Giltine, torn, tousled, and wounded, was now standing before Van Toder. A bullet had hit her in the side, and her dress was soaked in blood around the entry wound. Between them were the corpses of the three security guards. Rossari had wound up outside the glass, where he feebly tried to move.
“You’re the Girl, aren’t you?” the founder asked in Russian, looking at her as if she were some precious object. “Maksim wasn’t able to kill you. How could he have? You’re a special being.”
Giltine had already raised high the hunting knife that she’d taken from one of the guards on the steps, but the minute she heard him speak, she fell to her knees, defenseless and trembling. She was like a sinner hearing the voice of God on the day of the Last Judgment, a dog whose owner was shouting into his ears. In an instant, it swept away the shouting of the dead that filled her head, her self-control, her will. She had turned back into a two-year-old child, taken from the woman who had nursed her and weaned her and accompanied her into what the guards called the clinic, where the man who wielded absolute power of life and death over all the inmates had laid her down for the first time on the little bed with the leather straps.
Van Toder hadn’t moved to South Africa after the end of apartheid. Van Toder had been born the day the Soviet Union had disintegrated and a scientist had decided to transform his studies into invaluable merchandise for the new era, which was ushering in new wars and new needs for mechanisms of control.
The man standing in front of Giltine was Aleksander Belyy, Pavlov’s last heir, the jailer who had created his own hell on earth in the Ukrainian countryside, until the day another radioactive inferno had eradicated it.
24
Outside the main room, sheer chaos had been unleashed. The Frenchman had managed to create a hollow space around him with his windmilling blade, his life spared by the gunshots that had attracted security guards and Carabinieri officers toward the outside staircase. All that separated him from the front entrance were three civilians.
Licking his bloody lips, the Frenchman ran straight toward them with his knife held out in front of him like a bayonet. That was the sight that greeted Colomba, Dante, and Leo as they emerged at that very moment from the calle behind the Palasport. “Giltine has unleashed her confederates,” said Dante, horrified. There were dozens of people in the crowd who’d been wounded, and there were even a few trying to escape by jumping into the canal and swimming away.
Colomba and Leo pulled out their handguns and yelled at the Frenchman to stop where he was, but all they got in return was him waving the knife in the air like a bloodthirsty savage. They both fired: it was Leo who bull’s-eyed the man’s belly, sending him backward over the parapet, straight down onto a boat moored on the canal. The last thought to go through the Frenchman’s mind was that he’d never had so much fun in all his life.
Then Leo held up his badge and used it to make his way past the security men, followed by Colomba, her ears echoing with the gunfire and the screams. In the presence of the enormity of what was unfolding, she had to get a grip on herself to keep walking forward. It was Leo who saved her from a panic attack simply by gripping her hand. “Are you there?” he asked, looking her in the eyes. “I’d tell you to wait for me outside, but I’m not sure I can handle it all by myself in there.”
She nodded and smiled at him. “I won’t abandon you.” And she followed him.
Dante tried to do the same thing, but his legs gave way before he could cross the threshold. Too many people, too confined, too much screaming. The part of him that made decisions in those situations held him outside, cursing himself, while Colomba and Leo ventured into the hellish mayhem of the main room. As they followed the screams, they found three dead bodies on the stairs, killed by someone with bare hands. The blows had shattered their bones.
“She’s here,” said Colomba.
A little knot of guests managed to break past the security guards and violently shoved Dante aside, forcing him to back out onto the bridge. Only there did he manage to get a solid handhold on the balustrade, and from that position he got a glimpse of the Palasport’s external staircase, where two men were caught in a cross fire between security guards and police. The skinnier of the two dove into the canal and remained there, bobbing facedown in the water, while the other man fell under a hail of dozens of bullets.
In the midst of the fleeing mob, Dante caught sight of a man who was pushing through the crowd in the opposite direction. He was wearing a flight jacket with a fur collar, too warm for the season. Cautiously, Dante went toward him.
° ° °
Belyy had picked up the knife that Giltine had dropped, kneeling laboriously on his aging knee bones. He got up, using her body to brace himself where she crouched, motionless, on all fours. “What’s the matter? Does my voice make such a strong impression on you? If I’d known that, I wouldn’t have been so worried, my little Angel of Death.”
He raised the knife with both hands and plunged it down into Giltine, stabbing her in the left side. She arched her back, trying to scream or move, lost in her nightmare of electric bolts and pain. Belyy stabbed her again, and this time the blade carved through the ribs, puncturing a lung. Once again, Giltine tried to scream, but this time all that came out of her mouth was a moan that could have come from a little girl. Belyy raised the knife a third time, his arthritic hands aching and trembling, but the sound of crunching glass stopped him. Colomba and Leo had reached the office and both had their pistols leveled at him. “Freeze!” Colomba shouted. “Put down the knife.”
Belyy obeyed. “This woman tried to kill me,” he said in English. “I was only trying to defend myself.”
