Kill the Father

by Sandrone Dazieri

  But maybe it wasn’t a home. Maybe it was the womb from which he’d been reborn after eleven years of gestation. Before then, nothingness.

  He walked over to the courtyard entrance and put his eye up to a crack in the large wooden door, which was chained shut with a padlock. Inside, he saw only junk and trash, more graffiti, and vines climbing the walls. To the left was the door to Bodini’s house, where he could still see the marks of the fire, black brushstrokes on the stones. To the right was what had been Bodini’s mother’s apartment, uninhabited after her death. That was where Bodini had killed himself, on the ground floor. From where he now stood, Dante couldn’t see the stables. He remembered the mooing that had come from outside the silo wall, the bleating of the calves.

  He walked around the outside wall of the farmhouse until he found himself standing on a cement platform cracked by humidity and the passing years, roughly the size of a soccer pitch. The silos had once stood there, his and the one that had housed his matrix, his twin. Both silos had been demolished fifteen years ago by a new mayor, sick of witnessing the pilgrimages of local youth, who came to tell each other horrible stories about the place. Stories about the ghost of the boy in the silo, a ghost that appeared on nights with a full moon if you uttered his name, a sort of Candyman of the lower Po Valley. When he’d heard that the silos had been leveled, Dante, who hadn’t gone back there since he’d left Cremona, spent a whole day trying to decipher his feelings. He’d felt violated, somehow, though he couldn’t say why.

  The platform still bore the marks of the silos’ circular bases, marks that were almost black against the gray of the cement. Dante went to what had been his silo, still feeling the weight of the walls around him. He saw his bed again, the bucket he’d used to defecate and urinate. He remembered exactly where everything had been. He squatted down where he’d used to read the fragments of text brought him by the Father, to study his lessons. He heard the sound of an engine and realized that a white panel van had pulled up next to the platform. Dante assumed it must be a local farmer, or else a man hired by the town government to keep away the horror tourists who still came at night in search of cheap but powerful thrills.

  He raised his good hand in greeting. “Don’t worry, I was just leaving,” he said.

  The man at the wheel didn’t move. By now it was almost dark, and Dante couldn’t see him behind the glass.

  It was that very quality of stillness that he started to find unsettling. He waved his hand again. “I’ll leave! I haven’t broken anything.”

  He got down off the platform, on the opposite side from the panel van; he meant to take the long way around, through the tall grass, and follow the path back to the road. He didn’t care if he got all muddy.

  The panel van’s horn honked briefly, and he thought that the man at the wheel had waved at him.

  Dante didn’t react until the horn honked again and the man repeated the gesture, unmistakably this time. The driver wanted him to come over. After a moment in which Dante dragged his muddy feet purposefully across the cement of the platform, he cautiously approached the car.

  When he saw who the man at the wheel was, Dante tried to run, but it was already too late.

  30

  At first Colomba wasn’t worried, or at least not very worried. Unable to get in touch with Dante because they had both ditched their cell phones when they first went on the run—a situation that Colomba now found tremendously frustrating—she waited for him to come back, going to check his room every ten minutes or so. As evening drew on, she called Minutillo, hoping in vain that Dante had at least left word with him. Finally she wrote a note and left it on the door of his room, telling him that she was going to eat dinner at the Osteria La Bissola with Roberta from LABANOF and explaining how to get there.

  She reached the restaurant at eight that evening. It stood next to a Romanesque church and featured a first-rate paella that was hardly in line with the local culinary tradition. But Colomba merely picked at her food, anxious as she was about Dante and the reason she had come there tonight. Which was to give the forensic anthropologist a sample of Valle’s DNA and tell her everything she’d discovered. She wished she could have informed Dante first, but that hadn’t been possible, and it made her feel guilty, as well as afraid that she’d be taken for crazy. Roberta, however, took the news well. After a moment’s bewilderment she told her she believed her and assured her that she’d give the sample to the team biologists and guarantee complete confidentiality. Or at least, until the results were available, whereupon she’d have to hand them over to the prosecuting magistrate.

