“Do you know if he’d met a new woman lately?”
“If you’re running a club, that’s the last of your worries. Do you seriously think it wasn’t an accident? Because it never occurred to me that it could be anything else, and now I’m starting to have all kinds of doubts.”
“I swear I don’t know anything more than what I’ve told you so far.”
“But you’ll tell me if you do find out anything? Gun was a good person. He didn’t deserve this. Neither did any of the others.”
“I swear it,” said Colomba, hoping she’d be able to keep her word, though she didn’t have much of a track record lately.
Brigitte nodded and lost herself in thought for a few seconds. “No new girlfriend. And he wasn’t complaining about being stalked by any women, if that’s what you’re wondering. Listen, I’ve got to get back to the bar.”
“Sorry, I’ve taken up too much of your time. One last thing, do you know who was going to install those video cameras?”
“No. He told me that it was someone who did the work cheap, but I don’t know anything more than that.”
Colomba gave her the number at the Colloquium. “I’m going to be staying here for a few days more. If you manage to figure out who it was, I’d be happy to have a chance to talk with them.”
The young woman put the scrap of paper in her pocket and smiled at Colomba again, this time more relaxed. “All right. In the meantime, if you ever want to come back, just ask for me and I’ll make sure you don’t have to stand in line, okay? Maybe we can have a drink together.”
Colomba thanked her, wondering if it was a come-on. Whatever it was, she was on the other side of that particular barricade and couldn’t wait to get back to Italy to conclude a certain conversation that she’d begun with a friendly, athletic policeman.
She found Dante loitering in the street, looking bored. Together they joined Andreas at an Indian restaurant that stayed open all night; the blogger had told them he wanted them to try it, and they sat out in the rear courtyard that was normally used only in the summer. The proprietors very kindly gave them a couple of blankets to wrap around their legs, treating Andreas like a member of the family, since he ate there every time he was in Berlin. Dante stuffed himself on vegetable tandoori and Meera beer, while Colomba ate a blistering-hot spicy chicken, and Andreas had more or less everything on the menu. “Any luck in your research?” he asked.
“We’re still at the very beginning,” said Dante.
“Andreas, you never spoke to the man with no name, did you?” asked Colomba.
“No, I would have said so. It’s just a rumor I heard.”
“Firsthand?”
Andreas tilted his head doubtfully. “I was told that it was so, but . . . Have you two found out anything?”
“Only that he was an unlikely guest in that club. From the autopsy, it’s not clear how he could even stay on his feet. And yet he’s the one who survived the longest,” said Colomba.
“Maybe he’d been given special training in that type of endurance,” said Andreas, chomping on his cheese naan.
“And what kind of special training can you do to withstand fire?”
“Neuro-linguistic programming,” said Andreas. “They used to do it to KGB special agents. They’d take them out in the desert and use hypnotic suggestion to make them feel as if it were cool out. Our brain has resources we can’t even begin to imagine.”
“I’m sure there must be some other explanation,” said Colomba skeptically.
“Still, he could have been an ex-spy,” said Dante. “Do you have any contacts in the network of former Stasi personnel? Can you ask around?”
“Contacts? Do you know how many of those people have tried to sell me their memoirs? I’ve had to explain to them all that usually, I’m the one who does the selling.” Andreas laughed again and then started reeling off a series of anecdotes about the GDR that Dante found extraordinary and Colomba found extraordinarily dull, and which went on until a taxi dumped them out at the Colloquium, where a birthday party was well under way. It was common practice to rent out the villa when there were no conferences being held; the rental fees helped to defray the center’s expenses.
Colomba imagined that the two conspiracy theorists would join the party and go on chatting. She couldn’t wait to get away from them and finish her book. But even before she could make it up to the room, she started feeling unwell.
11
It all started with a sensation of light-headedness and euphoria that Colomba attributed at first to the alcohol and the exhausting day.
Climbing the steps had been a real challenge, and she’d had to lean against the wall, laughing like an idiot. She continued laughing until she got into the room, where a short while later she saw Dante come in, in not much better shape than she was. “We need to stop drinking so much,” she told him, sending them both into gales of laughter.
