Alberti looked at her like a dog that‘s been beaten as he opened the car door for her. “I’m calling in sick tomorrow, Deputy Captain. I really feel wrecked.”
“Inform your superior officer.”
“You’re my superior officer.”
“Not since I stepped out of the patrol car.” And that’s to say nothing of the fact that I kicked a fellow cop in the face, she thought to herself. “Give my regards to Captain Rovere.”
“Well, see you around, Deputy Captain,” said Alberti.
Colomba smiled, and Alberti realized what a good-looking face she had. “Be a good boy,” she told him. “Otherwise you’ll wind up like me.”
Colomba’s mother lived in an eighteenth-century palazzo right behind Piazza dell’Orologio, in the heart of the historical center. The apartment was a bequest of her husband, who’d died many years before, and he had in turn inherited it from his father, one of the remaining relics of a family with quarters of nobility that had been squandered along with almost the entire family fortune.
Her mother was sixty years old, had the same eyes as Colomba, and was heavily made up, with blue highlights. When she opened the door, she was wearing a pair of jeans and a white polo shirt, as well as a pair of earrings that Colomba had given her for Christmas. She pointed to them after kissing Colomba hello. “Did you see that I wear them?”
“I saw, thanks.”
“But you’re filthy . . . Have you been out in the fields?”
Colomba unlaced her muddy police boots and took them off, along with her damp socks. Ignoring the slippers her mother was holding out to her, she walked barefoot over the marble floor. Something she’d loved to do ever since she was a girl. “Yes.”
Her mother’s face lit up. “Have you gone back to work?”
“No, Mamma. I’m still on leave.”
Her mother grimaced in disappointment and unsubtly shifted her gaze to the photograph of Colomba taking the oath that hung by the front door. “Do you see how good you looked that day?”
“Young and foolish.”
“Don’t say such a thing,” her mother said in a scandalized voice. She led her to the kitchen, where the table was set for one. “I’ve already eaten.”
Colomba sat down. “Hey, wait . . . if you’re going to invite me over for dinner, you could at least eat with me, don’t you think?”
“I’ve been snacking all day, I’m not hungry.” She set a glass down in front of Colomba and poured her some wine from the same bottle she’d opened for her the week before. “I got you something from the deli that just opened downstairs. It’s really good. Unbelievably expensive but good.”
“Thanks.”
Her mother served her some veal with tuna-caper sauce from an aluminum tray. A solitary caper bobbed in the watery sauce. Colomba ate in silence, and her mother stood watching her.
“I was just thinking, though, that you look good. You seem to be in good shape, don’t you? You’re not limping anymore.”
“Every so often my knee still hurts me,” said Colomba.
“But I can see that you’re better.”
Colomba put down her fork, not actually banging it on the table but almost. “So?”
“So if you run into a colleague, what are they going to think?”
“That I’m a lucky girl. It’s not like in the movies, Mamma. If the cops I work with can get out of anything, they do.”
“All of them?”
“No, not all of them. But it’s a job, it’s not a calling.” Colomba started eating again. And, she added mentally, if I ever had that calling, I’ve lost it. “And most of the time it’ll bore you to tears.”
“What you do isn’t boring.”
“If winding up in the hospital is the price you pay for interesting work, then long live boredom.”
“Still, you can return to duty whenever you want, can’t you?” Her mother said “return to duty” as if she were reading a script from a cop show. “All you have to do is tell them you’re better.”
“It’s a little more complicated than that.”
“But you could, couldn’t you?”
Colomba sighed. “Yes, I could. But I’m not going to.”
“And when are you planning to return to duty?”
“Never. I’m turning in my resignation.”
Colomba had planned to tell her in some more diplomatic way, but it just came out that way. Her mother turned toward the stove, where the greasy paper sack from the deli sat on the cold burner. “Ah.”
Colomba knew that the best thing she could do was ignore her, but still she demanded, “Ah what, goddamn it? Mamma?”
Her mother turned to look at her again. She had the disappointed expression she saved for special occasions. Like the time when Colomba was fourteen and said she wanted to stop competitive swimming, at sixteen when she’d given up piano lessons, and at twenty-two, that she wanted to take the civil service exam to become a police inspector instead of continuing her doctoral studies. “It’s up to you,” she said. “If you want to throw away everything you’ve built so far, I can’t stop you. Though your father and I made sacrifices so you could study.”
“Look, I finished school, I took my degree. And you didn’t even want me to take the police exam. You said, ‘That’s gross, you’ll be putting tickets under windshield wipers!’ ”
“Then I realized that it’s a job you like. I saw you were happy!”
“You saw me in the newspaper. And you thought it was cool.”
“And what’s wrong with that?”
“What’s wrong is that my job almost killed me, Mamma. Does it really not worry you?”
Her mother started tearing up. “How can you say such a thing to me?”
