Kill the Father

by Sandrone Dazieri

  “Never seen her,” replied Santiago with a smart-ass grin.

  Santini gave the order to scour the cellars and knock down all the walls if necessary, while Santiago sagged, dead weight, in the hands of the officers who were dragging him away. Before being shoved into the packed armored car that awaited, he spared a thought for that gringo loco who wanted to save the children and the cop lady with the eyes that could drill holes in your flesh. “Mucha suerte y adelante, compinches,” he whispered. For what felt like the first time in his life, he was rooting for someone other than himself.

  Meanwhile, Colomba and Dante were slithering through the tunnel. Actually, Colomba was slithering and pushing Dante, who moved jerkily, his eyes closed, often slipping and sprawling face-first into the mud. After ten minutes or so, the dirt walls gave way to cement, and Colomba realized that they’d entered the sewer main. From there they were able to begin crawling on all fours, as the air grew steadily cleaner and cooler. After a curve, however, they found themselves face-to-face with a high cement curb that almost entirely shut off the tunnel. In the space that remained open between the curb and the roof there was a piece of sheet metal that seemed solid.

  A surge of terror swept over Colomba as she wondered whether Santiago had intentionally deceived her. Sealed off ahead and behind, they’d be trapped like rats. An anxiety attack clenched at her lungs, and she saw the shadows shudder in the flashlight’s beam. “Fucking hell, not now,” she muttered and pushed on the metal plate as hard as she could, bracing against the wall. The metal plate tumbled out with a tremendous crash, and the tunnel was dimly illuminated by a pale light that poured in from above. Colomba helped Dante into the opening she had created, then she pushed the bag of clothes through, and finally she wriggled through herself. She fell into the drainage ditch, a wide dry V-shaped cement culvert, its top open to the sky, partly concealed by roots and branches.

  She switched off the flashlight to keep from being seen, and once her eyes got used to the darkness, she saw beyond the treetops the outlines of the buildings they’d just escaped: the helicopter was turning in the sky overhead like an angry horsefly.

  She leaned over Dante, sprawled facedown on a pile of leaves; he was breathing loudly through his mouth. He was covered in dust and dirt, and the elevator grease had left long black smears along his face and arms. She shook him and saw that his eyes were regaining a little life.

  “We’re out,” she told him. “We did it.”

  For an instant Dante remained inert; then the fresh air and the difference in the light began to have an effect on him. “Out where?” he asked weakly.

  “I’ll explain later. Do you feel strong enough to stand up?”

  Dante didn’t move, so she grabbed him by the shoulders and pulled him to his feet, then pushed him along the ditch, which continued through the trees, blocked here and there by branches and rocks or else badly cracked, with shallow puddles to wade through. The park was deserted at that hour, and Colomba saw what looked like a man-made lake cordoned off with barriers for maintenance work under way.

  They approached the hurricane fence that separated the park from the road. There were no squad cars awaiting them, and Colomba heaved a sigh of relief, even as she marveled at how quickly she had come to consider enemies those who had once been her boon companions.

  “Stay here,” she told Dante; then she hid behind a bush and changed clothes, taking off the hospital gown that by now had turned into a tattered rag and putting on the clothing that Santiago’s sister had given her: a pair of jeans, a T-shirt with a patently counterfeit Giorgio Armani logo, and a sweater. She felt better, though she’d have given a quart of blood for a shower; she was caked with filth to the very tips of her hair.

  When she got back to Dante, he was in the same position she’d left him in, his eyes following the helicopter, which was now moving in widening circles.

  Someone knows we left, thought Colomba, and before long they’d be setting up roadblocks, if they had enough squad cars to do so. “Can you climb over the fence, do you think?” she asked Dante.

  He nodded, but as it turned out there was no need, because the hurricane fence was cut at more than one point and they got through it without difficulty.

