Kill the Angel

by Sandrone Dazieri

  ° ° °

  “Giltine?” asked Colomba, her mouth dry.

  “Giltine,” said Andreas. “I don’t know what you two saw while you were high, but she was definitely worse.”

  “Did you get a look at her face?” Dante asked anxiously.

  “She wore a mask. A tight-fitting rubber mask. Like the ones they put on burn victims, but the mouth was open, too. Her arms were bandages. Otherwise, she was an average-sized woman.”

  “Was she burnt in the fire at Absynthe?” Colomba pressed him.

  “I wondered the same thing. But only a couple of weeks had passed, and if she’d had such extensive burns, she wouldn’t have been able to get around the way she did. And she wouldn’t have been able to move the way she did.”

  When he’d found himself face-to-face with her, Andreas had tried to react, bolting toward the desk drawer where he kept his Mace, but the bandaged woman had gotten there before him, though Andreas never could figure out how she’d done it. It had seemed to him like a magician’s trick: you blink, and suddenly, the magician’s assistant is on the other end of the stage holding a bouquet of roses. Only Giltine had a hunting knife in her hand, the Rambo model with the saw blade, and she spun it through her fingers at lightning speed.

  “She told me that if I took another step, she’d kill me, then she explained what I was going to have to do if I wanted to stay alive.”

  “Forget about telling your story,” said Colomba. “Why didn’t you delete the piece from your blog?”

  “She didn’t want me to. She said that someone might notice and suspect she’d been behind it.”

  “Someone like who?”

  “She didn’t say. Maybe she’s just paranoid.”

  Dante and Colomba exchanged a glance, and both thought of the mysterious enemy Giltine seemed to fear so much.

  “Then she told me to keep an eye out. If anyone showed up and started asking questions, I was supposed to inform her.”

  “Can you get in touch with her?” asked Colomba.

  “Yes.”

  “How?”

  “By email. But if you think you can use that to track her down, trust me, it’s impossible. It’s an email account that belongs to someone who runs a fishing webpage under a false identity.”

  “You’ve done some investigating.”

  “Very cautiously. And I stopped right away.”

  “And what does she pay you for acting as her lookout?” asked Dante.

  “Don’t you think that being allowed to go on living is sufficient pay?”

  “Not in the long term, not for someone like you.”

  Andreas laughed and spat blood. “If you give me a cigarette, I just might tell you.”

  Dante stuck one in the man’s mouth and lit it for him. “You know that you’re running a risk, right?”

  “You know how much I don’t care, right?” he said mockingly, then went on. “After the Wall fell, a sizable number of the Stasi’s archives vanished. The names of informers and officers, wiretaps, and compromising material on those who were spied on. Giltine managed to get her hands on it, I don’t know how.”

  He told them that she’d put a USB flash drive in his computer and let him take a quick look. He’d managed to memorize a couple of names. “They were authentic, I checked on them later. I made a little money with them.” He shrugged. “I’d be given all the archival material as a reward if I did her a favor at the right time.”

  “And the favor was us.”

  “So it would seem. Unfortunately, it went sideways, and I’ll never see the rest of it.”

  “What else do you know about Giltine?” asked Colomba.

  “That she’s very handy with a knife and with drugs. The LSD is from her.” Andreas stretched, making the bed creak. “I’ve told you more or less all I know. Now it seems to me that it’s time for you to take off these handcuffs and let me get a good long sleep.”

  “Do you think we’d just let you go like that?” asked Colomba, astounded.

  “Why not? Giltine wanted me to kill you, but I failed. What do you think she’s going to do to me the next time she comes to see me?” Andreas winked at Colomba. “We’re on the same side, kids. I can’t wait for you to wipe that slut off the face of the earth.”

  14

  The gondolier had transported tourists of all sorts in his watercraft, including the ones who gave him an extra tip to look the other way while they had sex in the sheltering darkness. He sorted them into three categories: the enthusiasts, who laughed and shouted at the drop of a hat, usually middle-aged Americans; the ones who took a bunch of selfies and seemed to have no idea where they even were; and the ones who seemed to have all the facts of Venetian history at their fingertips and never shut up—this category included a vast number of Germans. But all of them, without exception, shut their mouths for a moment and looked up when they came face-to-face with the magnificence of the Molino Stucky or the church of Sant’Eufemia, or else were struck dumb when the Giudecca Canal widened to such an extent that the far bank vanished into the fog. The canal became even wider beyond the route usually taken by the gondolas, a quarter mile from the Island of San Giorgio, practically a saltwater lake. It’s no accident that it was the entry point used by cruise ships to approach the city: that was like watching a whale swim in a bathtub. The gondolier was convinced that sooner or later, those powerful sea monsters were going to make the whole city sink under the waves. And then he’d like to see them, the Venetians who insisted there was no danger.