  “Is there any chance that you’re wrong about Signor Valle, Colomba?” Roberta then asked her. They’d been on a first-name basis since Colomba had called to arrange to meet and Roberta had invited her to dinner.

  “Not a single chance,” Colomba replied. “He admitted it. And if you ask me, he’s been wanting to spill it all to someone for a long time now.”

  Roberta speared a piece of chicken with her fork and chewed it slowly. “I’ve worked on a lot of horrible cases in my career, as I have to guess you have in yours, but this goes well beyond. How is Signor Torre?”

  “Not well.”

  “I’d be surprised to hear he was. If you see him, tell him I’m very sorry to hear it.”

  Colomba smiled. “He prefers not to be pitied.”

  “But I don’t pity him,” Roberta said. “Quite the opposite. He has a very effective way of reasoning, and I find him quite attractive, even if he is skinny as a nail. On another topic, I think it’s only fair for you to know that the prosecuting magistrate is requesting authorization for a new examination of the bodies from the Paris bombing.”

  When she heard the Disaster mentioned, Colomba’s lungs clamped suddenly shut, as always. “Are they reopening the case?”

  “Spinelli is trying, but it’s not easy. From what I understand, aside from your testimony and that of Signor Torre, there is no objective evidence concerning the group that supposedly aided the German, either from the eighties or from now. The connections are all . . . shall we say . . theoretical. Do you think that the American intelligence agencies will cooperate?”

  “No,” Colomba replied gloomily. “Neither will the Italians. You saw for yourself the way that buffoon reacted during the meeting.”

  “That came as no surprise to me,” said Roberta. “That’s how they always are.”

  “Have you had dealings with them before?”

  “In the past I’ve been asked to analyze the bodies of suspected terrorists,” Roberta explained. “And I’ve never been able to get a speck of information out of them. Communications are always one way. After all, they are the secret services, aren’t they?”

  “Right. If there’s one thing they know how to do, it’s stonewall,” Colomba observed. “There are nineteen dead and ten kidnap victims, and that’s not counting the victims in Paris and the murders that the Father and the German committed in Rome in just the past few days. Still, everyone’s clamming up.”

  Roberta took a sip of her sangria. “Today I saw the cop who arrested you.”

  “Santini?” Colomba was stunned. “He’s in Cremona?”

  “Yes, I saw him check in to the hotel where I’m staying, the Ibis. I usually go back and forth from Milan, but tomorrow morning I have a very early meeting with the Forensic Squad, and I’d like to get a good night’s sleep.”

  “And what is he doing here?”

  “He didn’t tell me that.” Roberta flashed her a conspiratorial smile. “I think Spinelli is grilling him. She couldn’t get to De Angelis, but Santini doesn’t have the same kind of connections.”

  “For someone who spends all her time in the lab, you sure know a lot,” Colomba commented.

  “Actually, I don’t spend a lot of time in the lab when I’m here.” Roberta smiled. “I spend my days at court, meeting with local experts and prosecutors. And I have to tell you, I find that to be much more exhausting.”

  T
he proprietor came to their table to ask if there was anything else he could bring them; they ordered coffees and asked for the check.

  “How’s it going with the identification of the bodies?” Colomba inquired.

  Roberta shot a glance over at the neighboring table to make sure no one was eavesdropping while she talked about corpses; it was the kind of dinnertime conversation that could ruin someone else’s meal. “We’ve identified the names of missing persons who might have the same ages as the subjects whose remains we’ve recovered,” she finally said. “Now we’re going to try to contact the relatives and get DNA samples from them for comparison, even though I can’t say how many of the remains in the barrels are going to offer us any identifying details. By the way, I’ll need a sample from Signor Torre, in order to cross-reference our data.”

  Colomba nodded. “It would be nice to find out who he really is.”

