Kill the Angel

by Sandrone Dazieri

  Colomba finished her beer and said nothing. After a lengthy pause, she said, “Thanks for the help. I mean it.” But she didn’t look him in the face.

  “Okay,” said Leo. “Let me go settle up.”

  He was standing, but instinctively, Colomba grabbed his hand. There was nothing planned in the gesture, just as she hadn’t expected that Leo would bend over her or that she would reach up and kiss him.

  “I guess there’s no chance of us winding up the evening somewhere else,” he said when they broke out of the kiss, his voice a little jagged.

  “I have your number,” she said.

  “And I have yours,” he said with a smile that was begging her to slap him.

  “How long have you had it?”

  “Since before I asked you for it. There must be some advantages to being on the task force, no?”

  Colomba waited for him to pay and leave, then she ducked under the half-lowered roller shutter and reactivated her cell phone. First she called Esposito, who launched a series of hallelujahs, then Dante.

  “Are you out on your own recognizance?” he asked, leaving long pauses between one word and the next, and Colomba understood that he’d dropped something heavy.

  “They usually take your cell phone away if you’re in prison. I’m swinging by to pick up the car.”

  “Okay. Come on up and see me, I have some news,” he said, still in slow motion.

  “What else have you discovered?”

  “Discovered? Nothing. But I now have an idea that our Giltine is much, much more precise and exacting than I’d assumed up till now. And you’re going to have to take a little trip to check it out.”

  10

  Giltine had emptied one of the windowless storage closets, leaving only the shelves in place. She had then carefully disinfected the tiny room and painstakingly cleared it of even the slightest trace of dust. Then, wearing surgical gloves over her bandages, she’d sterilized a needle with a portable camping stove and deposited the spores on ten sterile laboratory slides, sealing them immediately. Each slide was double, like an Oreo cookie, and in the middle was a filling of agar-agar. On that jelly-like substrate, the spores would begin to grow: spores of Psilocybe mexicana, the same mushroom that the ancient Aztecs considered a gift from Xochipilli, the “prince of flowers” and the god of love. Agar-agar would provide fertile soil in which to begin the colonization.

  Making magic mushrooms was complicated. All it needed was a particle of dirt to contaminate a batch, and once the fungus had begun to spread over the slides, she’d have to transfer them to sterile jars with rice flour and vermiculite—a mineral that was used as a foundation for terrariums—and wait for them to grow. It took two weeks to complete the process, and there were endless complications, but the spores had the advantage that you could hide them anywhere, and that drug- and bomb-sniffing dogs had no way of detecting them. They were a perfect weapon to carry around, even if they didn’t kill her prey, but simply kept it from doing any harm and rendered it extremely susceptible to hypnotic suggestion.

  On another culture, however, she was growing something that could cause intoxication or wonderful dreams: ergot, a rye fungus. If properly distilled, it could be made into LSD, but in its basic form, it was fatal. Once ingested, aside from hallucinations, it could produce gangrene and convulsions. It had another advantage: it was heat-resistant, as thousands of people had learned at their personal expense during the Middle Ages, after eating contaminated bread and contracting Saint Anthony’s fire, or ergotism. Giltine also knew how to make other poisons from fruit pits, by extracting essential oils, and even from certain species of insects that could be easily made to reproduce in captivity, as she was doing in the little terrarium that sat on the shelf next to the spores. But she didn’t expect to need them in Venice. As for afterward . . . maybe there simply wouldn’t be an afterward.

  Somebody rang the doorbell. Giltine, who had heard footsteps on the landing even before her visitor had rung the doorbell, moved silently toward the door and looked through the peephole. It was the water-taxi driver. “What is it?” she asked, forcing a French accent. She couldn’t open the door, because she hadn’t put on her makeup.

  “Signora Poupin, it’s me, Pennelli.”

  “Yes?”

  “I forgot to ask you to sign my receipt for the agency. If you could open up, we’ll be done in a flash.”

