The intercom buzzed. On the screen, Petru saw a man and a woman; he had a mustache, she had red hair. They buzzed again. Petru pushed his chair over to the window, opened it, and leaned out. “Closed!” he shouted.
The couple outside didn’t seem to hear. The man buzzed the intercom again. Petru sighed, got up, and left his booth, shivering in the cool morning air. In the booth he had a little electric heater that he kept turned up to maximum. “Till ten, we closed. There’s sign!” he said, walking over to the gate.
The woman reached her hands through the bars and slammed him toward her and against the gate, banging the nose he had broken in his last bout as a professional, when some guy ten years younger than him had flattened it and shoved it practically up onto his forehead. The man pulled out a pistol and stuck it in his face. In his other hand he held a cop badge and ID.
“Open up,” the woman ordered.
The Father was sitting in one of the abandoned trailers about thirty feet from the excavation. When a customer left a vehicle or trailer—usually relatively worthless—and vanished, the storage facility would clean it up and try to sell it. If it was too old and beat up, it was simply hauled to the edge of the parking area, to what was known as “the elephants’ graveyard.” The trailer the Father was sitting in was one of them, and it still bore the marks of the family it had belonged to: the walls were dotted with decals of children’s cartoon characters, and in one corner a wooden cradle sat gathering dust. The Father’s computer was wedged atop the kitchen sink, and on the screen streamed the images of Dante’s dying torments, beamed in through the Wi-Fi network.
The Father stood watching, in silence, without moving a muscle in spite of the ache in his legs. Observation was the essence of the work he did, the art he’d honed over decades of unbroken experience. When he imagined himself, he saw an unblinking eye, capable of reading every secret, whether kept by the living or the dead. In his other line of work, which he had built as a sort of house of reflecting mirrors, he used only a fraction of this skill of his, but it had already been enough to elevate him well above the average level of his competition, so careless and imprecise, so incapable of paying attention to details. His cover occupation gave him a sense of peace. The material he was working with was inert now, devoid of any twitches or rebellions. There was no battle of the wills when it was time to insert a thermometer into a cadaver’s rectum or extract a heart from a chest cavity. The struggle had already taken place elsewhere, and what was laid out on the autopsy table was the loser’s remains. By studying the causes of death, the Father was actually searching for traces of the life that had been abandoned there. The marks of habits, dietary preferences, hidden vices and sins. He sniffed at the scents, he caressed them bare-handed. When no one was watching, he kissed them to savor their tastes. But there was nothing that could truly chase away every last shadow, let him know everything. Each time he was forced to stitch up a corpse and relinquish it to the morgue, the Father felt as if he were being asked to give up a fascinating book he’d only just begun to read.
It wasn’t until he went back to his real life that his senses sharpened and he felt rejuvenated. Because the secrets of a live and reactive mind were infinitely greater than those of a slab of meat just starting to decompose. It was a constant clash with the uncertain and the unforeseen; there were no clearly marked roads. His subjects could rebel against him or love him, let themselves die or try to kill him. At first, that is—until he’d finally shaped them into their definitive form, the form he had decided upon.
Dante had told him he felt power in domination, but the Father rejected that accusation. He was simply an artist who loved his work, because at the highest levels, art and science both aspire to beauty. To the absolute.
He brightened the screen a little. The battery-powered lamp inside the camper continued to work, as did the webcam, but it wasn’t as powerful as the Father would have liked. Part of Dante’s face was in shadow now, and he couldn’t see his expression as clearly as he would have liked. All he could glimpse was his mouth, open in an attempt to gulp down the air that was beginning to be in short supply.
When the first load of sand was dumped onto the camper, Dante began battering the back of his head against the wall, maybe because he hoped to lose consciousness. But he’d soon run out of strength. He’d almost stopped moving entirely, aside from the spasms in his legs. Still, he was conscious, and his eyes were open. The Father was saddened that he couldn’t look into them.
He shifted his gaze from the screen to his camper’s window. About thirty feet away he saw the bulldozer, halted at the edge of the pit. The driver was staring at him, awaiting instructions. His name was Manolo; he’d been with the Father from the very beginning. Chosen by him personally, not the dreck that the German recruited. Even if he’d put away enough money to live very well, the Father had held on to the long-term parking facility he’d inherited from his parents.
With a sigh, the Father decided that the time had came to say farewell to the last vestiges of the most productive and astonishing period of his life. He caught Manolo’s attention and gestured for him to cover up the hole.
Santini handcuffed Petru to the desk. Colomba leaned toward him. “Where’s Tirelli?”
“Who?” asked Petru.
“Old man. Skinny. Long hair.”
“Not know,” Petru replied.
Just then, the sound of the bulldozer’s engine revving higher came from a distance. Instinctively, Petru turned to look in that direction.
“He’s there,” said Colomba, heading for the door.
Santini started after her, but that’s when Petru caught him off guard. Until that moment, the Romanian had put up no resistance, but now he rose to his full six foot three inches and ripped the desk apart. A two-foot chunk of wood dangled from the handcuff; Petru brought it down on Santini as he was still turning around. Santini managed to dodge fast enough to avoid the blow to his face, but the sharp chunk of wood drove into his thigh and nearly ran it through. He collapsed to the floor, clutching his leg and screaming in pain, unable to grab his weapon.
