“What was her name? I can’t come up with it right now.”
“Caroline Wong, half French, half Chinese. Pinna only knew her first name, but we found her, even though we had to move cautiously because the minute Bellomo figured out we were onto him, he’d take off. He was clever, and he’d given proof of that already.”
“Why on earth did Pinna talk?”
“Because immediately after Bellomo’s departure, he found out that he had terminal cancer and didn’t have long to live. Rovere and I figured he just wanted to get it off his conscience. Even though later . . .” Colomba shook her head. “Let me take things in order. Well, then, Rovere assigned me to supervise the operation with the French authorities. And I had the added benefit of knowing one of the cops over there, someone I’d met at one of the many Schengen liaison meetings we had to attend, plus I speak a little French. So we put Wong’s apartment under surveillance, along with the place she worked as a coat check attendant, a deluxe Japanese restaurant atop a boutique.”
“That restaurant.”
“Exactly, that one. The operation was being left to the local cops, I was strictly an observer. They let me keep my sidearm as a courtesy, and I was supposed to do nothing but take custody of Bellomo once they caught him, but after two days of unsuccessful stakeouts, since one member of the team was always supposed to be at the restaurant, I went in instead, pretending to be a client. My bad luck. I was there pretending to eat when Bellomo came in. He spotted me and recognized me.” Colomba shook her head, stricken. “You know the rest.”
“Bellomo set off the bomb.”
Colomba had gone back for a moment into the midst of the smoke and the flames. “Yes,” she said softly. “And it was a massacre. He had it in the coat check room. His girlfriend was doing him a favor. I don’t know if I should be mad at her or feel sorry for her.”
“Sorry for her, I’d guess, seeing that she’s dead. How did Bellomo manage to recognize you? Had the two of you ever met?”
“Never. There are two possibilities. Either he had an exceptional nose for cops, and from a guy like him I wouldn’t have been a bit surprised, or else Pinna had described what I looked like. I know for certain that he recognized me. And Pinna had put him on the alert, from what we found out later.”
“So Pinna betrayed you?”
“He hanged himself the day of the explosion, begging forgiveness for all the mayhem. In his suicide note he explained that he’d changed his mind and had warned Bellomo ‘out of friendship.’ I’d imagine via Wong.”
“Why didn’t Bellomo try to escape?”
“Maybe he was just tired of running. Maybe he just wanted to be remembered as the piece of shit that he was. And he’d prepared a welcome for us.” Colomba took a deep breath; her lungs had started to hurt. “I saw him trigger the detonator, you know. He was looking me right in the eye, and he put a hand in his pocket. I tried to pull my gun, but . . . I wasn’t fast enough. The sky came down on our heads.”
After the explosion, Colomba had awakened with her ears ringing and her head pounding. She couldn’t remember anything from the last minute . . . What had she done? What had happened?
The power had failed, and Colomba’s eyes had had to become accustomed to almost total darkness before she was able to make out through the drifting smoke the shapes of the yawning gaps that had once been windows. Flames were licking at one end of the dining room, and in that surreal phosphorescent grayness she had glimpsed one of the models who had been sitting at the central table. She was now sprawled on her back just a few feet away, her outfit ripped to tatters. The blood streaming from her mouth formed a black puddle. All around was scattered rubble, dust, flames, and more smoke. A bomb, Colomba had decided. It was a bomb.
