellowing shout. “Dante! Sit down!”

  He stopped right in the act of laying down yet another piece of paper. “CC?”

  “Sit yourself down right now, I told you.” She shoved him toward the armchair where she’d been sitting until just a second ago. “Down, boy. Take a deep breath. Calm down.”

  He did as she said. “What is it?”

  “What it is, is that you’re going to work yourself into a nervous collapse. Did you sleep last night?”

  “No. But . . .”

  Colomba went over to the kitchen sink, filled a glass with cold water, and brought it to him. “Drink.”

  “Come on, don’t treat me like a mental defective.”

  “Drink!”

  Dante obeyed.

  “You’re seeing things that aren’t there, Dante.”

  He grabbed her arm with his good hand, which seemed scalding hot to Colomba. “Are you kidding? Don’t you understand that the pattern is always the s
ame?” he said.

  “You’re the only one who sees the pattern at all. How many crimes are committed by people under the effect of narcotics?”

  “Alcohol and cocaine, usually, not these.”

  “You’re wrong about that. There are parts of the world where it’s easier to pop a mushroom than to snort a line of coke. Plus, where are you getting all your information?” Colomba tore the stack of paper out of his hands and saw that they were nearly all printouts from websites with improbable names. One of them had a masked devil as its logo, complete with a pitchfork. “Do you also have an article about chemtrails and aliens?”

  “Now you’re just engaging in pointless sarcasm.”

  “Aren’t there any pictures of the webmasters? I’d guess they’re all fat young men who live at home with their mothers and spend the day jerking off,” she drove on.

  Dante rolled his eyes. “When you get started, you really know how to be a pain. I’ve spent years studying and cataloging conspiracy theorists, CC! Trust me, I can tell when there’s a crumb of truth. Anyway, I found corroborating accounts in local newspapers.”

  “I can just imagine the kind of newspapers you’re talking about.”

  “Why don’t you open up that closed little head of yours?” Dante blurted out in exasperation. “Do you think that this is all just simple coincidence?”

  “Not even. I think it’s nothing, nothing at all,” said Colomba. “You’re putting together apples and oranges, and according to you, that’s a theory that holds together. Let’s talk about what motive this woman might have. Or, really, this monster. Why would she be doing this?”

  Dante hesitated. “Maybe it’s in someone’s interest to have her kill the way she’s doing. She might be a paid assassin of the very costliest kind. Who works for some powerful transnational organization.”

  “Are you serious?”