Kill the Angel

by Sandrone Dazieri

  The Wannsee bridge reminded him of the bridge across the River Po that joined Lombardy and Emilia-Romagna. One of the few memories Dante had of his childhood before the silo was that of the bridge painted only halfway across, with the new paint that ended exactly at the border between the two provinces, until a crew from the other side could complete the job. The image was stamped in his head, even if he couldn’t see himself or whomever he’d been with at the moment. Then again, it might have been one of the many false memories implanted by the Father.

  That was the most horrible part of his condition: he had no way of knowing whether what was in his mind actually belonged to him. Sometimes he felt like a ghost walking among the living, insubstantial and fragile as a piece of onionskin; it was hardly strange that he should have thrown himself into the hunt for a brother who probably didn’t even exist. That would have given him a semblance of roots, of personal history. He thought back to the way he’d blacked out at Potsdamer Platz, the sensation of urgency that he’d felt, the need to chase after the man who’d vanished into the crowd. Had he really run in the same direction that the other man had taken? At the moment when he’d run, it had certainly seemed so, but now everything frayed, together with his consciousness.

  He fell asleep there, cigarette butt dangling from his fingers, and woke numb and covered with morning dew at six-thirty, when a waitress pushed a trolley full of food into the dining room behind him.

  In that brightly lit large room, there was a long wooden table alongside the picture windows so the residents could admire the lake. The walls—like, for that matter, all other available surfaces in the curious place—were lined with books, and it was hard to say whether the Colloquium was more of a library with an adjoining art hotel or vice versa.

  While Dante was stretching and brushing the cigarette ash off his trousers, two of the guests came outside to enjoy their breakfast. They eyed him curiously until it dawned on him that he ought to introduce himself. He learned that they were, respectively, an Egyptian poet and an Irish translator, who were joined shortly thereafter by two women, a German poet and an author from Liechtenstein. That group was so diverse and interesting that Dante soon found himself drawn into a discussion of Italian cuisine, and he set off on a sort of lecture on the various types of coffee and how to distinguish them, promising to provide them all with a tasting. When the conversation ended, his mood had decidedly been restored. “So what kind of work is it that you do, exactly?” the writer from Liechtenstein asked him.

  “Usually, I work with victims of murder or kidnappings.”

  “Ah, so you write thrillers,” she replied, misunderstanding. Dante didn’t correct her and went on spreading honey on his bread, looking with disgust at the mini-mortadellas that were being passed around the table and which Colomba grabbed hungrily when she showed up fifteen minutes later.

  “I thought you were still asleep. I tiptoed around to keep from waking you up,” she said.

  “I got up early.”

  “Am I wrong, or do you reek of vodka?” Colomba studied him with a critical eye. “You were down here brooding all night long, weren’t you?”

  “At a certain point, I fell asleep.”

  “I didn’t think you had the nerve to climb the stairs in the dark.”

  “I didn’t climb them.”

  Colomba threw both hands in the air. “I don’t want to know, I’d probably just get mad,” she said calmly, and then popped a roll of bologna the size of her thumb into her mouth.

  “Do you know what they put in those things, aside from the poor pigs?”

  “Don’t know, don’t care,” she said with her mouth full. “I called Bart.”

  “With the room phone?”

  “I know you think all cops are morons, but I used Skype on your iPad.”

  “Reasonably secure.”

  “Next time, I’ll just send a carrier pigeon, even though they’d probably eat it.” “They” were the crows that were now flying overhead in the dozens. “She found me a Berliner I can have a chat with. I had to explain to her what it was about, but I told her not to breathe a word to anyone.” It hadn’t been an easy conversation, and Colomba had had to promise to tell Bart all about it when they got back.

  Dante nodded. “Okay.”

  “So now do me a favor and go upstairs, shower, get dressed, and try to pretend you’re more than just deadweight around here. Up and at ’em.”

  Dante got to his feet. “Yes, sir, ma’am.”

  9

  Bart’s contact was a professor of anatomical pathology who served at the German equivalent of the LABANOF. He was also a friend of hers and had been her guest many times in Milan. His name was Harry Klein, like the assistant to Inspector Derrick in the television series of that name, a detail that Dante didn’t miss. Klein was a diminutive, skinny man in his early sixties with a two-pointed goatee, and they met him at Charité University Hospital near Mitte. He took them to get some nutritious street food not far from the redbrick university campus. At that time of the day, there were only a few young students, and they were easily able to find a table.

  “Bart told me you were investigating an accident that happened two years ago. A fire broke out in a disco, if I’m not mistaken,” said Klein. Aside from English, the doctor also spoke rudimentary Italian, translating the terms that Colomba didn’t get in English.

  “Yes. Though I want to make it clear that for now this is strictly unofficial,” said Colomba.

  “Not that it was all that necessary to make it clear,” Dante muttered in Italian, momentarily putting down his oversize glass of turnip extract.

  “I didn’t do the autopsies myself,” Klein went on, “but my department was in charge of it, and I did take a look at the reports. What do you want to know?”