  The woman who sat quietly on the edge of the gondola’s seat, her leather boots firmly planted on the flat bottom of the boat, was definitely a category all to herself. She was somewhere between thirty and forty years old, heavily made up, and with a scarf tied over her hair. She didn’t look at the sun that had risen during the crossing, she didn’t take pictures, and she didn’t talk. He had told her all about the Feast of the Redeemer and the bridge of boats that crossed the lagoon every third Sunday in July, but in response, all he’d gotten was a glint of her mirrored lenses when the woman had turned toward him, like a bird curious about some new species of worm. Then she’d gone back to looking out over the water, shaking her head every now and then as if there were some unheard noise that bothered her. Maybe she was suffering from seasickness.

  Actually, Giltine was thinking about Berlin and about the man she’d sent to take care of the problem there. She wondered if he’d succeeded. Of all the fish she was angling for, some were worth more than others. They were the sharks, who had no need for extortion or conditioning to make them act. They needed only to be stimulated. She had a tankful ready to use, and she occasionally tossed them choice morsels to keep them fond of her.

  The gondola went past the Bridge of Sighs with its off-kilter line of navigation, and Giltine studied the fireboat moored at the Fondamenta della Croce. At the end of the facing calle, she noticed the damage from the previous night’s fire, and the wind brought her the smell of the charred house.

  “I knew the tòso,” the gondolier said suddenly.

  Giltine turned around to look aft. “Tòso?”

  “It means young man, and to me they’re all young men if they’re under fifty. He killed himself by turning the gas on, and he did the horrible thing he did. He was a colleague, he was a water cabbie, just like me.”

  “Why did he do it?”

  “No one knows. But people are saying”—the gondolier let the phrase hang in the air, hoping in vain that the woman might show a glimmer of interest, but she just sat there, staring at him expressionlessly—“that he was a faggot. If faggots stay in the closet too long, they lose their minds.”

  Giltine remained impassive, but the voices from the water murmured their approval.

  That night, her avatars had put in overtime in the LGBT community, telling the sad tale of a gay man incapable of attaining self-acceptance, who engaged in sex that made him ashamed. It was still early for suicide to become a working hypothesis for the investi
gators digging into the explosion, but it was already an “accredited” rumor, and it would become even more credible once they determined that Daria had been murdered by a knife blow to the throat, delivered by the very same knife that Pennelli had been holding. The idea of a murder-suicide would gain ground, detouring investigations that pointed in other directions. Before anyone could guess what had really happened, weeks would go by, and by then it would no longer be of any importance.

  Giltine gave the gondolier a generous tip—she’d learned her lesson—and then went back to her rented apartment, changed her bandages, and checked the inbox dedicated to Andreas, the one where her avatar had first received the information that Dante and Colomba had arrived in Berlin. There were no new messages. And nothing on the sites of the agencies, either. Maybe it was just early. Or maybe her shark had failed her.

  Giltine summoned the information she had about Dante to the screen again. He’d been the one to trigger a sense of alarm in her, with that almost childish expression and those eyes that seemed to have stared into the same horrors through which she had passed. She had studied him in several videos that showed him leaving the court after testifying about the Father’s death, and she realized that she had seen him before. From the Dinosaur, near Youssef’s shop/home, while waiting for Musta, bound to the column, to regain consciousness, she had glimpsed that lanky man dressed in black, leading the first platoon of policemen. She couldn’t have been mistaken, and it couldn’t have been an accident. It was Dante’s doing that the police had arrived in such a hurry.

  First Rome, then Berlin: Torre was working backward, following a trail back to her.

  Giltine’s customary emotional state was one of calm and self-control, but as she stared into Dante’s chestnut-brown eyes, she felt something like anxiety. The dead who were always dogging her footsteps and encouraging her to continue, who punished her with their screams and rewarded her with their silence, began urging her to hurry.

  Giltine decided to give Andreas a few more hours. If she didn’t get any news from him, then she’d have to step in personally.

  15

  Dante and Colomba gagged Andreas with a system very similar to the one that Giltine herself would have used—they shoved one of Dante’s socks in his mouth and sealed his lips with duct tape—then they set him on the king-size bed and went back into the study to talk. In the garden, the waiters were cleaning up after the party the night before, unaware of what had happened a few floors overhead. “What do you think? Do you think anything he told us was true?” asked Colomba.

  “I don’t have the slightest idea. He’s a sociopath. People like him lie with astonishing ease. He might even be able to pass a lie detector test.”

  “You’re better than a lie detector.”

  “I’m not anywhere close to Giltine. Look at the way she manipulated those idiots who made the video, to say nothing of the security guard at CRT. And with Andreas, too . . . She went to his house to kill him, but she changed her mind and recruited him instead. She understood that he was capable of killing and had probably already done it.”

  “If there’s any truth in what he told us, the dead man was of Russian origin.”

  “Aren’t you catching a whiff of the Cold War?”

