“Or else she lacks a rational motive. She’s acting in a ritual manner. Maybe she even believes that she’s invoking Death Incarnate.”
“Like a serial killer?”
“Exactly.”
Colomba counted on her fingers. “First, female serial killers are exceedingly rare. Second, the ones we know about are nearly all moronic brutes. Trust me, I’ve met a few, and they weren’t nearly as interesting as they look in the movies. It was a big step up if they ever washed. Third, there are no serial killers who don’t enjoy watching their victims die, and most of the time your Giltine isn’t supposed to have even been present. Fourth, serial killers don’t do such complicated things. They stab you and then they fuck your corpse. Or else they slice off a piece, like the Monster of Florence.”
Dante felt his mouth getting dry. “Okay. You don’t have to go into the details. But leaving aside the matter of motives, which we can’t know about, everything else adds up.”
“If everything adds up, give me some proof.”
“We still need to find the proof. But you know perfectly well that there’s something about the official version that doesn’t add up. You know that the angel exists.”
Of course I know that, thought Colomba. That’s exactly why I want to steer clear of it as much as I can. “I’ve been put on suspension. If I start to investigate on my own, I can say goodbye to my job for good.”
“So much the better! You’re too intelligent to be wearing a uniform.”
“Could you let me decide that for myself, thank you very much? You can’t begin to understand what it means to have a normal life.”
“And you think I wouldn’t like that?” Dante said bitterly, and vanished into the kitchen. From a distance, Colomba heard the sound of his Zippo lighter. Send him home, she thought. End it here. Instead, when her adrenaline declined, she went to join him. Dante was standing in front of the open window, smoking and looking at the clouds, which were an indigo hue that day. “Have you already called the men with the straitjackets?” he asked without turning around.
“Not yet. First make me a decent cup of coffee, please.”
“Aside from mine, the only kind left is instant, which is anything but decent,” he muttered.
“I like it.”
Dante put another pot of water on the fire, keeping his back turned. “I don’t think like a cop, so I don’t know how to convince you,” he said.
“You don’t think like anyone I know.”
“I know, I know.” Dante flashed a smile that was as far as could be from his usual sarcastic smirk. “But there are advantages to being a pariah. If you’re a bird that flies along with all the others, you’ll never know what wonderful shapes you trace in the sky; you’ll only see the ass of the bird in front of you. The frustration is that when you tell others what you see, no one believes you.” Dante poured the hot water into Colomba’s mug and stirred until all the clumps of powdered coffee had dissolved. Then he handed it to her.
Colomba sipped her instant coffee. It was terrible, true, but she preferred it to the sticky tar from before. “Dante . . . even if you turn out to be right . . . I wouldn’t know where to begin hunting a ghost.”
“That’s too bad, CC, because without us? I don’t know how and I don’t know when, but she’s definitely going to kill again.”
2
Giltine could hear the dead singing. It happened to her only when she was on the high seas: that was when the souls buried in the deep reawakened. She looked out over the dark waters and listened, identifying the people those voices had belonged to. Sailors, migrants, victims, murderers, men and women, children and old people: each of them had a story to tell that Giltine would remember and take with her into the future, to honor them. It was her duty and it was her privilege.
Only when the sun rose and the songs faded away could Giltine finally get some rest, what little was allowed her, as she switched on the autopilot and stretched out on one of the bunks. Her boat was a forty-foot Linssen Grand Sturdy, with three double cabins and a range of over fifteen hundred miles. Giltine had set sail from the port of Civitavecchia on the night that Musta died, and since then she had sailed along six miles off the coast, heading for her objective. Luckily, the sea had remained unfailingly calm, and the wind had been moderate.
It was only another three miles to her destination, and already the number of vessels heading to or departing from the port was increasing, the big ferry boats that chugged along slowly, churning the waters around them on all sides, and the smaller fishing boats. The only boats missing were the yachts, which in that season were headed for warmer shores. The odors in the air had become more pungent, reeking of seaweed and brine, with the smells of food and life arriving from the houses.