  The man held up a sheet of paper in front of the peephole, and Giltine examined it from the other side of the door. It looked authentic, and it probably was. But the man was lying, clearly and unmistakably. “One moment, please,” she said. “I just got out of the shower.”

  She ran into the bedroom and slipped into a bathrobe and the wig. She didn’t have time to get made up, so she quickly unwrapped a seaweed facial mask. When she put it on her skin, it was pure agony, but it would serve the purpose. She left the latex gloves on her hands; Pennelli would just assume they were good for applying beauty creams. She slipped a scalpel into the pocket of her bathrobe. It might prove useful, you never knew.

  When she opened the door, the water-taxi driver looked around, throwing back his head like a landlord inspecting his property. “You’re getting all dolled up,” he said, eyeing her.

  Behind those apparently innocuous words, Giltine perceived a barely restrained hostility. She pretended she hadn’t noticed. “Would you please give me the receipt so I can sign it?” she said.

  “Only if you show me a piece of ID. Your passport.”

  Giltine cocked her head to one side and watched him. Her expression under the beauty mask was undecipherable. “Why?”

  “Do you know what I did for a living before I started driving a water taxi?”

  “I’m not interested in knowing.”

  “Come on, just give me this satisfaction,” said the taxi driver, making himself comfortable in an armchair.

  “Soldier. Cop,” said Giltine, thinking that the best thing might be to slice him up into tiny bits and flush him down the toilet. If she wanted to make a quick job of it, she could use a professional meat grinder. But the risk would be considerable: Giltine didn’t know whether Pennelli had informed anyone else of his plans, so she might receive a visit from the man’s friends or the police before she had finished the job. “And you liked it, too.”

  Pennelli hadn’t expected that. “Fuck, Signora, you’ve got quite an eye. But I have a good eye myself. I was on the border police, to be exact. And I was in charge of making sure that all the people trying to get into Italy were really who they said they were. I always nailed it; people told me I was a wizard. Even if their documents were perfectly in order, I knew when the person carrying them wasn’t.” He licked his lips. “And you aren’t.” Pennelli had exaggerated a bit in singing his own praises, but not that much. He was considered extremely good at visual recognition, a skill you’re born with. He remembered the faces of wanted suspects, and he could identify them even under wigs and fake mustaches. Still, nobody had ever said he was a wizard; at the very most, maybe, a filthy bastard. When he’d been caught stealing valuables from travelers’ suitcases, no one had been all that surprised. “And there’s something off about the documents that the agency gave me. I still don’t know exactly what, but I’ll bet I could figure it out. If I really put myself to the trouble.”

  Giltine said nothing.

  “You might be a terrorist who’s come to plant a bomb in St. Mark’s Cathedral, for all I know.”

  “I’m not a terrorist.”

  He looked at her from half-lidded eyes. “Probably not. But you have something to hide. You know what occurred to me? That you’re running away. Maybe you pulled off some fucked-up move in your own country, or else you have a violent husband.”

  Giltine decided that the man really did know how to take care of himself. “So what do you want?”

  Pennelli’s smile broadened. He was happy the woman hadn’t tried to deny it. At least that way it was all much faster. “What can you give me? And
don’t try buying me off with a blow job, because I don’t feel like one.”

  At least not now. “Money?”

  “How much?”

  “I don’t have much cash. And I need it.”

  “How much?”

  “Ten thousand.”

  “Let’s make it twenty. I’ve learned never to accept the first offer.”

  Giltine let a few moments go by before nodding. If she’d given in too quickly, the man would have become suspicious.

  “I’ll come back in two days. No extensions.”

  “All right.”

  Pennelli got up from the armchair, heaving a weary sigh. As he walked past her on his way out, he reached out to give her a pat on the ass. “If you’d just given me a tip to start with, you would have spared yourself a lot of trouble.”

  She grabbed his wrist before he could complete the gesture. The man wriggled free, but breaking loose from her grip wasn’t as easy as he’d expected. Giltine’s fingers clutched him so hard that she cut off his circulation. “Don’t touch me,” she said, then she let him go.

