He threw open the window and drank in the odors of salt water and diesel fuel, while he turned the invitation over and over in his hands, watching it glitter in the sunlight. This was Willy Wonka’s golden ticket, his door to a better world.
They called up from the front desk to tell him that he had a guest, and he told them to send him up. It was an athletic man in his early sixties in a gray suit. The man looked him up and down before shaking hands. “My name is Mark Rossari,” he said.
“You’re the man who answered the phone.”
“Yes. I’m in charge of security. My condolences about your mother. I worked with her for many years.”
“Thanks,” Francesco replied, slightly confused at finding himself face-to-face with someone who’d been a part of his mother’s life yet whose existence he’d never even dreamed of until just a few days before.
Rossari sat down on the little sofa without waiting for Francesco’s invitation. “I’d like to discuss with you the instructions for your meeting with the founder.”
“What sort of instructions?”
“About how you are to behave.” Rossari was relaxed but vigilant, and his constantly darting eyes looked levelly into Francesco’s. “The meeting will take place after dinner, in a private area of the building that is off limits to those guests who are not members of the board. You will be asked to hand over telephones and any other electronic devices to my men, and you will also be searched.”
“Okay.”
“You must not try to approach the founder, and you will not shake his hand or make any other physical contact with him. Even an attempt to do so will put an end to the meeting, as well as any ties you may hope to have with the association.”
Francesco picked at a skin tab on his thumb. “It seems to me that this meeting is more than a mere formality. It’s a sort of exam, isn’t it?”
“An evaluation. If I may venture to offer a word of advice, answer all the questions that you’re asked with the utmost honesty.”
“And what if the founder’s . . . decision is negative?” asked Francesco, to whom the golden ticket seemed to have lost some of its luster.
“We’ll ask you to maintain the strictest confidentiality about this meeting and everything that has to do with the association.”
“You don’t need to worry about that.”
“We don’t worry.” The way Rossari said these words put a twist into Francesco’s stomach. “To have you here is a token of gratitude and trust on our founder’s part toward your mother,” Rossari continued. “Normally, your candidacy would not even have been taken into consideration, which is something you need to keep in mind.”
“Yes, of course . . . but my mother was taken from us before she had a chance to really explain it to me. I was only able to read the documents she left me, and I have a thousand questions.”
Rossari, who had started to get up, sat back down. “The founder will tell you everything you need to know.”
“All right. But I’d like to avoid seeming like an idiot. If you can tell me anything else about how the association works, I’d . . . I’d feel more comfortable. But maybe this isn’t the most suitable place,” he added nervously. “Security and all that.”
“We swept your room in advance for bugs, of course,” said Rossari, as if astonished that this hadn’t occurred to Francesco. “Give me your cell phone, please.”
Francesco did as he was asked, and Rossari shut it in the minibar fridge. That way it was worse than useless.
“Aren’t you going to search me?” asked Francesco.
“You don’t have any micro–recording devices on you,” said Rossari. “We checked your baggage and your person during the boat ride from the airport.”
Francesco had a moment of irritation. Security was fine and everything, but being searched without his knowledge made him feel violated. “And what if I’d put it on me between the motorboat and here?” he said, just as a provocation.
Rossari smiled for the first time. “I’m certain you didn’t.”
“How can you be so sure?”
“Because you don’t have the balls to actually do it, even though you do have the intelligence to think of it,” said Rossari in the tone of a plumber explaining why a drainpipe is stopped up.
Francesco was tempted to answer in similar terms, but he knew that wouldn’t be the right thing to do, so he let it drop. “Can you help me or not?”
Rossari nodded. “Here, we’re getting out of my field, but . . . what do you know about neurology?”
8
Colomba woke up in the car parked in the rest area just before the Italian border at Chiasso, in Switzerland. She was sore all over, but she felt a little less tired. When she checked the time and saw that it was noon, she understood why. She’d slept two hours instead of the half hour that she’d asked Dante to let her rest before waking her. She saw him sitting on the cement of the parking area, legs crossed as he read on his iPad, surrounded by a carpet of cigarette butts.
Colomba opened the car door, which rose creaking on its compressed air pistons, and got out to stretch her legs. Dante seemed not to notice and continued scrolling through pages on his iPad. He’d logged on to the Wi-Fi at the rest area.
“Hey!” she shouted to him. “Don’t you want a cup of coffee? Or to use the bathroom?”
He pointed to the structure behind him without taking his eyes off the screen. “The bathrooms are there. I’ll make you a cup of espresso.”
“I would have preferred a rest stop with proper facilities.”
“They’re clean. Five stars on TripAdvisor.”
Colomba was in too much of a hurry to argue the point. When she got back, Dante had turned on the electric coffeemaker, which was conveniently plugged in to the car outlet, and a bubbling sound announced the imminent arrival of the coffee. “I made you a normal arabica espresso, that way you won’t start complaining,” he said distractedly. He’d set the iPad down on the seat, but his eyes were still distant. “Then we could start driving again if you want. But I’d rather wait a little longer. I’m not feeling great.”
