She went back to the first pictures, started leafing through the album more carefully, and finally saw something that at first puzzled her and then made her blood run cold. She quickly flipped through the pages as the ice spread through her veins but stopped when she heard Wanda’s heels clicking toward the bedroom. She hastily put the album back where it was. This isn’t the right time, she thought. Not now.
Wanda opened the door and found Colomba standing by the window, the stack of magazines exactly as it had been. “You can come down now, Colomba.”
“Thanks.”
“Andrea’s waiting outside for me, to give me a ride to where Annibale is. He thinks it’s probably best for me not to stay here.”
“I think so, too,” Colomba agreed.
Wanda hesitated. “Today the police came to ask him about Dante. It didn’t turn out like the other times. They were more aggressive. Do you think they suspect he’s helping you?”
Colomba shrugged. “I couldn’t say, but I do know for sure that they’ll find out, one way or another, if we stay here. Today’s the last day, I promise.”
“I’m a little frightened,” Wanda murmured. “At first it seemed like a game, but now . . .”
“I know. Dante and I will deny you had anything to do with it. That’s the least we can do. And once they catch us, they’re not going to waste a lot of time on you two.”
“You talk as if you were certain you were going to be arrested.”
“Because I am.” She shook Wanda’s hand. “Thanks for everything.”
Colomba waited until Wanda left, then went back to the living room, where Dante was sitting on the couch. He was looking at three large boxes marked with the logo of an athletic equipment company, arranged on the carpet in the middle of the room. “Father Christmas came,” he said.
“Or not,” said Colomba. “Let’s just say Santa Claus. I’ve had more than enough Fathers for right now.”
She asked Dante to help her, and together they opened the boxes and carefully emptied the contents onto the floor: there was a 10 mm scuba-diving wet suit with a winter hood, a headlamp dive light, a 100-cubic-foot scuba tank, and a portable magnetometer for use as a metal detector.
“Are you sure you know how to use it?” Dante asked.
“It’s been three years since the last time, but I think I still remember everything,” she replied. “Or would you care to try?”
“I’d be dead before I hit the water.”
“Then you’ll have to operate the winch.” Colomba studied her wrist dive computer, much more sophisticated than the depth gauge she was accustomed to. This one could even calculate the amount of air left in the tank, expressed as time, based on the depth and the ascent time required. She decided to read the instructions from start to finish, because that night her life was going to depend on it.
Because that night she was going to dive into the quarry.
20
At eight o’clock, the Friends of the River was starting to fill up with the evening clientele, younger and more diverse than the afternoon fauna. A number of couples dined there regularly, even on weekdays, while at that hour the elderly habitués were generally heading home, though they occasionally showed up again later for an after-dinner amaro, at least the ones sufficiently fit to ride their bikes.
The checkerboards were put away and the tables were set with red-and-white-checked tablecloths, chosen especially by the proprietor because they were reminiscent of the trattorias of days gone by; the scent of sautéing onions began to fill the air, and before long there would be frog’s legs browning in the pans, the specialty of the house. The chef, who was writing up the evening’s specials on the slate blackboard, was the first to notice the blue lights flashing on the roof of the Alfa Romeo parked out front and the two men in plain clothes getting out of the car. One of them had a salt-and-pepper mustache, a haggard face, and an athletic physique; the other one was short and bald; they came in and headed straight for the counter. The chef decided they spelled trouble, and one of the older men playing checkers made a face, having caught the smell of cops. The Friends of the River had been in operation since the turn of the twentieth century, even if a great deal had changed since then; up until the sixties it had been the meeting place for the so-called Lìggera, the organized crime syndicate of Lombardy, criminals who didn’t use weapons, long gone and largely forgotten. How many of the old members of the Lìggera were still in circulation was impossible to say, but the survivors hadn’t given up their habit of gathering at that establishment.
The policeman with the salt-and-pepper mustache showed his police ID to the proprietor, who read the name: Deputy Chief Marco Santini. “Good evening,” he said. “We’re looking for two people.”
The bald man pulled two photographs out of his pocket: one was of an attractive woman; the other showed a man who seemed to be malnourished, with the intense gaze of a rock singer.
The proprietor shook his head. “I’m sorry, but I haven’t seen them. Are you sure they’ve been through here?”
Santini put his finger on the photograph of the man. “This is Annibale Valle’s son. You know who I’m talking about, don’t you?”
The proprietor looked startled, then worried. “I know Annibale very well, but he’s never come here with his son. He wouldn’t be the one . . .”
“He would,” Santini said brusquely.
“He looked different in the papers. Have you asked Annibale?”
Santini stared at the proprietor as if he’d just spewed some awful obscenity. At that moment, a little old man, standing less than five feet, came up to the bar with an empty glass, indicating by gesture that he wanted a refill. He wore an oversized pair of eyeglasses and an equally oversized pair of hearing aids that were almost entirely hidden by the tufts of hair protruding from his ears.
