“I’m begging you, don’t touch it.”
“All right, all right. I’ll order up. What are you calling about?”
Dante explained his idea. It was actually quite simple. Perhaps Heinichen had a house or apartment in Ulm before the fire, though that was unlikely: he wouldn’t have gone someplace where Giltine easily could have found him if she’d bothered to inquire. So he would in all likelihood have sought out a temporary accommodation. There were thirty-five hotels in Ulm, as well as a couple of hostels; Santiago penetrated their computer networks one after the other, downloading the client registries for the period of time when Heinichen might have lived there. Of all except four, which still did everything by hand. Luckily, the fugitive had chosen to stay in one of the others.
Santiago called Dante in the middle of the night and sent him a picture of a passport. The photograph was almost identical to the one on Heinichen’s ID card that they’d seen, only here he had blond hair. “His name is Franco Chiari, and he’s a Swiss citizen,” Santiago said. “He arrived exactly when you said, and he took Room Twenty-eight.”
“When did he leave?”
“Who said anything about him leaving? He must like the place, because he’s still right there. If you get moving, maybe you’ll be in time to catch him.”
21
Dante woke everyone up and gave them the news: they’d have to leave for Ulm before Heinichen decided to get moving. Colomba found herself confronted with a difficult dilemma. She couldn’t leave Andreas bound and drugged, because if he got free, he’d find a way of throwing a monkey wrench in the works. But dragging him along meant adding a major unknown factor to the enterprise.
In the end, she opted for the second solution, because at least that way they’d be able to keep an eye on him. She’d travel in Andreas’s car with him handcuffed to the wheel—and who the fuck cared if anyone saw them—while Dante would travel in his car with Brigitte. The girl wanted to see this story through to the end, and Colomba agreed to allow her continued involvement, in part because she was now their official translator.
Before leaving, they identified a villa on Airbnb just outside the city limits, a place assuring that it was “quiet and discreet,” and they made reservations with Andreas’s credit card. If they managed to find Chiari, as Heinichen now called himself, they would need a place where they could talk other than his hotel, especially if he proved less than cooperative.
They left Berlin in the early afternoon, and it took them nine hours to drive to Ulm, on account of the frequent stops that Dante found so necessary. He enjoyed the trip very much, because Brigitte proved to be a spirited traveling companion, as well as very curious about him, which was balm for his ego.
“Have you and Colomba known each other long?” she asked Dante after the second stop.
“Two years,” he replied as he guided the steering wheel with only his left hand. “Ever since her boss sent her to try and talk me into working with the police.”
“So you didn’t work with them before that?”
“I’ve never much liked cops. They don’t seem to care much for me, either. But Colomba is a special case.”
“At first I thought you two were a couple. Then I saw that you slept apart. Or did you just do that to keep me from feeling awkward?”
“She’s never cared much about what other people thought. But we’re just friends.”
“And you’re not gay.”
Dante flashed a cunning smile. “No, but maybe I just haven’t met the right man.”
“I hope you don’t meet him anytime soon.”
Dante was so out of practice that he didn’t even realize for a few seconds. “Ah! Ulp.”
Brigitte punched him gently on the shoulder. “Ulp? I go out on a limb like that, and all you can say is ‘ulp’?”
“But weren’t you a lesbian?”
“Where on earth did you get that idea?”
“Colomba was sure of it.”
“So, is that why she sleeps fully dressed?” Brigitte let out her first real shout of laughter in the past couple of days. “Look, I’ve even given it a try with a couple of girlfriends, but it’s not like I enjoyed it all that much.”
Dante grinned his grin. “If you have any pictures, I’d love to take a look.”
She hit him again, harder this time. “I don’t know you well enough yet.”
“You’re right, you don’t.”
She scrutinized him. “And I’m not going to, am I?”
“I don’t have anything against free love, but my head isn’t screwed on straight these days.”
“But your heart is.”
Dante said nothing.
“Does Colomba know?”
“Who says I was talking about her?” said Dante, then sighed, realizing it was pointless to lie. “It makes me look like a teenage boy, doesn’t it?”
“A teenage boy would have leaned over and grabbed me.”
Dante pretended to smirk menacingly. “There’s still plenty of time for that.”
“Don’t start any fires you won’t be able to put out. Anyway, why don’t you just tell her how you feel?”
“Thanks, but no thanks. Her ideal type of man would need to be capable of killing a crocodile with his bare hands, and as you can see, I don’t fit into that category.” As he spoke, Dante saw Colomba giving the phone number of her NOA friend to Alberti. He’d been able to overhear every word of their conversation, and he’d noted that her gestures were charged with embarrassment and nervousness, but he’d attributed that to their imminent departure for Germany. Now they took on a new meaning. Did those two like each other? Were they having an affair? “But what about you? Are you single or in an open couple?” he forced himself to ask her, in order to avoid thinking about that bothersome image.
“Single. I don’t know whether I should say unfortunately or luckily.” A road sign pointing toward Ulm distracted Brigitte, who turned gloomy. “What are we going to do when we find Heinichen?”
“We’re going to talk to him.”
