Kill the Angel

by Sandrone Dazieri

  Colomba didn’t answer.

  “Did I already tell you my brother burned to death?” Brigitte added.

  Colomba had trusted Andreas and then discovered how badly she’d misjudged him. This time, though, she was sure she wasn’t wrong. “He might not be the reason someone set fire to the club,” she said.

  Brigitte’s face assumed an expression of horror. “So my brother and the others were just caught in the middle?”

  “Right.”

  “Yesterday you weren’t sure it was arson, but today you are,” she said in a broken voice.

  “Brigitte, maybe you’d better stay home. We can talk it over again when I’ve found out more about it,” Colomba said, feeling clumsy and inept. It was so hard to console someone in a foreign language.

  Brigitte murmured something in German that hardly sounded like a prayer and dried her eyes. “No, let’s talk about it now.”

  “Okay. I asked you if your brother had been seeing a new woman, and you said no. But there is a woman out there who’s doing everything she can to make sure that no one investigates. I think she’s the one who set the fire.”

  “Who is she?”

  “All I know is that people call her Giltine, nothing more. So can we go now?”

  Still shocked, Brigitte gave Colomba the address of an apartment building where, on the ninth floor, someone lived whom no one had seen in a long, long time. None of the neighbors had worried about the resident because the rent and utilities were paid regularly and because no one had ever exchanged two words with the person other than good morning and good evening.

  They went back outside and leaned against the building’s wall. In front of them loomed the top of the Berlin television tower with its famous sphere.

  “What should we do now, call the police?” asked Brigitte. “At least they can alert the family.”

  “The relatives can wait; the priority is to find out who set the fire.”

  “Maybe he’s just on a cruise someplace.”

  “I’ll get a better idea about that if I can take a look around his apartment. And that’s exactly what I plan to do. After I take you to catch a taxi.”

  “In case anyone sees you, it would be better if I stick around to translate for you, don’t you think?”

  “Brigitte, this is dangerous. And illegal. I can’t take that responsibility.”

  “You can’t, you know. It’s my own responsibility. I don’t know why you’re investigating this fire, but you definitely don’t have the same motives I do. And I think that mine are much stronger than yours.”

  Colomba was worried, but she also looked at things from a practical point of view. Brigitte could be useful to her. “Okay,” she said.

  Brigitte smiled weakly. “After all, I’ll probably wake up soon and find out this was all just a dream.”

  “If you do, wake me up while you’re at it. Wait for me here. I have to go pick up my partner.”

  Colomba drove back to the Colloquium, pushing the car as fast as it would go, and found Dante in their suite, keeping an eye on Andreas from the door to the study and wringing his hand. “Oh, thank heavens,” he said when he saw her come in. “What did you find?”

  “A door that I’d like to get open without making any noise.”

  “I’m on my way. Where is it?” said Dante, anxious to get the hell out of there.

  “We’ll go together.”

  Dante pointed at Andreas. “What about him? More pills? I can try and get them down his throat while he’s sleeping.”

  “Would he survive?”

  “He might not.”

  “Then we’ll take him with us.”

  17

  To wake him up, they dragged him into the bathroom and stuck his head under a jet of ice-cold water—an operation that was anything but easy with a man who weighed a good 350 pounds—then they put a new bandage on the back of his head, removed his handcuffs, and walked him down the stairs in a semi-comatose state, more than once at the risk of losing their grip on him and letting him fall and break his neck. They crossed paths with a couple of other guests, but no one paid the slightest attention to the condition of the mystery-obsessed journalist—or perhaps they were just used to seeing him staggering along drunk. Then they laid him down in the backseat of his car. Half an hour later, they pulled up on the sidewalk in front of Brigitte. “How many cars do you have, anyway?” she asked when Colomba and Dante got out.

  “This one’s not mine, either. And he’s Dante.”

  “Like the guy who wrote The Divine Comedy?”

  “Exactly,” he said, shaking hands with her and smiling for the first time in a great many hours. Brigitte really was a pretty young woman, and he liked the comic-book quality that the pink hair gave her.

