“Oh, really, and what were they like?”
“Dead, the last time I saw them.”
Andreas laughed. “Too bad those days are over, eh?” He went back to addressing Colomba. “You have three seconds, then I start to cut.”
Colomba shifted her gaze for a second to Dante, who nodded. He was certain that Andreas would act on the threat. So she laid her pistol on the floor, but then she kicked it under an old credenza so that Andreas couldn’t grab it. “And now?”
“And now we all come to an agreement,” said Andreas, continuing to press the shard of glass: by now Brigitte’s neck was bleeding from countless cuts. “The possibility that you two idiots actually manage to stop Giltine is so low that I can’t even take it into consideration. And that means I’ve got to keep her happy until she can finally die of whatever it is she’s got working on her under those bandages.”
“What do you intend to do?”
“The best thing would be to kill you and your autistic friend here,” said Andreas. “But that could be complicated. So I think we should all band together and do something nice, and then we can all go our separate ways.”
“You want to kill Maksim,” said Dante.
“And you think we’re going to let you?” said Colomba.
“From Andreas’s point of view, it’s perfectly rational,” said Dante. “We’d have a shared secret, which would mean that none of us would try to report the others. And Giltine would no longer have any reason to take revenge on any of us.”
“You see that when you try, you can figure things out?” said Andreas with a wink.
“There’s only one thing wrong with your plan,” said Dante. “Maksim disagrees.”
Andreas turned to look at Maksim, which was exactly what Dante had been hoping. The ex-soldier flung the bottle of vodka straight at his nose, and it shattered. Andreas staggered as alcohol and blood burned his eyes. Brigitte took advantage of the opportunity to wriggle free, and Andreas lunged at Maksim, plunging his fist with the shard of mirror glass straight into the man’s throat, so powerfully that his fist vanished into the wound. When he pulled it free, it made a sound like a toilet plunger clearing a stopped-up drain, and a geyser of blood erupted, dousing both victim and attacker.
Maksim toppled onto his back and found that he felt nothing. No pain from the wound, nor any of the pain from the burn scars that had tormented him for so long now. The room seemed to fill with sunlight; the other people in it turned into statues frozen in their last movements. Colomba grabbing a chair, Dante running straight at Andreas with his eyes shut. And Andreas with his mouth wide open in a primordial belly laugh.
The light began to fade and Maksim went back. He was no longer in the cottage in Ulm, now he was in the midst of the fire at Absynthe, buried under the avalanche of bricks that had saved his life, then down and out in Berlin, terrified every time a stranger glanced his way. Then, further and further back, in Shanghai under the red lanterns, in Spain, in Moscow, in the Box, in Kabul with his fellow fighters, and then at the Spetsnaz training school.
And in the end, or the beginning, he was in Kaluga, where his father waved goodbye to him and his brothers as they set off for the glass factory, and it seemed like the one intensely real thing, the only one that counted. He even tried to raise a hand and wave bye-bye to him, but he could find neither the hand nor his body, because what he was living through was nothing more than the last shimmering sparks of his brain shutting down, lasting no more than a split second.
° ° °
“Fuck. No!” Colomba hit Andreas on the back with the chair, which had no more effect on him than the bottle had. He swung a punch straight into her face, and Colomba tumbled backward onto the table. Dante charged with eyes closed and head down, but he was met with a fist to the chin, a fist that was wearing the knuckle-duster, which discharged the last few volts left in the battery, knocking Dante on his ass with his legs in the air.
Then Andreas grabbed the neck of the shattered bottle, the only part that had remained intact, and lunged at Colomba. As he did, Brigitte shoved him: Andreas, caught off guard, lost his balance and fell to the floor on all fours. The glass neck shattered in his hand, and he howled in pain. But even now he recovered instantly and slammed his elbow into Colomba’s gut, just under the sternum. Half-suffocating, she managed to roll through the broken glass and get out of range. Andreas, still on the floor, reached out blindly and grabbed Brigitte by the throat, yanking her toward him. He got up, holding her firmly, and then shoved her with all the strength he could muster.
