Kill the Father

by Sandrone Dazieri

  Colomba reached up and touched her aching temple. “But that’s impossible. I can never do it alone.” Rovere hesitated, but Colomba understood that he had an answer and was just pretending. He’s got everything all figured out, she thought, he knows just how to use me in his miserable war.

  “There is someone who could give you a hand,” Rovere said. “Someone who, if you were a cop who cared about your career, you wouldn’t even talk to and who might not even let you approach him. But in your case . . .”

  “Who?”

  Rovere lit a cigarette. “Have you ever heard of the boy in the silo?”

  - III -

  BEFORE

  The young couple at the middle table in the restaurant are the ones talking in the loudest voices. They’re not used to luxury, and they’ve decided to eat there to celebrate their first wedding anniversary. She looks around at the other tables, hoping to spot someone famous, while he tries to keep his thoughts from straying to the astronomical check that’s going to arrive. He knew it was going to be expensive, this restaurant on the top floor of a boutique where they’d never dare to set foot (actually she does set foot there regularly, to see the new collections when they arrive), but not nearly as expensive as what he saw to his dismay on the menu. Still, he doesn’t want to ask his wife to skimp on her order, not after she’s waited all week for this night out, trying out all the best combinations of her Zara outfits, all purchased at discount.

  He’s twenty-seven, she’s twenty-nine.

  A few yards away, a German citizen is sitting alone, eating a sushi assortment. He’s reading the American edition of The Bone Collector. He’s slightly irritated to find that his English has gotten worse over the past few years. He’s having trouble with the book, though he’s already read it in German translation. He’s the chief executive of a company that manufactures microcomponents, and he hasn’t had many opportunities lately to practice his English. He’s thinking of starting private language lessons again, though the mere idea depresses him. He feels too old to go back to school, and he suspects that his memory isn’t as sharp as it once was. He loves sushi, and he eats dinner there every week, usually by himself.

  He’s just turned sixty.

  At the large round table by the window, which is discreetly shaded by white curtains made of raw organic cotton, a deejay is sitting with his date, his agent, and the owner of a discotheque on the outskirts of town. They’re listening as the waiter inquires about possible allergies before telling them the night’s specials. The deejay is about to say, “I’m allergic to raw fish,” without realizing that this wisecrack is something the waiter hears about once a day and that he no longer even smiles when he does. The deejay is the former lead singer of a band that had a top ten single three years ago. He works roughly two hundred nights a year in the biggest nightclubs and discos. Music no longer sells; deejaying is the profession of the future.

  The girl holding his hand, which has as many rings as the hand of the Madonna of Lourdes (everything about the deejay’s look is a little excessive, including the tribal tattoo on the back of his neck and his bleached hair), hopes that this time he’s at least going to stay for the weekend or that he’ll ask her to go with him. She’s not his girlfriend, she’s just the girl he calls when he’s going to spend a night in town, but she knows that the two of them are really in tune. She can feel it under her skin. After they had sex in the hotel that afternoon, he opened up like a little boy. He laughed and joked with her. Would he have done that if he was just looking for a fuck on the fly? He even confided that he plans to replace his agent with someone new, someone more skilled and less emotional. A top secret piece of news, right?

  The agent in question wasn’t born yesterday, and he has a hunch about what’s coming. While he dreams of a cigarette, he desperately tries to remember the name of that movie where Woody Allen plays someone in his exact line of business, someone who’s always being dumped by the artists he represents. For the past month or so, the deejay has been pretty evasive about his future plans, and that, for shit sure, is a warning sign. The deejay’s planning to cut the cord, now that he’s finally starting to have a smidgen of personal success.

