He was going to have to take care of that.
- V -
BEFORE
Inside the counterfeit Invicta backpack sitting on the floor of the teak and rice-paper coat check booth, there’s a pressure cooker that contains roughly two kilos of a mixture of cyclotrimethylenetrinitramine, also known as RDX, and polyisobutylene. It’s a very stable compound commonly known as C-4. It can be shaped like Play-Doh, which it closely resembles in terms of its consistency—the color is an opaque white, however—it can be mashed, it can get wet, it can even be burned with relative safety. But it can’t be set on fire and compressed at the same time or raised to temperatures greater than 250 degrees centigrade. In that case, it detonates with great power. C-4 is a high-power explosive, very popular with the military. During the Vietnam War, the soldiers used to burn it to keep warm. Or they’d eat it so they’d be sent to the sick bay. It’s relatively simple to make, even in a fairly crude laboratory, though the process does present its risks. That’s why it’s also very popular with terrorists.
At 9:30 p.m. a digital timer, originally part of a Swedish-made hot-water heater, sends an electric impulse from four penlight batteries to a small steel capsule. That’s the detonator, and it contains twenty grams of black powder. The detonator goes off, producing the temperature necessary to trigger the bomb. The C-4 explodes, transforming itself instantaneously into a gas that travels at a velocity greater than the speed of sound: to be exact, 8,550 meters per second. The pressure cooker bursts, shattering into fragments and displacing a substantial mass of air, which turns red hot from the velocity.
Shrapnel, fragments of the coat check, cement dust, and scalding air hit the elderly couple sitting at the table by the door. The first to be hit is the man, who is literally lifted into the air. For an instant he assumes the position of a crucified man, his pelvis in contact with the table; then his limbs are torn from their sockets and ripped from his body, while shrapnel, fragments, and dust pass through him.
The shock wave continues until it hits his wife. She still has her head hanging over the table, lost in her gloomy thoughts, and she’s shoved into a semifetal position. It’s as if she were rolling backward, but with each turn her body loses consistency. It crumbles, so to speak. Fragments of her body, her husband’s body, their table, the glasses, and the bottle of Chardonnay, whose content is vaporized, are absorbed into the cloud of fragments. They hurtle into the recently married couple sitting behind the elderly couple.
The young bride is the first to be hit. Her left eye socket is traversed by her elderly neighbor’s dessert spoon, while her body hurtles over the table and hits her husband, who starts to slide backward while still seated in his chair, as the menu in his hands starts to catch fire. But the flames haven’t yet caught when the shock wave and the fruit cocktail of fragments hit the microcomponents manager and his novel. The bones of the older woman’s ulna and humerus pierce his chest and skull like javelins. He falls backward, grazing with what remains of the back of his head the feet of the young husband, who’s continuing his backward slide across the room.
The shock wave expands to the group of Japanese businessmen and the maître d’. The kinetic energy is uneven; there are differences of pressure and direction due to obstacles encountered and air resistance. Therefore, the five men are not simply lifted but dragged in many directions at the same time, as if they’d been sentenced to death by being tied to horses and drawn and quartered. Three of the Japanese lose their upper limbs. The back of the fourth businessman is ripped open from shoulder blades to tailbone, stripping the spinal cord bare. The maître d’, partly protected by the four Japanese businessmen but taller than they, is hit in the back of the head by a chunk of cement the size of a bar of hotel soap. The chunk of cement passes through bones and soft tissue and shoots out of his mouth. The maître d’ falls forward, while the shock wave, the fragments, and the shrapnel all reach the windows and shatter them. Part of the blast disperses into the outside air, but not enough. Shrapnel, fragments, and red-hot dust continue hurtling through the room.
