Colomba thought back over the long journey that had taken them here from that particularly cool September night at Rome’s Termini Station. She thought back to what she’d been then and what she was now. What she’d understood. Only a few weeks had passed, but it might as well have been another life. Perhaps it was.
“Yes. We’ve found them. And now we just have to stop Giltine from exterminating them.”
16
Dawn transformed Giltine into a silhouette against the hotel window. She’d put on her mask, the only patch of white in the darkness of the room. Francesco was stretched out on the bed in a state of well-being so absolute that he felt as if he were a child again, on one of those vacation mornings when you woke up and luxuriated in the feeling of your body between the sheets, savoring the long, lazy, light-filled day that lay ahead, free of all concerns.
He stretched lazily in the bed, comfortably scratching his testicles. “What did you say your name was again?”
“Giltine.”
“That’s a strange name. Are you Russian or something like that?”
“Something like that,” she replied, keeping her eyes on the water as it continued to tell her stories.
“And you killed my mother.” As he uttered the words, Francesco sensed that something wasn’t quite right. He should have been at least a little angry with her, shouldn’t he? But how could he be angry with his new best friend? And his mother was such a distant, abstract concept. “Why?”
“To get you here. So you could meet someone.”
“The founder.”
“Yes.”
“But what if he doesn’t come?”
“But he promised your mother he would. Do you know why he brought you into this?”
“No.”
“When she had that operation for her cancer, she was convinced she wasn’t going to make it. She designated you as her successor.”
Francesco stretched lazily. “How do you know all these things?”
“I listened to the voices of the dead.”
“Which means you’re crazy.”
Giltine turned to look at him. “No. That’s not my problem.”
“What is?”
She didn’t answer.
Francesco stretched some more. “Can I get up, or is that going to bother you?”
“You can, but don’t go out or call anyone.”
“No, of course not.” What kind of a fool did she take him for? She’d already explained what he could and couldn’t do. And if you make a friend a promise, that’s a promise you keep. He went into the bathroom to take the pee he’d been holding in for hours, and looked at himself in the mirror. His pupils were so dilated that they swallowed up his irises and he felt as if he could look through them, as if his skull were made of glass. Amused at the idea, he went back to the bed. “Who was it that put the microphone in my room?”
“Rossari.”
“So I was right to think he was a pain in the ass. Is he some sort of spy?”
“A mercenary.”
“And is that better or worse?”
“Spies believe in something.”
“Then I’m a mercenary. I can’t remember actually caring about a single thing.”
“I used to be that way, too.”
“And then what happened?”
Giltine didn’t answer, gesturing to him with her bandaged hand. “Come here.”
He obeyed and walked over to her, stepping on a cloud the whole way. Everything emanated beauty, even the wall-to-wall carpeting beneath his feet.
“Kneel down and put your chin on my legs.”
He did so, feeling that under the fabric of Giltine’s pants—she was wearing a pair of black stretch jeans—there was something slimy that smelled of chemicals. “What kind of disease do you have?”
“The kind that takes away all diseases. Now stay still and look up.”
When he did as he was told, Giltine used the tips of her fingers to open his right eye wide. “You won’t feel a thing,” she said. “But I need to give you another dose. Don’t move.”
Then, with a small syringe and a very thin needle, she injected something into his eyeball.
A flash of light filled Francesco’s head, and everything was erased once again.
17
The corpses of Guarneri and his ex-wife had been taken to the morgue in the Gemelli Hospital to be autopsied, since that was an obligatory procedure in all cases of violent death. In view of the cease-fire with Santini, Colomba asked if she and Dante could view the bodies in the early-morning hours. Permission was given. The excuse was to say farewell to two good friends without having to attend the official viewing, an excuse that Santini didn’t fall for in the slightest. He limited himself to being present while they had access to the bodies, standing to one side and smoking in spite of the prohibition: on that point, he and Dante really were in perfect agreement.
Dante, stuffed to the gills with Xanax, walked through the front door and pretended not to see Santini, continuing down the dim gray hallway that, from his panicky point of view—his internal thermostat was now stuck at eight—extended and twisted like a snake. If Colomba hadn’t been there, patiently locking arms with him, he wouldn’t have been able to walk the hundred and fifty feet that separated him from the autopsy chamber. This way, it took him fifteen minutes, one shaky foot set down in front of the other, with frequent course reversals. All it took was an unexpected sound, a door slamming, and he’d startle and turn back.
At last he walked gingerly into the windowless room with fluorescent overhead lights where an attendant pushed out the two gurneys with the bodies strapped down on them, just pulled out of the refrigeration unit. Then the attendant left Dante alone; even Colomba stepped back to the doorway. She’d seen more than enough of them. Dante slipped on his latex gloves and walked hesitantly toward the corpses. In spite of his past, he felt by no means at ease around death. But if he couldn’t conquer his phobias by sheer force of will, at least he could bring himself to do things he didn’t really want to do when necessary. That was a quality that he felt spelled the difference between someone with phobias and an outright coward.