  A few yards farther on, at the bend in the road next to the park entrance, they found a gray Opel Corsa with the keys in the ignition. There was no gift ribbon on the hood, no handwritten note, but still Colomba understood that this was a token of Santiago’s generosity. The last one for a good long time, she told herself. Given his priors, he could expect to spend some time in prison, at least until she’d proven her innocence.

  She helped Dante lie down on the backseat and then got behind the wheel herself. As she sat there, the gravity of her situation began to collapse atop her like a leaden avalanche, crushing her very bones. She was fooling herself, she thought; she’d never be able to prove her innocence. The children would remain in the Father’s hands, and he’d continue torturing them until he was too old to go on. She felt like sobbing, and her hands clenched into fists on the steering wheel until she regained some semblance of self-control. She couldn’t allow herself to be weak. No one would help her to her feet if she fell.

  As if he could hear her thoughts, Dante muttered from the backseat, “When do we leave?”

  She quickly wiped away the tears with her sleeve, concealing the fact to keep him from realizing she’d been crying. “Right now,” she answered in a broken voice and started the engine.

  By the time Santini and Infanti found the tunnel entrance behind the rack of shelves, Dante and Colomba were long gone.

  14

  Dante and Colomba’s trip was long and full of obstacles. They couldn’t take the superhighway or the high-speed bypasses because they were monitored by video cameras and patrol cars, so Colomba took the slower state road to Via Aurelia, which led north from Rome, frequently and unhesitatingly pulling off it to even slower county roads the minute she caught so much as a whiff of a roadblock or a checkpoint. At two in the morning, when the traffic was too thin to offer even the slightest cover, they parked on a dirt road behind a line of trees and waited for sunrise, dozing off for brief intervals, both too tense to really get any sleep. When they talked, it was about the Father or the children he had taken in those years, what he might have done to them and why, constantly rehearsing the same hypotheses.

  Dante had recovered somewhat, but he was still grim-faced and locked in his thoughts, tense in his condition of hunted fugitive, in a car that reeked of sweat and sewer. He needed a shower and a hot espresso, a bed and someplace safe. And he still couldn’t manage to remain in solid touch with reality. From time to time it eluded him, like sand slipping through his fingers.

  They set off again at dawn, sorely tested by exhaustion and the cold, taking a road where they’d encounter less traffic and fewer watchful eyes and where it would be harder to identify them. But they knew that in any case it was a crapshoot: all that was required was a local constable with an eye for faces to put an end to their time on the run; for that matter, a nosy pedestrian might do the trick.

  They filled the tank at a gas station too old to have video cameras, and in the bathroom Colomba dyed her hair, emerging with her head wrapped in a plastic bag. She rinsed off at another equally antiquated gas station about sixty miles down the road, and by that time her scalp itched so furiously she would gladly have cut her own head off just to make it stop. But at least the dye had taken, and now her hair really was mahogany red: with the zebra-stripe sunglasses she bought at a cigarette shop and her garishly colorful clothing, she didn’t look much like the photograph that the CIS had distributed widely. Dante, on the other hand, shaved his head bald with an electric razor and bought a suit of clothing too big for him at a market stand in a small town they drove through. In those clothes he looked like a refugee, even skinnier and more miserable than before, but as long as he kept his bad hand in his pocket—in their rush to escape he’d lost his special glove�
��no one could ever have associated him with the onetime boy in the silo whose face was pictured on the front page of all the newspapers. They bought some food at an out-of-the-way bar, chosen because its owner carried himself in a way that indicated he had no taste for sticking his nose into others’ business. She counted up their money and tried to reckon just how much farther they could go without having to raise more cash.

  Before leaving Rome, they’d used Dante’s card to withdraw all the money they could, but now they couldn’t use the card again without leading their pursuers straight to them. Unless they found the help they were hoping for when they got to Cremona, they’d be facing serious problems just getting food to eat. Colomba would, at least, because Dante’s appetite had diminished even more than usual. Since the start of the trip, he’d eaten only a couple of apples and a stalk of celery, and Colomba looked on with concern at the pale shadow of starvation that had crept over his face.