  “We need to know the cause of death, first of all. All we know is what we read in the newspapers,” said Colomba.

  “The bodies were almost entirely covered with third- and fourth-degree burns, but rather than charring, they nearly all died of asphyxia-induced pulmonary edema or hypovolemic shock.”

  “Which are the usual causes of death in a fire.”

  “Exactly. The bodies also presented extensive trauma due to the structural collapse of parts of the building.”

  “Any chance they died before the fire?” asked Dante.

  Klein had downloaded copies of the autopsies to his iPad, and he scrolled through them rapidly to make sure he was remembering correctly, even though he already knew the answer. “I’d say not. They all had soot in their bronchi, which means they were breathing during the fire. They also presented fat embolisms in their pulmonary blood vessels.” He explained that this was body fat that entered the circulatory system after being melted by the heat; if there was still a working circulatory system, there was still life.

  “But could they have suffered traumatic violence that would have rendered them helpless? Getting knocked on the head, strangled, blows to the nervous center?” Dante asked.

  Klein sighed. “Your unofficial investigation is because you suspect a murder disguised as an accident?”

  Colomba had expected the question. She would have liked to invent a reason other than the real one, but nothing had occurred to her that would pass muster. “I’m afraid that’s right. But right now that’s only a hypothesis.”

  “Due to what?”

  “Nothing that I can take to court. I hope Bart gave you assurances about us.”

  The man tugged at his beard. “Yes, she did. She told me that whatever your motives were, it would be worthwhile to help you, even though you’d probably give me a lot of nonsensical song and dance.”

  “She was just kidding,” said Colomba, feeling a flush of shame.

  Klein heaved another sigh. “As I was telling you earlier, many of the bodies were at least partly charred, with perimortem and postmortem fractures from falling bricks. A mark of violent aggression might be hard to identify at the level of the osseous structure and impossible
when it comes to tissues, unless there were deep wounds from a cutting weapon.”

  “Which means you can’t rule it out.”

  “I can, however, rule out any defensive wounds. And that would indicate a coordinated and high-speed assault so overwhelming that none of the victims were able to react in time. In a burning building. And without a single mistake. Whom do you have in mind?”

  “No one in particular,” Colomba lied.

  “Here comes the song and dance,” said Klein.

  “The victims tested positive for narcotics. Couldn’t that have slowed their reflexes?” Dante broke in.

  “Does your hypothesis entail involuntary ingestion? But how? By atomization in the air?” In the English they used as a lingua franca, it was hard to tell if Klein was being ironic or not.

  “Were there any signs of chronic drug addiction?” Dante asked.

  “No. But they could easily have been occasional consumers.”

  “Are the findings the same for the victim who remained nameless? Perhaps the fact that he didn’t die immediately might have revealed some difference,” Colomba said.

  “The only thing about him is that he was older than the others. Seventy or so. And he suffered from a very serious form of cirrhosis of the liver, as well as chronic malnutrition.”

  “So he was in bad shape.”

  “Terrible shape. Judging from the condition of his liver, he had at the most two months to live.”

  Dante started in surprise as he discovered another piece of the puzzle, with no idea where to fit it in. If what the doctor was telling them was true, then Giltine had massacred a roomful of people to eliminate a dying man.

  10

  With Andreas’s help—he had insisted on taking them out to lunch at a restaurant that specialized in soups, on the Tauentzienstraße, next to the KaDeWe department store (where Colomba would have gladly spent some time shopping in any other situation)—they were able to reconstruct the list of victims, with addresses and phone numbers for the surviving family members. Once they were alone, Dante and Colomba decided that the most interesting candidate was Brigitte Keller, the sister of the club’s owner. They called her from a phone booth, and her father answered. He informed them that his daughter had moved and that he had no intention of giving her address to total strangers. They could talk to her at work, if they wished. When Colomba heard the man’s broken voice struggle to get out a few syllables in English, she chose not to insist and just asked for the work address.

  Brigitte tended bar at the club Automatik in Kreuzberg, the neighborhood that, in the eighties and nineties, had been the center of the city’s underground art scene, and was still very popular with young people. Among the nightspots recommended by the various guidebooks, Automatik was always near the top of the list.

  Dante had accompanied Colomba to the club, then took to his heels when confronted with the line of at least a hundred people waiting to be admitted at the front door. On weekends, there were various clubs, Automatik among them, that stayed open around the clock, so you could go in on a Friday and leave the following Monday if you so desired, and people were pouring in at a steady pace. Choosing which customers to allow in was a man dressed as a Hells Angel who seemed to be picking at random. Colomba saw him refuse entry to a young man with an ostrich-feather boa and a young woman in a formal gown and high heels, while the man nodded at Colomba to let her in. For a moment, she felt proud of her white T-shirt and her jacket. Then it occurred to her that it might just have been her breasts.