The bodies were in dull gray body bags made of oilcloth with a sleeping-bag zipper. Dante, after awkwardly undoing the strap on the larger of the two bags, pulled the zipper down, grimly wondering if the bags were single-use or if they were reused once their fillings had been disposed of.
A stench began to emerge from the body bag. It wasn’t yet the smell of decomposition but, rather, the smell that Dante had had to breathe in more than once in the past: violent death, which reeks of blood, vomit, viscera, and food gone bad. When he pulled the bag back from the upper part of the body, he was presented with Guarneri’s face and upper body, whereupon his thermostat shot straight up to the maximum reading, emitting a loud inner bong. For a moment, Dante lost the use of his legs, but he managed to keep from going ass over elbow by holding tight to the gurney’s handles. He waited until he felt the blood start circulating in his veins again, then he leaned over the policeman’s face. Just a few inches from the body’s gray skin, he did the opposite of what anyone else would have done. He shut his eyes and inhaled deeply.
° ° °
In the meantime, Santini had caught up with Colomba. “Where are Esposito and Alberti?” he asked her.
“At home, sleeping. They just did a little office work for me, and I have no intention of involving them any further.”
The office work that Colomba was referring to was the investigation of COW, by means of the association’s publicly held documents obtained through the two I’s, Internet and Interpol, work that had gone on until seven in the morning. They’d discovered that COW was a far more intricately structured entity than any of the associations, often little more than spare-time activities, that took care of the children of Chernobyl. COW’s charitable activities were numerous and diversified on various fronts, from digging wells for safe drinking water to hospitals, to say nothing o
f involvement in research institutions, symposiums, international teams for vaccinations. It was very well funded, with working capital of two billion euros, which came for the most part from private donations from holding companies and corporations all over the world. The name of one of those holding companies had made Dante sit up straight in his chair because, aside from donating to charities, it was one of the major shareholders in another company that owned Executive Outcomes.
“You know what EO is, don’t you?” he’d asked. The only one who’d said yes was Leo, but Dante had pretended not to notice, even if he was sitting right across from him. Oddly enough, Leo always sat on the same little sofa as Colomba.
“Okay. Imagine a group of mercenaries, and now imagine that they want to become a brand name for legal exports—though to use the term ‘legal’ is stretching things a little, from my point of view—for military interventions in war zones,” he’d explained with a certain amount of showmanship.
“So you’re talking about contractors,” Colomba had said.
“These days we talk about contractors, but back then they were a novelty, more or less like the introduction of the iPhone. The boss of the whole operation was a South African racist who had built his regiment by recruiting from the army in the early nineties. White officers, black soldiers, and all sorts of cannon fodder, according to the rules of those Nazis.”
“And who hired them?”
“EO came into being after the Fall of the Wall, when the armies of both blocs started withdrawing from the occupied zones, leaving local groups to disband and slaughter each other. EO went in to secure valuable mines for some company or other, or else to eliminate rebels who were occupying another company’s oil wells.”
“But how on earth could anything like that be legal?” Esposito had asked.
“It was, and it still is for those who’ve taken EO’s place today, because their excuse is that they’re being hired by UN-recognized governments. Even though the money actually came from private companies.”
“Not very credible that people like that would finance a charitable association,” Alberti had said.
“They’re not the only ones on the foundation’s board. There’s also a multinational company, and it, too, has an Afrikaner ex-soldier on the board, which owns and runs private prisons in America and Australia. And I’m not talking about small operations, because they have something like fifteen thousand employees.”
“So you think they’re the same people who ran the Box?” Leo had asked.
“The Box was run by splinter groups of the Soviet intelligence agencies; they never would have been able to penetrate the American market so quickly in the early nineties. More likely, they were customers,” Dante had said.
“Customers for what, the children?”
“The children and all the others the Soviet regime tossed into the biggest correctional experiment ever assembled. Interrogation techniques, imprisonment techniques, designed to convert, to break the will, training in how to resist.” Dante had tried to light a cigarette, but his hand was shaking so badly that Alberti had had to help him. “Do you seriously think there’s no market for this kind of product?”
° ° °
Colomba didn’t tell this part to Santini: if he didn’t want to know, she was willing to respect his preferences. Or at least she understood them. Just a couple of years ago, she probably would have done the same thing. Before the Disaster. And Dante. Especially before Dante.
Who at that moment was doing his best to keep from throwing up, as he hoped to catch a whiff—under the various stenches wafting off the corpse—of the chemical citrus scent that he remembered. He couldn’t discern it; perhaps the contact with Giltine had been too fleeting, or she’d worn gloves, or perhaps the body had been handled too much. With a sense of relief, he lifted the two sides of the bag and tried to zip them back up, but got the zipper only halfway across before it snagged and stuck fast. Instead of giving it another try, he popped a piece of nicotine gum in his mouth and started chewing, then turned his attention to the other corpse.
“Are you done?” Colomba asked from the doorway.
“I’m afraid not.”
“As long as you’re sniffing them, that’s okay, but just don’t try fucking them, okay?” said Santini.
