Kill the Father

by Sandrone Dazieri

  “The problem is: he wasn’t the Father,” said Dante.

  Colomba leafed through the documents. “His were the only fingerprints, the property belonged to him, and no one ever saw him with anyone else.”

  “What kind of accent do I have?” asked Dante.

  “Accent?” Colomba concentrated. “Vaguely northern, except when you use expressions in Roman dialect. But a faint one, anyway.”

  “That’s the way it was when I left the silo, aside from the Roman dialect.”

  “So what?”

  “Bodini had finished fifth grade, and he almost always spoke in Cremonese dialect. He can’t have been the one who educated me.”

  Because during his imprisonment, the kidnapper had taught Dante to read, write, and do basic arithmetic with old textbooks. The police had found several of them and had learned that they were editions from the early sixties, most likely purchased at used-book stalls. The education imparted by the Father had been, to say the least, bizarre.

  “Sometimes he’d have me learn long passages by heart, passages taken from books I’d never see,” Dante recalled. “He’d bring me the pages and leave them for me overnight. If I made a mistake the next day, he’d deny me food and water, or else . . .” He raised his bad hand. The Father forced him to strike it with a wooden club or a knife. That was the part of the body designated to receive punishment. Dante had learned by heart passages from the most respected Italian poets and authors, up to the nineteenth century, and he could still recite them, letter perfect. For some of them, he’d never read the whole works. The Father had had a fixation with Cremona. Dante had been forced to learn the names of streets on a map like the back of his hand, and one of the Father’s favorite mnemonic games involved showing him fragments of pictures of monuments and buildings for him to identify. According to the experts who’d examined Dante after his liberation, the things he had been taught were designed for one purpose only: to exercise dominion over him.

  “Maybe Bodini was a self-taught man who concealed his vast culture from the world.”

  “That’s what your colleagues tried to tell me. But it’s not credible.”

  “And then his were the only fingerprints on the books. And also his DNA,” said Colomba as she read. “Here I see that they did some tests on samples at the end of the nineties. Did you request them?”

  “Yes. When I was rescued, there was no such thing. I had to pay for them myself, and nothing came of them.”

  “But you’re certain that the Father and Bodini weren’t the same person.”

  “Bodini just rented him the fun house. I’m certain of it. Among other things, because I saw his face, and he wasn’t Bodini.”

  Colomba made herself more comfortable on the chaise longue. It was the evening of their second day of research: they hadn’t found a thing to support Dante’s theory, but she also hadn’t been able to poke any evident holes in his account. He was lucid and displayed a steel-trap memory of the details of everything that had happened to him. And that wasn’t all; he had an almost perfect recollection of everything.

  “Tell me about it,” she said.

  “It’s all written down.”

  “Not everything. And you know it.”

  Dante shrugged his shoulders, feigning indifference. “As you wish. There was a crack in the cement wall of the silo. It was small, and it was concealed by the loft where I slept. I peeped out of it when I was certain that the Father couldn’t detect anything, and still, even then . . .” He shook his head. “I was always certain that he was watching me.”

  “What could you see?” asked Colomba.

  “A portion of the field and the other silo. It was identical to mine, but I thought it was empty.”

  “But it wasn’t, according to your testimony.”

  “Which remained uncorroborated, sadly. The silos each had a door, on the opposite sides. They seemed normal, but either the Father or Bodini had soundproofed them. At least, mine had been; from outside no one could hear even if I pounded on it. Which I stopped doing after the first week.”

  “Which meant you couldn’t hear what was going on outside either.”

  “Not much. The rumbling of the trucks as they went by on the county road, the sirens of ambulances going by, thunderstorms . . . occasionally birds. On the other hand, all the noises inside were amplified. It was as if they rose up to the ceiling and then plummeted down onto my head.” Dante shuddered. “You know what seems incredible?”

  Colomba shook her head, uncertain she could rely on her voice.

  “That I survived it. Fuck, you can get used to anything.”

  Dante went out onto the balcony to smoke a cigarette. The floor was littered with stubbed-out butts. He came back in after ten minutes, to all appearances calm again.

  “I think that the Father entered and exited the other silo, using the little door on the far, hidden side, at least starting from when I started to watch through the crack. And maybe he did it in the dark, because I never managed to see him coming from that side. But the last day I did. He was holding a boy my age by the hand.”

  Colomba knew this. It had been the most controversial part of Dante’s testimony immediately after he was freed. When she’d read it, she’d found it unbelievable, but hearing it in Dante’s voice, live, gave her the opposite impression.

  “That was the time you saw his face.”

  “His age was somewhere between thirty and forty, short hair, very light blue eyes. Hollow-cheeked. I tried to work up a composite sketch, but it turned out too generic. It was dark. And I was upset.”

  Colomba looked at it: the face of the man Dante had seen was barely sketched out. Except for the hard eyes. “The face of God . . . to quote your words.”

