Kill the Father

by Sandrone Dazieri

  She surfaced just a few yards from where she’d gone in, and Dante hurried toward her lamp, almost winding up in the water alongside of her.

  “CC! You’re back!”

  She pulled the regulator mouthpiece out and gulped fresh air, almost unable to speak from the pain in her teeth, though fortunately that subsided rapidly. “Yes, I am. You’re going to have to move the truck over to the other side.”

  Dante understood. “So you found them?” he whispered, almost incredulous.

  “Yes. They’re strange, but they’re going to be easier to hook up. Can you get the truck over there?”

  “Certainly, even if I have to push it the whole way.”

  “I’ll wait for you on the far shore.”

  Colomba swam back to the opposite shore of the lake and stopped where she guessed the wall began. She checked her wrist computer: she still had about fifteen minutes of air at sixty-five feet. She’d better not get the cables tangled up.

  The headlights emerged from the darkness, and she waved her arms so Dante would know where to stop and turn the truck around. There were fallen trees near the edge of the water; they’d been left to rot where they fell. Dante had a hard time getting around them, but he finally maneuvered the truck into the proper position, with the rear tires close to the water’s edge. He pulled the hand brake, jumped out, lowered the tailgate, and climbed up onto the deck.

  Colomba watched him work for a few minutes by flashlight; then she heard the electric winch motor start up and the cable start to unspool. Dante let it reel out for a few more yards; then he jumped down, grabbed the two hooks at the end of the cable, and ran through the mud to hand them to Colomba. “What now?” he asked.

  “You keep unspooling the cable until you get to the end. It should be longer than I need, but that doesn’t matter. I’ll guide it through the water and do my best not to get it snagged or tangled.”

  “And once you’ve hooked it?”

  “I’ll start tugging on it and I’ll just hope you get the message,” said Colomba. “Keep in mind that it’ll take me a few minutes to get the winch drum hooked up. If you feel tugs on the cable before it’s all paid out, that just means that I’m getting it untangled. If I can’t get it done, I’ll surface, but I hope I won’t have to because I don’t have much air left.”

  “All right.”

  Colomba put the mouthpiece back in, turned around, and walked toward the center of the lake, struggling a little to haul the end of the cable behind her. Carrying it, she’d reach the bottom much faster, and she’d have to compensate frantically unless she wanted her ears to explode.

  Dante climbed onto the deck and started the winch unspooling again. He watched as Colomba’s headlamp vanished into the water and thought to himself that he’d have given anything to be able to accompany her and help make sure everything went off without a hitch in this most delicate phase of the job. A job that, now that he thought about it, had actually begun twenty-five years ago, the day he had escaped from the silo and first told his story, hoping he’d be believed.

  The cable continued to pay out until the motor halted automatically as it reached the last yard. Four minutes had gone by, and Dante waited, ticking off the seconds in his head. After two more minutes he thought he felt a sort of vibration, and he lowered his ear to the cable to make sure. The vibration repeated itself, rhythmically. Dante understood that this was the signal he’d been waiting for: Colomba had hooked up the winch drum. He went back to the winch controls, but before he could start reeling the cable in he heard a rustling noise next to the truck and the sound of boots sinking into the mud. He whirled around and stared, breathless. Standing by the water, his terrible eyes gleaming in the moonlight, the Father was watching him.

  22

  Colomba banged her hammer on the cable hooked to the drum, then started jerking at the drum itself again, though it was clear that she was barely budging it. The cable still wasn’t moving, and Colomba cursed herself for failing to ask Valle’s henchman to buy a couple of underwater walkie-talkies. Unfortunately she had never done any underwater salvage work, and that had occurred to her only after she’d made the first dive. She checked her computer and saw that she had only six minutes of air left. She’d have to go up.

  She stuck the hammer back into her belt and inflated the BCD. Halfway through her ascent, she began to feel the pain in her teeth again; it lasted through the entire decompression phase. When she got to the surface, she immediately yanked the mouthpiece out, but she froze before she could yell “Why don’t you get moving, you blockhead?” Dante was on his knees in the mud, hands over his face, moaning. Standing behind him was a large, powerful-looking man who was aiming a pistol with an absurdly long barrel at the back of his head. It had a silencer, Colomba realized. When the man shifted his gaze in her direction, Colomba saw his eyes glitter like ice in the light of her headlamp. She recognized him.

  “Turn it off,” the man Dante called the Father and Pinna called the German told her. His voice sounded like a calm whisper, yet it had carried all the yards of distance that separated them. “Turn it off this second, or I’ll shoot him in the head.”

  “I’m turning it off right now,” Colomba panted. “Don’t hurt him.” She reached her right hand up and pressed the switch. The lakeshore plunged into darkness, and she understood that she was in plain view, with the moonlight reflecting off the lake water behind her, and that the German was probably taking aim and was about to shoot her. Her lungs clamped shut instantly, as the darkness seemed to pulsate with even darker shapes. Colomba could no longer distinguish real shapes from those her mind created. She stepped back instinctively and lost her balance, falling backward, dragged by the weight of the oxygen tank. Her head echoed from the blow, with a blinding stab of pain. Her lungs opened up again, and she gulped down air and water, coughing desperately.