  “After all these years, I’d say the clock has run out on that; after all, Giltine was just a little girl back then. The thing that strikes me as interesting is the fact that she’s sick or hurt.” The image had rooted itself in Colomba’s brain like a nail. A disfigured mummy. “And I wonder how she can go around looking like that.”

  Dante lit another cigarette and thought back to the aroma of orange that he’d smelled on the cardboard box and the glove next to Youssef’s corpse. It must have had something to do with Giltine’s medications. Probably an ointment, an antiseptic. If he could just figure out what it was, he’d know something more about her. “Her disease has something to do with what she’s doing,” he said. “Though I don’t understand what.”

  “Maybe Giltine only has a few months to live, just like the man she killed. She wants to send them to hell before her.”

  “Was there anyone with a terminal illness among the murder victims on the train?”

  “No. I think I remember reading that the woman who was a PR executive had an operation for breast cancer a year ago, but she was fine now.”

  “There weren’t any other Russians, either. So no connection there for now.” He crushed his cigarette out in the overflowing ashtray and lit another. “Andreas is right about our not being able to have him arrested, isn’t he?” he said, changing the topic.

  “Do you really feel like going to the police with a story about a woman wearing a rubber mask who ordered someone to kill us?”

  “No, but I don’t want to let him go, either. Which leaves us with only two options: murder and dismemberment. But wait until I leave, I hate the sight of blood.”

  “For now, he’ll stay with us. I don’t trust him out on the loose, either. Leaving aside the fact that he could tell Giltine what we’re up to.”

  The phone on the desk in the study rang, making them both jump.

  “Do you think anyone heard the noise and now they’re coming up to investigate?” Dante asked, his face ashen.

  “Don’t even joke about it.” Colomba lifted the receiver with a shaking hand, but luckily, there was a friendly voice on the other end of the line. Brigitte’s voice.

  “Did I wake you up?” she asked.

  Before answering, Colomba waited for her heart to stop pounding in her mouth. “No, no.”

  “Listen, I’ve finished my shift at the club, and I wanted to talk to you before going to bed.”

  “I’m glad you did. Have you found out anything new?”

  “The name of the man who was scheduled to install video cameras in my brother’s club. His name is Heinichen. My friend told me he’s retired and does handyman jobs to round out his pension. And that he was probably a collaborator.”

  “You mean with the Stasi?” Colomba asked as a pair of neurons sparked off each other after failing to connect until that moment. “Which means he might be over sixty.”

  “I thought the same thing, you know,” said Brigitte. “That he might be the man who was killed with my brother. My friend said he didn’t seem like a drunk, but he matches up with my idea of the out-of-luck ex-spy.”

  “Do you have a phone number or anything?”

  “I tried calling, but there was no answer. If you swing by and pick me up, I’ll take you to where he lives and we can find out for sure.”

  “That doesn’t strike me as a very good idea.”

  “It’s about my brother, and after all, you don’t speak German, right?”

  “Right.”

  They came to an agreement, but before going out, Colomba had the grim task of taking Andreas to the bathroom so he could empty his bladder, keeping an eye on him from outside the half-closed door after handcuffing him to the radiator. When he was done, she walked back into the bathroom, aiming her gun at his head.

  “Would you really be capable of shooting me in cold blood?” he asked, staring at her as he stood there with his underwear lowered. His penis looked like a pink skin tab under his enormous belly.

  “Get dressed and get moving.”

  “If it wasn’t for the fact that my life’s at stake, I’d like to see what you’d do if I refused.” He did as he’d been told. “If you free me, I can wash my hands.”

  Colomba uncuffed him from the radiator but refastened his wrists in front of him. “Do it like this.”

  “What if I start shouting?”

  “You already would have done it. You may be right when you say I can’t nail you, but you definitely don’t want to run the risk of a scandal. You’re something of a star, aren’t you?”

  Andreas looked her in the eyes, and Colomba struggled to withstand his gaze. “Not because of that but because you and I are on the same side. Sooner or later, you’ll understand that you need me.” He wa
shed his hands and then asked for something to drink. Dante gave him a glass of beer with four chopped-up Halcion tablets in it, a dose big enough to knock a hippopotamus unconscious.

  “Next time use something that doesn’t taste so filthy,” said Andreas. Within half an hour, he started to snore. Colomba put on her jacket and got the car keys.

  “You’re not going to leave me alone with him, are you?” asked Dante.

  “Do you think he’s likely to wake up?”

  “No, but what if he does?”

  Colomba flashed him a tight smile. “Then run.”

  16

  Colomba left the building and drove the DeLorean to Brigitte’s address in Kreuzberg. She buzzed the apartment number the girl had given her. Brigitte came downstairs yawning and dressed more modestly than Colomba had seen her at the Automatik; she looked like a college student. Colomba decided that she might actually be one. “What a cool car,” Brigitte tried joking to conceal the tension. “I didn’t peg you as such an eccentric.”

  “It belongs to a friend. Where are we going?”

  “Over near Alexanderplatz.” She hesitated. “Why do you want to know who he is?”