  “Don’t get your hopes up. It’s been a long time. Just as it has for those poor souls at the bottom of the lake. If we manage to identify two or three, we can consider ourselves lucky.”

  “Aren’t you being a little conservative?”

  “At LABANOF we have almost a hundred nameless corpses in our coolers, and for most of them we have more than just a tooth that’s been marinating in sulfuric acid.” She smiled. “I have a few colleagues who might tell you that I’m just an incurable optimist.”

  When Colomba got back to the hotel at ten, she found a little knot of reporters and photographers waiting for her in the lobby: a rumor had circulated about where the two main characters behind the macabre discoveries in Lake Comello were staying. The flashes blinded her, but even more befuddling was the feeling that she was at the center of attention, something she wasn’t used to, something she didn’t like one bit. She refused to answer any questions, and instead hurried up the stairs. She found that the Post-it was gone from Dante’s door. She heaved a sigh of relief and knocked, but there was no answer.

  She went back downstairs, and a straggling photographer took pictures as she hurried over to the reception desk.

  The clerk on duty greeted her with an apologetic smile. “We tried to send them away, signora, but they keep getting back in.”

  “I’m not here about that,” she said brusquely. “My friend, Dante Torre. Can you tell me if he’s in his room, or has he gone out again?”

  The concierge checked on his computer screen. “I’m afraid he’s checked out.”

  At first, Colomba didn’t understand. “Excuse me?”

  “He paid his bill in full and left.”

  “And he didn’t leave a message for me?”

  “No.”

  Colomba shook her head. “I don’t believe it. That’s not like him.” However upset he might be, he’d never have just dumped her like that. “Who did he speak to?”

  “The manager. Shall I get her for you?”

  “Yes, thanks.”

  The concierge vanished into the rear, and after a while the manager called her name. She was a stern-looking woman, about forty.

  “Signora Caselli . . . is there some problem?”

  “Yes. Did you see Signor Torre leave? Did he seem to you to be”—she hesitated, searching for a word that didn’t exist—“normal?” she concluded, realizing that it was a word poorly suited to Dante.

  “I really couldn’t say. And anyway, our guests have a right to their privacy . . . try to understand.”

  “You know who I am, and you know who he is, right? And the reason we’re here in Cremona?” said Colomba.

  The manager sighed. “Yes, ma’am.”

  “So don’t talk to me about privacy. Did you or did you not see him?”

  “No, I didn’t. He settled up over the phone and gave me his credit card number. It was about nine this evening.”

  “And the things in his room?”

  “He gave instructions to have them sent to his address in Rome. He even paid extra for the service.”

  “No way,” said Colomba. Her heart was in her mouth, and she felt her chest constricting with anxiety. She forced herself to breathe normally.

  The manager stared at her with a worried look on her face. “Signora . . . I assure you that’s exactly what happened.”

  “And are you sure it was actually him on the phone?”

  The manager hesitated. “I think it was. We hadn’t actually ever spoken before.”

  Colomba galloped upstairs to her room and pulled out the folded sheet of paper that served as an address book in case of an emergency. She found Spinelli’s number but stopped just before dialing it. She’d have to tell her that just before leaving, Dante had fought with Valle, and the prosecuting magistrate was unlikely to share her concern; Dante wasn’t a minor, after all, and he wasn’t considered an endangered witness, because he’d already told what he knew and it hadn’t led to the identification of any culprit. And even if Spinelli agreed to send the carabinieri out in search of him, Colomba would have to sit in her hotel room and wait for news, without knowing whether they were out looking or not, much less what steps they were taking. And the Father would learn all about the search efforts, Colomba felt certain.

  She hung up the receiver of the room phone by her bed. She’d have to find another way, and right now only one possibility was taking shape in her head. I’m insane even to consider this, she thought. But it was an effort she’d have to make.