“Just a minute, I’ll be right with you,” the proprietor said to him. Then he turned back to the two cops. “Is there anything else I can do for you?”
Santini shook his head and reached out for the picture, but he found the old man’s hand on top of it. The man muttered something in dialect that Santini didn’t understand.
Santini glanced at the bald man. “Did you understand?”
His partner nodded. He’d been born in Brescia, and the dialect around here was similar to his. “He said he’d seen him.”
“Torre? When?” asked Santini.
The old man mumbled a few more incomprehensible words, and the cop understood that it had been the day before. Torre had sat down to chat with the old man until a woman with red hair had come in to get him. They’d left with a big fat man he’d seen here regularly, a guy who had money.
Santini looked at the proprietor, who was now quite clearly uneasy.
“I swear I didn’t notice. I didn’t even see Annibale come in.”
“Because the fat man is Annibale Valle, right?” Santini asked.
“Skinny he’s not,” the proprietor replied, realizing he’d just said too much.
Santini raised one hand to silence the proprietor’s protestations, then asked his partner to take down the details of the old man’s ID. They’d come to the right place; they’d just come twenty-four hours too late. Soon he’d close that case and he’d be done with lunatics on the lam and little kids. God, the kids . . . They’d started appearing in his dreams.
The two policemen left, and the old man went back with a full glass to the game of checkers he’d left. He discovered that his adversary, as old as he and with hands tattooed with blue ink, had crossed his arms and was glaring at him with contempt. And he refused, despite the bespectacled old man’s protestations, to resume the game.
21
Standing atop the truck’s deck, Colomba finished attaching the oxygen tank to the BCD, or buoyancy control device, with little more than symbolic help from Dante. She tightened the ballast belt around her waist and slipped into the belt a flat-head dive hammer of the kind used by underwater mussel poachers, and with it a s
mall waterproof flashlight. The wet suit fit her snugly, while the neoprene flippers were half a size too small, but she could tolerate the pinch. She fastened the lamp to her forehead and tried it, blazing away the darkness for a good fifty yards around her.
“You look ready to take on Alien and Predator at the same time,” said Dante.
“I hope that won’t be necessary,” she replied. She sucked on the mouthpiece to check the airflow. It was a little hard to pull, so she loosened the valve.
“Remember to turn on the tank.”
“The advice of an expert. Help me get down.”
He jumped down off the deck and put his hands around her waist. They were practically embracing for a few seconds, and Dante on impulse really did put his arms around her. “Be careful down there,” he whispered, resting his chin on her shoulder.
Colomba responded to the embrace for a few seconds; then she politely disengaged herself. “It’s not as dangerous as you think.”
“What if you have an attack?” he asked.
Colomba sighed. She preferred not to think about that. “I’d just better not have one.” Controlling your breathing is the most important thing when you’re hooked up to an air tank.
“If you want, I have a couple of Xanax . . .”
“That’d be worse: I need to be clearheaded.”
By the light of Dante’s flashlight, they went over to the edge of the quarry lake; in the dark of the night the water looked black as tar. All around them, darkness. On their way in they’d noticed a couple of parked cars using the trees as a lover’s lane, but no one had questioned them. Colomba looked at the lake water. The wet suit would protect her a little from the cold, but at the bottom the water temperature would be around fifty degrees, possibly colder. She’d have preferred a dry suit. With her advanced certification, she could certainly have used it, but she would have had to purchase it herself. Leaving aside the fact that a dry suit is harder to find.
“According to the old map,” said Dante, illuminating the ground with his flashlight, “the quarry road ran around here. So I’d have to guess that the Father’s group came this way with the dump truck.”
“And that the barrels are down below,” added Colomba. “But it all depends on how they brought them down here and whether the current has moved them in all these years.” The body of water was a large one, 1,500 feet long and 650 feet across at the widest point, with plenty of grottos, excavation pits, and caves. Colomba would never be able to explore it all, not alone and not by night. She could only pray that her efforts would be aided by the little bit of good luck she hadn’t seemed to be getting, at least not so far.
“Let’s just hope that this thing works the way they say it does in the brochure,” said Dante, handing her the metal detector. It looked like a foot-long torpedo with a handle along the top and a circle of LED lights near the tip. When Colomba turned it on, the LEDs blinked, changing from red to green, while the device buzzed and vibrated slightly. She’d tried it out at Wanda’s house and had had no difficulties finding metal pipes in the walls, but she had no idea what its behavior would be underwater. Dante had set the sensitivity at medium, to keep it from going off at every lost coin.
Colomba tossed it from one hand to the other, then inflated the BCD to ensure that it would hold her up as she swam the first few yards away from shore. The walls of the quarry were sheer, but jagged and very possibly sharp enough to cut.
Wanda’s cell phone rang in Dante’s pocket.
“Did you leave it turned on?” asked Colomba.
