Colomba stood looking at him for a few seconds without a word; then she turned on her heel and walked away, taking long strides, shoving aside a long-distance runner coming from the opposite direction.
When she got back, she found Dante stretched out on his back on the hood of the car.
“If that’s where you want to ride, be my guest,” she growled.
“I just wanted to look at the sky.” He leapt to the ground and seemed to be the usual Dante again. “What does that genius of a boss of yours have to say?”
“Nothing helpful.”
“Did I already tell you that I don’t like him?”
“You made it clear. Let’s go back to the hotel.”
“Not yet. Santiago called me; apparently he’s found something big online. I don’t know what, because we don’t feel safe talking on the phone. Are you ready to take a walk on the wild side?”
Colomba thought back to her conversation with Rovere and his advice to drop all further activity. “I can’t wait,” she said.
15
Still feeling tense, Colomba drove to the outlying neighborhood of Tor Bella Monaca, where Santiago lived. It was one of the neighborhoods with the highest crime rates in Rome, where fifteen-story apartment houses were connected by internal labyrinths of alleys and tunnels, subsidized housing inhabited by poverty-stricken families, and mafiosi doing business in new and greener fields. The roundups and arrests that Colomba had been involved in there had always culminated in hails of rocks and bottles out of high windows, burning car tires, and screaming crowds. When a policeman entered Torbella—as its inhabitants liked to call it—he was entering enemy territory. Colomba knew that many of the people who lived around there were good folks who just couldn’t afford to move anyplace else, old people and the unemployed held in subjugation by the face-slapping arrogance of their criminal neighbors. But that did nothing to lessen the hatred she felt for that Roman quarter, knowing as she did that out of any doorway a gun barrel might poke, ready to fire the bullet that would punch a hole in her forehead.
Dante directed her toward a group of four public housing projects six stories tall, arranged like a stretched-out C, with outside walls a smoky gray and ramshackle window fixtures. The mailboxes were blackened by the blasts of firecrackers or spray-painted various colors, while the intercom panels had been yanked out of the walls. Out front, there was an expanse of lawn that was mostly stumps and scrub, and heaps of rubble, where a group of even dirtier and dustier children was playing war, hurling clumps of dirt at one another.
All the apartment buildings were connected to the same interior courtyard, and Colomba drove toward one of the entrances. Immediately, the way was blocked by three boys on scooters. They were driving without helmets, and the oldest of the three, a Maghrebi, couldn’t have been even fourteen.
He was the one who knocked on the window, right next to Colomba’s head. “Who are you going to see?” he asked.
“None of your fucking business, kid,” Colomba replied.
Dante leaned out almost simultaneously. “Santiago’s expecting us.”
“What’s your name?” the boy inquired.
“Dante.”
The Maghrebi signaled to one of the other boys, so tiny that he could barely put his feet on the ground with the moped stopped. “Go call him.”
The littlest boy revved up the moped and vanished into the inner courtyard. The two others moved a couple of yards away from the car but still blocked its way. They lit cigarettes.
“That’s the way it is here,” Dante said to Colomba.
“I’d take the parents of these boys and send them directly to jail without passing Go.”
“That’s probably where they already are,” said Dante.
After a few minutes Santiago emerged from the basement with two boys, who might have been eighteen at the most. They were South Americans, and unlike Santiago, who dressed in a nondescript manner aside from his leather jacket and colorful track shoes, they wore sagging trousers, backward baseball caps, and T-shirts with thuggish slogans. Colomba, to her surprise, actually recognized one of them. His name was Jorge Pérez, and she had arrested him for assault two years ago, when he was still a minor.
Santiago slapped the Maghrebi amiably on the back and sent him away with the other sentinels, while Jorge started cursing in Spanish. “That lady’s a cop,” he told Santiago while making a rapid gesture in Colomba’s direction that in the language of the street was a mute death threat.
She raised her middle finger in return, but with her other hand, unseen, she pulled her pistol out of its holster and propped it between her legs.