Brigitte flew backward and hit the edge of the mantel; a stabbing burst of pain shot up from her back and into her neck. She collapsed and Andreas ran over to finish her off, but he was unable to complete the job because Dante, crawling on all fours, had desperately grabbed his ankle with both hands. Andreas shook him off and kicked him in the stomach, making him roll a couple of yards away.
Colomba, though, had gotten to her feet, and she and Andreas eyed each other from opposite sides of the table like a pair of fighting dogs. By now, Andreas’s face was a mask of blood, his torn clothing revealing his flaccid flesh. He was muttering insults and obscenities in German.
“Come on,” Colomba said to him, wrapping the belt from her pants around her fist. Her eyes were a savage green, and Andreas hesitated for a second. Then he turned and ran toward the credenza: he’d just remembered the pistol that had been kicked under it. But he couldn’t see it, now that it had slid back all the way to the wall, so Andreas yanked over the tall cabinet, tumbling plates and glasses to smash against the floor. The Beretta emerged in the midst of dust and litter. Andreas grabbed it, turning around with a triumphant smile. “What’re you going to do now, you whore?” he said to Colomba.
She backed away toward the front wall, knocking against the coat rack. Andreas raised the pistol, which in his hand seemed little more than a toy. “They say that if you take a bullet in the gut, it takes you a while to die. Because the shit gets into your blood.”
Dante, who’d fallen to his knees again, raised both hands. “Andreas! Okay, you win. We’ll do whatever you say.”
“Shut the fuck up, you retard, your turn will come next.” Andreas ran his tongue over his lips. “Well, you slut of a cop, have you finally learned to regret busting my balls?” He took a step toward her. “Maybe now you’ve got a sudden urge to let me have it all, don’t you?” He took another step forward. Colomba seemed nailed to the wall, half covered by the jackets that had fallen all over her. “Maybe now you’ll work my big old dick, and if you do a good job, I might take it easy on you and your friends. What do you say? Do we have a deal?”
“No,” said Colomba, and shot him through the pocket of her jacket with Maksim’s revolver, praying that the old piece of junk didn’t explode in her hand. Andreas was hit by four bullets between belly and chest: he raised both arms like a gorilla, then fell backward, crushing the mantelpiece behind him and hitting the floor with the back of his head.
Brigitte was buried in fragments of wood and bricks. She fell again and found herself sprawled next to Andreas, staring into his face with the mouth wide open and the tongue dangling out, swollen and cherry red.
She screamed.
6
At two in the morning, Dante left the cottage and joined Colomba, who was sitting on the DeLorean’s front hood. Brigitte had gone to take a shower in an effort to recover. She was in shock, and Dante had made her drink some cognac that he’d found in the pantry. He leaned against the door and lit a cigarette. “Everything all right?”
“I just killed another person, Dante,” said Colomba. “Everything all right, my ass.”
“It was self-defense.”
“Are you sure of that?”
Dante looked at her quizzically.
“I know how I felt when I pulled the trigger. I wanted to kill him, Dante. I wanted to wipe that grin off his face, I wanted to wipe him off the face of the earth. And then, when he died . . .”
“Right.”
“Well, believe me, you aren’t. Okay, technically, you are. But I know that you had no alternative. In fact, you should have done it sooner.”
Colomba shook her head. It hurt. “I ought to have just let my colleagues pursue the investigation, full stop. Or else turned Andreas over to the German police.”
“You know perfectly well that wouldn’t have done a bit of good.”
“ ‘I pledge my allegiance to the Italian Republic, to faithfully observe and execute its Constitution and the laws of the state, and to comply with the duties of my office in the interest of the administration for the public good,’ ” Colomba recited. “Do you know what that is, Dante?”
“The least inspiring anthem I’ve ever heard?”
“My oath, which I swore when I joined the police,” Colomba said in a broken voice. “And I’ve always done my best to adhere to it. I believed in it. Then I started to sidestep the occasional rule and break a few laws. And now . . .” She shook her head and took a deep breath. “I have to turn myself in, Dante.”