Petru had acted without thinking. He just wanted to run and get away. Now that he’d injured a policeman, all the more so. If they caught him this time, it wouldn’t be like before. He wouldn’t get out again. He’d die in prison, just as his brother had. He charged straight at Colomba, who was standing in front of the door, windmilling his enormous fists. She stepped lightly aside and bashed him hard in the face with the swivel chair Petru had sat in all night long. One of the wheeled legs caught him right in the Adam’s apple, and the Romanian fell to his knees, both hands clutching his throat, suddenly red from the struggle to breathe.
Colomba kicked him in the face. Petru raised his hands. Colomba kicked him again, wounding his eye, then rushed over to Santini and pulled the keys to the handcuffs out of his pocket. Santini had unfastened his belt and tied it above the wound, applying pressure to stop the blood, which was spilling out in copious amounts. In the meantime, he cursed in a low voice.
Colomba unlocked Petru’s other handcuff, and this time she fastened it to a metal pipe, jerking her prisoner’s arm until he slithered the proper distance. “If you try to get out of here, I swear I’ll kill you.”
Petru turned his swollen face downward and remained seated on the floor.
Colomba went over to Santini. “Are you going to die?” she asked.
“No, I don’t think so.”
“I’ll leave him with you. Call the others, okay?” She slid Santini’s handgun out of his holster and ran outside.
Santini breathed slowly, doing his best not to pass out.
Colomba headed straight toward the noise of the bulldozer that reverberated through the metal canopies. As she walked past the last row of parked vehicles, she found herself in an area that looked more like a junkyard than a long-term parking facility. There were dented carcasses of campers and rusted trailers, broken picnic tables, skeletal beach umbrellas, tangled knot
s of cables, charred firewood, broken camp chairs. At the edge of that area was a field where sparse yellowed grass grew among the scrub and the tree stumps. Back toward the fence that separated the parking area from an adjoining untilled field, she saw the bulldozer, which was dumping a bucketful of sand into what looked like a long ditch.
Into what looked like a grave.
Colomba leveled her arm and aimed her gun at the driver. “Halt!” she shouted. She was twenty-five feet away from him.
The driver took shelter on the floor of the bulldozer’s cab. Colomba watched as the door cautiously opened, letting the barrel of a weapon protrude. She lunged for the shelter of a camper spangled with tiny flowers, just seconds before the first burst of automatic fire. It was a Kalashnikov, a weapon that before now Colomba had only seen displayed on evidence tables as confiscated goods, never being aimed at her with intent to kill.
The bullets chopped away the corner of the camper as if it were made of paper, and Colomba huddled into a crouch. Under normal circumstances, she would have awaited the arrival of reinforcements, but she couldn’t, not without getting some news about Dante’s condition. She tried the camper’s door handle. The door opened easily.
She dived inside, hoping to find a better vantage point from which to aim at the man on the bulldozer and catch him off guard. She realized she’d made a mistake when she glimpsed a movement behind her out of the corner of her eye. She barely had time to whip around before he’d slammed his laptop into her face, twisting it two-handed like a baseball bat.
Colomba lost hold of her gun and felt something breaking in her mouth. Then she saw nothing, heard nothing; she stopped breathing, her lungs two empty sacks.
“I swear I didn’t want to do it, Colomba,” said Tirelli and lifted the computer again. “I’ve always been fond of you.”
Colomba jerked her head away just in time, and the computer shattered onto the floor. The pain of that movement restored control of her breathing. She reached out and grabbed Tirelli’s wrist; he’d lunged forward and lost his balance. The wrist was thin and frail. She yanked it toward her, and Tirelli fell upon her, as if into an embrace. He tried to struggle, but his strength was nothing compared to Colomba’s; she wrapped him in her grip, glaring at him with blood-sheened eyes.
“Where’s Dante?” she whispered. She was having difficulty moving her mouth; something crackled in her jaw like broken glass.
“It’s too late for him, Colomba.”
She tackled him onto the floor. He was as light as balsa wood. She climbed on top of him and let blood and saliva from her shattered lips drip onto him. “Where.”
“In the hole.”
Colomba got to her feet and retrieved her gun. She was seeing double. “Get up,” she muttered.
He obeyed. She got behind him and braced her left arm around his throat. “Walk,” she said.
“What are you trying to do?” asked Tirelli.
She squeezed, he fell silent. She forced him out the door, out into the open air. The man on the bulldozer saw them, and, as Colomba had hoped, he held his fire.
“Tell him to drop his weapon,” Colomba ordered. She’d have done it herself, but she couldn’t: the pain every time she uttered a word was terrible.
“He won’t do it. Survival comes first, Colomba.”
“Tell him.”
He obeyed.
The man on the bulldozer got to his feet, still holding the rifle, but no longer aiming it in their direction. “I’ll go away from here!” he shouted.
“No,” Colomba murmured.
“She says no, Manolo,” Tirelli shouted.