  “What about the guy who’s asleep in the back?” Brigitte demanded.

  “We’ll talk about him later, okay? Now both of you go up and get that fucking door open. I’ll wait for you here,” Colomba said with an edge in her voice.

  Brigitte was perplexed but accompanied Dante up the stairs to the landing outside Heinichen’s apartment, astonished that he kept his eyes shut the whole way up while sweating copiously. The mixture of pharmaceuticals was keeping Dante’s internal thermostat reasonably low, but only to a certain point. “Do you feel okay?” she asked him.

  “No.”

  “Fine, then that makes two of us.”

  “I’m afraid you’re about to feel worse,” said Dante, taking off the leather glove.

  “Because of that?” Brigitte pointed at the bad hand. “Have you ever seen the charred body of a loved one who burnt to death in a fire?”

  “Luckily, no, I haven’t.” Using both hands and various rolled-up lengths of wire, and in spite of his current state of mind, Dante was able to click the two locks open in under a minute, while Brigitte stood watch to make sure no one was arriving. He left the door slightly ajar. Then he said, “Wait here.”

  “Aren’t we going in?”

  “My batteries are dead. I’ll see you outside later.”

  Dante went downstairs four steps at a time and relieved Colomba, who was guarding Andreas. At that very moment, the big man emitted a loud fart. After this, God, I’d say I’ve paid for all my sins, thought Dante as he held his nose.

  Colomba rejoined Brigitte, who was a little baffled by all this back-and-forth, and together they went into the apartment. The place was orderly, depressing, and clearly a bachelor’s residence, two small rooms furnished catch-as-catch-can, with an overall air of grimness. It reeked of dust and stale, closed air. There was a thick coat of dust on everything. There were no photos on display, and none of the shabbiness typical of the homes of alcoholics. Not a single empty bottle in sight, much less a full one. “Now what?” asked Brigitte.

  “Put these on.” Colomba handed her a pair of latex gloves, then put on a pair herself and started searching. Like the men who worked for her, Colomba was fast and brutal when it was necessary, and in half an hour, the apartment had been turned upside down. She didn’t find anything useful until she discovered a loose tile in the kitchen and managed to pry it out. Behind it was a small empty space. The back of the tile was smeared with a dark oil of some kind, and Colomba took it downstairs to Dante.

  “What is he doing?” Brigitte asked as she watched him waft it beneath his nose.

  “He’s smelling it.”

  Dante scraped it with his fingernail. “Oil.”

  “I’d figured that much out on my own,” said Colomba.

  “Teflon-based. It’s gun oil.”

  “So Heinichen kept a pistol in there.”

  “Then what became of it?” asked Dante. “He didn’t have it with him at the club; otherwise, the police would have found it. And if Giltine had taken it, she would have used it.”

  “So what’s left?”

  “Only two possible explanations,” said Dante. “The first is that Heinichen has risen from the grave and came back here to get it; the second one, and by fa
r the most plausible, is that Heinichen was never actually put into that grave.”

  18

  In the end, it was Brigitte who put them up. Her apartment was a one-bedroom with coffered ceilings and hardwood floors. The furniture was brightly colored; a print of the Flatiron Building hung on one wall, while on another was a poster for The Rocky Horror Picture Show. In the little living room, there was a DJ’s console hooked up to the stereo: aside from bartending, Brigitte spun records, though that was in clubs less trendy than the Automatik.

  While Colomba kept an eye on Andreas, handcuffed and sprawled out on the sofa, Dante had gone back to the Colloquium to pack their bags and say farewell to everyone. It had been particularly complicated to climb and descend the stairs all on his own, but the thought of getting out of there had sustained him. Brigitte, in the meantime, was listening to Colomba’s explanations about Giltine and their trip north from Rome. A couple of times her credulity had been sorely tested, but a quick check on the Internet had confirmed certain details, such as Dante’s background.

  “Huber tried to kill you. Because this Giltine told him to,” said Brigitte.