Colomba decided that Giltine, hunched over and covered with blood, the fashionable dress torn to shreds, didn’t have much about her of the pitiless killer whom she’d chased for the past three weeks. As usual, Dante had been right: under the now-smeared makeup and aside from any of her recent injuries, her body showed not a sign of burns or disease. Colomba walked toward her to handcuff her.
° ° °
Dante continued following the man from a cautious distance, unsure what to do next. Then the man turned around and looked at him. That was when Dante realized that the man had recognized him.
He got ready to run, in case the man tried to attack him, but the man’s posture clearly indicated that he had no such intention. They stood there, a few yards apart, the only two people in a quarter-mile radius who weren’t running away or screaming.
“Dante Torre,” said the man in the flight jacket, speaking an Italian that held a heavy Eastern European accent.
“How do you know me?”
“The Girl told me about you.” That wasn’t entirely true, because the two of them hadn’t exchanged so much as a word, but in the instructions for his task, there’d been a link to an article about the Silo Man. “She said that you were dangerous. If you’ve gotten this far, she was right.”
“The Girl would be Giltine?” asked Dante.
“I’ve never known her name.”
“She’s not going to leave this place alive, you know that, right?”
“She didn’t expect to leave alive. None of us expected to leave alive. Not even those idiots over there,” he said, pointing at the corpses of the two Italians, surrounded by police officers and security staff. “But nothing can keep me from hoping.”
Dante read him. “You were in the Box, too,” he said.
“As if anyone cared.”
“I care.”
“Then you’re insane. The Box no longer exists, but they’ve just built better ones since, in part thanks to us. Total solitary confinement, tiny cells,” and he shrugged. “At least I had someone to talk to when I wasn’t too . . .” He touched his head, at a loss for the right word. “From the medicines.”
“Someone like the Girl.”
“She never talked much.”
“Come with me to the police and tell all you know. Think about the others who were there with you: you could honor their m
emory.”
“That’s not my job here,” said the man who once was called the Policeman. And with those words, he raced off the bridge and headed straight for the Campo della Misericordia. Dante saw him run toward the line of police officers, and only then did he understand what the man had in mind. He waved his hands and tried to catch their attention. “Stop him! Shoot him! Fuck! That man has a bomb!”
But the Policeman had already arrived among the ranks of his colleagues from another land and a new era, and he’d pressed the button he was holding in his left hand. The Semtex concealed under his jacket went off, scything through everything in a radius of fifty yards on all sides, human beings and objects. The officers were catapulted through the air like rag dolls, the plate-glass windows of the Palasport disintegrated, the staircase was jolted until several of the bolts fastening it to the wall broke loose and it tilted down toward the water with the screeching of twisted metal.
Inside, the shock wave knocked all the fear-crazed guests to the floor, as well as completely shattering the glass-walled office, finishing once and for all the work of destruction that Giltine had begun. Leo and Colomba wound up flat on their asses, and a slab of plaster broke off the ceiling and landed on top of them. Belyy fell onto the desk, fracturing his pelvis, and passed out.
Giltine got back on her feet.
° ° °
Dante, completely deafened but miraculously spared by the explosion, stood up from the bridge and ran to the Campo della Misericordia, where he found a nightmare made flesh. At least a dozen police officers, Carabinieri, and passersby had been torn limb from limb by the explosion, and there were dozens of people wounded. There was blood everywhere and tattered shreds of bodies obscured by the dust and smoke. Dante wandered stunned through the mayhem, while other officers and EMTs hurried off the launches to administer first aid. He headed for the Palasport’s external staircase, praying inwardly that it would bear his weight.
° ° °
Colomba recovered before Leo did, shook the rubble off herself, then turned to look at him and gave him a shake. Leo opened his eyes.
Giltine had staggered to the desk where Belyy now lay flat on his back. She grabbed the knife that the old man had dropped. It wasn’t easy for her to do, because it kept slipping out of her blood-drenched hand. Just as she finally managed to get a grip on it, Dante appeared in the doorway, covered with dust and ashes. “Don’t do it,” he said.
But Giltine couldn’t hear him: the dead had once again begun filling her head with their cries and moans. She dropped the knife and then picked it up again, bending over the old man. Dante, praying to the god of fools, ran straight at her, while Colomba was doing the same from behind him. Giltine looked up at Dante and smiled at him before finally lowering the knife toward Belyy, whose eyes were wide open now, staring at her in terror.
But before Colomba or Dante could reach her, Leo emptied his clip of bullets into her back. Giltine, the smile still on her face, fell to the floor and lay there motionless, suddenly free of the burden of her body and the pain that had been her constant companion. Among the voices that had now turned kind and caressing, she recognized those of the Policeman and the Shoemaker and, fainter, warmer, the voice of a woman who had taught her to love music and the pleasure of sleeping in her arms.
Giltine went to her.
25
Colomba bent over Giltine and determined that she was dead, while Dante furiously wheeled around on Leo. “There was no need for that. There was no fucking need!”
Leo put a new clip in his gun, then went over to Colomba. “Is she dead?”
“Yes.” God, she’s tiny, thought Colomba. She couldn’t weigh a pound over ninety. “What was that explosion, Dante?”
