Colomba pushed it lightly. “Signor Torre?” She couldn’t see anything past the doorway.
Mechanically, without shifting her gaze, she unholstered her new handgun and held it out straight in front of her with both hands; the pistol felt unfamiliar and too light. With her right index finger, she flipped the safety off; then she extended it parallel with the barrel to prevent accidental discharge. She pushed the door open with one foot. The door came to a halt before it was half open, bumping into something.
That was the last straw for Colomba, already tense well beyond measure. Suddenly the darkness in front of her seethed with shadows and her ears erupted with screams and hisses only she could hear. She began to tremble violently, her lungs clenched tight as a fist, while in her head she kept repeating just one word: Run! Instead, she walked through the doorway on unsteady legs and aimed the gun at the shape on the floor that had halted the swinging door. Only then did she realize it was Dante, huddled in his bathrobe.
Colomba felt a burning desire for oxygen, and her legs sagged. She slammed her injured knuckles into the wall, and, as always, the electric shock dissolved the clamp of panic. She heaved a deep breath and coughed, looking at the giant shadow her backlit silhouette with outheld gun cast into the room. “Are you all right, Signor Torre?” she asked in a choking voice.
“Yes,” he replied without moving.
“Are you alone?”
“Yes, but come in out of the light.” Dante pointed to the window. “He’s out there . . .”
Colomba reholstered her gun and, groping at the wall, found the switch to the halogen light. Dante blinked as the stream of light made the phantoms fade away.
Colomba helped him to his feet. The lighted apartment looked to Dante like a faded memory. Colomba snapped her fingers in front of his nose. “Are you with me, Signor Torre?”
“Yes, yes.” Dante let himself drop onto the couch. His internal thermometer was dropping to an acceptable level. “I just got lost there for a minute.”
“Does that happen often?”
“Not anymore.”
Colomba brought him a glass of water, then dragged a chair out of the kitchen area, turned it around, and placed it in front of him, straddling the back rest and placing her chin on her hands. “You think the Father is spying on you.”
“He left the whistle for me. That means he knows I’m working on the case.”
“Why didn’t you say that if you’re sure of it?”
“Say it to who? To those two comedians when they were interrogating me?”
“To me.”
Dante trotted out a pale imitation of his usual sarcastic grin. “It didn’t occur to me.”
“Did you mention it to your lawyer at least?”
“He’s already too worried.” Dante drained the glass and set it down on a stack of travel magazines. “What made you start to have doubts?”
“I saw the VCU report. The whistle wasn’t there until a couple of hours before we got there.”
“And you think that was more than just a coincidence.”
“I don’t believe that your kidnapper has come back, Signor Torre. In fact, as of now, I have no reasonable cause to doubt that Maugeri is guilty.”
“Then why are you here?”
“Because I’m unreasonably afraid I might be wrong. And if I am wrong, then you’re in danger.”
Dante smiled at her, and it finally looked like his usual smile. “Thanks for coming to my aid. I know how much that must have cost you.”
“Only the gas in the tank.”
“That’s not what I’m talking about.”
Colomba eyed him suspiciously. “Then what instead?”
“You’re suffering from something that, considering the work you do, is probably post-traumatic stress disorder. Panic attacks, sensory disorientation . . . When you came in I was afraid you were going to shoot me in the face. That would explain why you’re not on duty.”
“You weren’t yourself. And I’m perfectly fine.”
“You just scratched your nose, you’re lying.”
“Cut it out.”
“Why? It’s interesting to talk about noses. Did you know that the length of your thumb is exactly the same as the length of your nose?”
Colomba resisted the temptation to check. “All right then, can you give me anything that can transform my fear into concrete doubt? Something I can take to the magistrate?”
“Do you know what the Father was trying to tell me with that whistle?”
“He’s dead, Torre. And he has been for years.”
“He was telling me ‘Steer clear of my territory.’ And that’s exactly what I intend to do.”
“Let’s just say, ridiculous though it is, that it was the Father . . . You can’t really know what he’s thinking. Do I need to remind you of what you said about his inscrutable mind?”
“What alternative would you suggest?” asked Dante.
Colomba hesitated. She was about to commit herself to something she didn’t want to do. But she was already involved, and she knew it. “I can help you to do some digging. You’d have access to all the documentation on your case and on the Maugeri case,” she said.
“And what am I supposed to do with that?”
“Prove what you’re saying. That the boy wasn’t kidnapped by his father, that there are certain commonalities with your own kidnapping. I’ll get the material to whoever needs to see it, the boy might have a chance of being rescued, and you’d be safe.”
“But what if I can’t do it?”
“Then that means that the child was taken and probably killed by Maugeri and there’s no one out there who has it in for you. I’ll go back to my life, you’ll go back to yours.”
Dante let himself sink back into his chair. “What happened to you?”
“Excuse me?”
“What is it that makes you worry so much about me and that little boy? We mean nothing to you, but you want to help us, even though it makes no sense.”
“Maybe I’m sick and tired of scratching my ass.”
Dante narrowed his eyes, and for a second they looked merciless. Predatory. “Or maybe you have sins to expiate. The ones that keep you up at night and take your breath away.”
