Kill the Angel

by Sandrone Dazieri

  Esposito shrugged and said nothing. Ever since the matter of the CRT company had come up, he’d become increasingly argumentative and grim. Dante had noticed and was about to ask him about it, but Colomba waved for him to keep quiet: she knew better than Dante did how to treat her men. “All right, boys,” she said as she stood up, “it’s getting late. We’re all out of sandwiches and beer, it’s time to go get some sleep. Thanks again for the conversation.”

  The three of them let her walk them to the door. “When are you planning to tell the task force about what we’ve found?” asked Alberti on his way out.

  “We haven’t found anything, Alberti. We’re just making a number of fanciful conjectures. Okay?”

  “Okay, Deputy Chief.”

  “At last, someone with a shred of good sense,” Esposito blurted.

  Colomba got between him and the door. “Can you stick around a little longer?” she asked him.

  “I came in Alberti’s car,” he said, caught off guard.

  “Then I’ll treat you to a taxi. I’ve discovered I have a little more cash than I expected,” said Dante, coming over and joining the conversation. “And I’ll even give you something stronger to drink than beer.”

  Esposito sighed. “See you guys tomorrow,” he told the other two waiting in the hall, and shut the door. “What did I do?”

  “First the cocktail. Vodka-based all right with you?” said Dante.

  “Or else what?”

  “Or else vodka.”

  “Okay.”

  “Come on, sit down,” said Colomba. Esposito went back to the sofa, where Dante joined him after a short while with two Moscow Mules—he’d made one for himself as well—in oversize cocktail glasses. Colomba took a Coke Zero from the minibar in an attempt to help digest the industrial quantity of tea sandwiches that she had consumed.

  “What are those?” asked Esposito, pointing to the little light green slices in the glass. “Zucchini?”

  “Cucumber. You’ll see how good it is,” said Dante, sitting down across from him. “Anything you say won’t leave this room. We’re on the same side, after all, aren’t we?”

  “You and me? I don’t think so.”

  “I can’t order you to say anything you don’t want to, Esposito,” said Colomba. “But it’s clear that the matter of the mole at CRT got on your nerves, and I’d like to know why, seeing that I came mighty close to dying on account of it.”

  “Or do you just want to try and guess?” threw in Dante. “Normally, when someone touches their mouth or face, it means they have a secret they don’t want to reveal or something they think they shouldn’t say, even though they want to. You touched yourself more often than usual.”

  Esposito looked at them both, first one and then the other. “You’re a hell of a pair, you know that? No disrespect, Deputy Chief.” He took a sip. “Hey, this stuff isn’t as disgusting as I expected it to be.” He downed another gulp and made up his mind. “All right. I knew Walter Campriani personally. The security guard who got his throat slashed open by that piece of shit.”

  “Was he a policeman?” asked Dante.

  “Yep. Years ago we worked together on the serious crime squad. He liked it there, and in fifteen years, he never once asked for a transfer. Not like the penguins these days who are dying to get onto the Mobile Squad after a month in the street.”

  “Why did he quit?” asked Colomba, trying not to remember Campriani lying sprawled in a puddle of his own blood.

  “They forced him out. They said he was taking money from dope pushers to get advance warning of roundups and sweeps. The big guys, not the losers who stand on street corners. The higher-ups decided to just take care of it without going through the courts.”

  “And was he really taking payoffs?” asked Dante.

  “I never saw him do it.”

  “Ah, well, in that case,” Dante said sarcastically.

  “I never saw him do it, I said, and that’s what I’m going to keep saying even if God Almighty asks me,” Esposito said with a note of anger. “Fuck, the man’s dead. A little respect.”

  “Still, you’re starting to have some doubts,” Colomba said in an icy voice. She didn’t have a lot of sympathy with fellow cops who took bribes, living or dead.

  Esposito looked at his hands. “He was in bad shape. I saw him a few times in recent years, more by chance than anything else. His ex-wife was eating up half his salary, and the other half was going to the Cuban woman he’d hooked up with.”

