They parked inside the gate, then closed the gate behind them. When Andreas started to get out, Colomba handcuffed him to the steering wheel again. “Are you going to just leave me here?”
“I told you not to put your hands on anyone. You’re lucky I didn’t leave you there to burn up.”
“I want to hear what he has to say,” said Andreas. “I deserve that.”
“All you deserve is a jail cell,” said Colomba, slamming the car door. Aside from wanting to punish him, she didn’t want Andreas knowing any more than he already did. For the good of the investigation, in case she ultimately was forced to set him free. “Don’t make any noise. You don’t want me to have to come back.”
She walked away and joined the others inside. Andreas ground his teeth and cursed in German, but he calmed down almost immediately. Externally, at any rate. He knew that his chance to make the cop pay for it would come. He could see her before him, in all the hues that blood could take on.
Soon.
When Colomba went into the cottage, he stretched out onto the seat next to him and used his foot to click open a hidden hatch underneath the dashboard.
Any journalist worth his salt should always have an ace up his sleeve.
23
They all got comfortable in the enormous living room of the cottage, which had two dining tables that each seated ten and an entertainment nook the size of Colomba’s whole apartment. Adjoining the huge room was a small hallway with a bathroom, and a staircase leading upstairs, where there were four bedrooms. The prisoner was seated on one of the sofas, where he glared at them in silence, his eyes asymmetrical. By the light of the big chandelier with its fake candles, the damage from the fire was even more evident.
Brigitte rummaged through the cabinets and found some tea and a kettle, while Dante asked her to toss him the bottle of vodka. This one was just as warm as the one he’d taken from the bar at the Colloquium, but at least it was a Beluga Platinum, top of the line. Sitting on the windowsill where the chilly air was pouring in from outside, Dante held it out to their prisoner. “Want some?”
The other man turned to look at him and was about to refuse, but then he changed his mind and nodded. He took the bottle, and Dante was assailed by the fear that he’d made a stupid mistake, that the prisoner would now use it as a weapon, but the man just took a couple of fast gulps, then a longer, slower one, and handed it back. “I haven’t had any alcohol in two years,” he said in perfect Italian, with only the slightest Eastern European accent.
“Doctor’s orders?”
The man shot him a contemptuous glance. “I wanted to keep my head clear. In case she came back. But now . . .” He shrugged.
Dante tossed back another gulp, and as the warmth of the alcohol spread out from his belly, he realized that it was true: they’d achieved the impossible. He had before him someone with the key to solve the mystery of Giltine. The man who knew why she traveled the world, reaping victims like the supernatural creature whose name she bore.
What if he’s lying, what if he refuses to talk?
Dante tried to read him, but his posture and facial expressions were too badly altered by the scarring. The prisoner upbraided Dante by shaking his healthy index finger at him. “They taught us the same trick. But we tried not to show we were doing it.”
“What trick?”
“The one where you try to figure out what people are thinking by studying their expressions.”
“Military training? Spy school?”
The prisoner just shrugged.
Colomba came back with Brigitte and a mug of tea in her hands. She was hungry as a wolf, but there was nothing to eat in the house. “Unfortunately, Brigitte doesn’t speak Italian,” she said in English. “So we’ll use English as our common language. Does that work for you?”
“I don’t have anything to say anyway.” The prisoner’s English was almost unaccented, and probably his German was perfect. Dante thought that learning languages like that was certainly part of the training process, whatever that process might be.
“At least tell us your name.”
“Franco Chiari.”
Colomba placed a chair in front of him and took a seat. “I don’t believe you, you know that? I think that name’s as real as Heinichen and who knows how many others.”
“I don’t care what you think.”
“You are Russian.”
The man didn’t react.
“Let’s see if this interests you,” said Colomba. “Giltine has killed twelve people in Italy, six in Berlin in the Absynthe fire, of which you were the sole survivor, and my friend here is convinced that she’s killed quite a few more in various places around the world.”
