Kill the Angel

by Sandrone Dazieri

  When she got to Centrale station, she sat on a bench at the top of the escalators to wait for her train and sent a Snapchat to Dante. He called her right back, and she told him what she’d found out. “I can’t be sure you’re right,” Colomba told him with a chill, which had by now seeped into her lungs. “But it seems quite likely that our angel wanted to make sure the attack succeeded, so she intentionally connected the tank in such a way that it killed only the Top Class passengers. Maybe she hates rich people.”

  “She’d have plenty of company, but I have a different theory. I think she was trying to conceal her real target,” said Dante.

  Just then Colomba remembered one of the old books that she’d read in her armchair when she was convalescing from the Disaster. It was The Complete Father Brown Stories, and even though she had always done her best to avoid detective stories, she’d fallen under the spell of the little country curate who solved mysteries by delving into the human soul.

  In one of the stories, an army officer had killed a fellow soldier, but in so doing, he had broken a sword. In order to cover up the crime, he had sent his regiment to certain massacre. Father Brown had solved the mystery by constructing a metaphor that now, to Colomba, had the flavor of a horrible truth: “Where would a wise man hide a leaf? In the forest. If there were no forest, he would make a forest. And if he wished to hide a dead leaf, he would make a dead forest. And if a man had to hide a dead body, he would make a field of dead bodies to hide it in.”

  “Giltine created her own field of dead bodies,” she murmured.

  Dante didn’t know what Colomba was referring to, but he understood instantly what she meant. “She had just one target, a single passenger on the train, and she hid that passenger among all the other dead people, constructing a reason for the massacre and killing anyone who knew the truth,” he said. “Do you realize what a titanic effort she undertook? The scale of the mechanism that she put together?”

  “Are you admiring her? If you are, cut it out,” Colomba said nervously.

  “I admire her intelligence, not her methods or her purposes. And I’m thinking about the reason behind that effort. Who is she hiding from? Certainly not from the police or the intelligence agencies.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because by bringing ISIS into play, she knew that she would prompt an investigation by all agencies of the government. If she had been afraid of uniforms, she would have faked an accident, the way she did in Greece or Germany.”

  “Would an accident have prevented an in-depth investigation, in your opinion?”

  “Not in this case. For whatever reason, she knew there would be one in any case. Unless she could toss something so spectacular to her enemy, whoever that might be, that it would allay all their suspicions. ISIS, for instance.”

  “There’s another hypothesis, Dante. That no one’s on her trail and she’s really just insane,” Colomba said without believing it.

  “I hope so, CC. I hope so with all my heart. Because I’d never want to meet whoever it is that can scare the Angel of Death.”

  12

  Francesco didn’t love his mother. This was a secret he’d kept deep inside for years, but which had tormented him like a bad tooth. When he was a child, she had been for him (as was the case for all human beings, or nearly all) a beneficent creature, a dispenser of joy. Then he had grown up, and he’d started to detect the shortcomings concealed behind her intellectual patter and her discreetly fashionable attire.

  During the funeral at Milan’s main cathedral, the Duomo, where city officials, the Carabinieri band, and a crowd of strangers had come together to see the coffin off, he’d been unable to shed a single tear. The sunglasses were his way of pretending the opposite, and he had done his job as the eldest son with some dignity, shaking hands and embracing relatives as they urged him to be strong, while all he felt inside was a strange sense of emptiness. The rotten tooth had been yanked, and he ran his tongue back and forth over the hole that it had left, feeling no pain, nothing but a sneaking, guilty sense of relief. He’d also greeted half a dozen or so clients of the agency, who had taken great care to show their best profiles to the video cameras with studied expressions while they acted as if they were consoling him.

  Francesco felt only contempt for them, just as he felt contempt for his brother, Tancredi, who had shown up at the service so stuffed with tranquilizers that he was practically incapable of staying on his feet. His mother had spent her life spoiling a brood of idiotic PR clients, doing her best to make them look better than they were, squandering her energy and intelligence on the task.

  Francesco had wondered how on earth she’d been able to tolerate them, and the answer had opened his eyes. She could tolerate them because they were exactly like her, fake and superficial. Perhaps that was why he had left home immediately after taking his degree in business and economics, even if the jobs he’d landed so far weren’t living up to his expectations and, once or twice, to his regret, he’d been forced to fall back on help from the family.

  Now, however, it was time to turn the page. The minute he got home from the funeral service, he went straight over to his mother’s agency to pick up the documents for the accountant so he could arrange the transfers of ownership. The agency office was located on the eleventh floor of one of the two towers known as the Vertical Forest, which had been built in the new office park constructed in Milan along with the 2015 Expo. The name had been given to the buildings because more than two thousand trees had been planted on their facades, with the idea of blending together eco-sustainability and unrestrained luxury, a sort of architectural oxymoron. Living there or having an office there was a privilege for the very few: foreign bankers, for the most part, as well as a few successful artists. There was even a rapper who preached a revolt against the system.

