Kill the Angel

by Sandrone Dazieri

  Andreas mimed stitching his mouth shut.

  “And he would have needed lots of medications,” said Dante. “If whoever signed his death certificate is the same person who took him out of the hospital, they must know where he’s hiding. Or at least they can point us in the right direction.”

  “How?”

  Dante sighed. He found it disgusting to have to speak with Andreas. “Do you have any little boyfriends over at the phone company?”

  Andreas mimed unstitching his lips a little and spoke out of the corner of his mouth. “If I didn’t, then what kind of a journalist would I be?”

  “If you’re a journalist, then Landru was a perfect gentleman. So you can get hold of the . . .” He tried to remember the English for tabulati telefonici—Italian for “phone records”—but couldn’t come up with it and just explained in other words what he wanted.

  “Jawohl,” Andreas replied, still talking out of the corner of his mouth.

  Dante turned back to Colomba and continued, “Let’s see if there’s a doctor or nurse among Heinichen’s contacts who also works at the Sankt Michael hospital. Then we can hack into the hospital’s computer system and find out who was on duty the day of his death. If the name matches up, bingo.”

  “You’re good with a computer, but you’re not that good.”

  “We need Santiago, CC. I know you can’t stand him, but . . .”

  Colomba pointed at Andreas. “Compared with him, Santiago is a stroll in the park. Go ahead and call him.”

  20

  It was by no means easy to talk Santiago into it, in part because of the car that Colomba had confiscated to hurry over to Tiburtina Valley; Dante had to beg him in a lengthy Skype call. Money wasn’t a sufficiently strong argument when you were dealing with someone who bought and sold credit card numbers on a regular basis. In the end, Santiago had found an acceptable compromise. “You owe me countless favors, so that means you’ll have to do anything I ask you.”

  “Provided it’s not illegal,” Dante said.

  Santiago threw both arms wide. He was on the usual roof, and behind him were two of his boys, smoking from the usual bottle: it seemed he had an endlessly looping background, never changing. “How about what I’m supposed to be doing for you? Is that legal? But don’t worry, I don’t need you for that sort of thing. Let’s just say I have to go on trial, let’s say I need someone to prove my innocence . . .”

  “As long as you really are innocent, you can count on me.”

  “And I want your hotel suite for a week’s stay, me and Luna. All included.”

  “I’d rather become one of your dealers.”

  “I only deal in data, hermano. Well?”

  Of course, Dante accepted, though only after getting Santiago to promise that Luna would behave herself around the premises. Then he called the hotel and made the necessary arrangements: guests except for Colomba were charged extra. Thank you, stepfather.

  In the meantime, Colomba escorted Andreas to his book presentation at the Colloquium scheduled for that evening, and Brigitte joined them to make sure the journalist didn’t go off-script. Those were three complicated hours for Colomba: aside from her exhaustion, which was starting to ring serious alarm bells, she was also appalled at having to watch her attempted murderer putting on his show in the large ground-floor room at the Colloquium, and to a full house. When he talked about tragic subjects, such as disappearances or torture in the ex-GDR, not a fly buzzed, and when he moved on to lighter-hearted topics, his audience rolled in the aisles. His appearance ended with a thunderous round of applause, after which Andreas signed a number of copies of his book and went back to Colomba. “Did you enjoy that?” he asked.

  “No. Let’s get out of here.”

  “So what if I decide I’d rather sleep here than on that fucking piece-of-shit sofa? How would you stop me?”

  “Go ahead and try it. I could start telling your fans about a few of the skeletons in your closet. Who knows if they’ll love you as much then.”

  Andreas stared at her, and once again, Colomba had a hard time meeting and holding his gaze. This time, though, she understood why. It was like looking into the eyes of a rag doll: behind them was sheer emptiness. Not evil, not viciousness, but an immense abyss of darkness.

  “Can I at least get some clean clothes?” said Andreas.

  “Yes, you can. After all, I searched your room pretty thoroughly after Dante knocked you out. I got rid of the Mace.”