  “Do you know whether security guards always work the same shifts?” Dante asked Colomba.

  “Yeah, usually, they do.”

  “Then Musta had been sent to kill the security guard to shut him up. All the rest was collateral damage,” said Dante.

  “You can’t be so positive of that, genius,” said Esposito.

  “Which is why you’re coming with us to see the widow,” Colomba said. “Maybe she’ll talk to an old friend.”

  8

  The Monti neighborhood was just a twenty-minute walk from Dante’s hotel, but Colomba had no desire to drag a sulky Esposito along. So she took her car again, even though Dante forced her to drive slower than usual because his internal thermometer was starting to beep in a state of pre-alarm.

  The security guard’s apartment was on one of Rome’s typical double-faced streets, where working-class housing stood side by side with super-deluxe apartment buildings. Campriani’s building was right next to the neighborhood indoor market, and it was one of the less fortunate ones. The front entrance was jammed between cars parked on the sidewalk and the enclosure of a construction site that blocked off access to a side street. Dante took just a quick glance at the gloomy front hall with its crooked walls. “I’ll wait for you outside,” he said immediately.

  “Okay,” said Colomba.

  “You could keep your cell phone turned on: that way I can hear, too. Maybe even with the video on.”

  “Like hell.”

  On the fifth floor, a woman in her early forties answered the door. She was dark-skinned, and her eyes were red with tears. Her name was Yoani, and she’d been living with Campriani for over ten years. She was unsteady on her feet, and Colomba could see that she was under the effect of some kind of tranquilizer, or else she’d been drinking. Probably both. The small apartment was crowded with flowers and funeral wreaths, and a photograph of the security guard hung on the wall by the front door over a sad little electric candle. Because of the work she did, Colomba had paid many visits to people who’d recently been bereaved, but that didn’t make it any easier. She continued to imagine all too clearly how life would go on in those homes where everyday living had been broken for good.

  Yoani, befuddled though she was, seemed to have processed the first hot impact of grief. She gave Esposito a hug; he clumsily tried to console her, then told her to sit down with him in the kitchen because he needed to talk to her. “Listen, there’s probably nothing to it, and we’re really sorry to bother you, but we’re checking out some details concerning Walter’s murder. There are a couple of things we’d like to—”

  “This is about the woman, isn’t it?” she interrupted, slurring her words. She spoke perfect Italian, though with a strong Caribbean accent. “I knew she had something to do with this.”

  Esposito turned around to look at Colomba. “What woman are you talking about, Signora?” she asked.

  Yoani said nothing.

  “Come on, Yo,” Esposito said, taking her hand in his. “This stays between us.”

  “Who’s going to care what a Cuban whore has to say?” said Yoani, staring into the empty air.

  “Have you talked about this with someone else?” asked Esposito.

  “With the fat lady. The judge.”

  Spinelli, Colomba thought, not even all that surprised. “And what did she tell you, Signora?”

  Yoani blew her nose, then went on talking. “Everyone thought the reason I was with Walter was because he supported me, but that’s not true.
I loved him. And I was jealous.”

  She told them how things had been recently with her man, and described his slow slide into depression. He’d felt old and without prospects ever since he’d turned sixty; he’d become apathetic and uninterested in sex. Still, in the past two weeks, Campriani seemed to have turned back into the man Yoani had fallen in love with fifteen years ago in Cuba, where she—and she cared a lot about making this point—had been working as an elementary school teacher, not a jinetera. “If a man suddenly becomes happy again, my mother always told me that means he’s making love to some new woman. He denied it, but I didn’t believe him.”

  So she’d started following him, checking up on his activities, and one day she had seen him climbing into a big black car that Colomba identified as a Hummer. A woman had been at the wheel.

  “What did this woman look like? Can you describe her?” asked Colomba, doing her best not to let the anxiety creep into her voice. It could have been a coincidence; maybe Campriani really did have a lover.