Giltine stopped the engines, dropped the anchor, and went below, into the cabin that served her as a wardrobe. On the king-size bed, now reduced to nothing but a bare mattress, there lay a Louis Vuitton leather suitcase, which, as it happened, was the same brand as the rest of the matched set of luggage that stood stacked in a corner. On the dresser was a small metal trunk with a handle, measuring a foot and a half on each side, very similar to the kind used by professional makeup artists. Giltine opened it: inside were numerous jars with many different hues of cream, brushes and sponges, but also sterile gauze bandages, scalpels, vials of disinfectant, and syringes. Giltine took off her clothing, then used one of the scalpels to cut the bandages that covered her arms and legs. The pain began to spread the minute the air came into contact with her skin, and grew in intensity once her limbs were fully uncovered.
That didn’t matter.
When she unbandaged herself—and it was something she had to do at least once a day to wash and change her medications—Giltine tried not to look at herself, but this time she was forced to. As she’d imagined, the infection had worsened, and by now she could glimpse, deep in the sores in her flesh, the gleaming white of her bones. The rotten smell had grown worse, too.
Giltine disinfected herself; after changing the bandages, she extracted from the suitcase on the bed a series of packages that contained what seemed like flesh-colored slime, with gradations ranging from pale to bronze. She selected one of the darker jars, extracted a quantity roughly the size of a walnut and mixed it with a fixative, then spread it over every square inch left free of wrappings. The sores vanished beneath what looked like tan skin, and the pain abated, though not completely. For Giltine, pain was a constant undertone.
Once the makeup had dried, she got dressed again in athletic undergarments and a lemon-yellow Gucci dress with floral decorations on the hem, and finally slipped on a pair of heavy tights.
The hardest part still remained. Giltine sat down on the side of the bed and unhooked the mask from the back of her head, clenching her teeth when the light struck her cheeks. Without even looking, she could hear the blisters as they swelled and popped with the sound, low but perceptible, of a stick of butter sputtering in a pan. She took the white concealing cream and spread it over her face and neck in a uniform layer, quenching the sputtering, then did the same with the cream that simulated a tan. After that she made herself up, and then, from a metal trunk twice the size of the first one, she took a blond pageboy wig and a pair of green contact lenses. Only then did she look at the mirror, studying the stranger she had become, identical to the woman who smiled out from her IDs with the French name of Sandrine Poupin, a surgeon working for a Swiss humanitarian NGO that existed only on paper, though it did possess an office and a bank account through which Giltine ran part of her funds. The NGO was also the owner of her vessel, donated by a Greek shipowner for its humanitarian missions. The fact that the Greek shipowner had drowned the year before could only be considered an unfortunate coincidence.
Giltine checked her makeup once more, then went back to the wheel and piloted her boat to the harbor’s wharf, radioing in her position. None of those she met, including the harbor official who boarded the yacht to check the documents and sea
rch for illegals, ever suspected that, beneath the broad-brimmed hat and the sunglasses, there was anything other than a woman making a ceremonial visit on behalf of her NGO to one of the most enchanting places on earth.
Venice.
3
After serving Colomba her coffee, Dante seemed to shut down. He swayed back and forth on his feet and spoke in a slurred voice, as if he’d overdone it with pills and drops of some kind, but in fact, he was only exhausted. Colomba succeeded in persuading him to lie down on the sofa with the promise that she would let him smoke indoors, and a few minutes later, she removed the cigarette butt from the fingers of his bad hand, which was dangling loosely over the floor. But Dante still hadn’t fallen asleep. “Who was the guy you had dinner with last night?” he murmured with his eyes shut.
“Why do you assume it was a guy? It could have been a woman.”
“Short dark hairs, no lipstick or makeup on the napkins, a bottle of wine,” he muttered.
Colomba was tempted to laugh. “Don’t you ever stop nosing around?”
