In that section, the Lungotevere had a brand-new bicycle path that was also used by joggers, and Colomba followed the current, heading toward the center of town and pacing herself to warm up. The bike path ended almost immediately, transforming into broken cement and mud; Colomba felt as if she were moving through a city that had been abandoned after a nuclear war. On her left, broken-down old barges and boats were anchored, covered with garbage, while on her right, there appeared at regular intervals narrow passageways barred off by metal grates marked ENTRANCE PROHIBITED. Those led to the Rowing Clubs, which could be reached from the street above, though they were almost all abandoned and falling apart. The cement walls were covered with graffiti and dirty words.
Colomba caught a second wind and pushed herself to her normal cruising pace, enjoying the sensation of her muscles loosening up and her heartbeat becoming regular. Little by little, the image of Dante locked up in the clinic, like in some black-and-white Gothic film, faded and vanished from her conscience.
But the oblivion was short-lived. All it took was for her eyes to settle on any random object, and it brought painful episodes back to mind. The old shoe that she ran over reminded her of when Dante had thrown one of his Clipper boots through the window of the hospital where she had been admitted, saving her life; a fork encrusted with food reminded her of the many dinners he had treated her to at the Hotel Impero, and which he was now struggling to pay back; the pile of sand outside a construction site that was supposed to be finished three years earlier seemed like the sand under which she’d found Dante in the half-buried trailer, when they’d embraced, wounded and suffering, after outliving the man who had tried to kill them both.
Colomba sped up even more. She ran back up to street level through an underpass full of human excrement, dodging around a couple of seagulls intently fighting over a rat carcass, and then headed back in the direction she’d come from. When she reached the Ponte del Risorgimento, she ran down onto the quay and started the circuit all over again—bike path, broken cement, underpass—but the flashes just grew faster and more confused. Dante jumping up and down in her living room, then his face covered with blood in front of the shattered plate-glass window of the shop where Youssef lived. His voice talking about angels and serial killers.
Colomba pushed harder yet and started the circuit a third time, leaping down the uneven steps, which were used as a public urinal. She could feel her hips pumping and where her jaw had been broken. Her lungs seemed to be trying to suck down the cosmic vacuum; her heart was a brick, her feet a machine gun. She was forced to stop, bent over and gasping like an old woman. In that state, she had a satori and understood that beneath her anger, beneath her refusal . . . she was afraid. Afraid of what could happen. Because when she and Dante were together, “things” happened. Horrifying things, for the most part. And she wasn’t sure she could live through another monster.
She went back to the gymnasium, wiped the soles of her shoes, then practiced a few combinations on the heavy bag, ignoring the woman on the lat machine who kept ranting about deporting immigrants and the death penalty. Then Colomba came home feeling as lighthearted as someone who’d made a decision, difficult and complicated though it might have been, her muscles pleasantly aching.
But her mood worsened the minute she stepped through her front door. Dante was sitting on the sofa in the living room, and he was smoking something that looked like a slightly crumpled cigarette. It had quite a pungent odor. “Have you lost your mind?” she shouted at him, slamming the door shut behind her. “Are you seriously smoking a joint in my home?”
“Oh my, how tragic,” said Dante, taking another toke. He held the joint in his good hand, wrapped into a hollow fist, and inhaled from the palm, the way that Colomba had seen only the older stoners do.
Colomba grabbed it out of his hand and crushed it out in the ashtray. “Where did you get the drugs?”
Dante snickered. “The drugs? It’s just cannabis, Mom. And I didn’t buy it. It’s Musta’s.”
“The boys told me that you’d thrown it out the window.”
“I did toss the bag out the window.”
Colomba reached out her hand. “Give it here.”