It seemed that Dante was worse off than when he’d had to manhandle the corpses at the cottage. “What’s wrong?”
“First the espresso, okay?” His voice was quavering.
They drank the coffee, then Dante smoked a couple of cigarettes, and then he finally made up his mind to talk. “Do you know why Pavlov didn’t win a second Nobel Prize?” he asked her.
Colomba might have expected anything, but not that. “Are you putting on this whole production because of Pavlov?”
“Yes,” he replied flatly. “Do you know or don’t you?”
“I didn’t remember that he even won the first one. All I know is that he’s the one with the dogs.”
“Yes, he’s the one with the dogs,” said Dante with a growing note of irritation in his voice. “Ivan Petrovich Pavlov. And what do you know about the experiment with the dogs?”
“Dante, I’m going to kick you around the parking lot if you don’t cut it out. We’re not at school.”
“Do you know anything about it or not?”
Colomba forced herself to remain calm. “All right, then. Pavlov would ring a bell every time he fed the dogs. He discovered that, after a while, when the bell rang, the dogs would salivate even if there was no food. And that’s when he formulated the theory of conditioned reflexes. Is that good, Professor? What grade do you give me?”
“That’s what they taught me, too, you know?” Dante said bitterly. “At night school. I imagined these big old dogs delightedly leaping in the air in front of empty bowls. But they weren’t leaping in delight at all.”
“Why not?”
“Because in order to measure how much saliva their glands produced, Pavlov surgically deviated their salivary ducts so that they emptied into a graduated container. By making incisions”—he touched his cheek—“here. He was a veritable paladin of vivisection.”
“I’m waiting to
find out why this concerns us. It’s been a hundred years, so we can’t call the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.”
“He didn’t do it just to dogs.”
Colomba heaved a deep breath of frustration. “Oh, come on, Dante, would you just—”
“It’s all true. There are plenty of documents and even a video broadcast by the BBC with plenty of old footage. I downloaded it, do you want to see?”
“No, thanks. But are you sure? He experimented on men?”
“On children.”
“Oh, fuck.” Colomba now understood what was upsetting Dante so much.
“He’d punched holes in their cheeks, creating artificial fistulas. These were orphans, street urchins . . . He started doing it in the twenties, but the findings of his studies were concealed for ethical reasons, so there was no second Nobel Prize in 1923.”
Now Colomba was listening closely. “This has something to do with the Box, doesn’t it?”
Dante nodded. “Pavlov left a great scholarly legacy. His techniques on conditioned reflexes were integrated into the training of cosmonauts and the Russian special forces. Stalin adored them, just as he adored Pavlov, even though Pavlov openly declared that he was an anti-Communist. And in the seventies, they continued to form part of the techniques taught at the KUOS. Does that name mean anything to you?”
“No.”
“It was a sort of academy for KGB officers and special forces. Exactly what they taught them there isn’t known for sure, but it is known that they made use of a bunch of self-control techniques, such as standing naked on the ice and convincing themselves that they were warm, that they felt no pain, that they didn’t feel tired. One of the instructors had trained at the Pavlov Institute in St. Petersburg and died in the 1990s after working as a consultant for the KGB and other intelligence agencies. Guess what his name was?”
“Belyy?” asked Colomba, hoping the answer was no.
“None other. Maksim’s boss, the medical director of the Box, and the sole true heir to that butcher Pavlov, even though all the superpowers spent money by the shovelful during the Cold War in order to test the limits of the human mind and body. They wanted to create a supersoldier, like Captain America. Or Captain Russia, in this case.”
“And the result would be Giltine?”
“Maybe she just learned from the other prisoners. Or else she was born that way, who knows.” He lit yet another cigarette. “There was an urban legend that was very famous in Russia, in the seventies and eighties, the myth of the Black Volga.”
“The car?”
“That’s right. It was the model used by the police, and everyone was afraid if they saw one parked out front. It could be your ride to Siberia. But the Black Volga in the urban legend drove around at night kidnapping unaccompanied children.” He looked at her, his eyes glistening. “Maybe it wasn’t a legend.”
“It’s over now, Dante.”
“Are you so sure? Then why did Maksim continue operating after the end of the Soviet Union? What interests was he covering up?”
“Do you think they’re still going around kidnapping children?”
“I think that something’s still going on and that the people Giltine is working against are as dangerous as she is, if not more.”
They would have gone on formulating hypotheses, but the iPad dinged to announce the arrival of an email. It was from Minutillo. When Dante read it, he turned pale.
“Guarneri” was all he said.
9
While Dante and Colomba had been on their way to Ulm, Guarneri had spent the day with Paolino, his seven-year-old son: he’d gone to get him at school and taken him to his house for a lunch-homework-and-dinner before taking him back to his mother, Martina, from whom he had been divorced for the past three years.
