The dog laid its ears flat and barked twice; then it lunged at Colomba, aiming directly at her throat. She instinctively raised her left arm, and the Doberman locked onto it: she felt the teeth pierce the fabric and sink into her flesh. Instead of trying to break her arm free, she shoved it in deeper, bracing the dog’s jaws open and preventing it from clamping down with all of its strength. She fell to her knees and found herself eye to eye with the beast for an instant: eyes that stared at her viciously. Eyes that seemed to be saying to her I know what you did, transforming the dog into the incarnation of revenge. Colomba was terrified, but still she went on pushing, and the teeth sank deeper. A clamp was ravaging her arm and her blood was dripping to the floor, mixed with drool. To keep the dog from breaking free and biting another vulnerable part of her body, she wrapped her other arm around its head and pulled him close to her. The dog tried to get away, but its paws scratched on the marble, unable to get purchase. She pressed harder. It was like trying to maneuver a rubber tube under high pressure, a coiled steel spring, but she could sense the dog losing impetus, being partially suffocated by the flesh it was trying to gulp down.
With an effort that seemed to make her head explode, Colomba turned the dog on its side and started pounding its ribs with her elbow, where she guessed its heart must be. The dog tried to twist free, but she grabbed it tighter and continued pounding. With her fifth, desperate blow, something broke, though Colomba couldn’t say whether it was her elbow or one of the animal’s ribs. The Doberman’s eyes had grown larger, and its fury had given way to fear and suffering. Colomba went on pounding it with her elbow until she felt it sinking in, no longer encountering resistance. “Die, die!” she moaned. “Please, just die!”
The dog regurgitated and defecated, and Colomba held it tight until its paws stopped trembling; then she fell back on her ass, cradling her wounded arm. The animal’s eyes were glassy, and a pool of blood was spreading under its body where the shattered ribs had perforated its internal organs.
Colomba slipped twice in the morass of blood and shit before she could get to her feet. Her arm was bleeding and throbbing, in time with the ache in her head, and her ribs burned where Ferrari had kicked her. She went into the bathroom and used a towel to stop the bleeding. In spite of Dante’s jacket, the teeth had sunk all the way to the bone, and Colomba wept from the pain when she poured hydrogen peroxide onto the wound. Half-blinded by tears, she cleaned the wound as best she could, then wrapped a clean towel around her arm to stop the hemorrhaging. She was leaving blood and prints everywhere, she thought sadly. What a mess. What kind of mess am I making?
When they questioned her, she’d have a hard time justifying any of what she was doing, but right now it didn’t seem to matter. That was a development that still lay too far in the future; right now, just making it through, from one hour to the next, struck her as a titanic undertaking. She staggered back into the hallway and picked up her phone from the edge of a puddle of blood, though whether it was her blood or the dog’s she couldn’t say. She looked down at the carcass, afraid it might leap to its feet snarling again and plunge its fangs back into her. This time she’d be incapable of defending herself; this time she’d just be eaten alive.
On the screen, above the worried face of Dante silently moving his lips, was a list of texts and missed calls. Another dozen. She deleted them, too, and put in her earbud. “I was just about to come upstairs,” said Dante in relief.
“There was a burglar alarm,” Colomba informed him in a faint voice. “One with four legs and a tail.”
“I saw. Poor creature.”
“Poor creature, my ass, if you don’t mind. Instead of going all PETA on me, help me out, because I’m having a hard time thinking straight.”
“Turn on all the lights, and let me take a look.”
Colomba did as he told her, moving through the apartment with her cell phone held out in front of her the way an exorcist holds a cross. Ferrari’s apartment measured some 2,200 square feet, with marble and parquet floors; the furniture was classic, all mahogany and glass. Three bedrooms, though only one seemed to be in use, a large living room with a silver-framed giant-screen television set, leather sofas, and a small workout room that had been turned into a storeroom.
Colomba rummaged through the closets and dresser drawers, her head and arm throbbing with pain that got worse by the minute. Her vision blurred a number of times, and each time it did she had to stop and splash her face with cold water. The face that gazed back at her from the mirror looked like a ghost’s.
She found nothing compromising, nothing that could be even distantly connected to children or violence, with the exception of the military photographs hanging just about everywhere and a collection of old muskets and sabers from the times of Garibaldi and the First World War, on prominent display in the living room.
“What do you think?” asked Colomba.
“That this apartment was already furnished when he bought or rented it. The old furniture clashes sharply with his taste in clothing and the rest of the furniture. The red refrigerator, the television set straight out of Star Trek . . . Plenty of money but not so much taste. And then . . . let me see the bookshelf . . .”
Colomba took him over to the one piece of furniture that contained printed paper of any kind, a console table right outside the kitchen. They were all history books, many of them about fascism.
“Now the bed, if you don’t mind.”
Accustomed by now to Dante’s brusque manners, Colomba obeyed promptly. The king-sized bed was beautifully made and tucked in.
“Did you notice? Bed made. How many men do you know who’d make a bed so neatly?” asked Dante.
“Not even many women, actually, but maybe the maid came.”