  The owner of the discotheque isn’t participating much in the conversation, which is by and large a monologue by the artist about the new musical directions that he was way ahead of; frankly, he just hopes this dinner will be over as soon as possible. As far as he’s concerned, the finest album in rock history is The Dark Side of the Moon, and all the deejays on Earth put together don’t have a crumb of the class that the old-school rockers had. But that’s not the kind of thing you can say to someone you just hired, paying him 2,000 euros under the table to fill your disco for you. In the meantime the owner sits smiling at the girl and thinking that she really is one hot babe, with the physique of a fashion model and a sweet expression. He can just see her doing filthy things, with that sweet, naive face of hers. Once the deejay gets the hell out from underfoot, he’s planning to give her a call and ask her if she wants to come work in his club, helping to improve the place’s image. “It can be a good stepping-stone, a way of getting into the world of show business. Don’t tell me it never occurred to you. Trust me.”

  The deejay is twenty-nine, the agent’s thirty-nine, the owner of the discotheque is fifty, the deejay’s date is seventeen, the waiter is twenty-two.

  At the table by the door an older couple is waiting for dessert: green tea ice cream for him and an assortment of soy and red bean paste pastries for her, though she practically hasn’t touched any of the earlier dishes. They were the first to be seated in the dining room, when it was still empty and silent. The husband has asked her more than once if there’s something wrong, but she just smiled and replied, “Everything’s fine, I’m just not very hungry tonight.” They’ve lived together for almost half a century. He’s had a successful career as a government functionary, but now he’s retired; she raised two sons, who come for the major holidays. She put up with his occasional cheating over the years, by now ancient history and virtually forgotten; he’s accepted her moments of emotional fragility, when she can’t get out of bed and keeps the shades down so she doesn’t have to see sunlight. Time has worn away their differences and sharp edges; it has intertwined them, made them dependent one upon the other. That’s why she’s having such a hard time now figuring out how to tell him that her test results were anything but reassuring, that they definitely reveal a tumoral mass between her breasts. What scares her most isn’t death but leaving him all alone. She wonders how he can go on living without her.

  He is seventy-two. She is sixty-five.

  Two tables away, at another of the round tables, sit four young Albanian women and a man with a Greek profile. The girls are models and the man is paid by the agency to take them out and about. Having dinner with them before any major runway presentation is part of his job. He looks after them, he assists them, and most of all he keeps an eye on them to make sure they don’t do anything stupid. That’s why he bought them a gram of coke and why the girls are now just picking listlessly at their food. He doesn’t like drugs. He doesn’t use them, and if it were up to him, he’d line all the dealers up against the wall and execute them. But he also knows that it’s pointless to tell the girls not to get high. If he didn’t buy it for them, they’d get drugs from the guys parking their Porsche Cayennes in front of the model hotels with baggies ready to go. If he locked them in their room, they’d climb out the windows to get to the coke. They’re always going out and getting wrecked. So they show up for rehearsals puffy-faced, with circles under their eyes. Cocaine keeps them from feeling hunger or the fear that they might not be pretty enough or good enough. He’ll give them an extra gram before telling them good night, and he hopes that’ll hold them.

  The conversation at the table is fragmentary: the girls speak only halting English, but to make up for it, they laugh a lot. Speaking in Albanian, they wonder if he’s gay or if he’s planning to take one of them to
bed. Both options are mistaken. He’s not gay, it’s just that he doesn’t like models. He finds them boring and stupid. He has a hard time telling them apart. And he finds them depressing.

  He’s thirty-five years old, two of the girls are nineteen, one’s eighteen, and one’s twenty.

  The maître d’ ushers four Japanese businessmen into the dining room. They represent one of the best-selling companies in the West in terms of Asian style, and they’ve just spent the week meeting local wholesalers. An experience that they found rather demeaning. It seems that no one wants anything that varies an inch from the stereotype of white tatami mats, futons, and rice-paper lampshades.

  The next day they have a flight back to Tokyo, and eating Japanese wasn’t what they had in mind. But the director of the boutique has invited them out to dinner, and they couldn’t turn him down. They would have preferred someplace fun, somewhere they could loosen their ties and laugh and drink wine. But that’s not the way it went, so they have to resign themselves.