Colomba lost her temper, stuck the dishes into the dishwasher, put her police boots on her bare feet, and left, slamming the door behind her. She walked home with a knot in her stomach and the desire to have some filthy pig try to molest her so she could cut loose on him. She intentionally chose the most dimly lighted alleys, slowing her pace hopefully every time she crossed paths with any human being of the male gender, but the black cloud enveloping her was sufficient to keep them at a distance. When she got home, she was even more frustrated than before and was almost tempted to knock at her downstairs neighbor’s door, the neighbor who had once brought back the thong that had fallen off the clothesline (the next day she’d had a dryer delivered) and had stood at her door with X-ray eyes. “I’ll bet you look good in it,” he’d said. All she’d done at the time was yank it out of his hand and tell him to leave, but she’d have been happy to find herself face-to-face with him now, him and his knowing little grin.
Instead, she found Rovere sitting on the top step.
10
Colomba felt a sequence of impulses: to ignore him and step around him, to grab him by the ankle and yank him down the stairs, to shout into his face. She chose the fourth option and sat down beside him.
“Santini has a bruised chin, and he’s out for blood,” said Rovere.
“He can file a complaint.”
“That wouldn’t make him look very good, being beaten up by a woman. It’s in his best interests to play it down.” He lit a cigarette. “Was he the one who left those marks on your neck?”
Colomba rubbed the place; she’d forgotten all about it. “No. It was a guy on the street under Torre’s window.”
“Apparently he made a big impression on you.”
Colomba didn’t reply. “Take the cigarette butt with you after you’re done. I don’t want the concierge to blame me for it,” she said instead.
“Can we talk inside?” Rovere asked.
“No.”
“As you like.” He opened the briefcase he’d set down on the step below. He pulled out a belt holster and a Beretta that looked like a scale model of the police-issue handgun. A PX4 Compact. Ten bullets in the standard clip, one in the barrel. Easy to conceal.
“You must be joking,” said Colomba.
Rovere set the gun down between them, along with two boxes of 9 mm ammunition and a clip. Atop the little pile he laid a brand-new firearm permit. The picture on it was of Colomba, from five years ago. The same picture she’d used to renew her police ID. “Concealed carry license, for personal defense,” Rovere explained. “The weapon is registered in your name. I can’t give you back your department-issued handgun as long as you’re on leave, as you can imagine.”
“That would mean until tomorrow. I’m going to bring you my letter of resignation.”
“You can’t give up now.”
Colomba slammed her hand down on the railing, which rang like a gong down the stairwell. “If we ever had any chance to weigh in on this investigation, we’ve pissed it away now. Torre’s flipped out!”
“What if he was right?”
Colomba stood up. “As long as it’ll let you screw Santini, sir, you’re willing to clutch at any straws that come floating past! But sorry, I’m not. Sit right here, and I’ll go get you that fucking letter.”
Rovere reached out and grabbed her arm. “Torre was telling the truth about the whistle.”
“And just how do you know that?”
Rovere opened his briefcase again and pulled out some papers in a clear plastic sleeve. “Today Torre was confronted with the fact that he’d never mentioned the whistle, and he admitted it. Actually, he never talked about it to the investigators, but he did say something to a woman who interviewed him for a newspaper. Read it. His one and only interview.”
He handed her the plastic sleeve: it held a color Xerox of an article from the newsweekly Oggi. The heading bore the date of August 1991. Two years after Dante was freed. There were three pictures of him illustrating the article. He was sitting on a park bench, many years younger and a few pounds heavier. The overambitious goatee and the self-consciously pensive pose, with his good hand propping up his chin and the ravaged hand in his pocket, made him look like a little boy posing as a grown-up. He wore a pair of corduroy trousers, the kind you never see anymore.
The interview barely touched on the topic of his captivity and focused on Dante’s new life. His relationship with his father, his return home after so many years . . . The journalist explained that Dante had asked her to meet him in the public park of Piazza Roma in Cremona because he tried to spend as much time as he could outdoors. “I’ve been locked up indoors for far too long,” he’d said, and Colomba wondered if he had already been suffering from claustrophobia or whether the symptoms had manifested later and he was just pretending. The whole thing was sugary and fake. Dante confessed his secret hopes to attend the university after taking the entrance exams as an outside candidate, his yearning to bike along the banks of the Po River to feel free. “I’d like to finish school and apply for the police academy. To keep what happened to me from happening to others” was how the interview ended. And in fact the headline read “The Boy Who Was Held Prisoner in a Grain Silo for Eleven Years Wants to Become a Policeman.” There was even a picture of the silo. It was cement, twenty feet tall by fourteen feet in diameter, blackened by the smoke from the fire Bodini had set in the farmhouse before killing himself, and for a moment Colomba imagined herself locked up in it.
Rovere had highlighted in yellow one of the things that Dante had said, the only one in which Colomba glimpsed a bit of the wit that she knew so well. “The police recovered most of my school things. Unfortunately that didn’t include a metal whistle that I’d always thought of as my good-luck charm. It turns out I was wrong about that.”
Rovere pointed at the line of text. “It seems unlikely that Signor Torre came up with this line just so it would come in handy more than twenty years later.”
“All that proves is that he didn’t lie about his past, not that he’s right about the present. And his kidnapper is dead and buried.”
“But what if the investigators before us got it wrong back then? What if Signor Torre has been shouting the truth for years and no one ever believed him?”