They machine-gun the waiter who’s waiting for the deejay to make his wisecrack. They perforate his back, reducing heart, lungs, liver, and intestine to mush; they exit from his body and riddle the face of the agent, who’s still trying to remember the name of that movie he has on the tip of his tongue; they hit the deejay and his besotted friend, smashing them both into a load-bearing column. The deejay’s left hand and the girl’s right hand, still intertwined, are torn off and sail all the way to the four Albanian models and their chaperone, arriving just before a hail of chunks of reinforced concrete. A flaming piece of the coat check room, about a foot and a half long, lodges in the spinal cord of one of the girls, just above a tattoo of two butterflies kissing, and exiting through the belly button. The shock wave knocks down the group like tenpins, and the five of them slide across the dining room floor, burning from the friction. The chaperone’s sternum snaps inward, crushing the muscle of his heart.
While the deejay’s head bends farther and farther back, snapping his cervical vertebrae, the young husband passes through what is left of a window. He starts to tumble to the street below at the same instant that one of the models, the one who was about to go snort another line of coke, impacts another load-bearing column, shattering her pelvis. The surface of the table where she and the others were sitting has now lifted into the air. It flies like a sixty-five-pound frisbee.
The shock waves keep spreading. While part of them are hitting the dining room, another part is wedging into the staircase. High-pressure air is shrieking like a train in a tunnel, growing scorching hot. It uproots a section of handrail, rips the plaster off the walls, and thunders down to the floor below. A bartender winds up on the floor, legs in the air, while the shaking of the walls, comparable to a magnitude 5 earthquake, knocks shelves and bottles to the floor, shatters the glass display cases holding the pastries, and knocks the espresso machine off the counter and onto the bartender, leaving her with six broken ribs and a fractured vertebra. The shock wave expands toward the boutique. The ceiling in one of the bathrooms collapses, taking down with it all the electrical wiring and cutting the power to the bottom floor. Mannequins and chests of drawers tumble over. The plate-glass shop windows of the bar and the boutique explode outward, covering the parked and standing cars in the street with shards of glass. It is atop one of those cars, a Smart car, parked illegally with the running lights on—the owner is enjoying an aperitif just a short distance away—that the young husband ends his long trajectory. He slams into the car’s roof with the upper part of his body. At the moment of impact, his face is almost entirely devoid of nose, lips, and eyelids.
The table that’s been sailing along like a Frisbee also ends its flight. It’s heavy, and before it’s gone more than a few yards it’s lost most of its initial momentum. All that would be needed is for it to glance off one of the columns or for a new funnel of hot air to shove it off course and render it harmless. But this isn’t a day for miracles, and the Frisbee continues along its trajectory unhampered. The woman with the penetrating gaze really doesn’t see it at all, though afterward she’ll feel sure that she at least sensed it, the shadow of a hurtling object wobbling out of the corner of her eye. The table lands flat on her, pinning her to the floor, knocking her senseless and breathless.
Three seconds have passed since the explosion. The roar echoes off the facades of the buildings all the way to the piazza, where it startles the pigeons.
Then the screaming starts.
- VI -
HOUSE CALLS
1
The Hotel Impero was a potpourri of modern, vaguely Japanese design and ecocompatible architecture, with tiny waterfalls in the hallways and grass growing on the fifteenth-story roof. It had been built into an early-nineteenth-century office building on a small cross street of Via del Corso, the central Roman shopping street, just a short walk from the Ara Pacis, or Altar of Peace. The bar was a transparent ver
anda located to one side of the interior garden, which also featured a Japanese touch in the path of white Zen river stones.
Colomba walked through the marble-clad lobby feeling decidedly out of place with her backpack and her jeans. When she was on duty, she used her police ID to get in everywhere, but as a civilian she faced a certain uneasiness in her social interactions. She should have paid closer attention when her mother was trying to teach her how a well-behaved young lady was supposed to act.
“There should be a room in the name of Signor Torre,” she said to one of the two concierges working at the reception desk, as a harem’s worth of women in chadors escorted by two bearded bodyguards went streaming past her.
The concierge typed into his computer, and his smile broadened. “Of course, madame. The manager will join you immediately to see you to your suite.”
Colomba pretended that nothing had happened, but thought to herself: Suite? She pulled her ID out of her wallet, as required by law, but the clerk waved his hand in mock horror.
“There’s no need. If you’d care to make yourself comfortable . . .”
“I’ll be in the garden.”
“Very good, madame. Can I have a drink brought out?”
