“The bandage doesn’t seem attached. Should I go ahead?”
Giltine turned the mask toward him. The eyes that looked out through the narrow openings were as wary as those of a wild animal. She nodded slowly. “Don’t touch the wounds.”
“Okay.” Francesco gave it a sharp yank. The wrappings came off the arm, taking with it all that remained of the skin, along with broad gobbets of necrotic flesh. Giltine saw the exposed muscle fibers, the bone that was practically black with rot. The odor was so pungent that her eyes teared up.
Francesco, on the other hand, looked on in bafflement. Aside from the mud, Giltine’s arm looked perfectly healthy to him. And when he helped her take off the rest of her bandages, what he saw was a petite woman, her crotch shaved and covered with scars, but not so much as a single visible wound or sore on her.
19
Colomba and Dante returned to the spare suite, which reeked of beer and cigarettes worse than any bar, because the Amigos and Leo had bivouacked there until the wee hours; the housekeepers were kept out by the DO NOT DISTURB sign that Dante had forgotten to remove. Even worse was the state of the suite where Santiago had taken up residence, because under the door they found an advanced advisory of a demand for damages due to burn marks on a sofa. “Who does he think he is, a heavy-metal rocker?” Dante muttered, crumpling up the sheet of paper and making himself a fourth espresso.
Colomba took a Coke from the minibar without a word. She couldn’t stop thinking about Giltine and what she’d found online about Cotard delusion. “So she’s a zombie,” Colomba murmured.
“Only in her mind.” Dante checked to make sure that the duct tape over the smoke detector was still in place and lit a cigarette. “Literally. We don’t know the exact causes, but it seems to have something to do with brain lesions. You’re alive, but you’re convinced you’re dead. Sometimes you’re even sure you’re starting to rot. You imagine that your internal organs are vanishing, that you no longer need to eat or drink. Cheerful as hell. And if you don’t get some kind of treatment, you really do die in the end.”
“The odor you smelled . . .”
“It’s the smell of something designed to slow the decay of the flesh, like the foundation they used on that guy in the coffin. They use it in the field of thanatocosmetics, to beautify the corpse and give it a pleasing appearance. I imagine Giltine uses it to convince herself she’s healthy. Even though, obviously, she has no need of it. Oh, by the way . . . if I die before you do, remember, I want to be cremated.”
“And where do we put your ashes?”
“In the Vatican Museum, seeing that I never managed to go in there when I was alive: too many people.”
Colomba remembered the description that Andreas had given them of Giltine. “Then there’s nothing wrong under the bandages. No burns or anything else.”
Dante shrugged. “I imagine not. Even if there might be some irritation after putting all that stuff on her skin.”
“And how long does she believe she’s been dead, in your opinion?”
“Maybe since Maksim left her in the cold-water plunge. He thought he’d killed her, and she thought it was true. She might have suffered brain damage from the lack of oxygen, which could have triggered the syndrome. We’d have to ask Bart whether that can be a cause.”
“So she believes that she has to settle her accounts before rotting away entirely.”
Dante shook his head. “I feel sorry for her.”
“I don’t. She’s murdered too many innocent people.” Colomba sat down on the little sofa that, even though it was identical to the one in their usual suite, seemed more uncomfortable to her, through the power of suggestion. Leo had nodded off a couple of times, and Colomba thought fleetingly that he was very cute when he was asleep.
Then she thought, a little less fleetingly, that she was going stupid. She’d just left a morgue where the corpse of one of her men lay; this was hardly the moment to get horny. “We know who she is, and we know who she’s killing. So who is the next victim?” She grabbed the stack of printouts that the Amigos had left that morning before being dismissed.
Colomba had told the two of them that they were off the case only after saying goodbye to Leo. They were sorry to hear it, but they were too tired and upset about Guarneri to really object. Colomba had promised them that she’d keep them updated as things progressed, even though she had no intention of keeping her word. Only when it was all over, if they survived that long.