Dante threw himself onto the single bed in the study, and it seemed to yaw like a raft. From the garden below came the notes of “Mamma Mia,” and through the door between the two rooms, he did his best to explain to Colomba that ABBA was the biggest show business fraud in the history of pop music. “Everyone thinks it’s just the four of them, right?” he shouted. “The two women who sing, the guy on the guitar, and the other one who plays the piano. So then who plays the drums? And what about the bass? In reality, ABBA must have been at least six people, if not more! I demand justice for the two unknown band members!”
From the other room, Colomba replied with a braying laugh, while Dante felt the bed start whirling so fast that it produced brightly colored flashes of light. He managed to grab the water bottle on the floor by a process of trial and error, but the arc as he lifted it up to his mouth seemed to last forever. Time is expanding; maybe I’m falling into a black hole. The water in his mouth was endowed with thousands of nuances of flavor, one for every mineral that was dissolved in it, and which Dante was able to place in its proper order in the periodical table, inventing new elements as he went along, certain they soon would be discovered. The vaulted ceiling of the room, meanwhile, was slowly disintegrating, transforming itself into a pixelated drawing like the ones in old video games. That was when he realized.
I’ve been drugged.
The thought only seemed to accelerate the process. The ceiling dissolved, revealing the night sky with an enormous moon spinning at the center. Then it shut over him again, transforming into the raftered ceiling of the silo. Only these were neon rafters colored with green and red, which pulsated in time to the music from the courtyard.
Paradoxically, he wasn’t afraid. Every time he felt the anxiety mount within him, he kept it under control by grabbing the thoughts that went scurrying in all directions, transforming themselves into cartoon thought balloons, which in turn squeezed out of his nose and ears. He knew how to behave because he knew what was happening to him. He was having an LSD trip. Only the effect was much more powerful than it had been the times he’d tried it voluntarily, in an effort to unblock buried memories. The trip that he was dealing with now was like . . . like guncotton compared with coffee.
The metaphor didn’t mean anything, but the word “guncotton” filled his mouth.
Gun-cot-ton.
Gun cotton.
Cotton gun.
He knew that he shouldn’t close his eyes, because then the hallucinations would take over; what he needed to do was stay firmly anchored to reality. Getting up from the bed onto his own two feet was out of the question, so he rolled off and fell onto the floor. From there he started wriggling toward his suitcase, a maneuver that was made somewhat more complicated by the fact that his body was turning into Jell-O.
In the next room, Colomba had stopped laughing. Unlike Dante, she’d never dropped acid or even smoked grass. The only hallucinations she’d ever had were the ones that came during her panic attacks, though they were shadows that she knew didn’t exist.
Now, however, the images confronting her w
ere growing increasingly solid as the drug invaded the neuroreceptors in her brain and toyed with her perceptions. The chains that hung from the ceiling, the creaking of machinery, the table out of an operating room that had taken the place of her bed all became terribly real. The lysergic acid also altered her consciousness, endowing her with a crystalline and absolutely false awareness of what was happening. She was no longer in Germany but in her own personal version of the Brave New World, where human beings were raised from their mother’s womb to occupy a very specific place in society. She had been brought into this world in order to become a police officer, but something about the treatment had malfunctioned. Which was why she had been sent back to the Repair Shop, to get whatever it was fixed. And the process was going to be painful, very, very painful.
The door to her room opened slowly, and Colomba began to tremble. This was the moment she feared, when the mechanic would remove everything in her that didn’t work, everything that made her sad and insecure. And there he was now, a monstrous figure that huffed and grunted, deformed, more bear than man, his eyes flame-red. He was holding a long metal tool that shot out flashes of light so bright they hurt her eyes.
The mechanic leaned over her, and Colomba could no longer move a muscle. She just hoped it would be over quickly. The tool dissolved before her eyes and, for an instant, revealed its true nature. It was a kitchen knife, and the hand holding it was the hand of a human being. But now it was too late, and Colomba accepted what was bound to be her fate.