“Did you see what she just did?” Jorge asked Santiago.
Santiago ignored him. “Why did you have to bring her with you?” he asked Dante. “I told you to come alone.”
“Because he doesn’t go anywhere alone,” Colomba replied.
“I wasn’t asking you,” said Santiago.
Dante got out, and Colomba felt her lungs tightening up. If any one of the three were armed, he might take Dante’s action as aggressive and shoot him. But Santiago remained calm, and none of the others made a move.
“I told you I trust her. And we’re in this together.”
Santiago looked at Jorge and then asked how he knew her. “¿Cómo es que la conoces?”
“Me ha enviado a la cárcel,” Jorge replied, repeating the menacing gesture. She had sent him to prison.
Santiago spoke to Dante again. “No.”
“You’ve already done the job. Do you really want to give up the money?”
“This is how I make money,” said Santiago, snapping his fingers in front of his face.
“You want to give up a friend like me? I’ve been useful to you in the past. I might be useful again someday.”
Santiago looked down at the toes of his shoes, uncertainly. “Do you vouch for her?”
“Certainly.”
“If she’s going in, we have to search her,” said Jorge.
Colomba stuck her handgun back in her belt and got out. “Just try it, you dickhead.”
“If she has a gun, she can’t come in,” Santiago stated. “That’s a point I can’t meet you halfway on, Dante.”
“Your people are armed.”
“My people aren’t cops.”
Dante looked at Colomba. “I’m going to have to ask you to trust them, then.”
“No gun because I’m a cop?”
“Exactly.”
Moving slowly and holding it out by the tips of her fingers, Colomba pulled the gun out of her belt and slid it into Dante’s. “He’s not a cop, is he?”
Santiago laughed. “No, Dante’s not a cop.”
Jorge tried to object, but Santiago shut him up with a kick to the seat of his pants, and warned him not to make him lose his temper. “Cállate antes de que yo me enojo, ¿OK?”
Dante looked at the dark, narrow tunnel running beneath the building and felt his breath fail him. “Can’t we talk here? It looks a little tight in there.”
“Don’t worry. I know your tastes,” said Santiago. “We’ll go up.”
“Up?”
Santiago pointed to the roof. “That’s where I have my office.”
They started off toward the entrance. Dante let Colomba walk by his side. “I don’t feel particularly comfortable with this,” he said, pointing to the butt of the pistol.
“Shut up. And stick close to me. Right now you’re my walking holster.”
The elevators in the building were out of use, the cables long ago snapped. They climbed up a long metal fire escape that rose up, attached to the interior facade of the main building.
For Dante, even climbing that staircase was no laughing matter, because he froze with every creak and groan of the structure, and they were frequent. In the end, he closed his eyes and Colomba was forced to act as his seeing-eye dog during the ascent. Taking care not to be noticed, she studied the place. It was structured like a full-fledged fortress, with l
ookouts standing sentinel, almost all of them young men, boys, or even little kids, keeping an eye on every access point, either straddling the saddle of their moped or else standing at windows. There were also watchmen at each floor, on the landings of the fire escape. On one of those landings, she even noticed a junkie shooting up. The others ignored him, and Colomba did the same, though the urge to call for uniformed reinforcements was almost overpowering.
“Are we here?” Dante asked in a faint voice.
“Yes, you can open your eyes,” said Colomba. “And you have no idea what a lovely spectacle you missed on the way up.”
They’d reached the rooftop, the area that had once been designated as a shared common space where residents could sunbathe or hang out laundry to dry. Santiago and his gang had transformed it into an open-air rec room, dragging up there a half-dozen or so swaybacked sofas, as many plastic tables, and a refrigerator pirating electric power through a cable that disappeared down the interior stairwell. Next to one of the sofas stood a hookah that was more than a yard tall, with four mouthpieces made of corrugated rubber. The cement surface was littered with cigarette butts, empty bottles, and bird shit—all except for one perfectly clean corner. There, under a plastic canopy with a drape down the sides to keep off the rain, was a little electronic workshop, with two brand-new desktop computers, a thirty-inch screen, and a digital disc burner, all of them hooked up to a satellite dish antenna.