“The members of COW are everywhere in the world; there are three offices in Italy and twenty more scattered around Europe,” she said, rereading the sheet of paper she’d studied until her eyes hurt, right up until dawn.
“Let’s focus on Italy.”
“No one of any interest among the members. On the board, there’s a ninety-year-old South African, John Van Toder; and an Italian-American woman from Boston who’s more or less the same age, Susannah Ferrante. The treasurer is English, then there’s the Vetri woman, who’s dead now and was in charge of public relations. And so on and so forth.”
“Russians, Ukrainians?”
“Not a one. Now that Vetri’s dead, Giltine ought to shift her target to one of the others. Or maybe someone who’s not officially listed but that she believes is actually in charge.”
Dante sighed. “Did it occur to you that we could warn them? A phone call so they knew what was coming. They’d call off all the events, they’d lock themselves up safe and sound at home. We’d have to find a way of making sure they believed us, but I think that if we could contact the highest levels of COW, someone who remembered the girl who escaped from the Box would still be around.”
“Yes. I thought the same thing,” said Colomba reluctantly. “But I’m not sure it wouldn’t mean starting up an even worse piece of machinery. How many Maksims do they still have working for them?”
“Even if they don’t have any, considering their close ties to the various contractor agencies, it wouldn’t take them long to get as many new ones as they need.”
“Plus, we don’t know what Giltine has planned. If she’s planted dynamite under a building, maybe she’ll set it off all the same. And then she might just go around murdering people at random.”
“She doesn’t do anything at random.”
“She’s crazy, you said it yourself. The best thing we can do now is try to stop her ourselves. That means going straight to the right place,” and she handed him the sheets of paper. “Take your pick.”
He didn’t take the paper. “Are there any special parties or events being held by COW in Italy?”
“No fewer than ten,” she said, peering with some effort as her eyes refused to focus through the sleepy haze. “And they’re all taking place this week, seeing that it’s the foundation’s anniversary. Come on, just go ahead and toss a dart.”
“First, one last question. Do you have any way of finding out whether any member of the Vetri family is anywhere close to one of these parties? On a plane, perhaps?”
“Why?”
“Because maybe Vetri’s death wasn’t just a murder. Maybe it was meant to set something in motion. Think about the decision to use ISIS as a cover. In the past, Giltine always hid behind seeming accidents and organized crime.”
“It sounds like an extreme last-ditch move, the final card in her hand,” Colomba agreed.
“I don’t know, maybe the members of COW are planning a secret funeral with hoods, like in Eyes Wide Shut. That would be a perfect way for Giltine to disguise herself.”
“And you hope they invited the family members to the big dance?”
“Exactly.”
Colomba thought it over. “If one of them checked into a hotel, if they were inserted into the system, and if I can wangle a favor . . .”
“I’m relying on you.”
Colomba avoided calling the Amigos, now that she’d dismissed them, and instead went directly to Leo. She woke him up with a video call via Snapchat, which she made all alone on the terra
ce. Twenty minutes later, she got the answer she was waiting for, and an hour later, all three of them were on a train to Venice. They’d get there just one hour before the benefit cocktail party in honor of the late Paola Vetri.
20
Francesco Vetri lay on the floor in a fetal position, dressed only in his underpants. He was awake, but he saw no reason to move, seeing as the patterns on the carpet were so captivating. And to think that at his mother’s house, he’d never bothered to give a second glance to the century-old Bukhara rugs that adorned the living room. He could see clearly only out of his right eye, because Giltine had done another injection into his left eye, a little more brutally than usual.
She was just finishing getting her face ready. She tended to it with extreme care, even though she could feel her flesh seethe under the layer of heavy flesh-colored wax that was normally used to cover injuries from car crashes. Over that, she applied normal beautician’s makeup. She finished the job by drawing on eyebrows and dusting her eyelids with champagne-colored powder, to highlight her gray eyes, and then applied lipstick that was just a shade darker. After that, she looked at herself in the mirror, wondering if that was the face her prisoner insisted on seeing in his delirium.