She’d lost her earpiece, but even if she’d still had it, she couldn’t have used it because the explosion had compromised her hearing. Slithering out from under the table top that had protected her, Colomba had made her way over to the model and shaken her lightly. Her head had moved like a doll’s. Under normal conditions, Colomba would have understood immediately just what had happened, but she was anything but lucid. She was in shock, with severe traumatic brain injury, two broken ribs, a knee out of commission, and a sprained shoulder. But right then and there, she didn’t feel all that bad, just very, very tired, and she was having a hard time focusing on anything near at hand. She thought in a muddled way that the girl was injured and needed immediate medical attention. She’d gotten up without her shoes and had cut and injured the soles of her feet, clad only in socks, by walking on red-hot rubble and broken glass. But she hadn’t felt the cuts or burns, either. She’d taken the model in her arms, as delicately as she knew how, and had made her way through the smoke. She’d staggered, unable to see where she was going. She was heading for the windows, which she could just glimpse, but she’d kept stumbling over wreckage and fragments of furniture, coming dangerously close to falling or dropping her burden. At a certain point she had stepped on something soft and felt it move. She’d leaned down and seen that it was a hand sticking out from under an overturned rack of shelves loaded with bottles.
Even now, Colomba didn’t know who that hand had belonged to. It seemed like a man’s hand, but in the dim lighting she couldn’t be sure. Whoever it was, he might have died because she didn’t stop to help him, but of all the wrongs she blamed on herself, she’d absolved herself of this one. In those fleeting moments her only thoughts were for the girl she carried in her arms, and most of the time she didn’t think at all. She’d continued her trek, which seemed to stretch out endlessly as she stumbled around in circles. One at a time, her ears had started to work again, and through the ferocious buzzing she’d been able to make out the sound of the fire devouring the curtains and the flakes of plaster falling from the ceiling. And the cries, weak and desperate, of those who had been left buried under rubble or too gravely injured to be able to move.
“I’ll come back soon to get you all!” she had shouted, or had thought she’d shouted, her throat burning with the dust and smoke. “I swear I’ll come back!” But in the meantime she had managed to make out the shape of the door that led to the restaurant’s front entrance. She’d headed straight for it, and as she got closer, the air had cleared up while the draft swept away the fumes; out on the landing, which had once contained a small reception desk, an emergency light that had somehow been left intact pointed her toward salvation with its green eye. It was the staircase, and on the first steps lay sprawled the dead body of a legless waiter. In her delirium, Colomba had thought: God, how lucky we are, me and this girl. It came so close. Really close. With her load, she wouldn’t have been able to make it down the stairs, but just then a small crowd emerged from the darkness. Waiters, black-clad salesclerks from the boutique downstairs, passersby who, instead of taking to their heels, were trying to help. They’d rushed toward her, all shouting and sobbing, all of them trying to take the girl out of her arms, saying “Sit down, stay calm, come here.” She’d pushed them away. She’d shouted, or imagined she was shouting, “Take care of the others, the others!”
She’d regained consciousness at Paris’s Sainte-Anne Hospital, and through the dull daze of the sedatives, a sad-faced doctor had told her that the girl she’d carried, the Albanian fashion model stuffed with cocaine, had died instantly when a table—the same table that had saved Colomba’s life—had shattered her skull. But Colomba had learned the news with almost total indifference. She no longer had guts and organs, she no longer had anything. She was a void held together by a thin layer of skin. And the fact that that void should go on breathing and maintain the appearance of a human being would have seemed incredible to her if she’d still had the capacity to be amazed at anything. She’d hardly uttered a word for the first week. She hadn’t spoken to her fellow cops or to her mother, who came to embrace her, to the representatives of the major institution, who “stood with her, deeply moved, in solidarity and fellowship,” to that piece of shit who had once bee
n her boyfriend but who now fled from her side in the months that followed, unable to put up with her in this new incarnation of a sick and suffering creature.
Interacting with them would have forced her to feel like a human being again, and Colomba had neither the ability nor the desire. She wanted to be a section of wall, a bedsheet, one of the flowers in a vase that the chief of police had sent her, “with deep affection and immense sympathy.” An ordinary everyday object that could feel nothing, a thing among things. She couldn’t actually do it, but she’d still whiled away the time making the attempt, while they were operating on her to adjust her tendon and shoulder, while they were trying to force her to eat, finally talking her into it, but only moments before resorting to force-feeding. And not even Rovere’s visit had been able to shake her out of it; when he had sat down beside her and had understood and had told her that it wasn’t her fault and had gone on saying it in the days that had followed, while the panic attacks started coming, along with the nightmares and the hearings of the internal affairs panel. Rovere, who was every bit as tested by the ordeal as she was, perhaps even more because he was fresh from the loss of his wife—one sorrow piled atop the other—and weighed down by the sense of guilt for having sent Colomba to what could so easily have been her death.