  “She was made up like crazy and had a head of hair that looked fake because of how blond it was. She didn’t look tall, but she was sitting in that car, so I couldn’t really tell.”

  “How old?”

  “Thirty, forty? With all the foundation she had on her face, it was impossible to tell, and I wasn’t close enough. But there’s one thing I know for sure.” Yoani hesitated for a few seconds. “That was a bad woman.”

  “How did you know that, Yo?” asked Esposito.

  “From the smile.” Yoani’s gaze was once again lost in the distance. “I always thought that if I saw Walter with another woman, I’d beat both of them up. But I was afraid of her, and I just stood there on that street corner like a fool.”

  Colomba clung to the idea of mere coincidence, but with every word the woman said, she could feel herself losing that grip. “Did you talk to Signor Campriani about it when he came home?”

  “Yes. And he immediately said it was something to do with work, a side job, that I didn’t need to worry about it. And then . . .” Yoani looked at Colomba, her eyes filled with tears. “And then we made love. It was the last time.”

  Colomba’s throat was dry, but before she could ask another question, her cell phone rang. It was an unknown number. But when she answered, the voice was familiar.

  It was Leo.

  “Listen carefully and don’t say my name,” the NOA agent said immediately. “You need to get out of there right away. They’re coming for you.”

  9

  Colomba didn’t waste any time. She sent a Snapchat message to Dante and then called out to Esposito. “We’ve got to go,” she said.

  He leaped to his feet at the sound of her voice. “What’s happened?”

  “I’ll tell you later.” Colomba went over to Yoani. “Someone might come here looking for us. Don’t tell them that you saw us,” she said hastily. “And don’t tell anyone else about the woman in the black car. That’s important. Can you do that for me?”

  The other woman looked to Esposito for help, and he nodded. “So I’m right? That woman had something to do with Walter’s death?” Yoani asked.

  “I think so,” Colomba replied, anxious to get going. “But if you say anything about it, I won’t be able to look for her anymore.”

  Yoani nodded slowly. “All right.”

  “And don’t say anything about her on the phone, either,” Colomba shouted as she went through the door with Esposito. When they got to the street, there was no sign of the car, and Colomba mentally thanked Dante for having followed her instructions. She and Esposito ran down the street, closed off to traffic for construction work, and emerged in the neighboring Piazza degli Zingari, where fifty or so young people were chatting and smoking joints.

  Who the hell are we running from? she wondered. The only answer she got was a squad car with its lights flashing as it screeched into the adjacent street, closely followed by another. The paddle sticking out of the window said CARABINIERI. A stunned expression appeared on Esposito’s face. “The cousins? That’s why we’re running?” he said, breathing heavily.

  “So it seems,” she said as the scale of the mess they were in began to dawn on her. “When we went to see Yoani, we stepped in shit.”

  “A big fat pile of it, too.”

  As if to confirm the statement, a couple of oversize men in civilian clothing came walking briskly from the direction they had come, pushing through the crowd and heading straight toward them. “Let’s get the hell out of here,” said Colomba.

  Both she and Esposito had tailed enough people in their careers to know exactly how to move away expeditiously without being obvious about it, and they did so, taking a series of alleys and narrow lanes until they emerged right behind the Imperial Forums. Here Colomba removed the battery from her cell phone and told Esposito to do the same.

  “Do you think they’ll come look for us at home?” he asked as he opened the back of his phone.

  “I have no idea. But just to be cautious, go sleep somewhere else tonight.”

  “My wife won’t be happy about this.”

  “I’m sorry. If I find out anything else, I’ll let you know. Do you know where you’ll be staying?”

  Esposito nodded and gave her a friend’s number, which Colomba quickly memorized. “Is the woman Yoani mentioned the one we’re looking for, Deputy Chief? Is she the reason that all this craziness is breaking loose?”

  “Maybe so,” said Colomba, who still hadn’t entirely resigned herself to the idea. “I’ll call you as soon as I can.”