“I don’t do it on purpose.”
“Nice excuse. Anyway, it was Enrico.”
“That piece of shit?”
Colomba remembered all the times she had talked to Dante about him, almost always to complain. “The very same.”
“At least he didn’t sleep here. There’s hope for you yet,” Dante said in an increasingly faint voice, then he started to snore softly.
Colomba tucked a blanket around him—a damp chill was coming in through the window—and slipped off his combat boots. There were holes in both socks. That was strange, because Dante was quite punctilious in the care he devoted to his apparel, though the result was always that he looked as if he’d just stepped out of a London club in the eighties. Even his shirt was threadbare around the collar, Colomba noticed. What’s going on with you, Man from the Silo? she wondered.
Moving silently, she picked up the small backpack that served as her bag and went out. Half an hour later, she was crossing the Piazza del Popolo, stopping for a triangular tea sandwich with shrimp and mayonnaise at the bar Rosati; she took the sandwich out and ate it on the steps of the Egyptian obelisk. There weren’t many people out and about on that late morning; the attendant at the Segway rental place off to one side of the piazza was smoking a peaceful cigarette and waiting for customers, while there was a long line of white taxis waiting under the pale winter sunlight.
Colomba forced herself to get up: she discarded the wrappings of her sandwich in an overflowing trash can and quickly strode the few hundred yards to reach the office of the lawyer Minutillo. It was a vintage building, decidedly aristocratic, but like all of Rome, it needed some upkeep, especially the elevator, with its wire-mesh doors, which creaked as it struggled up the center of the stairwell.
Emanuela, a secretary about Colomba’s age with a pierced nose, answered her knock at the door. “Deputy Chief Caselli, what a pleasure to see you!” she said. “Is the counselor expecting you?”
“No, but I hope he can spare a moment.”
“I’ll let him know immediately. In the meantime, make yourself comfortable, and I’ll bring you a cup of coffee. Let me warn you, though, it won’t be as good as the coffee Signor Torre makes.”
Colomba smiled: Emanuela always put her in a good mood. “I’d say that I’ve already had plenty of coffee for today, thanks,” she replied.
She took a seat in the waiting room. Ten minutes later, a man who looked like Jeremy Irons, only twenty years younger, came out and shook her hand. “Deputy Chief Caselli. Please come in,” said Minutillo, and led her into his office, lined with dark hardwood and crowded with books and large law tomes. He sat down behind his walnut desk and gestured for her to take a seat. “How can I help you?”
“We need to talk about Dante,” said Colomba after quickly deciding that the direct approach was probably best.
“In what connection?”
“I want to know what’s happened to him.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Minutillo said in a neutral tone.
“Counselor, can’t we skip the part where you pretend not to know?”
Minutillo just gazed at her owlishly.
“As you prefer. Let’s see. He swallows psychopharmaceuticals like candy, or he snorts them because they work faster that way, and he shows up at my house at seven in the morning. I used to have to kick him to get him out of the hotel, and often I couldn’t do it no matter how hard I tried.”
“How curious,” said Minutillo in the same tone.
“You do know that he drove a squad car right through a metal roller blind, don’t you? And that he easily could have killed himself?”
“And so you’re worried about him.”
“Of course I am. He’s a friend.”
“Such a close friend that you don’t call him for months on end? You have a strange concept of friendship, Deputy Chief.”
Colomba forced herself not to blush, and out of a dark corner of her brain, there came to her an unexpected and unwelcome memory of the evening when, a couple of weeks after their fight, she’d spotted Dante walking up and down the street in front of police headquarters with a distracted look on his face. She had watched him from the window of her office uneasily, as it dawned on her that Dante hoped to pretend he’d just happened to run into her, like some teenage boy wandering around in front of the apartment house of the girl of his dreams, hoping to bump into her. I’ll phone him when I get home, she’d told herself, knowing that she never would and feeling dirty for telling herself that convenient lie. Now that she realized she’d completely put that episode out of her mind, she felt even dirtier. “I’ve been very busy,” she said.