  They’re fifty, forty-five, forty, and thirty-six years old. The maître d’ is fifty-five.

  The woman with her back to the wall keeps staring at the restaurant’s entrance. Whenever someone walks past, she moves her head to ensure she maintains her line of sight. She hasn’t uttered a word since she first sat down, she hasn’t touched her water, she hasn’t read the menu or looked at the specials of the day. She just sits watching, with one hand on her knee and the other opened flat on the tablecloth. When the waiter asked her if she wanted to order, she replied that she was waiting for someone, lifting her eyes to look at him for just a fleeting instant. In those eyes, the waiter saw no reflection of himself. Her gaze looked right through him, as if he were air, as if he didn’t exist. He thought to himself that he wouldn’t want to be the person who was late for dinner. That woman didn’t seem willing to forgive and forget.

  She’s thirty-one, the waiter is twenty-nine.

  And while the woman with the cold eyes suddenly stands up, while the deejay is about to make his wisecrack, as the German citizen is about to turn to page 100 in his novel, while the young bride is about to order the twenty-course tasting menu, while the group of Japanese businessmen decline the offer of a house sake, and while one of the Albanian models starts to get up to go to the bathroom to snort one last line . . .

  Time stands still.

  - IV -

  OLD FRIENDS

  1

  The man with the leather jacket was back. He was standing at the usual corner of Via Tiburtina Antica, nervously shifting his weight from one foot to the other. Dante Torre spied on him from behind the glass enclosing his terrace six stories above the street, trying in vain to catch the man’s eye. He knew that the man in the jacket would wait for another hour, until 12:30, when the crowd of mothers outside the elementary school would start to grow and the man would retreat step by step. By the time the school doors were thrown open to let the kids out for the day, he’d be at least sixty feet from the other waiting parents, he’d watch the crowd of pupils charging down the steps and into waiting arms, then to be taken by the hand and walked home. Then the man in the jacket would vanish beyond the old city walls, not to reappear again until two or three days later, at the same time of day. While he waited, he’d smoke at least four cigarettes, but if he still had one going when the school doors opened, he’d crush it out immediately.

  The only thing that had changed since Dante had first noticed him two weeks earlier was his clothing. The man had changed from a T-shirt to a fake-leather biker jacket, with a bear’s head embossed on the back. Dante had googled it and learned that it was a low-cost Chinese-made brand.

  Dante gazed out at him for a long while. “How much longer will you wait?” he asked softly. He rolled over on the bed until he lay facing up at the skylight: a small blob of water on the glass above him sketched out a skull, with small pockets of air for eyes and a tiny ripple at the center carving out a nose. He wriggled across the mattress until the reflection of his own face lined up with it. It fit him perfectly, but the illusion was shattered when a raindrop fell from the gutter above and hit the blob. He shivered and pulled the blankets up to his chin. Soon he’d have to turn on the little catalytic heater that stood unused in a corner. It was the only way he could maintain a decent temperature on the terrace, which he’d enclosed in a glass cage, turning it into his bedroom-office. The rest of the apartment had been gutted, with no regard for appearance. A number of the internal partition walls had been eliminated, and the windows had been enlarged until they almost entirely filled the outside walls. Only flimsy ivory-colored cotton curtains concealed the chaos within.

  A bicycle was propped against the living room table, which was piled high with books, newspapers, file boxes, and folders, and the profusion of paper continued across the floor in teetering stacks, some of which had collapsed into piles of photographs and printouts. The only tidy part of the house was the kitchen, arranged in a corner of the large central room, and it was actually spic and span. The stainless-steel cabinets and cooktops gave the impression of an operating room, with dozens of electric utensils neatly arrayed. Atop the microwave oven a laptop computer sat charging.

  Dante had a desktop computer with a thirty-inch screen out on the terrace, as well as another laptop in the guest bedroom, though no one had ever slept there and the bed was a bare mattress. He used that room for the stacks of “time capsule” boxes that had occupied every available square inch until it became impossible to open the window. Dante never even went in there anymore. He’d drag the boxes out to him with one of those retriever poles they use in shops to hang clothes up high, and when he was done he’d slide them back into place, lying flat on the bathroom floor.

