Kill the Father

by Sandrone Dazieri

  “I know that, too,” said the Father impatiently.

  “I realized that I’d have to be able to take care of myself if it ever did happen. I’d have to be able to open any lock if I wound up being imprisoned. I spent years studying locks.” He looked at the Father. “And studying padlocks, too,” he added.

  Dante grabbed the collar and hurled it to the floor. Then he lunged forward, overturning the table. The paper cutter tumbled onto the Father’s legs, making him shout in pain.

  Dante in his turn fell onto him and grabbed him by the throat, even though it was with his half-numb hands. “If you use the lock-up points on a padlock, then the possible combinations drop to eighty, did you know that? Eighty. It takes half an hour. I can do it blindfolded if I need to.” He clamped his hands around his throat with what little strength remained to him.

  The Father groped for him, trying to lay hands on him, but the gloves just slipped off Dante’s body.

  “No, you didn’t know that, did you? You don’t know everything. You’re just a little man behind a big mask. Like the Wizard of Oz you like so much.”

  The door swung open, and the man who had kidnapped Dante came running in, brandishing a billy club. Dante let go of the Father and grabbed the file folder. He pulled it open. Nothing inside but blank pages. He dropped it just before the truncheon came swinging down and caught him on the temple. He dropped to the floor. The club hit him in the ribs. Something creaked, and he fought to keep from losing consciousness.

  The Father’s voice arrived from an infinite distance. “Don’t kill him!” he shrieked. “And don’t let him pass out!”

  The man with the truncheon grabbed Dante and pulled him onto the bed. Pinning him to the mattress with one knee, he pulled out a handful of plastic zip ties, the kind riot police carry, the kind you can’t get off without cutting them. He used them to tie Dante’s wrists behind his back, then he bound his ankles together, too. They were so tight that they blocked his circulation.

  Last of all, he put the collar back on him. With his hands bound, Dante had no way to reach the padlock.

  The Father got laboriously to his feet. His legs hurt. “I don’t know whether to be proud of you or offended. Perhaps both.”

  “Liar,” Dante said under his breath. “Storyteller. Piece of shit. Coward.”

  “No. I told you the truth. I’ve never known who you were.”

  Dante snickered. “Thanks.”

  “For what?”

  “I’ve been obsessed with you my whole life. And I think I’ve even felt a certain love for you, in spite of what you’ve done to me. But now that I’ve seen you for what you are, you’ve broken the spell, you’ve freed me. Even if you keep me locked up in here, I’ll be freer than I’ve ever been before.”

  The Father quivered with rage. He turned toward the man with the billy club. “Go get the bulldozer,” he ordered.

  “Should I leave you here alone?” the man asked. It was the first time Dante had heard him speak.

  “He can’t do anything to me now.”

  The man left. All Dante could think was: Bulldozer? What are they going to do to me?

  “You understand why I can’t leave you alive, don’t you?” said the Father. “But I won’t just abandon you. I’ll be with you to the very end.” He pointed to the ceiling. “There’s a webcam up there. I’ll watch you. This, too, will have value.”

  “What value?”

  “I’ll be able to watch the reactions of a claustrophobic as he’s being buried alive. Something people imagine but that no scientist has ever watched in real time.”

  Dante tried to say something, but his throat had completely shut down. He writhed and jerked, trying to get loose from the plastic straps, but all he did was cut his flesh. His wrists began to bleed.

  “Farewell, Son,” said the Father as he opened the door.

  “I know who you are!” Dante shouted. “I know who you are! I just recognized you! You came to my hotel.”

  The Father stopped. “I so wanted to see you up close,” he admitted. He pulled off the ski mask. “I wanted to see my creation.”

  The sharp-hewn face of the pathologist Mario Tirelli appeared.

  34

  Colomba rinsed her face with the ice-cold water in the bar’s bathroom. She’d had a minor attack, earlier. For a moment she’d stopped breathing, and she’d slammed her fist into the cigarette counter, injuring her knuckle. She’d have kept slamming her fist, just for the pleasure of the pain, if Santini hadn’t stopped her. Santini. Who was doing the right thing, while she was no longer thinking rationally.