“No. His breakfast coffee mug is still in the sink. He made his own bed. And you know which men instinctively make the bed every morning, perfectly?”
“Obsessive-compulsives like you,” Colomba retorted.
“And anyone who’s spent years in an institution where you’re punished if you leave things a mess.”
“Like a prison?”
“No, either boarding school or the army. Did you see the photo at the entrance, where Ferrari is making a parachute jump?” Dante asked.
“Yes. A civilian flight.”
“But that suggests retired military to me.”
“It’s a possibility,” Colomba replied.
Rummaging around, Colomba found Ferrari’s cell phone, which she pocketed, a handful of bills, and an official-looking letter, still unopened, from the Blackmountain Fund of Italy. In it was an account statement; she showed it to Dante. “Does this mean anything to you?”
“A little. Your friend owned an annuity fund with Blackmountain that made monthly payouts,” Dante explained.
“Which means . . .”
“. . . that every month he received something like six thousand euros, after taxes. That means a substantial chunk of cash invested in stock. My father set up something of the sort for me, but I burned through the principal almost immediately.”
“So Ferrari lived on a fixed income, some kind of trust?” Colomba asked.
“Apparently. Have you found any other pictures of him besides the one by the front door?”
“A couple in the kitchen. Of him with the dog.”
“Nothing old? Nothing that might refer to his past?” Dante queried.
Colomba sat down on the king-sized bed, ruining its impeccable crease. Its yielding softness lured her like a siren’s song, and for a few seconds she sat there, fast asleep with her eyes wide open.
Dante’s voice brought her back. “Colomba, are you still there?”
“Yes, sorry . . . what were you saying?”
“That if he really was nostalgic for his time in the army, he ought to have something to remind him of it.”
“Maybe he wasn’t in the army; maybe he’s just an obsessive who never served a day. Like those survivalist maniacs.”
“Survivalists stay fit. His home gym looks neglected,” Dante pointed out.
“Or else he kept his most cherished memorabilia somewhere else.”
“Can you go through the drawers again?”
“Dante, in a little while they’ll be here looking for me. I took his cell phone, and that might prove useful, but I don’t want them to find me here.”
“Please, just try once more.”
Colomba got up with some effort as a voice inside her screamed for her to stop and let herself fall onto that irresistibly inviting bed. A voice that didn’t care that it was a dead man’s bed. She started the routine all over again, checking the bottoms of the drawers and underneath the armoires, turning all the picture frames and examining the backs. “Nothing. And now I really need to go. I’m just about out of time, and that’s not all I’m running out of.”
“Okay,” said Dante in disappointment.
Colomba went back into the bedroom to get bills and receipts, but as she was leaving Dante cried out.
“Go back . . . what a fool I am . . .”
“What did you see?” asked Colomba, who was losing her voice again.
“The photograph on the wall, the one in the silver frame . . .”
“So?”
“It’s an old picture that seems to have been cut out of a military magazine, not a high-quality print like the others. But he hung it across from the bed, where he could always see it.”
“The picture could have a special meaning for him . . .”
“Maybe it does, but check it anyway.”
“I already did,” Colomba objected.
“This is the last thing I’m going to ask you.”
Colomba went back and grabbed the frame. She’d turned it around once already and found it sealed shut in the back. Looking at it against the light, she’d seen that it contained only a photograph of a tank from the Second World War. Despite her state of extreme exhaustion, Colomba had to agree with Dante: that magazine clipping, raggedly cut, moreover, was out of place with everything else. The voice inside her that wanted to go to sleep went on berating her, but Colomba told it: Soon, and then removed the picture frame from the wall and once again held it up against the light. “There’s nothing else,” she confirmed, but even as she said it, she realized she was wrong: the center of the picture was opaque because there was something blocking the passage of light. She discovered that a thin piece of cardboard had been glued to the back of the page from the magazine; between the piece of thin cardboard and the photo there was a thin square about four inches on a side. You’re slipping, sweetheart, whispered the voice that wanted her to get some sleep. I told you you needed some rest.
Colomba wrapped the frame in a corner of the bedcover and smashed it against the edge of the nightstand. The glass shattered; she extracted the print and scratched the cardboard backing away: an old Polaroid slid onto the bedside rug.
Colomba picked it up. It depicted five men in camouflage military uniforms, three of them sitting on the deck of a flatbed truck and two standing. One of the seated men was unquestionably Ferrari, thirty years younger, and next to him was a guy who looked remarkably like the identikit of the Father that Dante had helped produce. All of them had combat boots laced together and hanging around their necks, as if that were some inside joke for them, and they were flashing victory signs.
“You were right, Dante,” Colomba whispered. “You won’t believe what I’m about to . . .”
She suddenly broke off, breathless. She’d just recognized one of the standing men. She’d recognized his smile, though much younger, and his glance. A sinkhole gaped open in her mind.
“What did you find?” asked Dante, who stood leaning against the florist’s stand and scrutinizing the screen of his iPhone, trying to decipher the shadows. Colomba said nothing, and Dante realized that she was walking with the phone pointing at her feet. He saw strips of the floor, an alternating pattern of light and dark as she walked down the stairs muttering prayers and curses. He saw her emerge from the front door of the building, uncertain of her footing, looking as if she’d seen a ghost, and he ran toward her, shuddering at the sight of her ravaged arm dripping with blood. She was panting, avoiding his eyes.