“It’s strictly for personal use,” he defended himself, but when he saw the emerald skulls flashing in Colomba’s eyes, he reached in his pocket and pulled out the aluminum foil packet. Colomba emptied it down the toilet, along with the ashtray, and then sprayed the horrible pine-scented air freshener that her mother had given her, because according to her, Colomba’s apartment “reeked just a little of lack of cleanliness.” As she was doing it, Colomba remembered that she’d promised to have lunch with her mother, and her mood, if possible, worsened.
“You do go on,” said Dante, watching her maneuvers. “Let me remind you that cannabis isn’t as bad for you as alcohol.”
“And let me remind you that alcohol is legal. And marijuana isn’t.” She sniffed at her clothing. “Do you know what’ll happen if they do a random drug test on me?”
“You haven’t smoked any.”
“There’s such a thing as secondhand smoke.”
“Oh, come on, CC . . .”
“There is such a thing! And the THC persists in your urine for forty days.”
“Then I’ll just switch to cocaine, which only lasts for five.”
She swung around and stood in front of him. “Just try it.”
“I was kidding. I’ve never had any need for stimulants.”
“But tranquilizers are another matter. And so is rehab.”
Dante looked down. “You went to see Roberto. Obviously.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“You don’t believe a thing I say as it is. What would you have done in my shoes?” he said, ashamed as a little boy.
“Look at me.”
He raised his eyes.
“I know who you are, okay? I’ve seen the worst and the best of you.”
“And you ran away.”
“Not from you, Dante. From us. From what else might happen.” She struggled to find the right words, and it wasn’t easy. She sat down on the sofa next to him. “My life had an order before I met you. I knew what I was doing. Now every step is into the unknown.”
“It always was, only now you’ve finally just realized it.”
“Maybe so, but that doesn’t make any difference to me. As soon as I get off the beaten path, as you’ve seen, I start to get uneasy. Do you know what it means to feel your lungs tighten and shut down? I feel as if I’m dying every single time. And I see things that aren’t there.”
Dante was a member of that chosen elite who, if they have nothing to say, keep their mouths shut, though he almost never had nothing to say. But this time he sat silent as Colomba finished speaking.
“No secrets,” she said. “I have to be able to trust you, know that you aren’t hiding anything from me. No half-truths. No omissions.”
“Okay,” said Dante, who was happier than he’d felt in a good long time. “And no running away. I have to know you won’t abandon me in the middle of the stream.”
Colomba nodded. “That won’t happen. You’re my friend and I love you. I’m sorry if you ever thought otherwise.”
He stretched out on the sofa with his hands behind his neck. “I never thought that, not really. So, you believe me about Giltine?”
“I’m willing to take a look. If nothing convincing emerges, at least by my standards, you agree to accept my response and drop it, and we’ll just move on.”
“And if something emerges?”
“If we find something solid, then we’ll unleash Interpol or the colleagues from the anti-terrorism division.”
Dante seemed to consider the proposal, and then he solemnly held out his right hand, and she shook it.
Both of them felt both like laughing and crying at the same time, but they did neither.
4
The dead were whispering softly in the Grand Canal, but Giltine managed to keep
them out of her mind. It wasn’t easy, and it struck her as almost disrespectful. She would have preferred to find a place to stay that was far from the water, but she also needed it to be sufficiently expensive to ensure both privacy and anonymity, and that kind of apartment always offered a view to go with the price.
That afternoon, as soon as she’d arrived, she’d removed what remained of her makeup and reapplied the medications. On that unusually hot, muggy day, the makeup hadn’t lasted as long as she’d expected. She’d seen her arm discolor and reveal the sores shortly before she arrived at the Calle Sant’Antonio, and the water-taxi driver had given her a suspicious glance. Had he figured out who she was? If that had happened, she’d have to eliminate him inside the apartment she’d rented—twenty-two hundred square feet, with a large terrace and exquisite furniture in the finest Venetian style—and get rid of his body there, after which she’d need to change her address and her identity. But it would have been a major problem, because for what Giltine was doing, time was of the essence.