  Tirelli.

  She couldn’t believe it, but she knew it was true. She thought back to the time at the mountain meadows, when Tirelli had seemed not to realize that the murderer’s knife blows had been too accurate and clean to be the work of a jealous husband in a violent frenzy. Tirelli, who usually noticed if a comma was out of place.

  Because he knew it had been the German.

  And at the hospital, when she had asked him to check into Silver Compass. Secretly, because she trusted him

  And he decided to have me killed. He decided it at that moment.

  He’d known all about the investigation at the public health clinic, and he’d ordered Montanari killed, too. Colomba had asked him for the doctor’s name, him of all people. He must have had himself a good long laugh.

  And then there were the names he’d used. Tirelli liked old movies and TV shows. Zardoz . . . Colomba remembered that Leonard McCoy, the account name on the virtual credit card, was a doctor on an old TV series her mother used to watch when she was a kid. Star Trip? Star Trek? Yes, that was it. He’d made fools of them all, but especially her.

  She had been his mole, his number one confidential informant.

  Idiot. If anything happens to Dante, it’ll be your fault.

  She shut the faucet so forcefully that she bent the plastic pipe; then she dried her face and left the bathroom.

  Santini was waiting for her outside the door, and he walked with her out onto the sidewalk. Now there were other people in the bar: early risers, construction workers and factory workers for the most part.

  “Did you find the number?” Colomba asked.

  “Here you go,” Santini replied, handing her his cell phone with the number already entered.

  The sleepy voice of Anzelmo from the Ministry of Justice’s Special Internet Crimes Division answered on the fifth ring. When he realized that it was Colomba who was calling, he was speechless for a few seconds. What should he say to her? Congratulate her for having been cleared? Or tell her to go to hell because of the internal investigation he’d been put through on her account?

  Colomba beat him to it. “I need a favor.”

  “You’re joking, right? Do you know how much trouble you got me into—”

  “The Father’s taken Dante,” Colomba interrupted. “With you, there’s only three of us who know it. If word gets out, he’s dead.”

  “Why?”

  “Because the Father is Tirelli.”

  “The pathologist? Have you lost your mind?”

  Colomba gestured to Santini, who took the cell phone. “This is Deputy Chief Santini; we know each other.”

  “Yes, Deputy Chief, sir, but what on earth is going on?”

  “What Caselli just told you. Now, either you help us, or hang up and forget we ever spoke.”

  Colomba took back the phone. “I need you. Anyone else could be involved or just too close to Tirelli. You don’t have anything to do with it, I understood that at the public health clinic. Unless you’re an Oscar-worthy actor, but I’m willing to bet against that possibility.”

  “Caselli, you need to report him,” said Anzelmo, befuddled.

  Colomba ground her teeth. “Wake the hell up, Anzelmo! Do you really not understand why I can’t do that? Tirelli knows half the police of Italy; hundreds of colleagues have worked with him, all over the country. He’s a venerable institution. As soon as he gets word t
hat we’ve figured it out, he’ll dispose of Dante once and for all.”

  “But what can I do?”

  “Locate his cell phones. And find the phone records.”

  Anzelmo decided that he really was in deep shit this time. If he refused, he might turn out to be responsible for a man’s death, while if he accepted he ran the risk of another internal investigation and a suspension. But if he refused and then remained silent, he’d have the worst of both options, and he didn’t feel like being a rat spy. “Give me the numbers,” he sighed.

  Santini smoked a cigarette while they were waiting. Colomba stared into the empty air.

  “Would you ever have thought it?” asked Santini.

  “No. It still seems unreal to me.”

  “What are the chances that we’re wrong?”

  “Zero. Fuck. Not a single chance.”

  The cell phone rang ten minutes later. It was Anzelmo, with bad news. “Tirelli has had his phones turned off since yesterday. They read as being at his home. I tried calling him on his landline.”