“Your friend is probably right,” Chiari admitted.
“My friend thinks she’s not done killing.”
“That might be true, too.”
“You’re the only person who can help us to stop her.”
He smiled with the side of his face that still worked. The result was a grotesque grimace. “You can’t stop her.”
“After all she’s done to you, why don’t you want to help us catch her?”
“Because I deserved what she did to me. It’s my fault that she’s still out there doing what she does.”
“You were a soldier or a spy,” Dante broke in. He’d finally connected the dots. “By any chance, did your assignment have to do with Giltine?”
“That wasn’t her name when they gave me the assignment.”
“Okay. So you were supposed to catch her, but you couldn’t,” said Colomba, forcing herself to be patient, even though what she wanted was to kick him around the room.
“No, I succeeded. That’s the problem. I did my job.” The man’s voice sank to a whisper. “I found her, and I did exactly what I was supposed to do.”
“And what were you supposed to do to her?” Brigitte piped up for the first time. “What did you do to her?”
“I killed her,” said the man who called himself Chiari. “And that’s why she’s taking her revenge now.”
V
PRICE TAG
BEFORE—2010
There’s no moon out; the Shanghai skyscrapers are glittering against the black sky. Donna looks out over the great curve in the Yangtze River where it flows past, twenty stories beneath her hotel window. She thinks about the chilly water in an ancient prison, then she thinks about the warm water of the Spanish sea. About when they called her the Girl, or Mute Girl. Before she chose a new name for herself, the only name that she feels is her own.
In the room behind her, in the enormous bed that’s far too soft, Katia is sleeping on her belly, her hair spread over the pillow like the tentacles of a bloodred jellyfish, one foot poking out from under the covers. Donna goes over to her and delicately slides the sheets back to uncover Katia’s body. Katia’s flesh is milky white and seems to shimmer in the light of the bedside lamp. Her body is slender, almost without curves.
Katia’s ancestors must have been hunted, not hunters, thinks Donna. They would scatter into the forest on their long legs and hide. They stole food, they didn’t track and kill it.
Unlike me.
She leans over Katia. Under the scent of the no-brand bath foam in the hotel, she can smell the aroma of the wine as it evaporates from her pores, and the eel that they ate earlier that evening in the arts district, from a sizzling iron plate in a little restaurant wedged between an art gallery and a restoration workshop. Katia spends all her free time—when she’s not practicing and rehearsing, that is—in the arts district, and when she comes back at night, her eyes are gleaming with what she’s seen. Katia lives, like Mimi in the opera, on art and beauty. Donna doesn’t understand it, but she does perceive the effect it has on her. She is captivated by its allure as if by proxy. It’s always been that way between them, ever since the night Donna first saw her on the stage of a concert hall in Paris, Katia at the keyboard of the piano, her fingers flying over the notes in a pool of light. When Donna t
ook her that same night, Katia’s body still quivered with the music that had flowed through her, with the applause and the excitement.
It was supposed to be only for that night, but they’ve been together ever since, two years spent traveling around the world. Donna has become the artist’s partner, a shoulder for her to lean on, a necessary presence backstage. She knows that it’s a mistake, and she’s tried to run away from her, but she’s always returned to Katia. Katia has burrowed inside her. When she’s far away from Katia, Donna wastes away and dies.
Sooner or later, it’s bound to happen. She’ll see me for what I really am.
And then it will end anyway.
A solitary drop of sweat slides down the curving hollow of Katia’s back, just above her buttocks that are nearly flat. Donna licks at the drop of sweat. It tastes of life.
She’d weep now, if she only knew how.
Katia wakes up. She reaches up and touches Donna’s face, inviting her to come closer. Donna does, her lips climbing a vein that runs along Katia’s arm. She can feel it pulse softly, in time with her breathing. They kiss. “I had a strange dream,” Katia murmurs.
“Dreams are always strange,” says Donna, who never dreams. “What was it like?”