  “You fucking whore,” he said, and left.

  Giltine ran into one of the bathrooms and frantically washed her face, removing every bit of that nasty seaweed plaster. Once she had the mask back on, she went online and researched everything there was to know about the water-taxi driver. Very soon, she’d pay a little call on him.

  11

  Colomba arrived at Milan’s Centrale station at one p.m., after a trip on a high-speed train that had left her quite uneasy. Even though she’d bought a second-class ticket, she couldn’t stop imagining the corpses from Top Class all around her. She’d even gone to take a look at Top Class, and all she’d found there were a few passengers making phone calls or looking at their electronic devices, as if blithely unaware of what had happened a few days before. Maybe that’s the right approach, she thought. You ought to just live your life and not think too much about all the bad things that can happen. She tried to do the same thing for the rest of the ride, which lasted barely three hours, but when the smell of a burning grilled cheese sandwich wafted over to her from the adjoining carriage, she jumped up and ran to check, adrenaline surging through her veins.

  The distractions available to her were a phone call from Santini, which she declined, and the voicemail that he left her instead. A voicemail that she listened to only in part (in fact, only the first two words, delivered in an angry shout: Fuck, Caselli!), and a little smiley face from Leo, which gave her a pleasurable sensation. Instead of replying with another emoticon, she sent him a link to download Snapchat. If they were going to remain in contact, and Colomba certainly wanted to, it would be best to use Dante’s military tactics. She wasn’t certain that the intelligence agencies really were listening in on her conversations—even a creature as obtuse as Di Marco must have realized that she’d had nothing to do with the terror attack—but by this point, she wasn’t certain of anything.

  Centrale station was an imposing building from the Fascist era, built on two main floors with stone spouts that spewed out rain. Colomba walked down the steps of the main staircase and emerged into a piazza where there was a statue of a gigantic apple, in the midst of a tent city set up by the Red Cross, and small knots of bewildered-looking immigrants. The rain came down even harder, but Bart arrived at that exact moment, with an open umbrella in one hand and two leashed Labrador retrievers in the other. The dogs were dripping wet, but Colomba was happy to welcome their festive greetings: she’d been struggling with generic feelings of guilt toward all dogs since the day she’d been forced to kill a Doberman that had attacked her.

  “Ciao! Sorry I’m late.” Bart smiled at her, yanking the Labradors back. “I parked half a mile from here; what with no-traffic zones and construction work, it’s a mess around here. Would you hold the umbrella?”

  Colomba took the umbrella by the handle and Bart locked arms with her, guiding her down Via Settembrini until they reached a Volkswagen station wagon that reeked of dogs, the seats covered with hair. “Sorry, I really ought to get it washed,” Bart said.

  “You ought to see my car,” said Colomba, deciding that this, too, formed part of her penitence. “I haven’t been to Milan in a while,” she said, looking up at the new skyscrapers that had been built for the Expo. “The weather is still miserable, but the city’s changed.”

  “Don’t let the bright lights fool you. These days, there’s more ’ndrangheta here than in Calabria. And I know that for certain, because when things go sideways, someone always winds up on my table.”

  “What a nice picture you paint,” said Colomba with a smile.

  “The finest job in the world.”

  Bart lived in what once was a large factory that had been subdivided into lofts and small underground establishments, such as tattoo parlors and herbal teashops, a sort of mini-city where the average age was twenty. Bart liked it because the dogs could roam freely and she could play loud music in the middle of the night without bothering anyone. Every so often the residents would organize a rave and Bart stood in as the first-aid supervisor for those who overdid it with ketamine and other synthetic drugs.

  Her loft was a two-story duplex, decorated with considerable taste and such artful touches as a large hammock at the front door and lots and lots of souvenirs from her work trips. Bart lived alone, and people called her from all over the world to come and examine old bones. She was also an excellent cook, and in her visitor’s honor, she had made an enormous pan of baked pasta. Colomba threw herself on the food like a vulture. With Dante around, she didn’t get many opportunities to eat meat, and Bart made a first-rate ragù.