  “That’s right.”

  “He’s a pretty well-known author around here . . . he could cause a lot of trouble for me.”

  “I don’t intend to keep him here for good. Only long enough to figure out what we’re doing about Heinichen. Then I’ll let him go.”

  “But weren’t you a policewoman? He’s a dangerous man, from what you say.”

  “Unfortunately, I don’t have any proof against him. But the minute I get back to Italy, I’ll do all I can to make sure my German colleagues stay after him with a vengeance. They’ll be able to find something.”

  “I’m not sure if I like knowing that he’s out and on the loose,” said Brigitte.

  She would have liked it even less if she’d known that Andreas had only been pretending to be asleep for at least the past half hour, and was anticipating with great relish the revenge he planned to take for having been treated in that humiliating manner. If Dante and Colomba went back to Italy, he wouldn’t be able to get to them quite so easily, but the little pink-haired slut was a horse of a different color. He knew where she lived, and it wouldn’t be much of a challenge to find a way inside. Some night very soon.

  Dante rang the bell from downstairs, and Colomba went down to accompany him back up. When he came in, he headed straight for the little balcony, where he chain-smoked for quite a while. “So now she’s part of the group, too?” he asked Colomba in Italian. By “she,” he meant Brigitte, who had gone to take a shower.

  “We need someone who knows the country and isn’t a homicidal maniac.”

  Dante studied her. “And what if Giltine gets her in her sights?”

  “No one can tell her what we’re doing. We’ve captured her sentinel.”

  “If fat boy is the only one.”

  Andreas chose that moment to pretend to come to. “I have a splitting headache,” he said. “And I have to take a shit that’s going to unleash an earthquake.” He held up his handcuffed wrists. “Aren’t you guys tired of playing prison guards yet?”

  “No. Heinichen is still alive,” said Colomba.

  “And who is that supposed to be?”

  She told him. “If he’s who we think he is, then he just staged his death. That would explain the reason behind that strange report. That wasn’t his corpse. He just hightailed it out of there.”

  Andreas thought it over. “Then someone helped him out with a sort of shell game with a dead body at the hospital where he was being treated. I have a few friends I could ask about this.”

  “I don’t want to hear anything about friends of yours.”

  “Who else do you know who can get you a contact? I can tell you the answer to that question: no one. That means you’ll just waste a lot of time. And who knows what will become of Giltine.”

  “You can’t trust him, CC,” Dante broke in.

  “I don’t trust him, but he’s definitely right about wasting time. That works against us.” She pulled Andreas’s cell phone out of his pocket. “Call this friend.”

  Andreas smiled. “Do you seriously think I would talk about this sort of thing on the phone? You’re not as smart as I thought you were, policewoman.”

  “Arrange for a meeting.”

  Andreas reached for the phone and contacted the male nurse who had helped him to wake Heinichen from the coma. The man agreed to meet them shortly.

  Colomba reached for the key to the handcuffs and dangled it under Andreas’s nose. “Do as you’re told, and don’t try to escape. Otherwise you’ll find you’ve just sprouted a new hole. Do I make myself clear?”

  “I’m on your side,” said Andreas, his face absolutely neutral. It was impossible to guess what he had in mind, and Colomba didn’t bother to try. She uncuffed him and put her pistol in her pocket. She wasn’t sure she’d be able to bring herself to shoot him if she had to, but she felt safer packing it.

  Dante was on a slow boil. He took Colomba aside for a quick talk before she went out. “The man is manipulating you, for fuck’s sake. Don’t you want to see that?”

  “I’m not that naive, Dante,” she replied. “But you tell me what my practical alternative is.”

  “I don’t have one. Not yet.”

  “I’ll keep an eye on him. I’m pretty sure he wants to get to the bottom of this thing as much as we do.”

  “If you’re wrong, he’s going to try to hurt you.”

  “Let him try. I’ve dealt with much worse people than him.” She wasn’t sure that was true, but the thought calmed her down. At least a little.