“And what if he refuses to talk? Are you thinking about beating him up or something like that?”
“Do I strike you as the type?”
“No.” She leaned her head on his shoulder. “Can I do this without making you feel as if you’re betraying the love of your life?”
“Look out, I’ll pull over and turn on my hazard lights . . .”
“Ssshhh, I’m sleeping.”
And she really did seem to fall asleep. Those with teeth have no bread, those with bread have no teeth, Dante told himself, but his self-respect had just risen considerably.
° ° °
In the other car, the atmosphere was much less idyllic.
Colomba had rejected all the efforts of her mastodonic driver to start up a conversation. She knew that he was probing in search of her weak points. It was the kind of thing people like him always did.
“How does it feel to be on the opposite side?” he asked her about halfway through the drive.
Colomba said nothing.
“Come on, you’re forcing me to drive handcuffed to the steering wheel, can you imagine how uncomfortable that is? Help me take my mind off it. What does it feel like to become a criminal?”
“I’m not a criminal.”
“What do you call it when you’re holding another human being prisoner?”
“In your case, jailer or warden.”
“So you’re judge, jury, and executioner? I don’t believe that’s considered legal even in your country, however backward it may be.”
Colomba forced herself to remain silent, but her hand on the butt of the pistol under her jacket was starting to sweat.
“I approve of your choices,” Andreas went on. “Don’t get me wrong. You’re acting rationally. Still, the law ought to be obeyed, whatever our personal judgments. Otherwise, anyone could come along and decide to break the law in the name of their own selfish objectives. And you’re a policewoman, which means you ought to
be a guarantor of the law.”
“There’s nothing selfish about what I’m doing,” she hissed. “I’m trying to catch a murderer.”
“And this is the justification claimed by the defendant,” said Andreas in a stentorian voice.
“Oh, just fuck yourself and drive,” Colomba blurted, refusing to continue playing that game. Andreas smiled at the tiny crack he believed he’d just broken open in her facade, but he hadn’t understood.
The crack inside Colomba had been there for a while, and it was growing bigger with every passing day: because she couldn’t stop asking herself why she was doing what she was doing. She’d started out by stretching the rules a little, but before long, she’d found herself subverting them entirely. In nearly all the legal codes on earth, there is something known as the state of necessity. If you’re dying on a raft in the middle of the ocean and you kill your fellow shipwreck victim to eat him, you can’t be charged with anything. You were about to die, and it was your only option, no matter how cruel. And even if a ship comes along and rescues you a minute later, well, you couldn’t have known that was going to happen. It applies to someone who cuts the rope holding up a fellow mountain climber if they think they’re about to be dragged into a crevice below along with him, just as it applies to someone who runs from an earthquake, abandoning wife and children. State of necessity.
But did the same concept apply to someone trying to stop a mass murderer? It did for her conscience, at least, though maybe it wouldn’t in a trial. She didn’t know the answer, and riding along next to Andreas just made the question more painful.
They arrived at night, on schedule, and parked about half a mile from the hotel. It stood in the heart of the Fischerviertel, the old fisherman’s quarter filled with colorful half-timbered houses and little bridges across the River Blau: Dante had always wanted to see it, but now that he was walking through it on his way to war, it didn’t seem all that interesting after all. He kept his hands stuffed in his pockets to conceal the way they were shaking, trying to disregard the small inner voice that kept telling him to take one of his many pills or another slug of vodka from his pocket flask. He shot a glance at Brigitte, who was looking around with a baffled expression.
She’s so young, dear God, he said to himself in a moment of adrenaline-induced lucidity. What on earth was I thinking when I let her come with us? He could only think that he was responsible for both Brigitte and Colomba, because it was he who had brought them all the way here, and his concern was much greater than the excitement of finding himself so close to the man they were hunting for. He’s half a cripple and no longer young, it might all go smooth as silk, he thought, trying to quiet his nerves.
Still, he didn’t believe it, and he was right not to.
22
The hotel was small and charming, three stories and a steep pitched roof. The brick-and-mortar facade was covered with red wooden beams that surrounded windows with fixtures of the same color. To reach the reception area, you had to cross an ivy-covered stone bridge. A faint mist rose from the water that caught the light from the streetlamps, giving the whole scene a slightly dreamy appearance.
According to the plans they’d just reconfigured, Colomba and Andreas would enter together, pretending they were looking for a room, while Brigitte and Dante would remain outside, on either side of the building. They all had cheap walkie-talkies they’d bought on the way there. Except Andreas, who’d had his taken away because he continued to make rude noises into it.
Dante would have liked to go in with Colomba, but when they got near the hotel door, his internal thermostat had spiked and the entrance had turned into a sinkhole ready to gobble him up. He had backed away, leaning against the railing, and waved for the others to continue. And that was when things started to fall apart.