“If you weren’t so upset, you’d remember that Andreas was a very well-known writer and that no one’s going to believe our version of events.”
“Then what should we do, in your opinion? Hide the bodies?”
“Only the evidence that we were ever here,” Dante said cautiously. “The house was rented in Andreas’s name, and you killed him with Maksim’s gun. They probably had an altercation because Maksim was refusing to reveal some red-hot Stasi secret to him.”
“I can’t lie about a murder investigation, Dante!” Colomba shouted. “I can’t sink so low!”
“It’s the right thing to do.”
“Of course it is.” Colomba slammed her hand down on the trunk. “The corpses are still warm, and you’ve already laid out your plan to fix everything up. You don’t care about anything but saving your own ass.”
“Then maybe they should have put me in the Box, too, huh? With all the other sociopaths?”
“Don’t put words in my mouth that I never said.”
“But you thought them.” Dante lit another cigarette from the butt of the one before. “If we wind up in prison, then who’ll stop Giltine? Think about that.”
“Maksim’s colleagues, sooner or later.”
“I doubt there are many of them still in circulation. But if there are, then they’ll delete the last memory of the Box.”
“And would that be so bad?”
“Yes, CC. Giltine is a murderer, but she’s also a victim. And victims need someone to give them a voice.”
Dante felt that he’d exposed himself too much, and he fell silent. Colomba couldn’t manage to break the wall of silence. They both stood there, leaning against the DeLorean and looking up at the sky above the treetops. There wasn’t much light in the area, and the Milky Way stood out clearly. They looked at it long enough to fill their eyes, doing their best to ignore the horror that waited them inside the cottage.
“We’ll have to get our fingerprints and our DNA off the corpses,” Colomba said, as if in a dream. “There are traces everywhere, fragments . . . It’s impossible.”
“Unless we use the Giltine solution. We’ll arrange the corpses appropriately and then set the place on fire. After all, Maksim already torched the hotel. Maybe he was just starting a fire here when Andreas surprised him.”
“So you want to burn down a house that belongs to someone who has nothing to do with any of this?”
“The place has to be insured. Only an idiot would rent a house online and forget to insure it. It’s not the worst thing in the world.”
“Just one more crime,” said Colomba discontentedly.
“But it’ll buy us some time. How much?”
Colomba thought it over. “Our German colleagues will first contact friends and relatives, then they’ll look into Andreas’s latest contacts. In Italy, our names would illuminate some lightbulbs, but here it will take longer. Then they’ll have to talk to the Italian authorities . . . If everything runs smoothly, a couple of weeks. And after that, who can say? Maybe they’ll never even work their way back to us.”
“Every so often, we deserve to catch a lucky break.”
“Well, who ever told you the world was fair?” Colomba walked away from the car. “Come on, move your ass.”
° ° °
There are times when fire can actually fix fingerprints so they can be found later, and even after a raging blaze, there are materials that can survive, preserving DNA like an insect in amber. And so, before setting the fire, they had to clean house. Dante, with the cleaners and bleaches he found in the broom closet, saw to the exteriors, while Colomba worked inside, wiping down all the surfaces with Brigitte’s help. The bloody glass shards were washed in the tub and then re-scattered across the floor. When it came time to work on the corpses, Brigitte couldn’t bring herself to touch them, and ran outside to vomit. It was Colomba who cleaned Andreas’s hands, making sure to remove all organic traces from under the nails, then smearing them again with blood to make sure no one noticed the manipulation of the crime scene. As she was doing it, she imagined him getting to his feet and lunging at her, trying to strangle her, and the impression was so strong that she had a mini–panic attack. Andreas didn’t move, but his ghost seemed to vibrate in the corner of her eye, and Colomba felt her lungs tighten and shut down. She bit her lip, clenched her fists, and went back to work. The fact that she hadn’t felt suddenly ill during the fight was the only positive note of the day.