“I almost can’t remember it. I only remember that it was Giltine.”
“Who’s that?”
“A witch my grandmother used to tell me about. She would guide a line of women dressed in white who each carried a candle. They’d walk through a dark and deserted city, in ruins, all the houses destroyed . . .”
“Like after a war.”
“Maybe a nuclear war . . . you know, the world empty and lifeless.”
“Except for those women.”
“They aren’t alive. Giltine is taking them to paradise or to hell . . . She is the spirit of the dead.” Katia stretched. “Come to bed now.”
“Not right away.”
Donna puts on a bathrobe and terry-cloth slippers with the hotel’s logo stitched into them.
“Are you going to the sauna?” Katia asks her.
“Yes.” Donna always goes at night, when there’s no one there and the guests theoretically aren’t allowed. But she’s given the housekeeper a substantial tip, and she has a service key.
Katia swivels her legs off the bed and gets up. “I’ll come with you. I don’t feel like being alone.” She, too, puts on a bathrobe, and together, they leave the room. It’s two in the morning. The laughter from the groups drinking in the garden downstairs has died out. In the hallway, there are odors of boiled vegetables and durian, a fruit that Katia refuses to taste because of the stench. Donna, on the other hand, doesn’t mind. She can eat anything, dead or alive, one of the advantages of being what she is.
They take the service stairs—Donna never uses the elevator, if she can avoid it—and go down to the spa in the basement. There is a sauna, a hydrotherapy bath, and a small round heated pool with hydromassage jets. The walls are dark red, the floor is black marble, and the speakers are playing Bach’s Prelude in C Minor. Donna recognizes Katia’s influence. She wonders if it’s just a coincidence, or whether the hotel management did it intentionally to honor their guest, who will be playing tomorrow night at the Grand Theatre.
Only a few lights are turned on, and the two women slip naked into the hydromassage tub in shadow. Katia lets herself go, luxuriating in that vaguely forbidden pleasure, while Donna shuts her eyes only for an instant and then opens them quickly.
Something’s not right.
She perceived it when she came in, but she’s only just realized what it is. The door of the booth where you get towels during the daytime is standing ajar. That’s never happened during the week they’ve spent at this hotel, because the attendant always cleans everything up by eleven p.m., the official closing time of the wellness center. This time he didn’t do it.
Now all of Donna’s senses are taut as wires. The sound of the hydromassage is a blanket, impossible to penetrate, but beneath the smells of chlorine and disinfectant, she catches a whiff of tobacco and something even fainter and acid that reeks of human.
Katia opens her eyes when she senses the other woman’s warmth vanish. Donna has slid out of the tub in silence, and now she’s crouching on the edge in an animal stance, like a wild beast. Katia’s never seen her like this. This is no longer the woman she’s slept with for the past two years, the woman she’s traveled with, made love with. There was an unspoken pact about Donna’s past. They wouldn’t talk about it, as if she’d been born the day the two women met. But now Katia is wondering if she might have made a mistake, so powerful is the impression of seeing her in that state. She watches as Donna crosses the room, utterly soundless on the wet floor, creeping along in the darkest shadows.
Donna leans into the booth and sees what she already guessed at. The acid odor comes from the attendant’s guts, which spill out of his belly as he crouches, dead, seemingly praying to a cruel god. Donna steps back suddenly and slams into the two men whose presence she sensed in the darkness.
Katia, still in the tub, sees shadows move and hears muffled sounds, but she can’t figure out what’s happening. All the same, she’s afraid to call Donna, afraid that her voice might unleash something horrible.
From the darkness beyond the tub emerges a man wearing the gray suit of an office worker. He has a neutral expression, light-colored eyes.
It’s Maksim.
Katia asks him what he wants, but Maksim just grabs her hair and smashes her face into the side of the basin. Katia’s incisors shatter; at last she screams.