Giltine had covered her arm with a scarf, upon which a fetid stain had immediately begun to spread, all too visibly, while the taxi driver unloaded her luggage into the office with its bow window and then left without a word. From the window, she had seen him look back in her direction as if undecided. As was she. She didn’t want to compromise everything she’d worked for, especially when she was so close to the finish line.
The murmuring of the souls had become more insistent at the stroke of midnight. Giltine turned on the stereo, which was connected to a Bang & Olufsen amplifier that looked like a flying saucer, and tuned the radio to an empty frequency, letting the white noise fill her brain. Arms thrown wide, naked except for her bandages, Giltine felt herself disappear into the wave of sound, becoming immaterial and devoid of a body. Then her heart skipped a beat and she found herself on the floor, feeling her flesh burn as it came in contact with the chilly marble. Freed from the claims of the dead, her mind emptied and electric, she went over to the laptop that sat on the desk in the office. She connected to the Wi-Fi, went through a VPN based in the United States that concealed her real location and identity online, and summoned her avatars.
Giltine had hundreds of them, and they were now sliding across screens in as many chat programs, Web pages, and email browsers, which opened and closed like soap bubbles at a touch of the mouse. They were men and women, young and old, charming and horrendous, of a wide variety of nationalities. Some of them frequented lonely-hearts meeting sites; others stalked hookup sites or escort pages. Others engaged in discussions on forums dedicated to arrays of topics ranging from cooking to sports. Some of them had died because they’d outlived their usefulness or failed to lure in an intended victim.
Giltine maneuvered them, leaping from one to the next, managing the various conversations under way, offering advice, telling of sexual fantasies, and predicting the future. On one child-molester site, she was a sixty-year-old man trading pictures; on the black market of the new Silk Road, she was buying weapons and selling drugs; on Facebook Messenger, she was a friend to a young girl with learning disabilities, but also a sexy female student looking for a mature, generous man. In the dungeons, she was the money mistress to a French broker and a German doctor, the sex slave of a Japanese master, and the bitch of a zoophile. On Facebook, she joked, fought, seduced, and sent funny videos and GIFs. Everywhere she offered services and favors, shoulders to cry on, kind words, and psychological support. She was the generous friend, the needy one, the irritant, and the distraction.
Three victims were ready to bite, and Giltine devoted special attention to them, chatting with each for a few minutes instead of sending a direct message and moving on to the next one. The first one was a virgin in his early fifties, looking for a woman who understood him and could help him with his very first time. Another one was in his thirties, played poker on the online circuits, and had gambled away his apartment. The third was a prostitute who couldn’t seem to break up with the boyfriend who regularly beat her black and blue. Giltine had a solution ready for each of them, but her gift would come in the fullness of time, when the three of them could prove useful. And if, in the meantime, they had solved their problems, others could take their places. The pond she was fishing from was immense, including every country and city that had access to an Internet connection.
Giltine remained online until dawn. Depending on the time zone, she wished them good night or good morning, offering a consultation and a blow job, sent a picture of a live cat and a dead old man, then got up and stretched, popping the bandages that had adhered to the seat and back of the chair and left a slimy mark behind, and then shut down all the online conversations but one. That was the conversation with the victim who had been wriggling on the hook for days, eager to please the woman who seemed to be the perfect incarnation of her every erotic dream. Giltine sent her a long and carefully crafted message, attaching a short video of an actual rape that had been filmed with a cell phone. She knew that her prey would enjoy it. Soon the time would come to send her into action.
Then Giltine opened one of her suitcases, releasing the false bottom. It was time to increase her arsenal.
5
The next morning, Colomba started up the Fiat Punto, which had seen better days, and drove over to the Hotel Impero to pick up Dante, entering his suite with the magnetic card that he had given her over a year ago. After all this time, Colomba was astonished to find it all exactly the same. The aroma of coffee; the smoke detector covered with duct tape; the ten compressed sawdust logs neatly piled up by housekeeping next to the fireplace; papers, books, laptops, and tablets scattered wherever there was an inch of spare surface area, including the carpets and rugs; the large white sofas and the uncurtained picture window that looked out over a rain-beaten Rome.