  He shivered again.

  He often thought about moving someplace warm where he could sleep under the stars. He’d go by boat, of course. He couldn’t picture himself inside the sealed metal tube of an airplane, not much bigger than a coffin with wings. But he knew that far from the world he knew, he’d wither and droop like a plant left in darkness.

  Every time he sensed the onset of winter, though, he regretted that decision. In winter, outdoor restaurants disappeared, as did the already far too few outdoor venues for movies and concerts; convertible cars vanished, too. In winter everything he loved was closed up in hermetically sealed boxes, boxes he couldn’t enter without suffering. The world became suffocating and confined.

  Dante pulled a cigarette out of the pack and lit it, snapping the lighter into flame with his bad hand, and then went back to looking down into the street, sliding the glass open just a crack. With the wind that smelled of rain came street noises and the sound of a neighbor’s radio. Dante took one last look at the man in the jacket, still standing at his corner, then ran his eyes over the rooftops of San Lorenzo. It was one of the loveliest neighborhoods in Rome, and Dante didn’t mind the racket from the restaurants and bars. He rarely fell asleep before dawn anyway, and the sounds of life put him in a good mood.

  The man in the jacket had taken another step back. Dante finally rolled out of the bedclothes and went to take a shower. He moved lightly, gracefully, silently. He stood almost six foot three and was as slender as an Etruscan statue. Dripping wet, wrapped in a bathrobe, he took his morning dose of drops and pills, basing the prescription on his internal thermometer; then he turned on the espresso maker and his cell phone. The cell phone immediately spat out a text from his lawyer, Roberto Minutillo. It said only: “Please look at it.”

  Dante sighed. A week ago Minutillo had submitted a case for his opinion. Dante still hadn’t worked up the desire to look at it and had left the lawyer in limbo, pretending to himself that he’d forgotten. But now he’d have to tend to it. Sighing again, he woke the desktop out of its sleep, skimmed the documents the lawyer had sent, doing his best to keep from dying of boredom, then started the video attachment.

  The scene was of a room painted in pastel colors, with a table in the middle. In the background
he could guess at large colorful plastic cubes and a plush teddy bear. Sitting at the table was a six-year-old girl in a checkered pink dress; facing her was a woman about fifty, smiling from behind eyeglasses. The girl was drawing with an orange pencil.

  Another woman, seen from the neck down, was standing behind the girl; her hands were resting on the girl’s shoulders. The woman with glasses was a family court psychologist, and the one without a head was the little girl’s mother. Dante fast-forwarded the video, skipping the psychologist’s first questions and the girl’s first answers, then carefully watched the rest. At minute 4:06 he hit stop, ran back, and opened the video to full screen.

  The psychologist leaned smiling toward the little girl, who went on drawing. “You can tell me. You can trust me.”

  The girl held the pencil still for a moment. “It was Daddy,” she said.

  Dante hit the space bar to stop the video, then went back to minute 4:06 and ran it forward from there, in slow motion, without sound. He focused on the mother’s hands. He watched them move, slightly squeezing the little girl’s shoulders. Dante clicked the video off the screen and sat looking at his own reflection in its place for a few seconds. He felt icy sweat dripping down his back. That’s it, he thought. It could have been harder. He texted Minutillo, then got up and poured a blend of Panamanian arabica into the espresso machine. The phone rang while he was on his second cup.

  “Hi there, counselor,” said Dante without even bothering to glance at the number on the display. The aftertaste of the coffee on his tongue was a symphony of bitter and sweet, with hints of chocolate.

  “So you just spent the past week meditating, and now all you have to say to me is ‘no’?” the lawyer demanded.

  “Tell your client that she needs to find someone else to help her ruin her ex-husband’s reputation.” Dante drained the second demitasse. “That girl hasn’t been abused.”