  “Get up on your feet,” the German said. “Up on your feet, or I’ll shoot him.”

  “I’m doing . . . doing it,” Colomba stammered. “I fell over.”

  “I don’t care. You have two seconds to get up. Move it.”

  Colomba slipped twice on the slimy lake bed, then finally managed to get up on all fours, coughing as she did so. “I’m taking . . . let me take the tank off, otherwise I can’t do it,” she implored him.

  “Get busy.”

  She did as she’d said and slipped off the BCD with all the accompanying harness. Lighter now, she managed to get back onto her feet. Her eyes were a little better adapted to the darkness now, and she could see the German’s gun still aimed at Dante’s head. Dante remained helpless, hands over his face, weeping with a prolonged, heartbreaking moan. “Don’t hurt him,” Colomba said again. “You’ve hurt him enough already.”

  “Still, he’s alive, isn’t he?”

  “No thanks to you.”

  The German laughed quietly, and it was almost worse than hearing him whisper. “Do you really think it’s just chance? Come on. Walk toward me.”

  “And when I get there?”

  “Get moving. We’ve done enough talking.”

  Colomba realized that the moment she was out of the water he was going to shoot her. The German couldn’t run the risk of her corpse falling into the lake and drifting out into open water or sinking. He needed to make her disappear. With the truck and Dante.

  Colomba took one step and then another. The water was now down to her knees. “Tell me what you want,” she said.

  “Just for you to get closer.” In the darkness, Colomba saw him move the hand holding the pistol, raising it in her direction. “Come toward me. Just another step,” he said.

  Now the gun barrel was lined up with her face. Colomba thought about diving into the water and trying to get away, but she knew she wasn’t fast enough. And that this could be a quick, merciful way to die. One shot, and it would be over. She wouldn’t feel a thing. And most important, she wouldn’t face the horror of watching Dante die before her eyes. She was no heroine, and God only kn
ew how much fear she’d experienced in her lifetime. But then and there, at the sight of Dante’s desperate weeping, she’d have done anything to console him, anything to save his life. Even if only for a second, the time it would take the German to kill her.

  She lifted her leg to take the step that would bring her once and for all onto dry land. Her flipper emerged from the water, bringing with it silt and withered reeds. Colomba noticed everything in that moment, every slightest detail, as if it were all etched in glass. The rustling of the trees, the lapping of the lake water, and Dante’s piteous sobbing and the way it suddenly stopped. She saw his head lift and turn toward the man he’d called the Father.

  “You’re not him, you son of a bitch! You’re not him!” he shouted. And he lunged up onto him, grabbing the hand that held the gun.

  23

  The German pulled the trigger. Colomba heard the puff of the silencer, and the bullet ricochet off the water close by her. But she’d already moved. She ran as fast as was possible with flippers on her feet and threw herself at the German, who had turned and punched Dante, laying him flat on his back, and was now raising the pistol again and turning it in her direction.

  Colomba didn’t make the mistake of going for the arm with the gun. Instead she lunged straight at the German’s chest and rammed her forehead into his face. It felt as if she’d just slammed into a tree trunk. The German didn’t even stagger, just jammed his knee into her belly and hit her in the temple with his pistol grip. If Colomba’s head hadn’t been covered by her wet suit hood, she would have been neutralized by the violent blow, but the grip just slid over the rubber. She rolled across the grass and heard the ground next to her puff twice as the German squeezed the trigger. In the meantime, Dante had recovered sufficiently to sink his teeth into the man’s calf, deep enough to draw blood. This time the German sighed with pain; he turned the pistol toward Dante but didn’t pull the trigger. As she was crawling over to him, Colomba slid her dive hammer out of the utility belt. Still on her knees, she slammed it down with all her might, tearing a hole in the toe of the German’s left boot, shattering the bone within. Then she swiftly raised it again and brought it down on the wrist of the arm with the gun. The German dropped his pistol. Colomba didn’t bother to go after the gun but just kept hammering the German himself, with blows to the body, the face, the knees, while Dante grabbed him from behind and tried to shove him to the ground. Together they managed to topple him. Dante held his legs while Colomba pinned his face into the wet lakeshore mud, forcing him to breathe dirt. Shaking with adrenaline and rage, she raised the hammer to bring it down on the back of his head, catching herself only at the last second, altering trajectory just enough to smash into his cheek, which lacerated and sprayed out a handful of teeth and a spurt of blood. The German shouted with a mouth full of mud, struggling like a wounded bear, but Colomba kept his face crushed down with both hands until he stopped moving.

  Then she turned him over and cleaned off his face so he could breathe again. She turned her headlamp back on and lit up his badly dented face. She was appalled to see him up close: he was an old man with white hair and a wrinkled nose.

  Dante crawled away and covered his face again. Colomba bent over him, without taking her eyes off the German. “How do you feel?”

  “I feel like I’m dying.”

  Colomba put an arm around his shoulder. “No, you’re not dying. You were great.”

  “I can’t do this, CC. It’s too much. It’s just too much.”