Noticing that Colomba was looking at it, Santiago patted the dish. “For our connection, we go directly via satellite. The ping is high, but no one can sniff the network.”
Colomba nodded, baffled by the contrast between Santiago’s general attitude and his unmistakable technical prowess.
Dante had recovered from the ascent. “What did you find that’s so interesting?” he asked Santiago.
Santiago pointed to his two fellow thugs. “Your friend Zardoz did good work. I’ve never seen so many sites burned down in a single night. But even he made a couple of mistakes. He used another site for his business. He burned that one down, too, but not all the way to the ground.”
“I found it,” said Jorge, lighting himself a joint. “He used it five months ago.”
“Are you talking about another darknet site?” asked Colomba, making everyone present shudder in horror.
“You watch too much TV, cop lady,” said the second gangster, who up until that moment had remained silent. On the back of his hands he had the word “MIRRORSHADES” tattooed, “MIRROR” on the one hand, “SHADES” on the other.
“Anyway, it was another e-commerce site. No PayPal or any of that shit, strictly Bitcoin,” Santiago added.
“Electronic cash,” said Colomba.
Everyone smirked again. “All right. What you said,” Jorge conceded.
“And what did he buy with Bitcoin five months ago?” Colomba asked in alarm. “More videos?”
“That’s the weird thing; he didn’t buy, he sold,” Jorge replied.
“And he sold it for un montón de dinero. Twenty thousand euros,” said Santiago. “He might have sold other stuff, but we can’t find out. And if he did . . . puff . . . it all disappeared.”
“What did he sell?” asked Dante.
“We can’t tell from the burned site. But we tracked back to the buyer. He’s a French maricón. I found his virtual hard drive. Just full of shit. Kids and animals, ¿lo entiendes?”
“You can’t leave him at large,” said Dante, his eyes hard as glass.
“That’s not my problem. It’s not our job.”
“I’ll pay you extra,” Dante said. “Screw him.”
Santiago looked over at his laconic fellow gangster. “We can do it. We can just send an anonymous email to the police in his country, with a link to his hard drive. After all, I removed the one he bought from Zardoz.”
“Do you have it here?” asked Colomba.
“That’s why we asked you to come,” said Santiago.
Dante ran his tongue over his dry lips. “How bad is it?”
“Not very. It’s just . . . extraño.”
“I can look at it if you don’t feel up to it,” Colomba suggested to Dante.
Dante shook his head. “No, it’s okay. We’ll watch it.”
Santiago sat down at the console while the other two stretched out on a sofa. When he moved from one machine to the other, even his physical demeanor changed. His motions became almost delicate. “Con mucho gusto.”
He typed rapidly, and the moving progress bar of the video appeared on the screen. At first he only saw a black screen seething with other, darker patches, then the image was tinged green: whoever was shooting the video had made use of a night-vision video camera. The lens focused from above on a boy, little more than a child, who was washing himself with a rag. The boy dipped the rag into a bucket brimming over with water that stood on a wooden bench; then he scrubbed his body. He scrubbed meticulously, running it over his genitals and between his butt cheeks, and perhaps that was the part that most excited the buyer. Hard to say. When he ran the rag over his neck, Colomba saw that he was keeping his eyes closed. He had an oval face without much of a chin and wavy black hair.
“The details of the room have been blanked out. We tried to clean it up, but there was no way,” said Santiago. “Zardoz did an excellent job.”
Colomba nodded, understanding now why it was possible only to see the area around the boy, like a faded circle.
“Every centimeter twice. Every centimeter,” murmured Dante. “Every centimeter twice.”