They used the vacuum cleaner to sweep up hair of all kinds, then they pulled out the bag and wiped down the filter, put in a new bag, and got it suitably dirty. The leftover cognac was scattered all over the room, simulating a toast gone horribly wrong; the corpses were positioned to make it look believable that Andreas could have stabbed Maksim after being fatally shot; and Maksim’s pistol was put back into his fist. They scattered more shattered china, and at dawn, exhausted and on the verge of a nervous breakdown, they decided that the results were passable.
Now the problem remained of how to leave with three people and a two-seater car after scattering the gas and setting the fire, so they decided that first Colomba would do the driving, taking Brigitte to the station in Augsburg, the closest city except for Ulm, and then she’d come back to pick up Dante.
He and Brigitte took a few minutes to say goodbye, sitting on a bench in the garden, careful not to touch it with their hands. Dante acted perfectly normal, but the quantity of Xanax that he’d taken was barely enough to keep his anxiety at bay. Brigitte, on the other hand, was exhausted and emptied out. “There’s one thing I still don’t understand,” she said. “How did Maksim know we were coming?”
“He had a scanner, and our walkie-talkies made a fair amount of noise. He explained it to CC while she was walking him to the bathroom.”
“An old spy.”
“Right.”
“So now what are you going to do?”
“We’ll go back to Italy. Then we’ll probably have to take another trip to the far side of the world to find Giltine.”
“I’m going to hate being here all alone. You and Colomba are the only ones I can talk to about what happened.” She ran her fingers through her dirty, tousled pink hair. “I’m afraid of nightmares. And of winding up in prison.”
“As far as prison is concerned, I can reassure you: there’s nothing connecting you to Maksim or Andreas, and we’ll swear we never saw you. But you probably want to find some excuse for the bruises on your face. A brawl with a drunk at the Automatik would be perfect.”
“I’ll give it some thought.”
“About the nightmares . . . do you have Snapchat?”
“I do live in this millennium.”
“You have no idea how many people I’ve had to explain it to. My user name is Moka141. You can write me whenever you want, even phone me in the middle of the night. But don’t use any other a
pps. If you have any kind of problem, I’ll come running, okay?” If I can find a ride.
She nodded. “Promise you’ll keep me informed.”
“I promise. Does your face hurt?”
“A little. Why?”
He gave her a kiss, which turned into something more than just a goodbye kiss between friends. It did them both good.
After that, Brigitte climbed into the DeLorean: her travel bag was already stowed in back. Fifty minutes later, Colomba left her a few hundred feet from the train station—she didn’t want to get any closer, seeing how recognizable the car was. “I’m sorry for what you had to go through,” Colomba said.
“I was the one who insisted on coming. And at least now I know why my brother is dead. It’s no consolation, but it puts matters in order, somewhat.”
They shook hands, then they hugged and kissed each other on the cheek. “Thanks for everything,” said Colomba.
“Listen, take good care of Dante,” said Brigitte as her farewell.
And she said it in a way that was so . . . sad? impassioned?. . . that Colomba, even though she was positive that Brigitte was a lesbian, still felt an inexplicable stab of jealousy. It lasted until the first spark of the fire that she and Dante set in the cottage with the gasoline they’d siphoned out of Andreas’s gas tank, leaving the bottle next to Maksim. Then they ran away, reaching the DeLorean that stood parked a mile and a half away. When they turned around to look back, black smoke filled the sky.
They both thought of the nuclear reactor at Chernobyl.
7
Francesco landed at ten in the morning at Marco Polo Airport in Venice, where an attendant in a dark blue suit accompanied him to the speedboat that was waiting for him on the wharf. There, he found a waiter who poured him a glass of champagne as the boat sped across the water toward the Hotel La Rosa in Campo San Polo. This was the heart of touristy Venice, the part of the city where compact masses of pedestrians crowded the narrow calli and fashionable shops, though the hotel itself was an oasis of tranquility overlooking the Grand Canal. Francesco basked in the pleasure of the luxury and wasn’t surprised to find an iced bottle of Krug in his room. Next to the bottle was an envelope in heavy ivory paper, with the familiar image of the bridge in filigree. Inside the envelope was the invitation with the COW monogram.
Kill the Angel Page 37