  She walked down a short hallway with a ceiling so low that the very sight of it would have prostrated Dante, and then she emerged into the main room on the ground floor of the former brewery, furnished with recycled materials and battered old round metal café tables. On either side were doorways that led to the upper stories with three dance floors, and downstairs to the dark rooms, where people had sex in groups and at random, and where Colomba hoped she didn’t wind up by mistake. Not that the rest of the club suited her. There were probably a thousand partygoers circulating around the club, and at least half of them looked to be high on one drug or another. The looks ranged from denim to extravagant exhibitionism to complete nudity with running shoes, and no one seemed to pay attention to any of it. In dark corners, straight and gay couples and trios exchanged effusions that would have been considered offensive to public decency anywhere else.

  The only positive note, as far as Colomba was concerned, was that everyone seemed so relaxed. There were none of the upticks in tension that she’d experienced in Italian discos, with small groups fired up by the alcohol they’d consumed, ready to start a brawl for no good reason. Moreover, no one had tried to pick her up with the usual pathetic lines. From that point of view, hurray for Germany.

  She ventured onto the second-story dance floor, where the techno music being pumped out by a DJ on the platform was making three or four hundred people dance, some naked and some clothed. She pushed through the crowd until she reached the bar, the bass lines thudding into her stomach. There she approached the young man at the cash register, who was wearing a leather vest over his bare chest, and shouted in English that she was looking for Brigitte. After a short wait, a girl came over, her hair dyed pink and half shaved on one side of her head, tattoos on her arm, and piercings in her lips. “What’s up,” she said.

  “I need ten minutes of your time. I came up here from Rome just to see you. Can we go somewhere a little quieter?” The girl, taken aback, spoke in German to one of her fellow bartenders, then led Colomba out the back door into the courtyard, where the music that reached them was heavily muffled. Colomba introduced herself and got straight to the point. “I need to ask you about the Absynthe Club. And your brother. I’m sorry to do it, because I can imagine it’s a painful memory.”

  Brigitte was stunned for a few seconds, then stalled for time by cadging a cigarette off a passing young man. “Why are you interested?”

  “Because I’m trying to figure out if it really was an accident.” No point in beating around the bush.

  Brigitte’s eyes opened wide. “And why do you think it wasn’t?”

  “Like I said, I’m trying to figure it out.”

  “My brother was killed in that fire. You can’t dismiss it with a wisecrack.”

  “It’s not a wisecrack, I really am trying to figure it out. Let’s just say that a friend of mine suspects a terror attack, but I don’t have the evidence to prove it.”

  “And why should you prove it? Are you a journalist?”

  “No.”

  Brigitte studied her tensely. “Ask me what you need to ask, but let’s speed this up, because I need to get back to work.”

  “Do you find the theory that it was an accident convincing, or are there some points you find unclear?”

  “I’ve never had any reason to doubt it. The electrical system was old, and Gun was planning to update it.”

  “Did he have any enemies?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  “And was it normal for him to stay there until morning?”

  “On weekends, the place closed very late. The others who were killed were all regular customers, friends of mine, too . . . and they were all nice people.”

  Brigitte stared into the distance, and Colomba gave her a minute, pretending not to notice that she was crying. “I don’t think they were all friends of yours,” she finally said. “Because one of them was a man who was never identified.”

  Brigitte grimaced. “True.”

  “Do you know what his name was?”

  “No. The police asked all the relatives and regular customers, but they were unable to find out anything more. It must have been someone who just happened to be there, maybe a tourist,” said Brigitte.

  “Tourists who disappear from hotels are reported to the police. There were no disappearances. And he was an alcoholic on his last legs. He didn’t have long to live.”

  “I didn’t know that. But I can’t think of anyone who match
es that description.”

  “Could he have been the magic-mushroom dealer? Or do you think that was one of the others?”

  “There was no drug dealing in the club,” said Brigitte, tense again.

  “They found traces of drugs in the blood of all the victims. Even your brother. That’s one of the reasons we think it was mass murder.”

  Brigitte scrutinized Colomba some more. “Are you sure you’re not a journalist? Or a cop?”

  “I’m going to level with you. I used to be a policewoman, but I’m not anymore.”

  “Why, what did you do wrong?”

  “Too many questions.”

  Brigitte smiled for the first time, suddenly looking younger, practically a girl. But she turned serious again immediately. “I’ll tell you just one thing—Gun had tried more or less everything you could name, but he wasn’t a druggie, and he wasn’t a dealer, either. He wouldn’t have let anyone sell drugs in his club.”

  “Then how do you explain what happened?”

  “I don’t. Probably somebody just screwed up with their examination . . . of the bodies.” It had been hard for her to finish the sentence, and she took another couple of seconds. “I wanted to try to get a second opinion, a counter-autopsy, so to speak, but the magistrate decided to close the investigation, and that was fine with me.”

  “I really am sorry.”

  Brigitte shrugged. “Just to give you an idea of how careful my brother was about certain things, he was about to have a surveillance system installed to make sure no one was dealing drugs in his establishment. Too bad he wasn’t able to get it installed in time. You’d have been able to resolve all the doubts you might have.”

  Colomba nodded; she regretted it, too. “Can I ask you if your brother was in a relationship?”

  “Nothing long-term.”