  Francesco entered the agency with the keys that had been given back to him by the police. It was a large open-space office furnished with pieces of furniture in pale pastel shades and embellished with contemporary artworks. Only a couple of desks tucked behind a discreet little partition wall even hinted at the idea that this was a workplace and not merely a salon for tasteful entertaining. One of the two desks had belonged to his mother. On the desktop, lacquered a fine ebony hue, stood her reading glasses, which she had forgotten before leaving for Rome, as well as the spare charger for her cell phone. Also, an old photograph of the whole family, all of them stupidly happy. It had been taken shortly before his father decided to get behind the wheel half-drunk and get into a crash on the beltway, at a point along the road where there was now a bouquet of artificial flowers.

  The hole in his gums grew larger and sank down into the bone, beginning to ache.

  He sat down and picked up the photograph in the tarnished silver frame to take a closer look. His mother was wearing a light blue dress and a thin string of fine pearls. She had one hand on Francesco, still a boy in the picture, in an instinctive and possessive gesture. He almost felt he could feel the weight and the heat, the pleasure that contact with her had imparted to him.

  The hole grew enormous and the pain, terrible. Francesco understood at that moment the lesson that all grown-ups learn sooner or later: it’s not possible to withdraw the ties that bind you to the person who brought you into the world, not without a great deal of suffering. However far you may try to run and hide, sooner or later, the pain will catch up with you and hurl you to the ground.

  Francesco blew his nose on a Kleenex, then got a grip on himself and opened the little wall safe to get out the documents. His mother had given him the combination in a sidebar conversation at one of the few family luncheons he’d ever attended, just a few months earlier. “Why me?” he’d asked, making no secret of his irritation. “Give it to Tancredi, since he follows you like a lapdog everywhere you go.”

  “You’re the elder brother,” she’d replied, putting an end to the discussion with a brusqueness that wasn’t customary for her.

  He input the numbers and
opened the safe. It had two shelves. On the lower shelf was a box with cash and several ledger books; the upper shelf was stuffed with envelopes. One of the envelopes, a pale straw yellow, caught his eye. It was made of paper that was rough to the touch and clearly very fine, different from the other envelopes containing contracts. In the watermark on the paper had been impressed a stylized image of a bridge with so many tiny round faces poking out over the parapet. Curiously, it was fastened with sealing wax. On the back was written FOR FRANCESCO—PERSONAL.

  He turned it over and over in his hands. What could it be, a last will and testament? He was convinced that his mother hadn’t drawn up a will. And what if there were some sort of unpleasant surprise in here—for instance, that the management of everything fell to his overgrown baby of a younger brother?

  There was still time to remedy such a situation. He pulled the letter opener out of the penholder and slit open the envelope, pulling out two folded sheets of paper that protected a USB flash drive. He stuck it into the computer on the desk in front of him. The flash drive contained only a file named COW (Cow, why the hell is it called cow?); when he clicked on it, a diagnostic program started up, ending with this phrase: “Before accessing this data, please deactivate all Wi-Fi and unplug the Internet cable. Disconnect any external hard drives.”

  Francesco read the phrases twice in disbelief. What was this? A security system? What business of his mother’s required such an elevated level of secrecy? Baffled, he followed the instructions. At that point, the program asked him to place his thumb on the optical reader connected to the keyboard. At that juncture, Francesco’s heart began to race. What the fuck was going on?

  Once again, he did as requested—his thumbprint appeared to check out fine—and at last a dozen or so files appeared on the desktop. He opened the first file, which contained mostly numbers and dates. Francesco started reading, then went on to the next file, his astonishment growing by the minute. He discovered that, once the files were closed, they went back to the safety of the flash drive. By midnight, he had read them all, and his neck was aching from the tension. He stood up, pressed a switch to raise the electric blinds on the windows, and looked out at the lights of Milan, in a state of shock.

  The last file that he’d opened contained only a phone number and a message that his mother had written him just a few days before giving him the combination.

  Dear Francesco,

  If you’ve read it all, you understand what’s at stake here. Now it’s up to you to decide.

  If you don’t want to know any more about it, I beg you to destroy the flash drive and say nothing about this to anyone. Not to your brother, not to your girlfriend. Tancredi wouldn’t be capable of handling the family business, and if word got out, it would harm people who are dear to me. As I imagine you’ve understood, it wouldn’t be wise. If, on the other hand, you decide to take part in this game, you need only dial the number and tell whoever answers who you are.

  I know this can’t be an easy choice, and I wish that I were there to advise you. But if you’ve opened the safe and read this letter, it means that I can only wish you the best of luck.

  I love you,

  Mamma

  Francesco had read those words and then been seized by a dull rage. “How can you ask such a thing of me? How the fuck dare you?” he had shouted into the empty room.

  Then he had looked out over Milan from above, and little by little, he’d started to calm down. The city almost seemed pretty, especially at that time of night. He could even see the Madonnina—the statue of the Virgin Mary that was one of the city’s emblems—atop the spire of the Duomo, glittering gold.

  Gold. A lovely color. The color of his life from now on, if he agreed to do what his late mother—may her soul rest in peace—had planned out for him. And from that moment on, he’d say so long to the import-export company where he was in charge of relations with the Middle East for a miserable pittance of a salary, and bid goodbye to his idiotic colleagues, who were incapable of seeing past the tips of their noses. Farewell to his girlfriend, too, tired of her as he was; he’d always felt he needed to stay with her because she came from an excellent family. Now he’d no longer need her.