Dante turned around to look at Santini; he hadn’t heard him come in. In his brain there tumbled into view, like on a rapidly whirling slot machine, fifty or so possible wisecracks in response, but he had to discard them all because they were either horrendously sexist or inappropriate. Plus, he knew that Santini’s mother was dead, and he hardly thought it was the sort of thing he should bring up. “This is a colleague of yours. Show some respect.”
Santini turned around and limped away. “That’s your fucking problem,” he said. “I’ve done my bit.”
“What a grouch,” said Dante, pleased with his moral victory. But when he unzipped the second body bag, his ego deflated like a popped balloon.
Guarneri’s ex-wife looked as if she’d been run over by a train. Giltine’s knife had savaged her face, eyes, neck, and belly in particular, simulating the rage of a man who wanted to disfigure the victim of his obsession, as was so often the case in femicide. Trying hard not to look at the viscera that protruded soft and pink from the cuts, Dante took the same whiff. He immediately felt his stomach turn and ran to throw up in the sewage drain in the center of the room. Colomba rushed over to him and held him up. “Hey. You need me to get you out of here?”
“After all the effort it took to get me in here? No.” Dante went back to the woman’s corpse and sniffed again, trying to separate his olfactory sensations. And beneath that mixture of effluvia, he found the scent he’d found on Youssef’s body, which had taken root in his brain and which he now associated with Giltine’s bandages, with her mysterious wounds. What the hell was it? An ointment, a pomade, a disinfectant?
Focused as he was on prodding his memory, Dante almost failed to realize that Colomba was finally leading him out, half-tugging him and half-pushing him, stopping only when they encountered two employees of a funeral parlor putting a dead body, scrubbed and made up, inside an open coffin at the front door. It was there that Dante caught an overwhelming smell of the same orange smell, only now enriched with other floral and chemical notes, whereupon he broke free of Colomba’s arm to run straight toward the coffin. The undertaker’s attendants gaped in astonishment as Dante leaned over their client. “Is this a relative of yours?” one of the two attendants asked him.
Colomba hurried to grab Dante, thinking he might have slipped into a frenzy like the one that had come over him in Berlin. Instead of running away, though, he was now grabbing the undertaker’s attendant by the shoulders and shaking him. “Tell me what you used.”
“Would you let go of me?”
“What did you put on the face?”
Colomba separated them, identifying herself as a policewoman. Luckily, she said it so convincingly that the undertaker’s attendants believed her without asking to see her badge. “Dante, what’s going on? Are you all right?”
“Couldn’t be better. Ask them what they put on this corpse.” Dante ran his finger over the dead man’s cheek, collecting the pancake makeup and leaving a white streak on the dead flesh.
“Have you lost your mind?” said the other attendant, grabbing Dante’s wrist.
Dante twisted free. “My apologies. I just got carried away.”
“Yes, please forgive him. But answer him while you’re at it,” said Colomba, caught between embarrassment and curiosity.
“We don’t treat them. There’s a technician who’s in charge of the thanatopraxy—or the embalming, to you. Anyway, they’re specially manufactured cosmetics.”
“For the corpses?”
“Of course, what else did you think it was for? Can we go now, Detective? Because they’re waiting for us so we can get this funeral done.”
“Yes, yes. Again, excuse me.”
Colomba dragg
ed Dante away, though he still seemed to be walking through a dream.
“What have you discovered that’s so important?”
“Cotard delusion, is what I’ve discovered,” said Dante with his eyes closed.
And until he’d finished his third espresso, he said not another word.
18
By the time Francesco regained interest in the world, it was almost lunchtime. Giltine had drawn the blinds and started undressing. Now all that remained were the mask and bandages, which were stained with some dark substance. “What are you doing?” asked Francesco, to whom everything looked soft and luminous. The sensation of well-being had become almost unbearable, like a slow-motion orgasm.
“I need to medicate myself.”
“You seem to be sufficiently medicated already. What are you supposed to be, the Mummy?” He laughed. The great thing about his current condition was that nothing at all really mattered to him.
Giltine leaned over her bag and pulled out a series of jars that contained her creams and lotions. She also pulled out new rolls of bandages, with the clips to fasten them. She used the scalpel to cut the gauze on her left wrist, but this time, along with the scabs, wide strips of flesh came away. There was no blood, only a sudden weakness that made her stop, panting.
Francesco, from the bed, sensed her weakened state and leaped to his feet to lend a hand. “Let me help you.”
Giltine pushed him away. “No.” The sheer act made her sway.
“Why not? Aren’t we friends?” It was strange to say it aloud, but that day Francesco was bursting with emotions he wanted to share with the world. “And I took a first-aid course when I was a Boy Scout. My mother sent me to the Scouts, don’t you think that’s a fabulous thing?” Francesco pushed Giltine’s hand aside and grabbed the two cut ends of the bandage. “Don’t you feel well?”
“No.”
He looked at the flesh on her wrist, now bared. It was smeared with something that looked to him like mud, and it reeked of rotting flowers. At least he thought it did: in the state he was in, he couldn’t be sure of the things he was seeing.
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