  “Good for you,” said Andreas with complete indifference. Was there just a momentary flash of anger in his eyes? Colomba couldn’t be sure.

  When they got back to Brigitte’s place, Colomba handcuffed him to the usual bathroom waterpipe. Then she woke up Dante, who had once again fallen fast asleep on the balcony. “You’re standing the first guard shift.”

  “I’ll make myself a coffee,” he said, and plugged the electric moka pot into an outlet next to the French doors. It was clear he had no intention of moving from that spot.

  Brigitte came back with a pillow and a blanket. “Are you sure you want to stay on the carpet?” she asked Colomba. “If you want, you can sleep with me.”

  Colomba had both hoped for that offer and feared it, because while she definitely didn’t feel like sleeping in the room with Andreas, she hadn’t been able to figure out whether Brigitte was coming on to her or not. Her need for peace and quiet and some decent rest won out. She slipped into Brigitte’s bed, turning her back to her, and spent the first fifteen minutes trying to come up with a good way to delicately reject a come-on if needed. She didn’t know whether she ought to say she had a boyfriend, or limit herself to a generic preference for men, even though that, in her experience, might open the door to countless attempts to bring her around: sometimes women can be far more persistent than men. But there was no attempt to start anything, nor was there in the two days that followed, as they industriously hoovered up all the information they could find about Heinichen to hand over to Santiago.

  They collected all the mail from his almost bursting mailbox, as well as extensive documentation concerning his visa, thanks to a friend of Brigitte’s who worked at city hall. With that information came a Xerox of his ID card: the photograph showed a fit and energetic man in his early sixties. Colomba even put in a call to the Amigos to see if there was anything circulating in the international wanted postings, but nothing came up.

  It had been Guarneri who answered on the office landline, because the other two Amigos were out and about on various work-related errands, looking into the case of a transsexual found dead in a dumpster when the garbage strike finally ended. He was both happy to hear from Colomba and worried. “We’re still under special surveillance,” he whispered after doing the search through the system. “Santini is convinced that we know where you are, Deputy Chief. And that wherever you might be, you’re definitely stirring up shit, as usual. Excuse me, those are his words.”

  “He knows me well. Have you made any progress?”

  “We’re still investigating the passengers and sifting through the reasons for their travel. For now, we haven’t identified anything odd. They were all people who had planned to come to Rome for work or for personal reasons. Certainly, somebody else might have known about it in advance and had time to organize the attack.”

  “Look for connections with Russia.”

  “Okay. Did you two find anything interesting?”

  “Hard to say,” Colomba replied, keeping it vague.

  When she hung up, there was a smile on her face. During the phone call, she had heard footsteps in the hallways of the Mobile Squad, and the voices of her colleagues. What had occurred to her was that she missed them. Fortunately, she’d be heading back before long.

  Then the truth hit her like a bucket of cold water, and the smile vanished from her face. She’d be going back to Italy, but not to the Mobile Squad. Once she’d finished this investigation, she’d be sent to some office in the godforsaken provinces to stamp visa app
lications. That is, if she accepted the transfer, which she had no intention of doing. One way or the other, she’d lost the Mobile Squad for good. Just when I’d started liking it again.

  In spite of all their concerted efforts, in those two days the figure of Heinichen remained by and large quite vague. They knew that he had moved to Berlin four years earlier from a small town in the ex-GDR where he had worked as a technician. Before that, a total blank. His phone records revealed a fairly modest amount of activity, and rarely did the numbers occur more than twice, suggesting that most of his meetings were work-related. By checking up on several numbers, they found shopkeepers with new security systems that had been installed at cut-rate prices, but these people had no useful information to offer. Heinichen got his name out by word of mouth and never stayed in contact with anyone for long. Last item: there were no doctors among those numbers. Santiago had “sniffed” the email address that Andreas used to contact Giltine. They’d written an email in his name, explaining the delay in the execution of his task, but Giltine hadn’t responded, and Santiago wasn’t able to ferret out anything more. When Giltine signed on, she anonymized the connection, and the email account started and ended with that page.