Colomba took her eyes off the screen and realized that Dante was imitating the boy’s every action as if in a trance, rubbing his good hand over his neck and face. “Every centimeter twice,” he said again. His eyes were glued to the screen.
“Turn that gadget off,” Colomba ordered Santiago, then dragged Dante over to the sofa and forced him to sit down. “Don’t you have anything here to drink?”
Dante was now immobile, but he was still staring into the void.
Santiago brought a bottle of whiskey and placed it against Dante’s lips. “Get this down.”
He gulped, coughed, then took another, more substantial gulp.
“Take it easy, with all the pharmaceuticals you’ve downed,” said Colomba. “How are you?”
Dante’s internal thermometer dropped a couple of notches, so he could speak. “It caught me off guard,” he murmured.
“The boy in the video? You’ve seen worse.”
“But this is the first time I’ve seen someone who was just like me.” He wiped away the tears brimming over in his eyes. “A prisoner.”
16
Santiago made a copy of the video and a number of color printouts. In exchange, Dante used his computer to transfer what struck Colomba as an outrageous sum of money to a foreign bank account. The sheer number of criminal offenses she was committing in order to investigate this case was proliferating from one day to the next, but she realized that by this point she didn’t much care. She’d never been much of a stickler about rules, but unlike many of her fellow cops, she’d never crossed the line between the unorthodox and the criminally actionable, however fine that line might be. Not out of fear of the consequences but rather out of respect for what the uniform that still hung in her armoire represented, a barrier between all the good that existed in the world and the chaos that threatened it and undermined it around the edges. As she gradually sank into the morass of this case, though, she realized that she cared less and less about the violations. She only wanted to lay her hands on the Father, while all the rest sank into the background. At that moment, after having watched the video, she felt herself filled with a white-hot rage that was only waiting for the chance to burst forth.
On the way back down, they retraced their steps without an escort; Santiago and his men had stayed behind to snort coke on the roof terrace. Before getting back in the car, Dante made her take a stroll into the field of brush. Even if no one came near them, much less tried to bother them
in any way, Colomba felt she was being watched from every lit window in the facade behind them.
Dante smoked a couple of cigarettes without speaking.
“You can’t be sure he’s a prisoner,” Colomba said once she thought he was capable of replying.
“The way he washed himself . . . It was the same way he taught me. The same movements. I still repeat them sometimes when I’m in the shower. Only water was a scarce commodity in the silo.”
“If the Father already has a prisoner, why would he kidnap the Maugeris’ son?”
“One is not enough. Nobody believed me when I told them, but there was another boy along with me. And now there’s another one with Luca.”
“Don’t call him by his name.”
Dante dismissed the objection with a luminous wave of the glowing cigarette ember. “Cut it out. For what he does, the Father needs money. Selling videos to dirty old men is the best way to get it. They won’t talk, and if they do, there’s no way to track back from them to him or the victim. The boy in the video could have been filmed anywhere in the world. We’re the only ones who even know he’s Italian.”
“We just think we know. But maybe the Father took a little trip overseas.”
“I already told you: he’s too old to change his ways. If we need proof, we have Luca’s kidnapping. If he wanted to go to Thailand, he’d have gone by now. And he’d have saved money by doing it.”
Colomba stopped to think. “He sold the video five months ago, just before he started looking into the Maugeris’ son.”
“Funds for the new operation,” Dante pointed out sadly.
Colomba sat down on a piece of cement the size of a bollard, waving away a buzzing insect. “It could be anyone.”
“Santiago’s video is five months old. How old do you think the boy in it could be?”
Colomba took another look at one of the pictures by the light of her cell phone. “Seven, maybe. But considering the conditions he’s living in, he could certainly be older.”
Colomba saw a red dot bobbing up and down in the darkness: Dante was nodding with the cigarette in his mouth. “I would agree with you. Somewhere around seven or eight. No older. If he was taken when he was six or so, he’d have been a prisoner for one or two years before this video was shot.”
Kill the Father Page 20