This time Colomba didn’t move a muscle. “I sleep fine.”
“You’re asking me to work with you, yet you keep lying to me about your condition. Does that seem right?”
Against her will, Colomba looked away, and Dante understood that she was ashamed. The same thing used to happen to him.
“If you really want to help me, I need to be able to trust you,” Dante continued. “And I need to know the truth. The truth about you. Otherwise I’d just have looked it up on the Internet.”
Colomba leapt to her feet, and Dante decided with a stab of regret that she was about to leave and that he’d never see her again. But she was just getting more comfortable. She slipped off her police boots and massaged her icy feet. Dante wondered where she’d left her socks, since she hadn’t changed her clothes since that afternoon.
“You wouldn’t have found what you were looking for on the Internet. My name was never mentioned. Cop secrets.” She turned her gaze back on him. “Let’s do this, Signor Torre; when I feel comfortable around you, which is something that may never happen, but one day that I’m in an especially good mood or especially sad, I’ll tell you the whole story. But for now, why don’t you just settle for the knowledge that I know how to keep my condition at bay.”
“Without psychotropic drugs.”
“I don’t like to put crap into my body. But whatever my mental state, I’ll never use my gun unless it’s genuinely necessary. And I’ll never put you in danger.”
“How many people have you shot, CC?”
“CC is an idiotic nickname. And I have no intention of telling you that either. You’re going to have to take me as I am.”
Dante looked her in the eyes, which now had a vague hazel highlight. And that was what made hi
m say yes. The most rational of men, or at least that’s how he liked to think of himself, undone by a woman’s eyes. He stood up. “I’ll make you an espresso before you go back out into the cold and damp.”
Colomba stood up. “I have no intention of going outside. But I’m going to need the coffee because I have work to do. I’m going to have to search your apartment.”
12
Dante blinked. “I must still be out of it. I could have sworn you just said search.”
Colomba was already looking around. “If there’s someone spying on you, they’re not doing it with a pair of binoculars. Or not just that way. I’m going to search for microphones and microcameras.”
Dante looked uneasily at the lights in the building across the way. “Do you really want to go through my stuff?”
Colomba raised an eyebrow. “You can get rid of anything you don’t want me to see.”
“Huh? No . . . you don’t understand. I don’t have anything illegal in my home, except for some medicines I bought on the Internet. It’s that I don’t want you to mess up my archives.” Dante closed his bathrobe, went over to the guest bedroom, and opened the door. “Take a look.”
Colomba stopped in the doorway.
The room measured ten feet by thirteen, and it was stacked to the ceiling with cardboard boxes. There was a narrow central aisle that lined up with the window overlooking the courtyard; over the center of the aisle hung a bare bulb that barely illuminated the room.
“The archive of lost time,” said Dante.
“I’m sorry?”
“What do you remember about 1984?”
“Right here, right now? Nothing.”
“Alphaville hit the Top Ten with their song ‘Forever Young.’ ” He sang the refrain.
“Oh, right,” Colomba replied. The guy’s got a voice, she thought.
“And Red Dawn by John Milius came out. It’s a great movie. In comparison, the remake is horrible.”
Colomba remembered it vaguely. “So?”
“I don’t know what it is that makes us who we are, CC.”
“Stop calling me CC.”
“But at least in part it’s our memories, even the ones that seem trivial.” Dante opened a box by the door and pulled out a blue plush toy. “Like this one.”
Colomba recognized it immediately. “Judge Brainy Smurf.”
“They came in the Kinder eggs. In the ones from 1989, to be exact. Did your folks get them for you?”
“Yes. And I’d trade my doubles at school for others I wanted.”
“For the whole time the Father held me prisoner, he never gave me sweets. Only what he considered healthy food. He never let me listen to music, he never let me watch a movie. I discovered the existence of Judge Brainy Smurf on eBay, where I bought him for forty euros.” He smiled. “According to collectors, I got a bargain.”
“You’re trying to get back what you lost in the silo,” said Colomba, and she was touched. Poor guy, she thought. Not even in the toughest high-security prison would you be cut off from the world the way he’d been. The fact that he’d recovered, even if not in full, still struck her as nothing short of miraculous.
Dante nodded. “I started when I realized that sometimes I didn’t get the references people my age would make. They’d talk about a movie or go into ecstasies about a song that meant absolutely nothing to me.”
“And do you collect everything?”
“No. Just Western pop culture. You can study official history in books, but you have to watch TV shows and you have to play with toys to understand anything about them. And music, too, unless you listen to it, it’s worthless to you. Though I’ve stopped buying CDs now that Spotify exists.”
“Half of the things you find, no one even remembers anymore.”
“They think they don’t remember them. How long has it been since you thought back to the Smurfs you used to trade at school?”
“A long time.”
“But they came back to you immediately. The way you act, speak, laugh at a joke, or make a decision is influenced by your experience. I couldn’t have done my job without my boxes of lost time. Last year I found a bipolar girl who ran away from home because I understood what she meant when she said, ‘She went away with Scooby-Doo.’ ”
“What did she mean?”