Across from the front door was Dante’s room, with black-lacquered furniture and an enormous round bed, while to the right of the living area was the door that led into the guest room, smaller but more comfortable, where Colomba had slept many times.
Along one wall was the inevitable row of boxes and cartons, the “time capsules” that Dante accumulated until he could take them to a rented storage carrel already full to bursting. They were objects from the years of the silo, during which Dante had remained segregated and cut off from the world; they included recordings of television shows, most of them very low-quality, which he kept and studied in the hope of being able to capture the spirit of all that he had lost. Colomba peeped into one of the big boxes and found a horrid belt with an oversize buckle in fake gold, with the monogram EL. “And just what is this belt supposed to be?” she asked.
“A prized item that I was able to find only after a great deal of searching,” Dante shouted from the bathroom in his bedroom, where he was drying off after shaving. His whiskers grew sparse and almost blond, so he had to shave only a couple of times a week. “The El Charro F302 Cult belt. The dream of all the rich kids of the eighties.”
“Did they put serial numbers on them?”
“Are you kidding me?” Dante emerged from the bedroom with nothing but a towel wrapped around his waist. “It’s an important relic from a more carefree time than this one, in great demand from collectors.”
Colomba studied him with a critical eye. “How the fuck skinny have you gotten? Why don’t you go to a nutritionist and put on a pound or two?”
“Nutritionists tend to want me to eat animals, or else they freak out about the amount of medicines I take,” and as he spoke, he unscrewed a bottle and swallowed a couple of tablets. “They did prescribe these for me, though.”
“At the clinic?”
“Yup.”
“What was it like?”
Dante shrugged. “Irritating. I always have problems interacting with people who think they know more than I do about my brain.”
“And vice versa. You’re a mess of a patient.”
“I know that, but in the end, we found an amicable compromise. They gave m
e psychopharmaceuticals that don’t turn me into an absolute vegetable . . .”
“. . . and you stopped thinking about your hypothetical brother.”
Dante shook his head, and his hair flew out, scattering drops of water onto the wall. “The compromise is that I think less about it, and I avoid letting it become an obsession. In effect, I guess I did overdo it a little, even though the memories of the last little while before going to the clinic are somewhat confused.”
“Maybe you should try some more radical treatment.”
“I haven’t entirely dismissed the possibility.” Dante slipped behind the counter of the bar, eager to change the subject. “But you haven’t seen the big new thing around here. I’m especially proud of it.”
Colomba leaned forward to look and realized that, next to the espresso maker, which Dante ran and maintained personally, was a steel gooseneck faucet that rose directly from the countertop. Next to it was an LCD pressure and temperature gauge. “What’s that?”
“A TopBrewer.” Dante pushed a touch-sensitive button, and there came a sound of coffee being ground deep in the viscera of the cabinet. “Normal coffeemakers push boiling water through the filter. This one uses a vacuum chamber to suck it up.” The faucet expelled a narrow drizzle of light-colored coffee that filled a demitasse. Dante pushed it toward her. “Try it.”
Colomba sipped cautiously, while Dante kept an anxious eye on her. “It tastes like the coffee from a moka pot, only soupier,” she said.
“Listen, what you’re drinking is an Indonesia Sulawesi Toarco Toraja,” said Dante with feigned indignation. “High notes of lemon and vanilla, aftertaste of wood . . .”
“Filtered through your million-dollar coffeemaker, I get it. Maybe if you could just add a drop of milk . . .”
“Over my dead body.” Dante made an espresso for himself and went over to sit on one of the sofas. Colomba got comfortable on the sofa opposite. She decided it was hardly surprising if Dante was penniless, considering the amount of money he spent on whims and expensive trifles.
Kill the Angel Page 21