“CC . . . what is it? What did you see?” he asked, in a worried voice.
Colomba, without speaking, handed him the picture and sat down at the edge of the sidewalk, as if she had no idea where she was. Dante took the picture from her and saw the face of the man he called the Father. For a few seconds he was incapable of tearing his eyes away from the eyes of the man in the picture, eyes that seemed to see him, penetrating the acetate coating. Camouflage uniform aside, he was identical to the man he’d seen that night in 1989, walking toward him with a knife in his hand. For a moment Dante went back in time, and once again he was a boy who’d grown up in an environment ill suited to human life. Then Colomba’s hand weakly seized his and brought him to.
“Not him,” she murmured. “Not him.” And she shut her eyes.
Dante reviewed the other faces. He recognized Ferrari from having watched him through the window of the hospital room. In this picture the man was practically a kid, but still identifiable. All the others, though, were unknown faces . . . or were they?
He realized that the man standing next to Ferrari looked somehow familiar, and maybe it was him that Colomba was referring to. He imagined that face older, with a receding hairline, fatter, and when he put a graying beard on the chin, he felt a shiver, and a number of missing puzzle pieces suddenly slotted into place. The man smiling lazily into the camera lens was Emilio Bellomo, the murderer whose picture had been all over the newspapers after he’d blown up the restaurant in Paris.
9
A little girl, three or four years old, dressed in nothing but a pair of panties, was staring at her while sucking on an enormous spiral lollipop. “¿Estás despierta?” she asked.
“What did you say?” Colomba asked, bewildered.
The little girl said nothing and ran out of the room shouting “¡Mamá! ¡La policía está despierta!”
La policía? Colomba wondered, still unable to think straight. She was in an unfamiliar bed in an unfamiliar room that reeked of fried food; through the walls she could hear voices shouting in Spanish and Italian and the very loud audio of a shoot ’em up video game.
Colomba felt rested but weak. Her headache was gone, but the bite on her left arm still hurt, though not as much as before. The wound had been dressed with a clean gauze bandage held in place by adhesive tape; it itched a little, while her right elbow had a purplish bruise that extended all the way to her forearm. As she moved, she felt a stab of pain where Ferrari had kicked her, but nothing seemed to be broken. She vaguely remembered collapsing onto the sidewalk, and even more vaguely tossing and turning in a fevered sleep, waking up for short intervals in darkness and light, as someone gave her something to drink and helped her piss into a plastic jar. A dark-skinned woman, that much she knew, but the image was as blurry as a forgotten dream.
She tried to stand up, but as soon as she put her feet on the floor, she felt the bed spin under her; she remained seated, staring around her. The room was small and cluttered with large clothing boxes still covered with cellophane, poorly lit by a window with a broken blind, looking out onto a sunset sky. On the wall across from her were an enormous crucifix and a plastic bust of the Madonna, covered with artificial flowers. Dazed though she was, Colomba was quite certain she’d never seen the place before in her life.
Through the door the little girl had run out of came a woman Colomba judged to be about forty, with thick curly hair and a pair of enormous earrings that jangled at every step. She, too, was Hispanic, and she wore a T-shirt that left her belly button uncovered and a pair of skin-tight jeans. The woman sat down next to her and took her hand. “¿A dónde vas?” she asked. “You’re not supposed to get up!”
From up close, Colomba realized that forty was about fifteen years too old: the heavy makeup and th
e creased, weary face had deceived her. She gently pulled her hand away. “Where am I?” she asked.
“You’re in my home. My name is Ayelén.”
“Did you take care of me?” Colomba pointed to the hospital gown dotted with tiny hearts that she was wearing. “Did you give me this?”
“Me and my mother. And my sisters. You slept a long time.”
“How long?”
“Three days.”
Colomba shut her eyes. “Fuck,” she murmured under her breath. Her colleagues must already have written her off as a missing person. “Where are my things?”
Intimidated by Colomba’s curt tone, Ayelén lost her smile and recoiled. “No sé,” she replied.
“Do you at least know where Dante is? He’s the one who brought me here.”
“¿El gringo loco?”
“That’s the one.”
“He’s with my brother. En el techo.”
“Sorry, didn’t get that last part.”
“On the roof.”
Colomba connected the Spanish word for roof—techo—with the Italian word—tetto—and understood. “Is your brother called Santiago, by any chance?” she asked grimly.
“Yes, ma’am.”
Propelled by her fury, Colomba got to her feet, overriding all objections, and strode quickly out of the room. She found herself first in a hallway dominated by a large poster of Che Guevara, and then in a small living room where Jorge Pérez was playing with a PlayStation 4 hooked up to a television set that Colomba thought she must have seen somewhere before. A couple of kids in shorts and tank tops were watching, enthralled, and rooting eagerly.
Jorge smiled mockingly as she walked through the door: “Well here she is, la puta.”
Kill the Father Page 31