The mechanic raised the blade, but something that was moving too fast for Colomba to be able to make out what it was slammed into him, producing a cloud of shimmering speed lines. The mechanic and this new arrival fell to the floor in a cloud of dust straight out of a cartoon and writhed there, twisting and grunting and shouting. In the end, the silhouette of a man slithered toward the bed, elongating as if it were made of rubber.
° ° °
She screamed and tried to recoil, but Dante’s voice whispered in her ear not to be afraid. “It’s all going to pass, don’t worry. Drink this,” he said. He poured a bitter liquid into her mouth, which Colomba struggled to swallow, then he wrapped his arms around her and rocked her until her fear vanished. Colomba curled up into a fetal position, and Dante clung to her back, continuing to murmur comforting words to her.
It took over two hours before Colomba regained mental clarity, and it was like dreaming without sleeping. Little by little she realized what had happened to her, and she felt gradually less and less excited and more muffled and numb. At last she managed to look at Dante and make out his face, even if it was occasionally haloed with flashes of color. He had a large bruise over his right eye and bloodstains on the collar of his shirt. “Ciao,” he said to her.
“Ciao . . . I feel . . .” Then she stopped.
“Hard to say, I get that. But now that you’re back on Planet Earth, I should tell you that we have a little problem on our hands.”
Colomba looked in the direction Dante was pointing and saw Andreas with his head split open.
12
Andreas wasn’t dead, luckily, and he wasn’t even in particularly serious shape. Dante had taken him by surprise and hit him with the brass base of the lamp on the nightstand—though he hadn’t been quick enough to avoid a punch to the face—but the blow had only torn the flesh of Andreas’s scalp and knocked him unconscious. Then Dante had put Colomba’s handcuffs on him, struggling to get them around his wrists, and poured half a vial of tranquilizing drops down his throat. Andreas was sawing logs, out cold.
Colomba felt lucid again but strange. She was wide awake in spite of the fact that it was four in the morning, and her perception of colors was still altered. Looking out the window at the dark lake, she saw rainbow flashes darting across the water. “Is this what it’s always like?” she asked Dante as she drank the cup of espresso that he’d made for her.
“It’s different for everyone. And it’s not like I have all that much experience; I’ve only done it a couple of times.”
Colomba drank the coffee, and for once she had nothing critical to say. Maybe it was because she already had a nasty taste in her mouth. “How can anyone take pleasure in dropping a drug like that . . .” Realizing that she was implicitly disapproving of the person who had just saved her life, she corrected her aim. “I wouldn’t have survived a minute longer in there all by myself. Thanks for cuddling with me. I needed that.”
“So did I,” said Dante, blessing the darkness of the room, which concealed how red his ears had become. There was no need to let her know that he’d spent the last hour trying to convince a certain part of his body to lie down and sleep as he’d embraced her.
“How were you able to fight back?” asked Colomba.
“If you know what’s happening, it’s easier to control it,” Dante replied, delighted to change the subject. “I immediately took some chlorpromazine, the same vial that I had you drink. You may know it as Thorazine. It’s an ideal antidote for hallucinogens.”
“What are you, Batman, carrying everything around in your belt?”
Dante coughed in embarrassment. “No. It was prescribed for me.” Colomba said nothing, and he went on. “They give it to schizophrenics and people with bipolar disorder who don’t respond to other treatments. Apparently, I fall into one of those two categories. I ought to take it every day, but I save it for emergency situations, like yesterday.”
“Is that why your affect was so flat?”
“Yes. But I still had a little in my circulatory system, which helped until my next dose. What are we going to do with Andreas? I guess cutting him into tiny pieces and throwing him in the lake is out of the question.”
Colomba grimaced fiercely, and Dante saw her shoot green rays from her eyes. It was just a residual effect of the drug, but it looked so realistic that Dante shivered. “That depends on how he acts,” said Colomba.
They put him in a seated position on Dante’s bed, with the handcuffs still on him, and in about half an hour Andreas regained consciousness. “Can I have some water?” he mumbled. Dante poured some water from a bottle into his mouth. He would have liked to smash the glass bottle against his teeth, but between the LSD and the psychopharmaceutical, his aggressivity was at a low ebb.