  She asked the receptionist for the address of the Hotel Ibis and discovered that it was just a twenty-minute walk away. It took only fifteen for her to get there, and she managed to get the room number by pretending she was expected.

  Santini opened the door in a tank top undershirt. He needed a shave, and he reeked of sweat. When Colomba told him what she wanted, he let out the first wholehearted laugh he’d had in quite a while. But then he let her in.

  Meanwhile, Dante was slowly regaining consciousness. The last thing he remembered was the panel van’s window rolling down, then darkness. The same darkness that now pressed in on him, a darkness that smacked of the taste of fabric and the smell of his own breath. Then someone pulled the hood off his head, and Dante saw where he was.

  He started screaming.

  31

  Santini listened to Colomba’s story, sitting on his single bed and polishing off the twenty-two-ounce “bomber” bottle of beer he’d bought at the hotel bar. The hotel room reeked of cigarettes, even though the CIS detective had left the window ajar. “Maybe your boyfriend really did go home,” he said in the end.

  Colomba shook her head, in irritation. “I don’t believe it.”

  “Because he didn’t say good-bye?”

  “If he really was so upset that he ran away and forgot his manners, he would have forgotten to pay for the room, too,” said Colomba, forcing herself to curb her temper. “He has an old school code of conduct, and I believe he would have paid for my room, seeing that he reserved for the two of us.”

  “You can’t be sure of that. People aren’t always predictable, especially when they’re under stress.”

  “I’ve seen him upset before, terribly upset, and I know what to expect. No, that was someone else calling, pretending to be him.”

  “The German is in prison. He was the dangerous one.”

  Colomba shook her head. “No, the Father is the dangerous one. And he’s still out there.”

  “Show me a single piece of evidence that he exists.”

  “All I know is that Dante believes in him and that he’s been right from the very beginning, from the Vivaro mountain meadows, from the disappearance of Luca Maugeri. And if you’d listened to him,” she added, making no secret of her anger, “you wouldn’t have come off looking like the complete asshole that you did.”

  Santini let himself sink back against his pillow. “You have a nice way of asking a favor, Caselli.”

  Colomba pulled over the only chair in the room, turned it around, and sat down in it, straddling it. “I’m not asking you a favor.”

  “Ah, n
o?”

  “I’m asking you to do the right thing.”

  Santini sighed in exasperation. “Don’t be ridiculous.”

  “But it is the right thing. And even if you don’t believe that, it’s better than sitting here drinking and crying over your troubles.”

  Santini closed his eyes. Of all things I could choose to do, why is it that lately I’ve always been choosing the stupidest option available to me? “Let me make a few phone calls, and let’s see what happens,” he said. He felt like laughing again.

  It took more than just a couple of phone calls, but finding Dante’s trail in a city as small as Cremona was easier than expected, in part because a couple of Santini’s subordinates, whom he treated like doormats, pitched in to help. After quickly marking trains, buses, and car rentals off the list, along with hospitals, the city morgue, and other hotels, they managed to track down the taxi driver who’d picked Dante up on the tree-lined boulevard. When they reached him by phone, the cabbie told them all about the farmhouse where he’d left him.

  Around midnight Colomba and Santini pulled up outside the farmhouse in Santini’s government car. They examined the place by flashlight before making their way around back to the cement platform.

  “Is this where they held him?” asked Santini.

  “Yes,” Colomba replied. “Though the silos are gone. But what did he come here for?”

  “A nostalgic outing.” Santini looked around: there wasn’t a light in the darkness other than theirs. “He’s not here. And without a cell phone he couldn’t have called another taxi. He must have left on foot.”

  Colomba waved for Santini to light up the surrounding area. “Or else someone picked him up. A car came through here recently,” she said, looking at the tire marks in the soft dirt.

  “A panel van,” Santini corrected her, and he knew what he was talking about. “But it might just have been a farmer from around here.”

  “Bring the light over here,” said Colomba, pointing to the cement of the platform.