  “Until that moment, he’d always worn a wool ski mask with a military-style cap stitched to it and sunglasses.” According to Dante, he’d worn five caps during the time of his imprisonment, all of them identical. “While the boy . . . I saw even less of him . . . it was like . . . looking at a planet against the light of a star . . . He seemed tall and skinny, more than the Father, who was of average height, and my same age. Shoulder-length hair like mine. There’s one thing I’m sure of, though. He was laughing or crying. Or both at the same time, because he kept making these strange, high-pitched noises.”

  Colomba took a look at the identikit of the kid, too, and found it just as elusive. It could have been any kid the age that Dante was at the time. “Couldn’t it have been a couple of visitors? Father and son going on a picnic?”

  Dante shook his head. “Oh, no.”

  “Then what happened?”

  “The Father led the boy out along the field. He went past my silo. I had a limited line of sight, even when I squeezed my eye against the wall. It was a crack just half an inch wide, for fuck’s sake . . . And as they were about to vanish from my field of view, I saw the Father’s other hand, the one he was holding behind his back. It held a knife. Now that I know something about these things, I think it was a carving knife.”

  “You said that you’re convinced that the boy was killed. Did you witness the killing in any way? Did you hear screams?”

  “No. I know they never found a corpse or any traces of blood, but I have little doubt about what the Father did to him.”

  “That must have been a shock for you.”

  “Shock doesn’t begin to give the idea. For the first time in eleven years I was seeing the Father’s face and another human being. Then, after a few minutes, I saw the Father again. He was alone, and he was coming toward my silo.”

  “And did he have the knife?” asked Colomba.

  “Yes. I heard him opening the door. He didn’t expect any reaction from me. I had never reacted in recent years. Instead, I hit him with the bucket of excrement and I ran. I didn’t know exactly what to do.”

  “What pushed you to take action? Were you afraid?”

  Dante smiled sadly, a different smile from the usual sarcastic grin. “No,” he said softly
. “I ran away because he’d betrayed me. I thought I was the only one.”

  2

  Dante went out onto the balcony to smoke a cigarette, and Colomba had an urge to do the same thing, even though she hadn’t smoked since her first year of university. She felt as if she were walking into the most intimate, delicate part of Dante wearing her heavy boots, the part that he’d learned over the years to screen off from the rest of the world. With the work she did, she’d interviewed and listened to hundreds of victims, suspects, and criminals, but rarely had it hit so hard. Perhaps because Dante’s story was anything but common, or maybe because she was starting to like him.

  When Dante came back in, he nonchalantly went on with his story. “I didn’t turn around to see how he was, I just ran as fast as I could, and I came very close to breaking my neck climbing down the ladder. I didn’t know how to do it, except in very theoretical terms. Like so many other things you can’t do in a silo.”

  “Like riding a bike,” said Colomba, trying to lighten the mood.

  “Like riding a bike.” He smiled. “Or even just running.”

  Somehow he’d managed to do it, though, and barefoot, too, because he’d made it to the county road, where a car had hit him. Luckily the driver had picked him up off the road and taken him to the hospital without waiting for an ambulance. At the hospital, Dante had managed to tell them who he was and persuaded them to believe him.

  By the time the police got to the silo, Bodini had already shot himself in the mouth with a military handgun he’d kept without ever registering it, after soaking the farmhouse and silos with kerosene and setting everything on fire. The masonry silos had survived the flames, though it was difficult for the forensic squad to obtain much usable evidence afterward, but the farmhouse had burned to the ground. They had never found a trace of the other man Dante had described, much less of the boy. No blood, no corpse, no personal effects or clothing. The most broadly accepted theory was that Dante had dreamed it, like a sort of projection of himself, and no matter how much he disputed that version, it had done nothing to make the investigators change their minds.

  “If he really existed, how can you be sure he was in the other silo?” asked Colomba. “Maybe he kept him in the farmhouse.”

  “For two reasons. The first is that he set fire to the other silo, too. If he wasn’t using it as a prison, what reason did he have?”

  “Maybe he used it for other purposes. He kept things in it, I don’t know. Or he simply went around the bend.”

  “Maybe, but I don’t think it was Bodini who did it. It was the Father. He murdered his accomplice, erased all traces of himself, and disappeared.”

  “Then why didn’t he leave the corpse of the second boy?”

  “Because it would have led back to him, somehow, I think . . . I don’t remember his face, but I remember how he moved. With small steps, astonished and frightened by everything around him. As if he were unaccustomed to being out in the open air. I moved the same way at first, when I was freed from my imprisonment.”

  “Except for when you ran away.”

  “I remember only the headlights of the car that hit me.”

  Colomba reflected for a few moments. “Then the boy had been a prisoner as long as you, or almost.”

  “I’ve never been able to identify him, even though they showed me dozens of photographs. Back then, there was no Internet to send out alerts on missing persons, and there was no coordinated database shared by all the attorney generals’ offices. Probably more reports than we can guess were simply lost. For a while I continued trying to find out about him; then I just gave up.”