Colomba waved the knife under Andreas’s nose. “What were you planning to do to us?”
Andreas shrugged. “Nothing. I just came in because I heard some strange noises. Then he jumped me. He looked like he was on drugs.”
“Do you think that anyone is likely to believe you?”
“I think that everyone is going to believe me.”
Dante was reading him, and he was baffled. “You’re lying. But you do it very well, I have to admit. Too well. Can I do a little experiment, CC?”
“Be my guest.”
Dante grabbed the knife and pressed the tip against Andreas’s right cheek. “What do you say I carve one of your eyes out? After all, you have two.”
“I doubt you’d do it.”
“You don’t know me all that well. You could be wrong.”
“What’s life without a pinch of excitement?”
Dante scrutinized him again, then slid back against the chair, dropping the knife on the desk. “Have you always been like this? Did you kill puppies when you were a boy? Did you torture your little friends?”
Andreas said nothing, but something glittered in his eyes.
“How did you think you were going to get away with it?” Colomba asked him.
“LSD plays nasty tricks on people. Especially people who like to climb down walls at night,” he said, as if chatting idly about the weather. “Oh, yes, I saw you.”
“Murder-suicide,” said Colomba.
“You know you can’t prove it, and you’d only come off looking like a fool for the umpteenth time. Because you’re used to failure, aren’t you? That’s why you go around with someone like Torre.”
Colomba forced herself not to give him any satisfaction, and remai
ned impassive. “Stop being a showboat. Why did you want us dead?”
Andreas smiled. With all the blood on his teeth, he wasn’t a pretty sight. “Did you seriously think that I was the one who wanted you dead?” he said.
13
Andreas cared absolutely nothing about the dead victims at Absynthe. Zero, zip, zilch, nada, as the Joker liked to say in the cartoons. But that was nothing new. There were very few things that Andreas cared about, and they were all things that he could either put in his mouth or stick his dick into. Money was what he needed to gratify those two precious parts of his body. To make that money in his first few years as a freelance journalist, he had done everything that many of his colleagues lacked the stomach to do. Interviewing people who had suffered a tragedy, or women who had just been raped, letting a pedophile tell him about the things he found exciting, blackmailing reluctant witnesses, trading information with all sorts of criminals.
Andreas knew the difference between right and wrong, good and evil, but he’d never felt any impulse to conform to current morality, just as he cared nothing about romantic love or having friends. Since he’d studied, he also knew perfectly well that he possessed what psychiatrists describe as “antisocial personality disorder.” Just like Lee Harvey Oswald or Ted Bundy, in other words, though he considered murder a tool that should be utilized sparingly, like when he’d decided that his elderly parents were starting to get a little too nosy. He had to be careful with how he employed violence, for that matter. Because as long as no one knew who he was, he could do more or less as he pleased, but his big moon face was now seen regularly on TV, thanks to his painstaking investigative work. He rummaged through old archives, finding UFOlogists and Satanists who tried to hide from the world. But even if they didn’t want to cooperate, he knew how to convince them otherwise: Andreas had an instinct for good stories.
Like the story of Giltine. Contrary to what he had told Colomba, he had gone straight to the hospital and tried to get the old burned man to speak, convincing his friend the male nurse to give the old man a little injection to wake up. Aside from the name of Giltine, he’d obtained a few words in Russian that he hadn’t understood, except for one that meant “white,” but which hadn’t helped a lot, taken out of context like that. Andreas had seen the story take shape before his eyes. A man with no identity who speaks Russian and is murdered by a mysterious woman? What could possibly be better? He could write a book about this, not just a series of articles. And if he threw in some gossip about the old GDR, he knew there would be thousands of people willing to take every word of it as solid gold, pure truth. As to whether any of it had actually happened, he cared not a bit. Zero, zip, zilch, nada. When he had gone home, savoring in advance the words he was going to write—now, that, yes, gave him almost physical pleasure—she was there waiting for him.
Kill the Angel Page 30