Just as Colomba and Andreas were walking through the front door, the scream of the fire alarm pierced the air, and a plume of black smoke coiled languidly out a third-floor window. Colomba and Andreas stood frozen in the doorway, and the concierge came running toward them to stop them from entering the hotel. Knowing perfectly well what was about to happen, Dante murmured a faint “no,” but Andreas didn’t hear and instead delivered a head butt to the poor man that would have knocked down a brick wall. The concierge dropped to the floor as if he’d just been given a jolt of electricity, while Andreas, covering his face with a handkerchief, galloped into the billowing cloud of smoke that had already filled the staircases. The big man pushed up the stairs, overwhelming and frightening the guests who were just trying to get out. Colomba, cursing into the radio, ran after him.
“What’s happening?” Brigitte asked over the radio.
“Our friend Chiari has set fire to the hotel,” Dante responded. “He’s going to try to get away, so keep a sharp lookout on your side.”
“Nothing moving over here. What about Colomba?”
Dante looked back into the smoke-filled hotel. “She’s inside with Andreas.”
“Scheisse.”
Dante nervously watched the fleeing guests, doing his best to identify Chiari, but then he turned his gaze to the darkness behind the hotel and noticed that one of the restaurant windows was opening: a few seconds later, a shadow tumbled into the garden, fell, and got back to its feet, and continued hobbling painfully toward the riverbank. This was the man they were searching for, Dante was sure of it.
Dante ran after him. Or he tried to, anyway.
He was unable to take so much as a step. He trembled and sweated, and the hand that rested on the bridge railing had fastened on it in a vise grip. “Fuck, not now, not now!” he begged, but the shaking just grew worse, and the sweat turned icy cold. At that point he frantically grabbed at his radio and called for help, but all he got back was static. It was one of those nightmares where everything happens very slowly, but everything is inevitable. The man was going to get away, and Dante would just stand there, rooted to the ground like a tree. The umpteenth miserable performance in front of Colomba, he thought, the umpteenth demonstration that when it came to real-life, in-the-field action, he was worthless.
It was this thought, more than anything else, that gave him the strength to react. As quickly as it had come on, the attack of paralysis went away, and Dante ran toward the man.
Chiari heard footsteps behind him and turned around to look. By the light of a streetlamp, Dante couldn’t see him very well, but he could tell that the fire had been cruel. He was a man of average height, and the right side of his body was that of an old man in pretty good shape who tended to his appearance. The left side, however, was quite another matter. On that side, the face was a twisted mass of scar tissue, and there was no hair at all. The eye looked out through a narrow fold of flesh, and the mouth curved downward, revealing the lower teeth. The leg was crooked, and it made him tilt in that direction; his left hand had only stumps for fingers. But the real problem was in the right hand, because Chiari was holding a small revolver, and he raised it in Dante’s direction.
“We just want to talk to you,” Dante said quickly.
Caught off guard, he’d spoken in Italian, but the other man understood all the same. “I have nothing to say,” the man replied in the same language, mangling the pronunciation with his badly deformed mouth.
“Don’t you want to find the person who burned you alive? Don’t you want to take revenge on Giltine?”
Chiari, or whatever the hell his name was, hesitated, and Dante saw two figures growing bigger behind him in the dark. From their silhouettes, they could only be Colomba and Andreas.
“Let me go or I’ll shoot you.”
“She’ll find you the same way she found us. But we can help you.”
The two figures were only thirty or so yards away now. Andreas tried to get ahead, but Colomba tripped him, and he sprawled ruinously on the ground.
The sound alarmed Chiari, who spun around for a moment. Dante had been expecting it and lunged at the man. They fell, and Dante grabbed the arm holding the gun
with both hands. “He’s here! I’ve got him! Hurry!” he shouted.
Colomba’s shadow loomed between Dante and the lamppost, then she kicked the pistol away. “What are you shouting about? He’s nothing but an old cripple.” She was covered with soot, and her hair was singed.
“An old cripple with a gun.”
Colomba put the gun in her jacket pocket. “Not anymore.”
Dante got to his feet while Andreas and Brigitte came running up. Andreas was as singed and sooty as Colomba, aside from his lack of hair. “Come on, let’s get out of here before they see us,” he said in a hoarse voice.
“To the cars,” Colomba ordered.
They ran to the cars, keeping the fire behind them, and for a short distance they were followed by a few of the guests who had glimpsed them in the dark. Fortunately, something had exploded near the hotel, perhaps a car, and their pursuers quickly lost interest in them. “Why didn’t you answer me on the radio?” Dante asked Brigitte.
“Actually, it was you who stopped replying at a certain point. I could hear Colomba, but not you.”
Dante checked his walkie-talkie. In the frenzy of the moment, he’d twisted the tuning knob to another channel. “It must be broken,” he lied.
Chiari was struggling to keep up with them, and Colomba made Andreas pick him up and carry him. He did it effortlessly. “I thought you were afraid of fire,” he said to Chiari.
“Fuck yourself,” Chiari retorted, anything but intimidated.
They threw him into the backseat of Andreas’s car and drove to the villa that they’d rented three miles outside of the city. In reality, it was a small cottage at the center of a large meadow that was curiously dotted with statues in the ancient Greek style. They had a code to open the main gate, and the keys to the cottage were in the postbox.
Kill the Angel Page 34