  At eleven in the morning they finally crossed the line into Emilia-Romagna. As they drew closer to their destination, Dante became even more nervous and insecure, talking at breakneck speed about trivial topics and chewing his nails, something that Colomba had never before seen him do. She tried to soothe him by asking him about the good memories he had of his native city; she was surprised to discover that Dante didn’t have any. He remembered little or nothing of his life before the kidnapping, and when he’d tried to reconstruct it, he’d found that his early childhood had gone up in smoke.

  “When my mother killed herself,” Dante said, lying with the seat back fully reclined and the wind from the car window buffeting his face, “my father got tremendously drunk and set fire to the house, though it’s still unclear whether it was on purpose or by accident. He wound up in prison for the first time, and the house was saved, but almost nothing was left of the family possessions. And in particular, nothing of mine. The only surviving photographs are the ones in the case file in the district attorney’s office, the ones you’ve already seen.”

  Even after the silo, there wasn’t much that Dante could tell her about Cremona, for better or worse. He’d stayed there for only two years, taking his tests and graduating from middle school, as his state of mind grew steadily worse. In the end, his father had sent him to a psychiatric clinic.

  “In Switzerland, too: how unoriginal.” Dante straightened his seat and lit a cigarette. “Don’t think it was a prison camp; it cost too much for that, and my father blew through a sizable chunk of his settlement to send me there. More than anything else, it was a controlled environment, with a constant drizzle of pharmaceuticals and mandatory psychotherapy sessions of every description, I don’t know how many times a day. I guess these days we’d call it rehab.”

  “How long were you there?”

  “Four years.”

  “Fuck.”

  “After the first year or so, they let me travel. At first with a chaperone; after that alone, on organized tours. If I acted crazy or got sick, my permission was revoked. I was always under supervision, you see, so I was let out and sent back on a constant, rotating basis. But after four years I finally succeeded in getting the family court to recognize that I was in full possession of my faculties, and after that, it was so long, suckers.”

  “And that’s when you did all the luxury travel you’ve told me about?”

  “Exactly. Though not as much as I would have liked. Airplanes are off limits for me, and there are places you just can’t get to overland or by sea. But since I returned to Italy, I’ve never once set foot in Cremona.”

  “Not even once?”

  “The thought alone was enough to trigger a crisis. The same is true now, though after what I’ve been through in the past few days, I doubt I could get any worse.”

  “How long has it been since you’ve seen your father?”

  “We ate dinner together last year. On neutral territory, in Florence. He complained the whole time about his kidney stones. An unforgettable evening out.”

  “Maybe we should try to come up with an alternative solution.”

  “There is none. It’s hard to hide in Cremona unless someone’s helping you. And he’s the only person I know around there who’s willing to help me.”

  They arrived at four in the afternoon, crossing the steel bridge over the Po River, leaving Emilia-Romagna and entering Lombardy. Beneath them rushed the waters of the river, almost in flood, and two scullers pulling their craft upstream. At the first roundabout, where they were greeted by an abstract metal depiction of a violin, Dante asked Colomba to take a road that ran down toward the river and then pointed the way along the riverbank. On their right flowed the river Po; on the left were the gates of the various bathing facilities and swim clubs. It was a clear day but cold and damp; there were very few strollers and bicyclists about, and nearly all of them were elderly.

  They stopped in front of a low red building with palm trees in the courtyard and a large open patio with a light blue kiosk. The sign read: FRIENDS OF THE RIVER. The patio was deserted, but behind the glass there were signs of life.

  “Here we are,” said Dante. “This is the club where my birth father plays checkers every afternoon.”

  Colomba turned off the engine. Dante crammed the Mickey Mouse baseball cap he’d bought down on his head and stuck his bad hand into his pocket.

  “Are you sure you’re going to be able to go in?” asked Colomba.