When he and Martina had gotten married, her girlfriends had been certain that the newlyweds would become like one of those couples, romantically linked sleuths, whom they so adored in the television shows broadcast around lunchtime, that the two would spend sleepless nights discussing difficult cases and poring over photographs of dead bodies. Actually, though, it had been much less exciting. Guarneri’s career had come to a screeching halt almost immediately, and all he brought home from the office was annoyance and bad moods. In the end, Martina had kicked him out. There had been the inevitable clashes, and even screaming fights that neither of them was proud of, but little by little, their relations had become almost amicable again.
Taking his son back home, Guarneri had expected to spend a few minutes chatting with Martina over an espresso or even, if he played his cards right, to spend an hour or so with her in the big bed. Instead, after using his own keys to open the door, he’d found his ex-wife on the living room sofa fast asleep, so out of it that she didn’t even wake up when he shook her roughly. Guarneri, worried now, walked Paolino to his bedroom and told the boy it was time to go to bed. Then he went back to the living room to call an ambulance. Only now there was another person in the living room. Guarneri realized that she had been there before, only he hadn’t seen her. Because she moved silently, clinging to the walls, like a shadow among shadows. And she was blindingly fast. Once she was in front of him, he saw that she was a woman of average height, dressed in black, her face covered with a rubber mask.
Guarneri grabbed his service revolver.
° ° °
Boom
Paolino, who preferred to be called Pao, like the street artist who draws penguins on the walls, woke up with the reverberation in his ears. It was as if he’d dreamed a sound so loud that it actually woke him up. Looking at the big blue alarm clock with the luminescent hands on the nightstand, he realized that he’d slept for no longer than an hour, maybe even less. He pricked his ears up to listen for the sound of the television, but the silence was absolute. Probably his father had gone away already, because if he was still there, Pao would have heard shouting, or else laughter. Lately, it had been mostly laughter, and Pao had even shyly started to hope that Mamma and Papà might go back to living together. He had vague memories of when the family was together, but those memories held the golden glittering light of the TV commercials for Christmas panettone. He didn’t really know what nostalgia was, and yet he felt it for something he’d never really experienced. He got up from the bed, with the idea of going into the kitchen to get a glass of water, but when he opened his bedroom door, there the woman was.
Standing in the door without a face.
Pao hadn’t wet himself since he was two, but the sight was so terrifying that his bladder released a warm stream that ran down his pajama leg.
A monster. A ghost.
Pao curled up into a ball and started crying, putting both hands over his ears.
He felt a light touch on his head. “Don’t be afraid,” said the woman without a face. “I won’t do anything to you.”
Her voice sounded like the voice of a robot, like Lieutenant Commander Data on Star Trek. Pao stopped crying and wiped his nose on his sleeve, keeping his eyes closed. “Who are you?”
“No one.”
“Why don’t you have a facce?”
“But I do, just look more closely.”
Pao did what he did when he watched a horror movie: he slowly raised his eyelids, ready to lower them. The woman hadn’t moved, but now there was a broad red smile drawn on her face, like a smiley face, dripping as if it were fresh paint.
“You see?” the woman asked. “Are you still afraid of me now?”
Pao studied her. When she’d drawn the smile, the woman had gotten a drop under her left eye that reminded him of clowns in old movies. He felt like chuckling. This was a dream, now he understood that. A nightmare, the kind of dream that makes you wake up yelling. But soon he’d wake up again. “Where’s Mamma?”
“She’s asleep,” replied the woman with the dripping smile. “And so is your father. And you’re going to have to stay in this room until someone comes to get you.”
“Why?”
“Am I dreaming?”
“Yes. This is only a dream. But you’re going to have to act as if it’s all true.”
“And what if I don’t?”
The woman without a face rubbed out the smile with her forearm and then drew another mouth, this time in a frown. “Then I’ll become very sad. And I’ll come back every night. Is that what you want?”
Pao felt like peeing again. “No,” he said, so quietly that he wasn’t even sure he’d spoken at all.
“Good boy.” Giltine leaned over him. “Now open your mouth,” she ordered.
10
Colomba crossed the border into Italy three minutes after reading Minutillo’s email and stopped only once to fill up the tank. The rest of the time, she kept the accelerator pedal pressed all the way down, roundly ignoring speed limits, speed cameras, and highway police. When a highway policeman did order her to pull over, she was forced to comply, but she shouted into the officer’s face until he put in a call to the Mobile Squad, which issued an order to escort her all the way to Rome. When the trip resumed, thanks to the highway patrol escort, the DeLorean was able to hit its top speed of 125 miles per hour, roaring so loudly that it really did seem like it was about to go back in time. Dante didn’t object: he’d taken a double dose from his magic vial and collapsed into a state of stupor from which he emerged only when they pulled up in front of the Hotel Impero. Colomba pushed him out of the car, leaving him shaking on the sidewalk. “Get moving,” she told him. Those were the first words she’d spoken to him since they’d left.
Dante obeyed, languid as pudding. One of the doormen rushed outside at the sight of the DeLorean blocking the front entrance, and Colomba handed him the keys, telling him to park the car for them. Then she dragged Dante into the lobby. “Come on.”
Kill the Angel Page 38