  He went back to the desk and dialed the number.

  The voice on the other end of the line told him what to do.

  PART TWO

  IV

  PSYCHO KILLER

  BEFORE—2006

  In January, the Costa del Sol isn’t anywhere near as spectacular as it is in the summer, but the sea off Marbella is so blue that it hurts the eyes. On the palm tree–lined boulevard next to a beach resort, a little group of people in jacket and tie are pretending to admire the view. Stretching out before them are long lines of cement stands that hold beach umbrellas. At the moment, only one of them is actually supporting an umbrella, with yellow and white stripes. The umbrella is extended, and beneath it, on a pair of upright beach chairs, are sitting two men, talking without looking at each other.

  The first of them is named Sasha, and he has the physique of a wrestler who’s let himself run a little to fat. He’s wearing a red tracksuit with España written on it, and he’s barefoot: he likes to feel the cold sand between his toes. Set in the basket attached to the beach umbrella are two diamond-studded cell phones, both with their batteries removed.

  The second man is Maksim. The years of hunting have marked him. His face is razor-sharp and his eyes are dull, weary. “You’ve been pardoned, Sasha,” he says.

  Even though he’s acquired Spanish citizenship through marriage, Sasha is Russian to the bone. And, Russian that he is, he knows that gifts never arrive from Moscow without strings. “What do they want in exchange?”

  “They want you to keep doing what you’re doing.”

  “But with them now.” Sasha has been altering the face of southern Spain since he was forced to leave his country. New hotels, luxury resorts, discotheques built through offshore companies based on Cyprus, in Panama, and on the Virgin Islands. The resort where they’re meeting right now also belongs to one of his holding companies. Every year, hundreds of millions of euros from the Russian narcotics business are transformed into bricks and mortar and fun fun fun, and nearly all of that cash is filtered through him and his companies.

  Maksim rubs his hands together. They’re frozen, even though it’s sixty degrees out. “In exchange for peace and quiet.”

  “I don’t need protection.”

  “They’re investigating you, Sasha. You need their friendship.”

  In the last few weeks, Sasha has had a recurring nightmare: a bull being slaughtered, or else put in a cage, or castrated. Now he understands why: dreams always tell the truth. “I’ll just move to a new country,” he says.

  “And where will you go? In any European nation, you’d wind up arrested and extradited. In America, they don’t want you. But the Great Mother Russia will welcome you back with open arms. Provided you remain here until the business has been taken care of.” When Maksim said “Great Mother Russia,” the sarcasm was unmistakable.

  “But what if they arrest me first?” The screams of the bull from the nightmares echo in his head.

  “You have a year. Maybe two. Long enough to get the money out of the companies that are burnt and into the ones I tell you about.”

  Sasha doesn’t ask how he’s managed to find out so much about such a top-secret investigation. Maksim is a sort of living legend in the criminal underworld. There are those who say he was in the special forces of the Red Army, others that he was in the KGB and then in the FSB, the Russian Federal Security Service. The only thing people know for certain is that every place he’s ever left, someone has died a brutal death just before his departure. But that won’t happen to Sasha, because today the hunter is bearing an olive branch. “And then what?”

  “And then you’ll come home.”

  Home. Sasha sees in his mind’s eye the young women walking along Liteyny Avenue in short skirts and high heels in spite of
the snow, the young men’s hair glistening with ice crystals. “So now this is your job? Bringing runaway children back home?”

  Maksim smiles, because the other man has almost hit the bull’s-eye. “In exchange for a small favor.”

  “Which would be what?”

  “The Mute Girl. I’m here for her.”

  The wrestler grimaces in amazement, but he shouldn’t. If the Mute Girl isn’t a legend like Maksim, it’s only because she’s killed most of the people she’s ever come into contact with. “She doesn’t work for me.”

  “Not full-time, not permanently, I know that. But you’ve made use of her on numerous occasions. In Spain, too. I want you to help me bring her home.”

  The wrestler’s face loses its granite composure. He’s accustomed to the Mute Girl, the way you get used to having a loaded weapon in your pocket. “This is about the Box, isn’t it?”

  Maksim stiffens at the sound of that name. No one uses it anymore. Not him, not even Belyy. “What do you know about the Box?”

  “I’ve done a little investigation. Rumors swirl. Rumors say that she comes from there. And maybe so do you.”

  Maksim says nothing, and the wrestler realizes that he’s walking into a minefield. His men are waiting on the boulevard, and he has killed men with his bare hands, but Maksim is an enigma. Sasha doesn’t want to challenge him. “But I haven’t been able to find out anything about it. All I know is that it was a place,” he continues.

  “A bad place,” Maksim confirms. He thinks back to his three-hundred-mile hike to what he thought was safety. And the thousands more miles traveled over the years aboard military vehicles and civilian airliners to bring bones back to his master. But no matter how many miles he traveled, the shadow of the Box always remained over him.