  Dante stopped with his good hand on the car door. “I’ve been bracing myself spiritually for the past two hours. And just look, it’s got plenty of windows.” But his tone of voice wasn’t relaxed.

  “You go in on your own. I’ll keep a low profile out here—the last thing we need is for someone to recognize me. If you start having problems, get outside quick and we’ll try again some other time.”

  Dante nodded sadly. “All right,” he said and then stepped out of the car and slowly headed over to the building, breathing calmly and pretending it was nothing but a fake facade that opened onto an open space, like on a Hollywood film set. Come on, he told himself, you’ve been through a basement. You’ve been down an elevator shaft. After those things, this ought to be a breeze. But he couldn’t talk himself into it; he felt weighed down and fragile. When he reached the steps, he stopped and lit a cigarette.

  Colomba watched Dante’s movements with her heart in her mouth. Seeing him walk very slowly down the middle of the street made her fear for his safety. She practically expected to see the Father jump out from behind a wall at any moment and take him away for good. But that of course didn’t happen. Dante finished the cigarette and then dodged into the club.

  Colomba waited patiently for a few minutes, then less patiently for two more. From where she was, she couldn’t see the inside of the room. If Dante was in trouble or if someone had called 911, the only way she’d know would be when the flashing lights appeared in the distance. Getting out and taking a look, on the other hand, would expose her to the risk of being recognized. The two alternatives battled it out in her head until she impulsively threw the car door open and strode, head down, to the club’s plate-glass window.

  She shielded her eyes with both hands and peered in. It was an unpretentious place, decorated in a maritime theme with fake fish and netting hanging on the walls, with the inevitable photographs of second-rank VIPs. A dozen or so people were scattered around the room playing cards or checkers, and not one was under sixty. Tilting her head, Colomba finally spotted Dante, seated at a card table talking with a wiry old man with a woolen cap on his head and glasses that clumsily concealed his hearing aid. Colomba guessed that the old man was Dante’s birth father and wondered why Dante was staying inside with him instead of bringing him out immediately and introducing her.

  Behind Dante’s shoulders, a card player looked up and waved hello when he saw her peering through the glass. Colomba moved away immediately, leaning against a pole on the patio. Beyond the railing, the waters of the Po ran swirling. The river looked treacherous, full of whirlpoo
ls and hidden currents, capable of sucking you under and never spitting you out again. Just like the mess we’ve wound up in, she thought bitterly. A pickup truck stopped right in front of her, blocking her view of the river. An enormous old man got out; Colomba guessed he must weigh about four hundred fifty pounds. He was dragging himself on two canes, moving slowly. Colomba lowered her head to keep him from seeing her face, but she thought she’d detected a glint of interest in the fat man’s porcine eyes, and instead of climbing the stairs he made his laborious way over to her.

  He squared off in front of her, leaning his whole weight on his canes, which looked as if they were about to snap. From up close, he looked even bigger, his nose disfigured by a purplish birthmark. “Haven’t I seen your face somewhere before?” he asked in a rheumy baritone.

  Colomba forced herself to smile. “No. I doubt it. I’m not from here.”

  “I didn’t say you were from here, I just said I’d seen your face before.”

  This time Colomba looked him hard in the eyes. “Could you leave me alone, please?”

  The man seemed unfazed. Instead he smiled fiercely and stuck a forefinger in her face the size of a salami. “You’re the policewoman!” he exclaimed. “The one from the bombing. They ran your picture on TV.”

  “You’re wrong.”

  “I’m never wrong. What are you doing here?”

  Colomba considered punching him and taking to her heels. But Dante was still inside, and she couldn’t leave him here. She decided to do the only thing possible: she dodged around the fat man and hurried into the club.

  Dante spotted her and immediately leapt to his feet. “What’s happening?” he asked.

  “Some guy recognized me. We’ve got to get out of here right away.” Then she leaned closer to the old man, who was staring at her, wide-eyed. “I’m very sorry. Dante will get in touch with you later. Please don’t tell anyone we were here.”