“In the end, the internal affairs panel acquitted me. But I’d have willingly accepted a guilty verdict. I felt and I still feel that I made a terrible mistake,” Colomba concluded her story.
In the dense darkness that surrounded him, and in the darkness evoked in that account, Dante almost hesitated to breathe. “CC . . . But why should it have been your fault? What could you have done differently?”
“Stop him before he got into the restaurant.”
“But you didn’t spot him until the last minute.”
“I didn’t. But my colleagues down in the street did. They’d seen him come in through the front entrance of the boutique. But I told them to wait. That we had him now, that he was certainly coming upstairs to see his girlfriend. That I’d keep an eye on him and wouldn’t let him shake me. The exits were all under surveillance, he had no escape route, we could do things on our own schedule. Technically, I wasn’t in charge of the operation, but my French colleagues took my advice. And they wrote in the report that they’d done so, ‘relying on my experience and knowledge of the subject,’ their exact words. We’re talking about the worst foul-up committed by the French police in the past half century, and possibly in all of Europe. No one wanted to take responsibility for it. The city prefect resigned, the French chief of police was looking wobbly for a while, things got vicious among the embassies. And ever since, relations between us and them haven’t been good.”
“I’m sure you had your reasons. I know the way you think.”
“I knew Bellomo’s priors. I was afraid he might be armed and could start shooting in a crowded place. That someone might be hurt. But I let something even worse happen.”
“He’d have set off the bomb in any case the instant he sensed you were about to capture him.”
“That was the finding of the internal affairs panel, and they made sure my name was kept out of the newspapers and I wasn’t kicked off the police force. And that’s what I keep telling myself. But the fact remains that I made the wrong decision. That’s why I can’t do my job anymore. Not because of the panic attacks. You can get over those. But because I no longer trust myself and my judgment.”
Dante slid down on the chaise longue to get closer to her. Now he was just inches away, and he felt the sorrowful and almost irrepressible desire to hold her. God, how he missed wrapping his arms around a woman, and in that moment of fragility Colomba appeared, a simple silhouette against the light, as the very essence of what he wished he could feel pressed against his body. As he formulated that thought, Dante surprised himself and caught himself in the midst of reaching out to take her hand. That wasn’t a good idea, decidedly not. He leaned back against the chair. “CC, I’m not much when it comes to comforting other people. I’ve wallowed in self-pity for so long that my strategy when other people are in pain is just to wait for them to get over it. But I can tell you something. I feel sure that if you had been working on my case when I was locked in the silo, you’d have found me.”
Colomba snorted. “That came out nicely.”
“Really? It just popped into my head. Do you want to get some sleep?”
“No.” Colomba stood up and stretched, making the vertebrae in her neck crack. She felt a pleasant numbness in her leg muscles from the run that afternoon and once again told herself that she needed to amp up her training. “I don’t know if I would have found you, but I do want to free that child in the video before he turns into someone like you. The world only needs one Dante Torre.”