  Colomba squeezed him. “Dante. I still need you. Please don’t abandon me now.”

  Dante panted feverishly for a few more seconds. “What do you need me to do?”

  “Help me tie him up. Before he regains consciousness. Otherwise I’ll have to hit him again, and this time I’d kill him.”

  Dante stared at her, his eyes filled with tears. “Well, would that be a bad thing?”

  “Yes. It would.”

  Dante dried his eyes, and Colomba helped him get back onto his feet. “Are you okay?” she asked.

  “I’ve never felt so bad in my life.”

  “You’re a lucky man. Go see if there’s anything in the truck we can tie him up with.”

  Dante limped away, and Colomba felt herself all over to see if anything was broken. It seemed as though nothing was, even though every bone in her body hurt, but she was so overjoyed to have the man of Dante’s nightmares right there in front of her, finally rendered helpless, that it almost didn’t matter. Still keeping an eye on the German, she bent over to search for the gun he’d dropped. She found it stuck in the mud, barrel first. It was a Glock 19 with a plastic handle. Colomba unscrewed the silencer, because she didn’t know how to aim with one, then pointed it at her prisoner, who was just starting to blink his eyes.

  “Who are you?” she asked him.

  The man said nothing. He just lay there, breathing hoarsely, his face streaming blood and turned up to the sky.

  Dante came back with two rolls of packing tape. “This could work,” he said in a slightly steadier voice.

  “Tape his feet first, then his hands,” said Colomba.

  “Okay.”

  “But don’t ever get between me and my line of fire, understood?”

  “Got it.”

  Dante walked over to the German and started wrapping the tape around his ankles. From close up, he realized that Colomba’s hammer had driven all the way through the foot and that there were bone fragments glistening in the blood. He turned his head away and stifled the urge to vomit, wondering how on earth the man could keep from crying out in pain.

  “Why did you say he’s not the Father?” Colomba asked.

  “Because he’s not. He doesn’t move like him, he doesn’t walk like him. When I saw him again at the hospital, I missed it. But here I can see.”

  Colomba felt her head start spinning. “Are you trying to tell me that we’ve been chasing the wrong man? It wasn’t him at the silo?”

  “Yes, it was him.”

  “I don’t follow you.”

  Once he was done with the ankles, Dante grabbed the German’s hands and crossed them over his chest. The man put up no resistance and just kept looking at the sky. Dante started binding his hands, too, fearful that he might make some sudden movement.

  Realizing his misgivings, Colomba stepped closer and pressed the pistol barrel against the prisoner’s forehead. “Be a good boy, eh?” she said.

  He remained impassive.

  “I told you, he’s not the Father. He is the man I saw that night, but he’s not the man who came in with a ski mask over his head and dark glasses to give me lessons. I think he might be shorter, and he’s certainly more powerfully built. When I saw him through the crack in the silo wall, I associated him with the Father, but he was the only human being whose face I’d seen in eleven years of imprisonment. I was just wrong.” When he was done binding the man’s wrists, he stood up to admire his work. “He didn’t take care of prisoners like me. Now I understand that he had another job.”

  Colomba stared at that expressionless face. “The killer. So all that whimpering you did was just put on for show?”

  “Let’s say it was, from a certain point onward anyway. As long as he thought I was completely helpless, he wasn’t going to waste a lot of time on me.” He turned to look at Colomba. “What are we going to do with him now?”

  “We aren’t going to do anything with him. We need to finish hauling up the drum.”

  Dante nodded. “Can we do it even if you don’t guide the cable?”

  “We have no alternative. My tank is out of oxygen, and in any case I’m in no shape to dive again. We just have to pray it doesn’t get snagged.”

  “All right, then, I’ll start the winch.”

  Dante started to climb back aboard the truck, but the night’s darkness was suddenly broken by the beams of flashlights. Someone shouted, and the eardrum-shattering noise of a police siren split the air.

  The German had wasted too much
of their time; the police were already there.

  24

  Colomba and Dante, shivering from the cold and covered with mud and blood, were searched, and their hands were cuffed behind them. Meanwhile, the cops from the police headquarters of Cremona and Milan swarmed in from the dirt road that ran through the trees, and squad cars were arranged in a semicircle so their headlights could be used to illuminate the scene.

  Once the area was safely locked down, Santini ordered his men to give first aid to the bound man who lay on the grass and to call an ambulance.

  Colomba thought about how close they’d come to recovering the barrel. Ten minutes, maybe less. After everything they’d done, they’d been screwed just as they were about to cross the finish line. It was the burden of defeat, more than the shame of being arrested, that made her drop her eyes. Dante, absorbed in his thoughts, couldn’t get his mind off the idea that he was going to be tossed into a dark cell where he’d never see the sky again.

  Santini slouched over to them with his hands in his pockets, without ever having pulled his government-issue revolver. He seemed almost as tired as Colomba and Dante. “Who’s the half-dead guy, Caselli?”

  Colomba looked up at him and pretended to be unruffled. “They call him the German. He works for the Father.”

  “That’s enough of this Father crap . . . cut it out, Caselli. No one’s going to believe that you’re as crazy as your friend.”