“One of Giltine’s old friends tried to arrange an escape route for her.”
“And he came mighty close to succeeding,” said Leo, grabbing the knife that Giltine had dropped.
“Leo, you know that you’re contaminating a crime scene, don’t you?” asked Colomba.
“How careless of me.”
Something about the way he said it sent a shiver down Dante’s spine. “Don’t touch her!” he shouted. But it was too late, because Leo had plunged the knife into Colomba’s belly and then twisted it, ripping the wound wider.
Colomba felt her stomach turn to ice and she fell to her knees, dropping her pistol, watching as her blood filled her hands. She watched as Leo punched Dante and knocked him to the ground and then bent over Belyy. The old man stared at Leo in horror, incapable of moving because of the terrible pain in his pelvis. “If you spare my life, I’ll make you a rich man,” the old man said.
“Dasvidaniya,” said Leo, and cut the man’s throat with as much indifference as you’d use to cut a slice of cake.
Dante crawled toward Colomba, who was curled up in a fetal position, already in a lake of blood. “CC,” he said, with tears in his eyes. “Don’t move. Now I’m going to compress the wound. I’ll compress your—”
Leo grabbed Dante and yanked him to his feet. “It’s time to go,” he said.
Dante felt his internal thermostat shooting past level ten, level one hundred, level one thousand, and Leo’s face became a dark dot at the edge of a megascreen in Berlin, and then the passerby who, months before that, had triggered the psychotic episode that had sent him to the Swiss clinic. “So it’s you,” he murmured.
“Be good, little brother,” said Leo, then he wrapped his hands around Dante’s throat and squeezed until he lost consciousness. Then he slung Dante’s inert body over his shoulder.
The last thing Colomba saw was Dante’s hand trying to reach out to her over Leo’s shoulder. She wanted to tell him that she’d save him, that she’d win out over everything, that they’d never be apart again, but she uttered the words only in her dream.
When the EMTs showed up to save her from death’s door, Leo and Dante had already disappeared, and no one had seen them go.
It took a week of searching to determine beyond the shadow of a doubt that Leo Bonaccorso had never existed.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
I changed some of the acronyms of agencies and corps of Italian law enforcement and armed forces so that I’d be able to take liberties in describing the way they work, and I took liberties with offices, barracks, addresses, and other such matters.
I took even more liberties with train technology: the actual air-conditioning system on Rome–Milan trains is not the way I described it.
The Box, too, is my own invention, but many other things connected with it are, sadly, all too true: for instance, the statistics concerning the deaths caused by Chernobyl.
If you want to learn more about:
PAVLOV
E. Asratian, I. Pavlov, Sa vie et son oeuvre, Editions en Langues Étrangères, Moscow, 1953.
Y. P. Frolov, Pavlov and His School—The Theory of Conditioned Reflexes, Oxford, New York, 1937.
I. P. Pavlov, Conditioned Reflexes: An Investigation of the Physiological Activity of the Cerebral Cortex, Oxford University Press, London, 1927.
Luigi Traetta, Il cane di Pavlov, Progedit, Bari, 2006.
As well as this article, which I also mention in the novel: https://snob.ru/selected/entry/109466.
THE SOVIET SPECIAL FORCES
https://aurorasito.wordpress.com/?s=kgb
http://www.voxeurop.eu/it/content/article/3006271-il-kgb-e-ancora-tra-noi
THE RUSSIAN MAFIA
https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organizacija
http://www.eastonline.it/public/upload/str_ait/522_it.pdf
http://www.corriere.it/esteri/08_ottobre_01/mafia_russa_cartelli_messicani_48ba1c2a-8fc5-11dd-83b2-00144f02aabc.shtml
DUGA-3
http://www.nogeoingegneria.com/tecnologie/nucleare/il-disastro-di-chernobyl-le-verita-nascoste/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duga_radar
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
There are people who say that these are all fairy tales. You can judge for yourselves.
&nb
sp; I’d like to thank:
The Mondadori team. My editor Carlo Carabba, my editor Marilena Rossi, and the line editor Alessandra Maffiolini, who worked with me the whole time, even on Sundays and in the middle of August, with great patience and good humor. The managing editor, Fabiola Riboni.
My agent, Laura Grandi, who encouraged me and supported me every time I needed it.
My fraternal friend and coach Piero Frabetti, who was close to me from the first day to the last: I never had a more implacable reader.
My wife, Olga Buneeva, who not only puts up with me but guided me through the mysteries of Russia in the Cold War and its organized crime, digging up rare documents and constructing schemes of rare complexity.
Julia Buneyeva for the cakes (they come in useful, believe me).
And, of course, you readers, for this trip we’ve taken together.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
© MORIS PUCCIO
SANDRONE DAZIERI is the author of numerous novels and screenplays. The debut novel in his Caselli and Torre series, Kill the Father, has appeared on bestseller lists around the world. Kill the Angel is the second book in the series.
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Authors.SimonandSchuster.com/Sandrone-Dazieri
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Also by Sandrone Dazieri
Kill the Father
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Kill the Angel Page 44