  19

  The meeting was arranged not far from Brigitte’s place, at a bar in the Que Pasa chain, which offered inexpensive cocktails and heaping helpings of Mexican food. Andreas, unhandcuffed now, had gone back to playing the role of the likable lunatic whom Colomba and Dante had first met. Only his bloodshot eyes and the bandage on the back of his head remained to remind them of what had happened that night. He never made a single threatening gesture, and he acted as Colomba’s interpreter, providing an English account of the meeting with the male nurse, a skinny guy with a rat face who seemed quite intimidated by the presence of the corpulent writer. He’s afraid of him, he knows what he’s really like, thought Colomba. She recorded every word of the conversation on Andreas’s cell phone, just to make sure Huber’s translation was accurate. Later, though, when she played it back to Brigitte, she discovered that Huber had left out nothing.

  Ratface, who knew the entire history of everything shady that had ever happened at the Sankt Michael hospital, told them that around the same time Heinichen was buried, the corpse had vanished—the corpse of a homeless man who’d been killed a month earlier by the explosion of a camp stove in the shanty where he lived. The disappearance of the body had been hushed up; after all, this wasn’t the first time such a thing had happened. Unclaimed corpses had a way of falling into the hands of medical students or bone vendors with the complicity of morgue attendants and hospital staff. The law prohibits trafficking in human remains, but you need only go on eBay to find plenty of skulls and femurs for sale, in some cases transformed into artistic masterpieces.

  That time, though, the whole corpse had been put into Heinichen’s bed, and someone had pretended not to notice. Just who, Ratface couldn’t say.

  Harry Klein, meanwhile, had called the Colloquium, and his call was forwarded to Andreas’s cell phone, which was the number that Colomba had left them. As he’d been asked, Klein had done his best to figure out who had performed the autopsy on the self-proclaimed Heinichen, but he’d come up empty-handed. The original death certificate and the autopsy findings had mysteriously vanished, and all that remained was the registration of the date of death in the hospital’s computer system. The entry had been done by one of the clerks, who was not a member of the medical staff.

  After Andreas had scarfed down his third plate of Nachos Sonora and two
one-liter bottles of beer and they’d returned to the apartment, Colomba found Dante wrapped in a blanket, fast asleep in a corner of the little terrace. She woke him up and explained to him and Brigitte what they’d learned.

  “Then Giltine really has failed,” said Dante.

  “Wipe that disappointed look off your face, we’re not rooting for her. And now I can’t wait to get my hands on Heinichen and figure out what made him so damned important.”

  “Just think if he doesn’t know a fucking thing,” Andreas said, cackling from the sofa.

  “Is he taking part in this discussion?” asked Dante.

  Colomba shrugged. “He’s here. And he’s being a good boy, but that’s not enough.” She pulled the handcuffs out of her pocket and jangled them. “Do you want to be handcuffed to the water pipe on the wall or to the radiator?”

  “So you still don’t trust me?”

  “Okay, I’ll choose. The water pipe seems stronger to me.” They shoved the sofa against the wall, then Colomba cuffed Andreas to the pipe. “Comfy?”

  “No.”

  “Good. The date of death was entered into the system two days after the fire, so we have to assume that’s when Heinichen escaped, or else a little earlier. What kind of shape was he in?”

  “He was bursting with rude good health,” said Andreas.

  “The next smart-ass answer out of you and I’ll stuff a box of pills down your throat.”

  Andreas shook his big head. “He was covered with burns. If he ran away two days later, then he was one tough son of a bitch.”

  “It’s impossible that he could have done it all on his own,” said Brigitte, speaking up for the first time. “I know what it means. When my brother died, I read up extensively on fires. I wanted to understand whether he—” She stopped short.

  “Whether he suffered,” Andreas finished her sentence for her in a casual tone. “I can give you the answer. Yes. Yes, he did. A lot.”

  Brigitte insulted him in German, and he just laughed.

  “Last warning, Andreas,” said Colomba. “One more, and the next time you wake up, you’ll be a lot older.”