“So has Dante. Trying to survive,” said Minutillo. “And he could have used your help while he was at it. Now, if you don’t mind, I have a client.”
Minutillo got up, but Colomba didn’t. “You’re right, Counselor. I’ve been an asshole. But now I’m here.”
The lawyer scrutinized her, then seemed to make a decision, because he sat down again. “Why did he come to see you this morning?” he asked.
“He’s convinced there’s a woman behind the massacre on the train who travels the world killing people.”
“And you want to know whether you can still trust him.”
“I do trust him. But I’m not sure whether I can trust the things he tells me.”
“I could tell you that everything is fine and dandy.”
“That wouldn’t be like you, Counselor.”
Minutillo made an irritated grimace. “Four months ago, Dante wasn’t at all well.”
Colomba felt a shiver run down her back. “Not well how?”
“He wouldn’t open the door to his hotel room for the housekeeper and just stayed barricaded inside. He felt he was being followed and spied upon exactly like in the time of the Father.”
“The Father is dead.”
“But Dante’s brother isn’t.”
Fuck, thought Colomba. So that’s the problem. “He’s still fixated on him,” she said grimly.
“He was sure that this brother existed and that he was watching Dante. He stopped sleeping and, at a certain point, taking the most basic care of himself. He wanted to be sure he could intercept him in case he passed within reach.”
“And how did he emerge from that state? Because even if he’s not well now, he’s not doing that badly.”
“We found a discreet clinic right by Lake Como. He understood the situation and agreed to spend a few weeks there, most of the time sleeping in the garden, in a camping tent.”
“I didn’t have the slightest idea,” said Colomba, her heart full to bursting.
“When the drug dosage stabilized,” Minutillo continued, “Dante started regaining contact with reality. I imagine he’s now following a treatment that he’s more or less devised for himself, but the advice from the psychiatrist who was working with him was to avoid any other involvement in violent cases, at
least for a while. And Dante decided to follow that advice, because he was worried that he might screw things up with his clients.”
“Is that why he’s delivering lectures at the university?”
“He’s trying to recycle himself as an expert on myths and folklore, seeing as he knows more about that field than only a very few people on earth. Right now he’s not making enough to keep up the style to which he was accustomed, but it’s a beginning.”
“Luckily, the hotel is free,” said Colomba.
“The room is, but not the extra services, which are starting to add up to a completely unmanageable sum. Considering his state, I thought this might not be the time to urge him to move back into his apartment in San Lorenzo. Sooner or later, he’s going to have to, though.”
“Valle can’t help him?”
“Dante is too proud to ask his stepfather for help. He even insisted on paying for the clinic with his own money, and that left him flat broke.” Minutillo grimaced; it was clear how sorry he was. “In the last little while, he’s been all right, in any case. Not working on criminal matters relaxed him. He was lucid and active, in a good mood, and rational, according to his standards, which we know all too well.”
“Then I showed up,” murmured Colomba, “and he became delirious again.”
“Maybe.” Minutillo smiled. “Or else you showed up again and he started thinking straight for a change. Your call.”
° ° °
Colomba left the law offices with a family-pack sense of guilt and even more doubt. As always when she felt depressed and confused, she turned to physical effort.
Her gym wasn’t far from the law offices, in the Prati district so beloved by legal notaries and filmmakers. She always had a clean tracksuit in her locker there. She went straight over and got changed, but she couldn’t bring herself to go into the fitness area, which seemed too crowded with starlets and models. She ran outside and kept going down Viale Mazzini, running past the big bronze horse that decorated the headquarters of RAI TV and the oversize face that once was a fountain on the corner of the same street. Then she went trotting down onto the quay of the Lungotevere, the riverfront esplanade along the Tiber, along a reeking stone staircase.
Kill the Angel Page 20