“There must be a reason, don’t you think?” asked Colomba, pretending to be more confident than she was.
“Can you swear that he didn’t put the whistle there?”
“Yes.”
Rovere gesticulated with the dead cigarette butt. “Look at the printout attached to the article.”
Colomba slipped the sheet of paper out of the paper clip. It was a photo of the piazza next to the highway.
“The men from the VCU are what they are,” said Rovere, “but they did check all roads leading away from the scene of the crime. And since they enjoy snapping pictures, this morning they also photographed the pole you found the whistle hanging from.”
“That tears it. It wasn’t the murderer on the run,” Colomba observed.
“The whistle showed up later, you’re right about that. But it wasn’t the rain that washed away all organic traces, since it didn’t rain today.”
Colomba eyed him suspiciously. “Sir, you know a lot of things about what De Angelis said today, and I doubt that it was him or Santini who told you. Was it the lieutenant taking down the transcript?”
“An old friend,” said Rovere, faintly embarrassed. “In any case, the murderer came back after the VCU came through, and that’s when he hung it up.”
“At the risk of being seen.”
“Maybe he had a good reason.”
“Like leaving a signature?”
“Yes, and doing so just a short while before the only person capable of reading it passed right by there.”
“But that’s insane,” murmured Colomba, feeling a chill spread inside her. “Flat-out insane, no two ways about it.”
“Certainly. It might be a coincidence. Torre might have finally lost his mind. Or else . . .”
“Or else the kidnapper was still close by,” Colomba said softly. “And he recognized him.”
“Decide for yourself which version you want to believe.”
Colomba grabbed the gun and hurried inside.
11
Dante had chosen his ideal observation point. He was sitting on the floor with his back against the front door. From there he could see through the crack he’d left open between the curtains on the central living room window. By moving his head he enjoyed a good view of the surrounding buildings, while no one could see him from outside, protected as he was by the darkness and the shape of the table. He was still in his bathrobe, and his butt was freezing from the cold floor, but he was too enervated to get dressed. The mere thought of getting up to do anything other than watch was enough to send his internal thermometer rocketing to astronomical levels.
Twice now, he had lost awareness of where he was. The first time he’d thought he was back in the silo, the second time in the clinic where he’d met Lodovica.
She’d been his first girlfriend, two years and six months after his liberation. She was in the clinic recovering from amphetamine addiction; he was there at the advice of his father’s lawyer after having lost control in a crowded place. Dante found the clinic boring and Switzerland horrible in general. He couldn’t know that he’d be in there for the next four years, incapable of going home and just as incapable of choosing a better place to go.
According to her birth certificate, Lodovica was a couple of years younger than him, but her knowledge of the world was immeasurably broader and deeper than his. Dante had spent the days following his liberation researching the present, but the things he’d learned as abstract information, she carried carved into her flesh. A diplomat’s daughter, Lodovica had changed city and nation at least ten times before finishing middle school, each time starting over from scratch, establishing friendships, and finding her footing. At age fourteen she’d started taking cocaine occasionally, when her older friends gave it to her, and getting drunk almost every night, discovering that bad girls had a much easier time getting invited to parties. At age fifteen she’d lost her virginity to an ambassador’s son her age, the same boy who had taught her how to freebase by putting cocaine in
acetone nail polish remover and then putting it in the freezer. At sixteen she’d been hospitalized for a methadone overdose, and after that she started checking into and out of clinics. This was her fourth.
They’d had sex the first time in the rec hall; she’d managed to get her hands on the key. Afterward, Lodovica had caressed his bad hand and had asked him whether the Father had ever molested him sexually. Dante had been so scandalized at the thought that he’d been unable to speak. Nothing of the sort had ever taken place between him and the Father. But to explain what their relationship had been like, to express the love he still felt for him in spite of everything he’d done to him, had been simply impossible, and he’d broken into tears. She’d comforted him, holding his head in her lap, until dawn.
They’d been inseparable for three months. Even after Lodovica was released, she came to see him every day and sometimes stayed overnight to sleep in his bed, tucking her head under the covers and laughing like crazy whenever a nurse went by. Then her father had received a new posting—his government had sent him to some African country—and Lodovica had gone with him. The day she’d left, Dante had had such a bad attack that he’d been unable to leave his room, and he hadn’t gone to tell her good-bye. The psychiatrist had talked about psychotic abandonment issues.
Dante now wondered whether Lodovica had continued damaging herself until she finally succeeded in killing herself, or whether instead she’d married some diplomat’s son. He hoped for the second option, even if he’d have been faintly disappointed.
Someone rang the doorbell, and Dante froze in the middle of a thought he was unable to retrieve. The doorbell rang once more, and this time it was accompanied by Colomba’s voice. “Signor Torre. It’s me, Caselli! Open the door, please.”
He didn’t move. Colomba rang the bell again.
“Signor Torre. If you’re all right and can hear me, please say something.”
Dante reached up his hand and snapped the lock open, moving as if caught in molasses. A draft pushed the door partway open.
Kill the Father Page 10