“A Volkswagen Type 2 van. A microbus. The members of Mystery, Inc., have one covered with flowers, the Mystery Machine, because they’re hippies. Did you know that there’s a theory that Scooby is actually just a collective hallucination of his friends, who are all tripping on LSD?”
“There’s a theory about everything,” said Colomba, uninterested. She pointed at the room. “May I?”
“Absolutely.”
Colomba went in, while Dante remained cautiously at the door. She opened a box at random. It contained videocassettes. The first one was of a taped television show. “Non Stop?” she read out loud.
“An Italian variety show that was on the air from 1977 to 1979. You can find old movies on TV from time to time, but if you’re looking for old programs, you have to go to the broadcasters or to collectors.”
Colomba closed the box back up, unconvinced. “You have your whole collection here.”
“No, these are just the things I haven’t examined yet. The complete collection is in a storage unit, and there’s a guy I pay to dust it off once a month. When I die, I’ll leave it to a foundation in my name.”
They’ll just set fire to it, thought Colomba. “Then I’ll start here, if that’s all right with you. This seems like the hardest part. I promise I won’t get things out of order.”
Dante nodded. “But if you’re going to go through my things, do you mind if we address each other in the informal? I’d find it less embarrassing.”
She nodded. “Of course I don’t mind.”
Dante extended his good hand. “Dante.”
She shook it. “Colomba.”
“CC.”
“Fuck yourself.”
He laughed. “I’ll make you a first-rate espresso.”
For the rest of the night, Colomba opened boxes and drawers, moved furniture, tapped at tiles, dismantled electric plugs and lamps, doing her best to work quietly so she wouldn’t wake the neighbors, even though Dante had soundproofed floors and walls. She staggered with exhaustion once or twice, but it was hardly the first time she’d gone the night without sleep, and rummaging through Dante’s things was more interesting than a stakeout in a police van, with an eavesdropping headset over her ears.
Dante’s archive contained many references to, and memories of, happier times; she even found a bottle of the patchouli perfume she’d worn in high school. Sniffing it, she was amazed to discover how much her tastes had changed.
Dante accompanied her for a couple of hours, singing the praises of this object or annotating that one—for each one he seemed to have a bottomless store of anecdotes—then his voice grew muddled and Colomba found him facedown in the bed on the balcony. She was glad. In the past few days Dante had talked to more people than he had in the past six months, and he needed some rest.
At seven in the morning Dante opened his eyes and saw Colomba emerge from the bathroom with her wet hair in a ponytail and a soup mug in her hands. Her T-shirt stuck to her damp skin. She was done with her work, and she’d taken a shower. “I didn’t want to wake you up,” she said.
Dante slid over to the edge of the bed, wrapping his naked body in the sheets. He’d forgotten who she was, and for a moment he thought she was his ex-girlfriend. “What’s in the mug?”
“Caffè latte.”
Dante shuddered. “What kind of coffee did you use?”
“I don’t know, just some kind that was lying around.”
“I don’t have just some kind of coffee lying around in here,” Dante muttered.
“Take a shower, and then we can talk,” she grunted.
“Yes, ma’am.” Dante slithered into the bathroom and emerged half an hour later with the occa
sional drop of water still beading his skin, dressed in a black suit, with a shirt and tie in the same color.
Colomba was waiting for him at the kitchen table, picking at a piece of stale bread. “Do you always dress like an undertaker?” she said grimly.
“More like Johnny Cash, actually.”
“Who’s that?”
“Never mind. Well?”
“Nothing. I even took the television set apart. Maybe your paranoia is nothing but paranoia.”
“Maybe he’s listening to what I say with a laser that can detect the vibration of the window panes,” said Dante.
“You read too much crap. Anyway, you can’t stay here.”
Dante sat with his cup in midair. “Are you kidding?”
“This morning I called Rovere. He’ll give us anything we ask for, on the current investigation as well.”
“What’s he gain by putting his career at risk like this? Aside from making the magistrate look like an asshole?”
Colomba hesitated, then shook her head. “Maybe that’s worth it to him. Well, where are we moving to?”
“Together, you mean?”
“You don’t have a gun. I do. Until I’m sure that your fears are strictly paranoia, I’m going to be glued to you. Believe me, I’m no more thrilled than you are.”
“There just might be a place where we can go,” he said with a smile. “Let me make a couple of phone calls.”
“Which would be where?”
“It’s a surprise.”
“I hate surprises.”
“I can’t imagine why, but I expected that.”
While Dante went to get the phone and Colomba stretched out for a nap, down in the street a man, unseen, stopped beneath the balcony. He was wearing a raincoat buttoned to the neck, and he was carrying a plastic shopping bag with enough food for a week’s balanced diet for a six-year-old boy. A boy who refused to eat and kept crying for his parents. The man in the raincoat knew that the boy would soon become more tractable. That was the way things worked. As long as someone didn’t stick their nose into things and ruin it all. The man in the raincoat looked up to the seventh floor. He didn’t like what was going on behind Dante’s window right now, not one bit.
Kill the Father Page 11