“I have to go away from here! I don’t want to have anything more to do with this bullshit.”
“No,” Colomba whispered again.
“Be reasonable, Colomba,” Tirelli said.
“No,” she said again.
The man on the bulldozer seemed to understand. He suddenly jerked the rifle up. Colomba did the same thing, over Tirelli’s shoulder. They both fired at almost the same instant. Half of Colomba’s bullets hit their target. Manolo fell backward off the bulldozer, tumbling onto the tread.
Two of Manolo’s shots passed through Tirelli’s chest and hit Colomba in her left side.
She felt as if she’d been run through with needles of ice. She let Tirelli drop but managed to stay on her feet. She looked down at him, sprawled on the ground, his chest ripped open at the sternum. The blood had pumped out in gushing spurts and was now forming a broad puddle beneath him, as he alternated between rapid panting and breathlessness.
The Father was dying, and he knew it. Someone would lift him up off the ground and cut him open on a metal autopsy table, and they’d study him the way he had done with hundreds of men and women, some of whose lives he had been responsible for ending.
But they wouldn’t understand, the Father thought with his last spark of life. They’d never understand who he’d been. No one would understand his dream.
The last thing the Father saw before dying was a pair of terrible green eyes.
36
Colomba staggered unsteadily away from the Father’s corpse. At a certain point along the seemingly endless path, she let her pistol drop, and she herself almost fell to the ground.
When she got to the edge of the pit, she realized that there was an entire camper buried in it. She could see only part of the crushed roof, and through it she could see a heap of sand. If Dante was in there, he was dead. He had to be.
Colomba jumped down onto the camper. It was less than a yard down, but the effort was almost enough to make her pass out.
The bullets actually served as hemostatic plugs, but she was still losing blood, and the pain in her face had become monstrous. She dropped down into the opening and landed on the pile of sand, sliding down the side until she reached the far end of the camper, the only part still clear of detritus. Grains of sand got into her throat and eyes. She coughed, and the pain was so bad that she wept. She wept in great racking sobs, entirely forgetting where she was until she could finally lift her head and saw a human figure illuminated by a dim green night light. All that emerged from the sand was part of his chest and his head.
Dante was tied up with a dog collar, and he was desperately stretching toward her, trying to make it across the sand but unable to move.
“CC,” he said in a voice that seemed to come from beyond the grave. “I knew you’d come.”
Colomba crawled toward him and hugged him tight, without speaking. When the first responders arrived, that’s how they found them.
EPILOGUE
It took two months before Colomba and Dante recovered from their injuries and their imprisonment. In those two months, the investigation into the Father, known by his everyday name of Mario Tirelli, continued, though without clearing up all the mysteries that the case had raised. Whoever his contacts and financers might have been, he hadn’t written their names down anywhere or confided them to a living soul. Any relations he might have had with the CIA or the Italian army were categorically denied, and the only thing worthy of note in that connection was that a retired Italian general blew out his brains with a collector’s piece, a pistol from the Second World War. According to his personnel files, he had been the commanding officer of the barracks where Bodini had served before leaving the service and becoming, for many years, the only guilty party in Dante’s kidnapping.
There were more suicides. The managing director of the foundation that had run Silver Compass turned on the gas in his apartment, killing himself after stabbing his wife to death. Murder-suicide, the investigators decided, even though there were newspapers that theorized murder-murder, plain and simple.
A few weeks later, a man turned himself in of his own accord at a carabinieri barracks, saying that it was he who had originally taken the photograph of the German’s little platoon and now he was afraid he might be killed. He had no evidence to support his claim. He said that he had been enrolled in the platoon by the German himself, that
he did not know the German’s real identity, and that the only part he had played was that of supplying food for the prisoners. The only contribution he offered to the investigators was an explanation of the shoes hung around the neck.
“It was our nickname, ‘Two Shoes,’ ” he told Spinelli during an interview. “Because we had our feet in two shoes, Italy and America, get it? And the rule was that if we did something that might attract the attention of the authorities, we just needed to tie together two shoes on the scene of whatever we had done, so whoever it concerned would get the message and cover us up.”
Whether what he was saying was the truth or merely the fantasies of one of the many lunatics involved in the case had not yet been established. Digging into his past, the investigators learned that he’d been dismissed from the armed services because he was a drug addict. The man said that was a decoy, a cover-up.
The German was still in jail, keeping his mouth closed, and not much progress had been made in figuring out who he actually was. No one came forward to identify him, aside from a number of people who had met him in any of his numerous fictional identities. Since not even his nationality was known, he was given books and periodicals in a number of different European languages, and he seemed to read and comprehend them with equal facility.
In the meantime, an American pharmaceutical company was accused of having supplied experimental medicines to Tirelli, and the CEO defended himself by claiming that the pharmaceuticals had been stolen and the theft had been properly reported to the authorities. He suspected a case of industrial espionage and was disconcerted to learn the deplorable uses to which they had been put. The fact that the founder of the company was one of the chemists who had taken part in Project Bluebird in the 1950s could only be viewed as an unfortunate coincidence.
Kill the Father Page 50