He stopped flailing around and started breathing noisily through his open mouth, his eyes slowly focusing again. Colomba held off on smacking him a third time, and that proved wise, because after a few moments, Dante managed to utter her name.
“Are you going to run away again?”
“What? . . . No . . .” he murmured.
“Good!” she said, getting up from the uncomfortable position she’d had to assume. She was dripping with sweat.
Dante slowly sat up and shook his head. “Fuck.” He tried to fasten his jacket, which was torn in the front next to the buttons, but couldn’t. “Fuck,” he said again.
“Come on, let me get you on your feet,” said Colomba, reaching a hand down to him. He grabbed it like an old man who’d collapsed on a hot, sunny day. He had the same blank look.
Colomba checked to make sure he could stay on his feet. He was swaying but remained upright.
“How do you feel?” she asked him.
“Not great.” Dante picked up his pack of cigarettes, but the cardboard had been creased in the fall. He put it back in his pocket.
“Do you want to tell me what happened? You practically gave me a heart attack.”
Dante’s thoughts were becoming coherent again, and with that came a feeling of shame. And anger at himself. “Nothing,” he muttered.
“Dante. Do you remember the rule about no bullshit?”
“I saw . . .” He stopped himself. “I thought I saw . . .”
“Giltine?”
He sighed. “My brother. I saw him disappear into the crowd . . . I tried to catch up with him.”
Colomba’s first thought was: I knew I shouldn’t have trusted him. But her second thought, immediately afterward, was: It’s my fault.
“Okay,” she said. “Now let’s find a hotel, and tomorrow we can go back home.”
“Please, CC, no.”
“What do you mean no? Do you have any idea what just happened?”
“That was just an episode.”
“And what if there’s another one and you wind up lunging under the wheels of a trolley? Or you run someone over with the DeLorean? I’d put you on a train if I didn’t know you’d be worse off.”
“I’m begging you. You can’t give this up because you feel sorry for me. Not now, not when we’ve come all this way.”
A big man in his early fifties, bald and wearing glasses, tried to attract their attention. He stood a good six and a half feet tall, and he had an enormous gut. In his hands were the suitcases that Colomba had dropped during her frantic sprint after Dante.
“Are these yours?” the man asked in English.
“Yes,” said Colomba, taking the suitcases from his hands. “Thank you.”
The man stood there, looking at her.
“I said thank you,” Colomba repeated. “Dante, how do you say in English ‘Stop being such a pain in the ass’?”
“I understand only a little your lovely language,” the bald man replied in broken Italian. “But I can translate into German if you like. Even if I don’t understand ‘pain in the ass,’ I understand the meaning.” He laughed a deep and resonant laugh and held out his hand to Dante, returning to English. “I ran after you from Potsdamer Platz. I’m Andreas Huber, the journalist of Inspektor. It’s a pleasure to meet you, Signor Torre.”
Dante, his cheeks red from the smacks, his jacket torn, and his pants covered with mud, decided that he had hit bottom in terms of humiliation.
7
They sat down outside a bar run by Turks near Checkpoint Charlie. Or rather, a reproduction of Checkpoint Charlie, with two actors dressed respectively as an American guard and a Soviet one on either side of a fake border. A selfie with them cost two euros.
Dante slumped into a chair, clutching the tattered remains of his Duran Duran jacket around him. Luckily, the bar sold cigarettes, and he smoked one after the other in an unbroken chain of tobacco, opening his mouth only to order a vodka with ice and to translate the occasional term that Colomba hadn’t understood. His English was infinitely better than hers.
Andreas didn’t much resemble the onanist Colomba had envisioned when she’d called him a wanker. He didn’t live with his mother, either, if it came to that. He seemed happy with his life, especially the simpler aspects of it: eating, drinking, chasing any creature of the female sex, as he tried to do with one of the waitresses. He explained in heavily accented English that he had been a crime reporter for ten years, and that now he had graduated to covering almost entirely mysteries and legends. His Guide to Magical Berlin had sold quite well, and he’d enjoyed almost equally good sales with his book on the paranormal Cold War, in which he told the story of how the CIA and the KGB had faced off in dueling research on telepathy and teleportation. He contributed to a wide variety of daily newspapers and magazines, and he was frequently asked to appear on TV as an expert.
“It’s not as if I believe everything I write,” he said, tossing back his second liter of beer. “I just limit myself to taking no stance either way and not making anything up. I quote from texts that circulated at the time and historical studies. Maybe slightly nutty ones,” he said, laughing again. “Berlin is full of stories; it’s the city of spies par excellence, and not only in the movies. Do you know how many Stasi ex-spies, informants, and collaborators are still around?”
Colomba and Dante shook their heads.
“Twenty thousand. And most of them live here. They’re an endless source of narratives. But then you two . . .” He looked at them the way you might admire a handsome painting. “In my next book, I intend to devote some space to your adventure with the Father, with a special focus on the lengthy captivity of Signor Torre, here. I read about what you did. If you need the help of a sincere admirer willing to fight alongside you against the forces of evil, just say the word. I promise I’ll go on a diet,” he added, and laughed again.