  They parted ways, and Colomba went looking for a phone booth. She found one that still worked, even though it was covered with graffiti, and the receiver reeked of wine.

  Luckily, Dante had already headed back to the hotel. “What the fuck happened?” he asked, so upset he could hardly speak straight.

  “They missed us by a hair, Dante.”

  “People in uniform or civilian clothes?”

  “Uniform.”

  Dante gulped loudly. “Should I expect unwelcome visitors?”

  “I don’t know that yet. But you’d better alert your lawyer that trouble may be coming.”

  “I’ll do that. Even though he’s at a wine tasting, and he’ll just hate me if I make him miss it.” Colomba could sense that he was hesitating. “CC . . . I don’t like the idea of you out there all alone.”

  “Nothing’ll happen to me. I’ll call you back soon.”

  Colomba hung up, less confident than she’d just tried to act. Then she pulled the card with Leo’s number out of her wallet and called him. “It’s me,” she said.

  Leo didn’t give her time to say another word and gave her the address of a bar at San Lorenzo, La Mucca Brilla, or the Tipsy Cow. Colomba knew the place because it wasn’t far from Dante’s old apartment. In the summer, the proprietors put tables outside, so Dante could have a drink there.

  When she arrived, it was one in the morning, and there was no one left in the bar but an elderly couple and a tableful of kids. And then there was Leo, sitting at a table by himself, ideally located to keep an eye on the entrance, in a white T-shirt and light-colored jacket that highlighted his athletic physique. He stood up to greet her with a smile. He seemed relaxed, or at least more relaxed than she did.

  “One for me, too,” Colomba said, pointing to his beer.

  He gestured to the waiter, who brought it to the table practically at a run; Colomba drained half the glass at a single gulp. “Am I wanted by the authorities?”

  “No,” said Leo.

  “Well, fuck, that’s a relief,” she said with a sigh. “Then tell me what’s going on.”

  “What’s going on is you’re prying into the attack.”

  “I’m not prying into anything.”

  “Colomba, they know at the task force that you went to see the secretary from CRT, and this evening, Campriani’s girlfriend. Both of them are under surveillance. Hadn’t that occurred to you?”

  “Of co
urse it had, but I didn’t think they would have sounded the alarm so quickly. Who gave the order to have me picked up?”

  “Di Marco from military intelligence. He wanted to catch you with your hand in the cookie jar and teach you a lesson.”

  Colomba knew Di Marco very well. He’d been one of Dante’s main adversaries when he’d first started talking about the connections between the Father and the intelligence agencies. The lack of esteem was reciprocal. “On what charges?”

  “With an investigation into an ISIS terror attack under way, do you think they’re really going to sweat those details? They could just come pick you up at home, but it would be too clear that it’s an abuse of power: you’re something of a heroine, after all.”

  “Something of a heroine and something of an asshole,” she muttered. “How come you knew about it right away?”

  “Two of the guys on the squad were my men. They followed you in the piazza.”

  “Did they lose me on purpose?”

  “All I can tell you is that my men like you, too.”

  “Why, do you like me?” asked Colomba, regretting it immediately.

  Leo smiled. “I’m here, aren’t I?”

  “You could be here for lots of reasons. For instance, maybe you can smell something fishy about this ISIS terror attack.”

  Leo leaned back in his chair and looked her up and down. “Has anyone ever told you you’re stubborn?”

  “How about nosy? Yes, they have, and recently, too.”

  Leo laughed. “The intelligence agencies have their rules, and most important, they don’t go around telling people why they do things,” he said in a serious tone. “I go where they tell me to go, and I don’t worry about investigations, just about security and apprehending targets . . .”

  “But?”

  “Everyone’s in too much of a hurry, maybe just so they can look good. If there’s a chance that someone else might be going around planting gas canisters, I’d rather know about it.”

  “Don’t jump to conclusions. I just paid a call on a widow.”

  His face tightened into a sad grimace. “I risk getting drummed off the force, and you still don’t trust me.”