At the far end of the room, the shadows begin to move more quickly, then suddenly, Donna’s naked body appears, covered with blood. She runs toward Maksim so quickly that he can’t even begin to take aim. He’d hoped to lure her into a trap by using Katia, but he miscalculated. He manages to squeeze off only one shot before Donna slams into him, knocking him against the wall. The bullet drills into Katia’s forehead just as she’s trying to get up out of the tub. She tumbles back into the water with a splash. Donna’s attention shifts. Only for an instant. Perhaps for the first time in her life. And Maksim, who has lost his gun and broken three ribs in the impact against the wall, as well as cracking a vertebra, still manages to slide his hunting knife into her back.
Donna arches forward and slams an elbow back at him. Maksim’s jaw is shattered, and he loses his grip on the knife, which remains firmly planted in her flesh. He slides to the floor, and Donna tries to kick him in the throat, but she’s bleeding copiously from the wound in her back. She’s slow now, and Maksim tries to go for broke. He shoves her, and Donna loses her balance, hurtling face-first into the hydrotherapy bath. Maksim, with all his remaining strength, climbs on top of her, crushing her down toward the bottom of the basin as he tries desperately not to lose consciousness. Donna tries to push against the side of the basin, but she slips and can’t seem to get a grip. At the fifth minute, her body stops writhing. At the sixth, there are still tiny shivers in her limbs and face.
At the tenth, there is only silence.
Maksim would go on holding her underwater if he didn’t hear voices speaking in Chinese coming from outside. So he runs away. With every drenched step that carries him far away, along the streets still brightly lit by the signs of the last few establishments open this late, by the red lanterns for tourists, he leaves behind a piece of all those long years that have passed since the day he accepted the offer of a man who struck fear into his heart. He was a young man then, and he’s become an old man since, like a dog on a chain. Now it’s over, he thinks. Now he’s cut the last link.
But he’s wrong.
When the police—or rather, when the Chinese People’s Armed Police Force, as the nomenclature would now have it—arrive, the officers are obliged to report the death of a world-famous pianist of Lithuanian origin, as well as the deaths of two local criminals well known to the authorities to be affiliated with the Triads.
Donna’s body, on the other hand,
has vanished.
1
Maksim, who had taken the names Heinichen, Chiari, and many others he couldn’t even remember, asked for a cigarette, and Dante threw him the pack without bothering to glance at him.
“How did she manage to survive?” asked Colomba, breaking into the grim silence that had settled over the room.
“Extreme cold slows the metabolism,” Dante murmured. His voice seemed to come from somewhere close to the floor. The part about the drowning had summed up all his worst fears. “There have been shipwreck victims who’ve survived even longer without breathing.”
“I should have plugged her full of bullets, but I was struggling just to stay on my feet, and after all, I hardly thought it would be necessary.” Maksim realized that he was confiding in total strangers. After a lifetime of absolute discretion and secrecy, he was liberating himself as if it were the most natural thing on earth. What the fuck, I should have done it years ago. “It took her four years to find me, but she did it. And if I’d been in the farthest corner of the earth instead of in Berlin, it wouldn’t have made a bit of difference. If I’d been on top of the Eiffel Tower, Giltine would just have set it on fire.”
“And you would have deserved it,” said Brigitte, livid with anger. She seemed ready to lunge at his throat. “Everything that happened after that was your fault.”
“How can you be so sure of what she would have done?” asked Dante.
“What do you think she used to do before I tracked her down in Shanghai? Work as a housekeeper?” Maksim asked contemptuously. “I hunted her for practically thirty years, and in those thirty years, she made a living by killing people. For the vory v zakone, or else for those judases at the FSB, when they had some job that was too disgusting even for them. It was impossible to find her unless you knew just where to look, and it was always too late by the time I got there. Russia’s a big place, and she regularly traveled outside the country. A couple of times, I made deals with some Mafioso or other working with her to hand her over to me, but she always managed to get away.”
Kill the Angel Page 35