  “Are you insane?”

  “I would have thought of something if he’d answered. I work with him. Or I used to . . . But he’s not picking up. If you ask me, he’s not home.”

  “He left his cell phones behind, but he’s not there,” said Colomba angrily. “He’s still with Dante.”

  “I sent you the phone records,” Anzelmo said. “Maybe there’s something useful in there. I’ll be waiting at home, all right?”

  Just then, the barista stuck his head in with a stack of paper. “These are for you.”

  Colomba grabbed the pages out of his hand and scanned them rapidly, sharing them with Santini. They were printouts of an Excel spreadsheet that contained, aside from the numbers of the phone calls made or received, the names of the individuals called and the location of the cell tower that the cell phone that had been called was connected to. They started reading from the bottom, then from the top, and in just minutes it was clear that they were completely at a loss. Tirelli had made only work calls to colleagues and friends they both knew, to restaurants, to his sister, who lived in Milan, to the taxi dispatch number, and not much more. Nothing that could be considered even remotely suspicious. Or maybe everything could be considered suspicious, but they had no way of checking it out in such a short space of time. For the past twenty-four hours, nothing. No calls. Colomba threw the stack of paper to the floor in a burst of fury.

  “Shit! We’re just wasting time!”

  “We can still find him,” said Santini. “But we have to stop trying to do it all ourselves. In ten minutes we can have half the cops in Rome helping us.”

  “And one of them will call Tirelli! I know it, and you know it.”

  Santini grabbed her arm. “It’s the only chance we have. I’ll do it even if you don’t agree to it, at this point.”

  She shook loose. But without the vehemence she might have used until recently.

  I’m no better than he is, she thought. It’s partly my fault that Dante’s risking his life. “It’s impossible that he hasn’t made at least one small mistake,” she murmured.

  “The only mistake he made is that he’s completely insane. That aside, if he’s been out there for all these years, there has to be a reason. He’s probably never made a compromising phone call in his life.”

  “Oh, no, he made them, all right,” said Colomba. “It was Tirelli who phoned all the children’s mothers, introducing himself as Dr. Zedda. The German did the dirty work, but his voice is too distinctive, maybe his vocal cords are damaged . . . He can only whisper.”

  “Could Tirelli have another phone?”

  “No, he was using Skype.”

  Santini and Colomba stared each other in the eyes, both thinking the same thing. “Shit!” they exclaimed in unison.

  Dante heard the sound of the bulldozer grow outside the camper until it became deafening; then the first crash knocked him to the floor, so that the collar almost hanged him. He pulled himself to his knees, his head against the foam rubber mattress that reeked of his acrid sweat. There was another crash, this time not as violent but more prolonged.

  They’re crushing me, he thought, crazed with terror. He’d tried to wear through the plastic ties by rubbing them against the headboard of the bunk bed, but it was too smooth and the plastic was too tough: all he’d managed to do was make his wrists bleed even more profusely. He tried again, shouting and spewing insults at the man who was watching him via the webcam. There was a part of him that wanted to fall silent, to avoid giving that man any further satisfaction, but that was the rational part of his mind, shoved aside by the animal howling to be set free.

  Another crash, but once again the camper remained intact. But it shifted on its wheels, creaking. The bulldozer was slowly shoving it.

  Where? Where? shouted the Beast in his mind.

  He understood when he felt the camper tilt toward the wall to which he was tethered. Dante rolled across the mattress and banged his head against the bunk bed above him, as the camper leaned over onto a forty-five degree angle, creaking and screeching. The table slid down the floor, the doors of the small cabinet on the opposite wall flew open, and a plastic trash bag tumbled out, ripping open as it hit the floor. A rat emerged from the garbage and started scampering wildly in circles, squeaking. The camper keeled over even farther, and Dante hit his forehead against the headboard; the resulting cut started streaming blood. The cabinet fell off the wall and burst apart at the seams; the plywood covering one of the small windows broke away. For an instant Dante saw the morning light through a film of blood and had a flash of irrational hope. I can get out that window if I can only reach it, he thought. I can save myself.