19
When the sun rose, the list of cases that Infanti had put together had been winnowed down to thirty or so, and by ten that morning to just six. The others had been discarded because of confident identification of corpses or because of the age or sex of the minors. The first to be eliminated were the murder victims. Most of them were newborns or infants. The six they’d kept were a sampling of the cruelty of fate. A child swept away by the current during a flood and never found, another burned to death in his parents’ home, a third buried in an avalanche, the fourth and fifth killed in car crashes caused by high speeds and the idiocy of the motorists, their bodies so enormously damaged that even their surviving relatives were unable to identify them. The sixth was the cruelest and most grotesque of them all. A minivan carrying six people on a pilgrimage to a religious sanctuary in the province of Macerata had plummeted into a ravine, exploding upon impact. All the occupants of the vehicle had been killed, rendered unrecognizable because they’d been crushed in the impact, as well as by the explosion of the gas tank, an event as common in movies as it is rare in real life. That parish-owned minivan was old and had none of the modern safety devices, and perhaps it shouldn’t even have been on the road.
With the six names written down on a pad of paper in front of her, after downing a pitcher of single-origin arabica coffee from Santo Domingo, Colomba prepared to complete the most painful task, contacting the families. Dante had stepped aside. As much as he enjoyed lying and fabricating on the phone, he was completely incapable of dealing with other people’s sorrow, especially the scalding pain of losing a son or daughter or a grandson or granddaughter. In personal contacts, his capacity for observing facial expressions and body language made him more detached, but when the interaction with his interlocutors was strictly verbal, he was unable to avoid recognizing in their voices the thousand nuances of suffering and at the same time feeling those emotions inside himself. And although most people have an array of conventional phrases and gestures to offer in situations of mourning, Dante was a complete social idiot and always did more harm than anything else.
She had expected the task to be painful, and so it proved, even more than expected. Colomba’s phone call awakened nightmares and caused weeping, cursing, and, in at least one case, screams of pain and sorrow. Nonetheless, she had no choice but to insist. “Could you send us a picture, please? By email would be best, but we can work with a fax as well.” She talked about police statistical research projects, the assembly of databases that would help save lives, and she was only partly lying. To add discomfort to the moment, there was the additional inconvenient detail that only two of those contacted had an Internet connection or a computer, and so Colomba had to persuade the others to go to a local tobacconist or an Internet café and arrange to do it at their earliest convenience. Miraculously, no one refused to do it, and in just a few hours she managed to obtain them all.
Meanwhile, Dante was sleeping fitfully, with a black sleep mask covering his eyes, nodding off and jerking awake in continuation because his brain wouldn’t stop churning. It was as if in his restless state he was trying to assemble a jigsaw puzzle with pieces that refused to fit together. And among the pieces was certainly the Father, but
also the mysterious boy and Rovere’s still more mysterious motives. Just how they linked up with the rest, he couldn’t say, but he sensed that his sorrow and his motives were an important thread in the weft he was trying to untangle. His thoughts were feverish, typical of serious sleep deprivation. But still he reiterated the well-known points, the way you do in those Griddler crossword puzzles that require you to black in squares in order to reveal the hidden features of everyday objects.
Suddenly a flood of light brought him back to consciousness. Colomba had yanked the mask off his eyelids, and now she was staring at him with a weary expression. “I’ve got them. And I’ve come up with an idea.”
“The pictures of the kids?” he muttered with a parched throat, reaching around in search of his cigarette pack.
“Yes. They’re on the computer. Are you ready, or do you want to stall a little longer?” she asked sarcastically.
“Just a minute, let me wash my face.”
He’d thrown himself onto the bed fully clothed. He took off his shirt and splashed cold water on his face at the bathroom sink, then took a complex assortment of drops and pills designed to take away a little of the anxiety that had been tormenting him. Then he returned to the living room with his towel over his shoulders.
It was the first time that Colomba was seeing him bare-chested, and once again she was reminded of David Bowie in that old sci-fi movie, skinny as a twig. Still, in spite of his undoubtedly bad habits, he wasn’t skinny in an unhealthy way. In fact, it seemed somewhat like the thinness of a teenager who’d just been through a growth spurt. If it hadn’t been for the hint of white whiskers that had sprouted in the past two days, when he’d stopped shaving, you would have thought he was younger than his years.
Kill the Father Page 22