Even though she knew it was the result of the cocktail of mescaline and psilocybin she’d stuffed him with, Francesco’s insistence on finding her lovely—bellissima, he kept saying—had troubled her, driving her to give him an extra dose just to shut him up. She wasn’t the one to give in to impulses, but the end was drawing near, and she’d become uneasy. She was living on borrowed time, but her creditors were eager to be paid what she owed. She could hear them murmuring in every creak of the furniture, in every rustling of the curtains. They screamed in the waves from the wake of the vaporetti, they roared in the horns of the barges.
She put in her emerald earrings. They had belonged to a woman, and all that Giltine remembered of her now was the sound of her hands and the taste of her skin. She could feel the earrings vibrate on her earlobes because of the electricity that filled the air, like when lightning is about to fall from the sky. Giltine knew what was causing it. It was the approach of the great darkness. Of nothingness. The game that she had started playing one night in Shanghai, as she climbed out of the cold water, was coming to an end.
The last few pieces were taking their places on the chessboard.
21
John Van Toder, the founder, was arriving.
Eighty-nine years lived and enjoyed, tall and straight as an iron rod, white hair and leather-brown skin. He moved like a man twenty years younger as he came down the steps of the private plane that had brought him here from Cape Town. White but not a racist, as his biography proudly stated, because he had moved back to South Africa only after the end of apartheid, after a lengthy and voluntary exile in the West. He traveled with no one but the members of his personal security detail, made necessary by his great wealth, earned by skillfully targeted real estate investments in the south of Spain and, later, in the medical and insurance fields. He wore an alpaca suit and a white panama hat. As soon as he cleared customs, he was accompanied to a covered motorboat and escorted by a state police patrol boat.
° ° °
The sharks, which Giltine had released from the tank, were arriving.
Not all of them, though. Three had decided not to come at the last minute, awakening from the meshes of the senseless attraction that was luring them into unknown territory. Another one had been stopped at the Vienna airport because he’d tried to board a plane with a homemade handgun, and a fifth in Barcelona because he’d been identified as the man wanted in the murder of a transsexual. Therefore, only the four most determined sharks landed in Venice, the ones who had been intelligent enough not to expose themselves needlessly or pack weapons in their carry-on luggage. There were two Italians, a Frenchman, and a Greek.
Once they reached the appointed rendezvous, near the Bridge of Sighs, they met up with the fifth member of the group, who worked as a waiter at a pizzeria on St. Mark’s Square. It was he who led them to the place where Giltine had lived, in accordance with the instructions that she had attached with the latest snuff movie she’d sent him. They took the key that had been tucked away over the doorframe, and entered the apartment. The Greek, who was a fetishist, hastily went in search of the laundry hamper and rummaged through the underwear, while the others assembled around the kitchen table. Upon the table stood a plastic bag containing five hundred thousand euros in cash, as well as a line of well-made sawblade knives in their original packaging, wool ski masks, and thick latex gloves. The written instructions accompanying those items specified that the sharks were to split the money into equal parts, provided that they successfully followed the orders and, of course, survived to the end. After the fetishist emerged from the bathroom, he suggested they just split up the money and run, but in the meantime, the sixth member of the group had arrived, a man in his early sixties who traveled with a Croatian passport, even though he’d been born and raised in the Soviet Union. Without even introducing himself, he grabbed one of the knives and murdered the fetishist, careful not to spatter blood on himself. The waiter met an equally unhappy end when he tried to escape after realizing that acting in a snuff movie isn’t as much fun as watching one from the safety of a computer screen. The last arrival gave the waiter a punch that stunned him; then the man turned to the others and pointed at the supine body. “Are you waiting for an engraved invitation?” he asked in English. The three of them grabbed the waiter. One covered his mouth with his hand while the two others took turns kicking and punching him. Once again, it was the new arrival who finished him off, crushing the man’s throat with his foot. “The next one who fails to obey the instructions,” he said, “will receive the same treatment. Now all of you sit down and wait for it to be time.”