  The stroke of luck came when they examined an old account statement, because Heinichen had received a payment of some two thousand euros from a woman who turned out to be the wife of the deputy head physician at the Sankt Michael hospital, a surgeon named Kevin Ode.

  “It was all about a cheating husband,” said Andreas. By now, as a provocation, he refused to wear his trousers when he was at home. He lay on the sofa in his underwear like a disgusting handcuffed Buddha.

  “Were they lovers?” Brigitte asked, slightly perplexed.

  “More likely, the wife hired Heinichen to keep an eye on her husband,” said Dante, finding that, to his immense annoyance, he agreed with the man. “Pretty clearly, our man not only installed video security systems but also supplemented his paycheck by doing jobs as a private investigator. Which would confirm that he really was ex-Stasi.”

  “What does the admissions list say?” asked Colomba.

  Santiago had penetrated the protections of the hospital’s computer system with embarrassing ease. “You won’t believe it, but he was on duty,” said Dante, rummaging through the file. “He even ended the shift with two hours of overtime.”

  “He waited till it got dark,” said Andreas.

  Colomba nodded. “Let’s go pay a call,” she said. “Get dressed, Andreas. Usual rules.”

  “It turned out all right once with him, but don’t tempt fate again,” Dante protested.

  “Would you rather I take Brigitte and leave him here for you to handle?”

  Dante thought it over for a second, then shook his head. “Please just be careful.”

  “I’ll have to be.”

  Colomba undid Andreas’s handcuffs, waited for him to put his pants on, then went with him to the Sankt Michael hospital, in the Schöneberg neighborhood, not far from the spot where John F. Kennedy had declared that he, too, was a Berliner. It was late afternoon: Colomba decided to take the metro to get there faster, and the whole ride, her nerves were taut as piano wires because she was afraid that Andreas would pull some bullshit. But being in public actually limited his range of action. Three or four passengers came over to say hello, and he signed a few autographs, even though whatever he’d whispered in the ear of one young girl with a buzz cut had made her blush and hurry away from him.

  Kevin Ode met them at the front desk on the ground floor, clearly irritated at having been urgently paged over the loudspeaker system. He was in his early fifties, tall and skinny, and his glasses were gold wire-frame. “What’s going on?” he asked in German.

  Andreas embraced him unexpectedly. “You fucked the wrong slut. And you let the wrong corpse get away,” he said into the man’s ear, so that only he and Colomba could hear. He was speaking in English, and the other man turned pale as a sheet. Then Ode turned and informed the head nurse that he was going to take a five-minute break and walked them both down to the underground parking structure where he had left his Mercedes. Colomba told him to sit in the back with Andreas, who wrapped an arm around his neck. She sat in the front seat. “Where’s Heinichen?” she asked.

  Ode had had a few minutes to think it over, and he’d decided that perhaps the best strategy was to try denying everything. “I really don’t know who you’re talking about. Is he a patient of mine?”

  “He’s the man you switched out for the corpse of a dead homeless wino.”

  “Seriously, you’ve got me mixed up with someone else.”

  That strategy turned out to be the wrong one. Before Colomba could do or say anything, Andreas grabbed the surgeon’s left hand and twisted it hard. Colomba heard the crack loud and clear. Ode screamed in pain.

  Colomba ordered Andreas to let the man go, and Andreas obeyed after giving her a quick wink.

  “You fractured my wrist!” screamed Ode, adding something else in German.

  Andreas slapped his face hard, knocking off his eyeglasses. “Speak English.”

  “Enough’s enough!” Colomba warned him.

  “I know who you are!” Ode told Andreas. “I’ll report you to the police! I’ll send you to prison! I’ll send both of you to prison!”

  “Are you done now?” Andreas asked, looking him in the eyes. The other man fell silent.

  “Doctor,” said Colomba, “you’ve intentionally lied in a mass-murder investigation. You’ve falsified a clinical chart, and you’ve helped a suspect escape. You’re the one who’s most likely to wind up behind bars.”

  “What mass murder? It was an accident—”

  “If you don’t believe me, go ahead and call the police right now,” Colomba bluffed.