  They drank a couple of beers, too, and Colomba stuck intentionally to frivolous topics, discovering just how far behind the curve she was on what movies and books had come out in the past few years. “You live like a recluse. You work and nothing more,” said Bart as she made espresso in the moka pot.

  Colomba flopped down on one of the colorful ottomans in the living room, feeling as if she’d just put on a few pounds, at least. “Lately, I haven’t even been working,” she said.

  “How long will the suspension last?”

  “I imagine for the rest of my life.”

  “Don’t say that,” Bart scolded her. “You’re a supercop, the best one I know.”

  Colomba shook her head. “I’d already turned in my resignation after the Disaster, I was just waiting to sign the request, when Rovere convinced me to put it off. And then Curcio dragged me back into it.”

  “And then he dropped you.”

  “He did what he could for me. It was my mistake,” said Colomba. She just couldn’t bring herself to blame him; she knew what it meant to hold the reins of command.

  “All I know is that you did a good job,” said Bart, arriving with a tray on which she had arranged, along with the espresso pot, two steel demitasses and a small dish of cat’s-tongue cookies. “You’ll see, it’ll turn out all right.”

  Colomba bit into a cookie. “I need to ask you something.”

  “And here I was hoping that this was just a visit from a good friend!” said Bart, feigning despair.

  “It is, believe me. Still . . .”

  “Okay, okay, go on. I was just kidding.”

  “Are you sure the attackers made a mistake in how they attached the gas canister, the way you said during the meeting in Rome?”

  “They only killed nine passengers instead of a hundred and ten,” said Bart in astonishment. “If that’s not a mistake, then . . . The ventilation system only saturated one carriage with gas.”

  “But what if they did that on purpose?”

  Bart turned serious. “This isn’t just a theory, is it?”

  “Let’s just say it is. That way, if you’re summoned to testify tomorrow, at least you won’t have to perjure yourself. Just a friendly chat between friends.”

  Bart set down the cup. “Does Dante have anything to do with this? The questions that he asked me about the
corpse?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “You know I’m going to be worrying about you, right?”

  “You shouldn’t.”

  “It’s inevitable. Don’t you worry about your friends?” Bart sighed, then she went on. “Well, then. The lethal quantity of cyanide is roughly five hundred milligrams per cubic meter of air. There wasn’t enough in the tank to kill the whole train.”

  “The bigger the space, the more it gets diluted,” said Colomba.

  “Exactly. The concentration would have declined car by car until it became toxic but not lethal in the rear carriages, or else in the front carriages, depending on how the air was recirculated.”

  “Couldn’t they have just used a bigger tank?”

  Bart made a couple of mental calculations. “It would have needed to be at least ten times bigger; there wasn’t enough room behind the panel. Still, a great many more people would have been killed if they’d attached the tank differently, and many others would have been seriously intoxicated.”

  “Like how many?”

  Bart shook her head. “I can’t say. There are models for the diffusion of gas in closed environments, and if you want, I can do some further research. Just keep in mind that the train wasn’t hermetically sealed. So there was also the dispersion into the surrounding atmosphere.”

  “But they wouldn’t all have died, would they?” asked Colomba, starting to feel a chill in her gut as if she’d swallowed a block of ice.

  “No. Less than half, at a rough guess.”

  The chill rose to Colomba’s face, which turned pale.

  Bart noticed. “Everything all right?”

  “Sure, sorry to have pestered you. I was just curious. It’s clear they just got it wrong.”

  Bart narrowed her eyes. “If you don’t want to tell me the truth, that’s fine, but don’t take me for a fool, okay?”

  Colomba looked down. She and Bart spent another couple of hours together, but the relaxed atmosphere was dead and gone. Colomba called a taxi to take her back to the station and said a hasty goodbye. As the taxi pulled away, she waved goodbye from the backseat, but Bart, standing in the rain next to the former factory, didn’t even wave back. Colomba deposited another portion of guilt into the archive and realized that this one had plenty of company.