“No, thanks. I’m fine.”
She went out, still somewhat dazed, and joined Dante at one of the little tables scattered under the dwarf palms and the oleanders; he was smoking a cigarette and sizing up a heavily retouched blonde at the neighboring table. He’d stuffed himself with Xanax to deal with the stress of moving house, and his eyes were at half-staff. “Hey, listen, just how rich are you?” she asked him.
“If you turn me upside down and shake me, you won’t get a cent. I live from one consulting job to the next.”
“Bullshit. Unless you have an American Express Centurion card, they won’t even let you rummage through the Dumpster in this place.”
“Do you remember when I told you about the girl who disappeared with Scooby-Doo’s van?”
“I’m not suffering from senile dementia.”
“It was the owner’s daughter, and I agreed to take my payment out in trade. Now all I have to do is pick up the phone and I can have a suite, even if they’re overbooked. No charge.”
“And what good is it to you if you never leave your apartment?”
“It impresses girls.”
“Like the blonde right behind me? Even a Centurion card wouldn’t get you anywhere with her.”
“Let me dream.”
The manager came to their table and practically bowed at their feet, while two porters loaded Dante’s matched set of suitcases onto a luggage cart, along with Colomba’s backpack, and then vanished in the direction of the freight elevator. The two of them, in contrast, were accompanied to the top floor in the glass elevator that rose from the center of the lobby. It was transparent from floor to ceiling, and it moved so slowly that Dante agreed to take it, even though he couldn’t conceal a hint of unease. “The only elevator I’ve taken in the past ten years,” he said with a foolish grin.
Colomba took advantage of the slow ascent to study the security situation beneath her. She identified at least four members of the hotel security staff in the lobby, dressed in dark suits, with earpieces and the broad shoulders of ex-military. Given the rank of the clientele, she assumed they’d be efficient and accustomed to noticing any anomalies. It was no accident that they’d all zeroed in on her when she entered the hotel. If she hadn’t kept her handgun in her pocketbook—it was too hot that day for a jacket—they’d have certainly spotted it.
The elevator stopped across from the door to the suite, which the manager opened, stopping short at the threshold. “Signor Torre is very familiar with our hotel, so I’ll spare you the guided tour. If there’s anything you need, please don’t hesitate to call me,” he said.
Colomba tried to hand him her ID; the manager pretended not to see it and stepped back into the elevator with a smile.
Colomba put her ID away, once again embarrassed. “Why don’t they want my ID?” she asked Dante. “It’s the law in this country, a hotel guest has to show ID and the hotel is required to register it.”
“I’m already registered, and my guests have a right to their privacy. It’s a side benefit.”
“It’s against the law.”
“What a pain in the ass you are, mamma mia!”
“The next time you see him, tell him that I’m not one of your girlfriends.”
The suite was divided into two bedrooms, each with a truly sybaritic bathroom, and a large living room with a fireplace; before five minutes were up, two maintenance men came in to install a café-quality espresso machine and an electric coffee grinder.
“Let me guess,” said Colomba. “Another side benefit.”
“Well done.”
“Is there someone to wash your back in the shower?”
Dante displayed his sarcastic grin. “Only upon request.”
Dante assigned Colomba the smaller bedroom—so to speak; after all, it was half the size of her whole apartment—and kept the big room for himself, but he explained that the reason he was doing it was that it had so many more windows, as well as a terrace with a Jacuzzi and a sauna. “Where I’ll sleep.”
“Aren’t you going to use the round bed in the room?” asked Colomba, who’d only ever seen anything like it in movies.
“Not to sleep on . . .” he winked. “If you get what I mean.”
Colomba snorted. “No, I don’t.” She checked the view from the terrace: it overlooked the rear garden, and there were no other buildings nearby. Of course, she couldn’t be one hundred percent certain, but considering Dante’s needs, it was either this or they’d have to move into the open countryside. “Pull the curtains when you go to sleep, okay?” she said. “And keep the light turned off in the bedroom, otherwise your silhouette will be visible.”
“Are you worried about snipers?” he asked, uncertain whether or not to kid around.