Colomba smiled. “We’ll give it a thought, but for now all we need is some information concerning a case you wrote about on your blog, Signor Huber.”
“Call me Andreas, please. Can I call you Colomba?”
“Certainly.”
“Which case?”
“The fire at the Absynthe Club.”
Andreas raised his eyebrows in surprise. “That was a lifetime ago.”
“Two years.”
“I didn’t spend a lot of time on that case, I’m afraid,” he said. “What do you want to know?”
Colomba shot a glance at Dante. His cigarette was dangling from the corner of his mouth, and he was looking at his glass as if trying to figure out what was in it. “Are you with us?” she asked. Dante nodded without looking up. No help from that quarter. “Anything you can tell us besides what we’ve already read,” said Colomba.
Andreas shook his big head. “I don’t really know much more than that. It’s been two years, but nothing new has happened,” he said. “The fire took place in August, I think, and the investigation determined that it was a short circuit.”
“And the victims had all been drugged, right?”
“Magic mushrooms, exactly. The idea circulating was that the club owner was a dealer, but seeing that he was dead, the investigators didn’t dig much deeper. To be honest, all I really was interested in was the story of the guy who’d seen the Angel of Death. I thought I could put it into a book.”
“Giltine.”
“Exactly. Giltine . . . the best part. You wouldn’t give me one of your cigarettes, would you, Signor Torre? I’m not supposed to smoke on account of my heart, but one every now and then . . .”
Dante handed Huber the pack without looking at him, and the German shot Colomba a wink of complicity. He’d read up on Dante; he knew what to expect.
“The only reason I’m able to do the work I do is that I have many friends in the right places—fire department, hospitals, police—who tell me about the strangest things that happen to them,”Andreas went on. “One of them is a male nurse, and at the time, he told me there was a su
rvivor of the nightclub fire. The word was that the poor man had seen Giltine coming through the flames to take him to the underworld. The nurse was of Lithuanian descent, and he explained to me who Giltine was, which caught my interest. I had asked my friend to let me know when the man regained consciousness, but unfortunately, that never happened. He died almost immediately.”
“Did he describe this woman?” asked Colomba.
Andreas shook his head. “No. He managed to say only a few words.”
“Did you do any research into this man’s past?”
“I would have liked to. Unfortunately, he had no ID or documents, his facial features had been mangled by the flames, his fingerprints weren’t on file, and no eyewitness had seen him enter the club before the fire.” He threw his arms wide. “Apparently, the only person who saw the ghost was another ghost.”
8
Dante loudly dropped the lighter on the table, like a child tired of waiting. Colomba said, “Well, I thank you for going to all this trouble, Andreas. Dante is very tired from the trip, and I need to find a hotel that’s suitable for him.”
“I took care of that!” Andreas exclaimed. “Which means we’ll be neighbors, if that’s all right with you.” He explained that he lived in Munich and happened to be in Berlin for a series of lectures about his latest book on the Stasi, which was why he had been offered room and board by a cultural association devoted to writers, the Literarisches Colloquium. “I told them that you are friends of mine, and they would be glad to put you up in a lovely room.”
Colomba hesitated. However likable Andreas might be, he was a nonstop talker and he was intrusive, and she wasn’t sure she wanted him underfoot. Dante, though, beat her to the punch.
“With a balcony?” he asked.
“Practically,” said Andreas. Instead of a balcony, he explained, there was a study with a bow window almost entirely glassed in, overlooking a park with lots of trees. Beyond the park was the lake. Colomba, fascinated by the description of the place, decided to set aside her misgivings and accept the invitation.
Wannsee is a Berlin neighborhood eight miles from the city center, accessible via the municipal metro, but she and Dante still had to pick up their car from the train station parking lot, so it was late at night when they got to the hotel. Before letting him get out of the car, Colomba shook Dante by the shoulder. “Snap out of it.”
“Come on, now . . .”
“Dante, we stayed because you insisted. You came off looking like an asshole in front of your admirer, and that’s too bad, but if I have to drag you around like in Rain Man, then I’m turning straight around and taking you home.”
“I didn’t expect to collapse like that, CC,” he said moodily.
“Still, you see?” she said. “I didn’t run away.”
“Maybe you ought to.”
She gave him a good hard smack. “I told you to cut it out! You’ve got a few screws loose, no doubt about it, but you’re like the broken watch in the joke, you know the one? Every so often you tell the right time.”
“Not every so often, twice a day. If you’re going to use a metaphor, use it correctly, at least.”
“You’ve turned back into the usual pain in the ass, which means you’re feeling better. Get out.” She opened the doors, which swung up with a hiss of air, frightening an enormous cat that was strolling through the fallen oak leaves. They’d parked in the courtyard of the villa, which loomed against the moonlit sky with a vaguely Gothic silhouette. There were scattered spires, and a stone portico with a large three-arched picture window that looked into the ground-floor room where the literary events were held. At one of the tables in the portico, Huber was waiting for them with the keys to their room and three bottles of beer. “One for the road!”
Colomba smiled and shook her head. “No more beer for me, thanks.”