  “And if I help you?”

  “As far as you’re concerned, it ends here. If you keep your mouth shut, we’ll do the same.”

  The man had no other option, so he told them everything.

  The story was just as they’d guessed. Ode’s wife was having him followed, but before Heinichen got a chance to tell her that her husband was having sex with a number of his female patients, as well as two nurses, he’d wound up in the hospital teetering between life and death. When he’d regained consciousness, Heinichen had explained to Ode, with what little strength remained to him, that someone would come kill him unless he found a way to disappear, and that Ode had to help him in exchange for silence to the wife. Ode had given in and arranged for the corpse swap, spiriting Heinichen out of the hospital in a wheelchair. If he’d just been smarter, looking back with the benefit of hindsight, he’d have suffocated him with a pillow.

  Ode had let Heinichen stay in his house in the Bavarian Alps for four months, caring for him as best he could, mostly leaving him to his own devices. Miraculously, Heinichen had recovered without skin grafts and had left under his own power without saying where he was going. In all that time, he’d never breathed a word about who was trying to kill him or why.

  “So you don’t know where he is?” Andreas asked threateningly.

  Ode’s wrist had swollen up to the size of a ball and was hammering with pain. “He’s in Ulm, unless he’s left.”

  “How do you know?” asked Colomba.

  “Heinichen phoned me a few months after he’d left because he had a bad infection and didn’t want to go to a hospital. I had to fax a prescription to a pharmacy in Ulm. There’s nothing more I can tell you, except that the infection was in his legs. I don’t think he would have gone very far. Now, please, just let me go. I need medical attention.”

  Andreas warned him in a loud voice not to say anything to anyone and—without Colomba hearing it—whispered in his ear just what he’d do if Ode dared to do otherwise. As soon as they were out of the hospital, though, Colomba slammed Andreas against a wall. It was like shoving a sack of cement, but she’d caught him off guard. Concealed from prying eyes by the darkness, she shoved the barrel of her pistol into his g
ut. “Next time you put your hands on anyone, I’ll make sure you regret it.”

  “What are you going to do? Arrest me?” said Andreas with a nasty grin.

  “I’ll shoot you in the leg and leave you there. It won’t kill you, but you’ll learn to behave for a while.”

  Andreas went back to his usual placid expression. “I’m not your enemy.”

  “Oh, yes, you are. A third-rate enemy I’m not interested in wasting any more time on. But if you force me to, I’ll take care of you.”

  In Andreas’s eyes she once again glimpsed that metallic gleam, and he said nothing the whole way back.

  Deep inside, though, he was seething. How dare that little slut of a policewoman treat him like this? Didn’t she know who he was, what he was capable of doing to her? In his mind, the images of dozens of prostitutes unreeled, and the way he’d taken his pleasures with each of them, then he focused on the ones he’d gotten a little too rough with. The ones he’d made spit blood, the ones who had begged him to stop, the ones who had sworn they’d report him to the police, though in the end they’d begged his forgiveness, just adding please, please never come back to see them. In place of their faces, he put Colomba’s. He couldn’t wait for a chance to restore the natural order of things. He was the one who issued orders; he was the one who instilled fear. Not that ridiculous cop lady whom he’d seen twisting on her bed in the throes of delirium, weeping in utter despair. To look at her like that, he’d gotten a hard-on, and the distraction had allowed that scarecrow of a friend of hers to catch him off guard. But the next time, he wouldn’t let it linger.

  ° ° °

  They went back to Brigitte’s place, where Dante, as soon as he learned the news, hurried to call Santiago. The hacker answered the video call in the bed of the suite at the Hotel Impero. It looked like a rap video, with Santiago sitting bare-chested, half covered by the sheets, tattooed, and with a huge gold pendant on a chain that he must have worn for the special occasion. Luna was coiled around him, completely nude and smiling into the lens. “It’s totally awesome here, hermano!” Santiago said to Dante. He was drinking a glass of champagne, which was certainly going to wind up on Dante’s tab. “But tell me how to work the coffee machine, because I’ve been trying to figure it out.”