  Then the bulldozer gave another shove and the camper slid downward, landing after a drop that lasted just a fraction of a second. The light from the small window was blocked out by a shadow that shot up from below like a reverse guillotine; the floor returned to an almost horizontal position. They had tossed the camper into a pit, into utter darkness. With his last glimmer of lucidity, Dante just hoped he’d die in a hurry.

  The idea that had occurred to Colomba and Santini was very simple. In order to connect to Skype, the Father must necessarily be using a smartphone or a PC, and that fact reminded them that Tirelli had a laptop he always carried with him when he visited the scenes of various crimes. Both Colomba and Santini had seen it dozens of times. The laptop had a flash drive he used to connect to the Internet. Anzelmo identified it and tried to pin down its location: unfortunately, it, too, was turned off. That didn’t mean that the PC wasn’t connected to the Web, just that it was connected in some other way: an Ethernet cable, for instance, or else by Wi-Fi. Some computers had an internal GPS locator in case of theft, and it was possible to find out where they were if you knew the access code. But Anzelmo didn’t know it, and in any case he seriously doubted that Tirelli would have activated it.

  The cloud, he thought to himself. He connected to the server at the Institute of Forensic Medicine. Tirelli had a shared folder on that server to which he uploaded his expert reports, and it updated automatically whenever his computer was connected to the Internet. The folder had updated twenty minutes ago. Anzelmo, sitting at his computer in his underwear, high-fived himself and then tried to figure out where Tirelli, without even realizing it, had connected from.

  Colomba and Santini were back sitting in the car, ready to take off the minute they got an answer.

  “Even if we do find out where his PC is,” said Santini, “that doesn’t necessarily mean that Tirelli’s anywhere near it. And if he is, it might not mean Torre’s there, too.”

  “I know. We only have one shot. If we get this wrong, we’ll do what you say,” Colomba replied.

  “If we get it wrong, we might be too late. Are you sure you’re willing to take on that responsibility?”

  Colomba shook her head. “No.”

  “But you’re going to take it anyway.”

  “Yes
.”

  “I’m glad I’m not in your shoes,” said Santini.

  Two minutes later, the phone call came in from Anzelmo. Tirelli’s PC was connected to the Wi-Fi of a long-term parking area for campers and recreational vehicles.

  35

  Via Pontina was the regional highway that ran from the EUR section of Rome to the little beach town of Terracina. The long-term RV and camper parking facility was located on Via Pontina just outside of the Rome beltway. It was a small facility, just twelve acres, nearly all of it covered with sheet-metal canopies under which the vehicles were parked in long orderly rows. A sign at the front gate—which opened automatically, powered by an electric motor, once you punched in a code on a keypad—announced that due to construction work currently under way, vehicles could be dropped off and picked up only between ten in the morning and six in the evening, instead of the usual hours of seven to midnight. “We apologize for the inconvenience.” Perhaps that was why many of the parking spaces were empty, and it could also explain the appearance of general decrepitude. In the distance, in a fenced-off area invisible from the road, a bulldozer was moving piles of sand, pushing them into a large hole in the ground. Next to it, a cement mixer was turning, beside a stack of cement bags.

  At seven in the morning, on the stretch of road overlooking the vehicle storage facility, the truck traffic was already intense, while pedestrians were virtually nonexistent. The watchman, a fifty-year-old Romanian who spoke Italian poorly and in general didn’t talk much at all, was sitting in the guard’s booth next to the front gate. He was alternately watching the screen connected to the two video cameras trained on the road and the television set showing an old movie. The watchman’s name was Petru, but he was generally known as “Dumbo” on account of the cauliflower ears that were a legacy of a short and inglorious career as a boxer; his orders were to keep people out and turn a blind eye to whatever his boss was doing on the far side of the parking area. Illegal construction, maybe. Or maybe he was burying toxic waste. Something nasty, but Petru didn’t care. He was paid not to care.