“I’ll have one,” said Dante, even though Colomba glared at him disapprovingly, and raised a toast to the journalist. “Thanks for the help. Today I was . . . feeling a little tired.”
“Don’t worry. Geniuses have their needs. Do you think you can get up two flights of stairs?”
Dante took a few deep breaths. “Sure,” he said with more vim and vigor than he’d shown in the past few hours.
In fact, he ran straight up the steps without breathing, eyes closed and dragged along by Colomba, who then went back down to get their suitcases. Andreas, in the meantime, climbed slowly, making the wooden steps creak, puffing as he went. The air was filled with the smell of food and old books.
Aside from the study with the bow window, where a single bed had been set up, the mini-apartment had another room with a king-size bed and a bathroom. There was also fast Wi-Fi, and Dante smiled his first faint smile of the day: he’d be able to use his iPad.
Andreas told them there was a shared kitchen on the ground floor if they got hungry. They could use the food in the fridge or do some shopping at the supermarket; there was one just a few minutes away, and it was open late at night as well.
“Thanks, but we’re too tired to grocery shop,” said Colomba as Dante threw open the double windows in the little study. “You said that the unidentified man’s body was never claimed by any relatives, right? So it’s still being held by the authorities, I assume?”
“It was buried after a couple of months. A grim ceremony, which I didn’t attend.”
Andreas bade them good night and left, and Colomba went over to Dante. He was sitting bare-chested on the bed and, of course, smoking a cigarette. “There’s a great big sign that says no smoking,” said Colomba.
“I have all the windows wide open.”
“It’s cold as hell in here now.” Colomba looked out the central window in the study, observing the lake rippling in the wind, and the yellow and red lights along the quay. Beneath them in the villa garden were a few perforated-metal tables with matching chairs. “Not bad here. Why don’t you become a writer, then we can travel around free for a while?”
He grunted. “I’m guessing there’s no way to get anything with some serious alcohol in it around here.”
“Andreas said there’s a bar downstairs, but they only open it during conferences or lectures.”
“All I need is a bobby pin.”
“And my complicity, which I’ll deny you today and for such a purpose. What are the odds that the guy with no name wasn’t Giltine’s target?”
“Zero. And the fact that they buried him in such a hurry doesn’t really add up, either. They still have Rosa Luxemburg in the icebox, but they got rid of his body in a flash.”
“Who did? Doesn’t your girlfriend work alone?”
“But she knows how to find helpers when she needs them, doesn’t she? Go on, call Bart and ask her to contact her counterparts in Berlin to find out if they know anything more.”
“If I ask her another favor, I’m going to have to sacrifice my firstborn son to her.”
Dante opened both eyes wide. “Are you saying you intend to have children?”
“I happen to possess a uterus, and I actually like children. Why not, if I find the right man?”
“Because of the life we lead.”
Colomba sat down next to him. “Dante, this isn’t life. This is just something we’ve committed to for reasons that are still unclear to me. And when we’re done here, it’s all going to go back to normal, more or less.”
“Maybe it’s not your life,” he said sadly. “Do you mind much if I take the first shower?”
“Not at all, because I’m so tired I’ll wash up tomorrow morning.”
“Not very hygienic.”
“This coming from someone who buys medicine on the Internet and then snorts it.”
Colomba went to lie down, and when Dante emerged from the bathroom, modestly wrapped in a bathrobe, she was already asleep, surrounded by Snickers wrappers and with the television tuned to a news channel. Dante turned off the TV and went back into his room, knowing that he wasn’t going to get any sleep. When, through
the door separating their rooms, he heard Colomba snoring, he climbed out the window, using windowsills and rainspouts as handholds. It was easier for him than taking those airless stairs, and they were only a few yards aboveground.
° ° °
In the Swiss clinic, not the most recent one but the one where he’d spent almost five years after his liberation from the Father, Dante had been capable of scaling much smoother, higher walls: the important thing was not to look down, because he suffered from vertigo. Once he was on the ground in the tree-lined courtyard, he examined the door to the bar, established that there was no alarm system connected to it, and opened the lock with a length of wire. Under the counter of the bar, he found a bottle of vodka that was a third full. It was warm, and it was a very low-quality brand, but it was better than the syrupy Amaro or the German wines that stood in rows next to it. He poured the vodka into a cocktail glass and carried it to one of the outdoor tables after leaving twenty euros for the trouble and relocking the door behind him.
Then he sipped the vodka, doing his best not to notice the flavor, until the lake started to reflect the morning light and the crows started cawing from their perches on the trees. In that part of town, in another villa that stood not far away and which had been the property of the SS general Reinhard Heydrich, the Final Decision had been made. Now that villa had become a museum, in commemoration of the Holocaust for those who thought it had never happened.
On the other side of the lake, in the old days, you’d already be in East Berlin, and until the Wall fell, it was impossible to cross that lake. The famous Bridge of Spies, where Americans and Soviets exchanged prisoners, was just a mile or so farther along. Dante would have liked to see it, convince Colomba to make an outing. Probably she’d do it just to keep me happy, he mused bitterly, and maybe she’ll even buy me some cotton candy if I’m a good boy.
Kill the Angel Page 28