  “You’re not at fault as far as that goes. If anything, the blame’s on us,” Colomba admitted, looking at the clock. It was 10 p.m. She was starting to get hungry.

  “Now you know everything there is to know,” said Dante.

  “You’re wrong about that. All I know is your version. Then there are the investigations and interviews that my colleagues and the magistrates did. I’ve read through them, but I ought to study them in depth.”

  “I’ve already done it. You want to know what I got for my trouble?” Dante stood up and walked over to the plastic whiteboard that they’d hung on the wall and covered with Post-its. He took one off and wrote ZERO with the dry-erase marker. “Everything they found always pointed in the same direction. Just one kidnapper, namely Bodini, no stranger, no other boy.”

  “Is it possible that there was never any kind of check on the farmhouse during the whole time of your imprisonment? Local constables, health office . . .”

  “More than once, and Bodini was always there. No one ever thought of searching the silos, even when they thought I’d been kidnapped. The only piece of evidence that sticks out from the rest is the testimony of a guy who lived in another farmhouse, about a half a mile from Bodini’s. He said that he would often see the headlights of a car stopping not far from Bodini’s farmhouse, but he’d always just assumed that it was young couples using the road as a lover’s lane.”

  “Maybe they were.”

  “If you believe that, then we’re wasting our time.”

  “Dante, I’ve already told you. I’m looking for evidence, just a single shred, proving there is a link between you and the Maugeris’ son.”

  “The whistle.”

  “Aside from that. We’ve already talked about it.” Colomba opened one of the files she’d fallen asleep reading the night before. It included a list, in some cases with distinguishing features, of the people questioned after Dante’s escape or who were suspects in some manner. “The district attorney’s office questioned thirty people in the search for a potential accomplice.”

  “Your colleagues pulled a few sexual offenders and common criminals out of the hat, but they didn’t find a thing on any of them.”

  “And what do you think about it?”

  “I dismiss them all. The Father held me prisoner for eleven years, without a break, and I saw him at least once every three days. All of the people they brought to me had served periods of time in prison or in the hospital, which made such a long period of continuity impossible.”

  “And you are absolutely certain that the Father and Bodini didn’t stand in for each other?”

  “I was positive then, and I’m even more so now. And none of the suspects they showed me had the right build. He disguised his voice, speaking in a low voice, but he couldn’t hide his physique. You’ve gotten to know me a little . . . do you think I dreamed that man and that boy?”

  “I want to be honest with you, Dante. I can’t say.”

  Dante let himself sprawl out. “If you have to choose between kindness and honesty, always go for the latter when you’re dealing with me. Above all, no pity.”

  “That’s good, because there are lots of people out there who think I’m not capable of it. Tell me the other points of contact that come to mind for you.”

  “The age of the Maugeris’ son.”

  “Okay.”

  “And my father was accused of having done it, exactly like Maugeri.”

  “But your father wasn’t accused of killing your mother. She killed herself.”

  “He killed with a bladed weapon, just like he did with the boy in the other silo.”

  “Most family murders are committed with bladed weapons or blunt objects. Not everyone in Italy has a firearm in their home.”

  “There are no traces of the boy. Not one,” said Dante.

  “Aside from the blood in Maugeri’s trunk.”

  “The Father put that there.”

  “In other words, the Father is a ninja. He deflects attention from himself, lands his blows on whoever he aims at, and can never be caught.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Then what are the odds we can succeed against someone who doesn’t make mistakes?”

  “He made at least one. I managed to escape, anyway.” Dante yawned and stretched. “I’m hungry, and I’m sick and tired of this. What do you say we have a prop
er meal for once?”

  “Should I put on my evening gown?”

  “Do you have one?”

  “Do you really want me to answer that?”

  They ate dinner at the hotel bar—the restaurant was too confining for Dante—where a table had been set up for them behind a privacy screen. Colomba was embarrassed by the white-gloved waiters. Not that she’d only ever eaten in diners and grills her whole life, but she’d never risen to the level of a waiter standing right behind her the whole time.

  “Enjoy life a little for once, CC,” Dante told her. For the occasion, he’d put on a charcoal gray tie and a black Giorgio Armani suit.

  “I don’t feel comfortable here.”

  “Pretend you’re on vacation.”

  She smiled. “Then I wouldn’t be here with you.”

  “Thanks. Anyway, it’s better than the police cafeteria.”

  “With the work I did, I was always out and about, and I just grabbed something to eat where I found it. If I ate at all.” Dante had nothing on his dish but vegetables. “Are you a vegetarian?”

  Dante smiled. “I’ve spent far too many years in a cage myself not to feel horror at the way livestock is bred.”

  “Human beings have always eaten meat, and I don’t have problems with the fact,” said Colomba, spearing another chunk of her tournedos Rossini.