The three men did as they were told. The new arrival watched them the way a sheepdog guards his flock: in fact, that was exactly what he’d been sent to do. Giltine had called on the only person she could trust in her absence, a man she hadn’t seen in over twenty years, but who had cleansed her wounds in the Box and then, in the first few days after their escape, had taught her how to orient herself in the outside world. He had told her his name, but in Giltine’s mind, he’d always be the Policeman.
° ° °
Colomba, Leo, and Dante were arriving, too, even though Giltine had done everything within her power to prevent that from happening: they were in the second-class carriage of the high-speed train from Rome to Venice. Dante lay sprawled out on two seats, his face glued to the glass, and in a deep coma thanks to the usual vial of medicine without which he wouldn’t have been capable of boarding the train. Even so, he dreamed of being able to dematerialize and escape to the outdoors by passing through the molecules of the train’s window.
Colomba and Leo, sitting across from him, were burning with impatience, and they moved away to talk at the café in the middle of the train, over a cappuccino and a pack of Loacker wafers.
“What move do you think our friend is going to make now?” asked Leo.
“I don’t have the faintest idea. And like I was telling you, I’m worried about the victims, too,” Colomba replied, making a pair of air quotes with both hands. “There’s nothing official against COW, no lawsuit or investigative journalism, they really do seem like the South African equivalent of the Gates Foundation. But if even a tenth of the things that Dante told us is true, they’re a gang of criminals. War criminals, anyway.”
Leo took the now-empty plastic coffee cup and threw it into the trash can with a perfect shot. “If? Don’t you believe him?”
“There’s one thing you have to understand, Leo. Dante is constantly caught between two worlds—our world and one that only he can see. When he talks about murderers and liars, I believe him. When he talks about plots and conspiracies, I look for corroborating evidence. Concerning all the rest, I don’t know exactly what to make of it.”
“Is that true f
or his kidnapping, too?” Leo asked, his curiosity aroused.
“The evidence that he’s provided is irrefutable when it comes to the Father and his connections. But what that has to do with the MKUltra experiments and the Cold War . . . what can I tell you? He also hopes to find his brother, sooner or later, who’ll explain it all to him. And even though I tell him there is one chance in a billion that there is anything to this at all, he continues to be obsessed with it.” She stared at him. “But let me ask you something. How can it be that Di Marco or someone who works with him has never even heard of Giltine or the Box? Why hasn’t COW been targeted for investigation into its activities? Could it be that in all these years, no one’s picked up any information about them? Haven’t there been any tips and rumors worth looking into?”
Leo gestured for her to step onto the gangway connection between the cars. “Security multinationals are difficult subjects to handle,” he said. “You might find out that they’re working with allied nations, or you might need them in a war zone. Do you think I’ve never had dealings with contractors? It happens every time some foreign billionaire shows up and you have to work with them. COW is connected to some of these entities and is clearly on good terms with them.”
“So the intelligence agencies can’t touch them.”
“But they might not be sorry if somebody blew COW up. If it’s true that they sold the Box to the highest bidder, it wasn’t the Italian government who bought it.”
“Giltine is doing the intelligence agencies’ dirty work,” Colomba murmured. “If she’s successful, great; if not, no one’s to blame.”
Leo shrugged. “That’s just a hypothesis, but if I were in their shoes, that’s what I would do.”
“Really?”
“The world’s at war, Colomba, people are fighting with whatever comes to hand. And there are always collateral victims. Sometimes they’re inevitable and help to prevent far worse bloodbaths. Like when you shoot a kid in the head because you’re afraid he’s going to blow himself up.”
Kill the Angel Page 42