“I’m not worried about anything, you just do it.”
“Yes, Mamma.”
Colomba went to put away her things. The bed was a standard bed-shaped rectangle, but it was a king, covered with a fluffy white quilt. On one wall was a plasma-screen television set, and on the other was a burnished metal armoire and a set of shelves. She wondered, for the hundredth time that day, whether it even made sense to move someone with a few screws loose on the basis of such a vague threat or if she’d been infected with his paranoia. She hoped she’d be able to figure that out soon, before she got tangled up in an even bigger mess. She put her change of clothes in the dresser drawers and her shoes in the bathroom, then returned to the living room.
Dante noticed that she’d clipped her holster back onto her belt but said nothing. He was extracting his bags of whole-bean coffee from his suitcases, placing them in alphabetical order on the bar counter behind the espresso machine. Blue Mountain, Mérida, Vintage Colombian . . . The aroma of roasted coffee was spreading through the room. “There’s a magnificent heated pool right above us and, just think, with a transparent roof. We could take a swim and drink an aperitif up there,” he said.
“I have an even better idea. Let’s get to work.”
Dante sighed. “You really just don’t like to enjoy life, do you?”
Alberti had been standing by, and less than half an hour later he delivered two large boxes of documents in the lobby; Colomba went downstairs to take delivery. Alberti was in plain clothes.
“You used your own car, didn’t you?”
“Actually, I don’t own a car. I borrowed one from a friend.”
“That’s just as good.”
The swelling had gone down, and his nose looked almost normal, even if it was clear that it would never be the same. It didn’t look bad though, thought Colomba. It made him look a little more grown up. He gave her a hand carrying the boxes up to the floor and looked around the suite with unguarded curiosity. “Do you really live here now, Deputy Captain?”
�
�Only for a few days. And I’m not paying for it,” she replied, shutting the door in his face with a hint of sadistic glee.
“Santa Claus came early!” Dante exclaimed as he looked at the file boxes. “Why on earth don’t you archive things in digital versions?”
“Nearly everything on the Maugeri case is digital,” said Colomba as she opened the box. “But your case is still for the most part on paper. We don’t have the money to digitize old stuff.”
“I’m not ‘old stuff,’ ” he said, sounding offended.
Colomba tossed him a couple of folders. “Just be grateful that Rovere managed to lay his hands on this.”
“Where do we start?” asked Dante, leafing through one. It was the report from one of the detectives who had worked on his case.
“With you. You’re what I know least about.”
“I’ll make an espresso.”
Colomba and Dante drank a great many espressos as they pored over the documents and discussed them for almost twenty-four hours straight. They ate in the hotel suite and stopped working only to sleep, as Dante’s bedroom, strictly off limits to the housekeepers, was gradually buried in a uniform layer of papers and photos. If she wanted to move, Colomba had to slalom between the piles of paper and the empty coffee cups, but most of the time she just lay back on the Le Corbusier chaise longue asking Dante questions about his story. And he told her everything, with great precision, for the first time since he had been liberated.
Dante had been imprisoned in a grain silo in the courtyard of a farmhouse that belonged to Antonio Bodini, a retired army corporal. Bodini had inherited the property from his late parents. The silo in question was one of two that Bodini’s father used to store wheat, but before he died he’d sold most of his farmland—now worked by a neighboring commercial farming operation—and since then they had stood empty, at least officially. For the eleven years Dante had been held a prisoner, Bodini had gone on with his life, tending his garden, feeding roosters and hens, and withdrawing his monthly pension at the local post office. In town everyone remembered him as a shy, taciturn man, too rustic to have a family, who might have a brief conversation about the weather if he was buying groceries but who always drank alone at the bar. On summer evenings he could be seen sitting at the table outside his home in tattered pants and a tank top. The discovery of who he really was and what he had done had upset everyone in the town and surrounding areas, and from then on he had been referred to “the nutcase.” His grave had been defiled twice, and then he was disinterred and cremated, and his bones had been placed in a common ossuary. The motive for what he had done was accepted by investigators and expert witnesses to be a simple one: the thwarted desire to have a family, metastasized into madness.
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