“Just in case of unexpected developments,” said Dante. He answered, and Colomba realized that something bad had happened, because by the light of the smartphone screen, he seemed to turn even paler. “I understand. All right. Thanks. Good luck.” He ended the call, pulled out the battery, and stuck the phone back in his pocket.
“What is it?” Colomba asked.
“That was Wanda. She was calling me from the bathroom with her cordless. The police have arrived at my father’s house. She said that they know we’ve seen him.”
“It wasn’t a good idea to call you,” Colomba replied. “They’ll trace the call.”
“How long will it take them to find us?” Dante enquired.
“The dive time of this tank at sixty-five feet, which is the lowest point in the quarry, is about an hour,” Colomba replied. “I’d say we’ll be done before they can get here. And we’ll have enough time to get out of here, too. Unless they’re more efficient in Cremona than in the rest of the world.”
“Then we’d better get moving.”
Colomba let herself slip into the water, which slowly started to seep into the wet suit and warm up with the heat of her body. She swam a few strokes, swung into a vertical position, and then opened the valve to deflate her BCD. She immediately began to sink.
She descended slowly, stopping every ten feet to compensate, holding her nose and blowing. The quarry water, illuminated by the lamp, glittered with green and purple highlights and was clearer than she would have expected, at least from her first sight of the surface covered by bobbing vegetation and rotting branches. She also saw a couple of iridescent pike dart away as she approached, as well as an enormous carp almost a yard long. With neutral buoyancy, ten yards under according to her wrist dive computer, she forgot for a moment why she was diving and delightedly drank in the fantastic panorama. Then she deflated the BCD some more and started descending again, this time without stopping, until she was within little more than a yard from the bottom. She once again adjusted her trim to make sure that the tips of her flippers didn’t touch bottom, because they’d kick up silt, making the water murky. The water temperature had dropped sharply, though it was still tolerable. She rotated to light up the wall next to her, which was covered with nudibranchs and tiny clams, then in the other direction, toward the center of the lake, which vanished into darkness.
For a moment she felt tiny in that space and feared that she’d never be able to find what she was looking for in time; if, that is, it was even there. She turned on the metal detector and pointed it downward as she pushed out into open water.
The metal detector almost immediately blinked red, and Colomba felt her heart leap into her mouth. She reached out a hand to touch the bottom, but all she felt was a chain that looked as if it might lead to an anchor, covered with mussels and algae. You can’t count on being lucky on the first hit, she thought to herself. She went back to swimming, moving in a spiral, and the detector blinked a number of times, leading her to find a wide array of metallic garbage that had nothing to do with what she was looking for. She found a piece of a moped, a gas can, cans that had held bait or food, more chains, metal cables, a pick blade, and even a television set. She wondered who’d gone to the trouble of bringing a TV set all the way out here just to throw it into the water, but she knew that idiots always seem to have plenty of time on their hands.
After twenty minutes or so of fruitless searching, she took a look at her wrist computer. She had thirty-six minutes’ worth of air left. Calculating the five minutes it would take to ascend without risking a brain embolism, however unlikely at these depths, she realized she’d have to come up with a better system, and quickly.
She strained to remember the map of the quarry that she’d studied on the screen of Wanda’s cell phone—it had fortunately been able to access the Internet, though at an embarrassingly slow rate. Dante wasn’t wrong about the access road, but perhaps the Father and his henchmen had driven the dump truck to a different point than the quarry entrance. In fact, considering the results of Colomba’s searches, by now it seemed practically certain. But why hadn’t they just dumped the drums immediately? Why waste time, with the risk of getting bogged down? She understood as her headlamp lit up the wall in front of her, opposite where she had entered the water: there seemed to be a projection at the base. As she was swimming in that direction, she realized that for thirty feet or so, instead of a sheer drop, there was a gentle slope down
to the center of the quarry.
Colomba silently prayed that the Father’s fellow soldiers had behaved like soldiers around the world, with or without insignia, and that in order to avoid pointless effort, instead of carrying the barrels down, they’d rolled them down the slope to the bottom, which even then must have been muddy, or perhaps yards deep in water.
She started at the bottom of the slope, swimming slowly in small circles. The metal detector blinked only once, about five yards from the quarry wall. Colomba touched the bottom, finding a hard, compact layer under the silt. She pulled the hammer out of her belt and used it to scrape at the clayey substrate. The water turned murky and the light was blocked by the billowing detritus, but she continued to dig until the tip of her tool hit something elastic.
She slipped the hammer into her belt and went on digging with her hands. She felt the shape of a rounded object and was then able to make out in the mud the upper end of a fifty-five-gallon drum. She realized that it was made of some material that appeared to be heavy plastic, with steel hoops on the exterior. It wasn’t a standard fuel drum, therefore, and when she saw a second one and then a third next to it, she realized that she’d found what she was looking for. To mark the spot, she turned on the little flashlight she carried on her belt and planted it in the water pointing straight up, then swam hastily to the far end of the lake, inflated her BCD slightly, and ascended, seething with impatience at each of the two decompression halts that she deemed adequate. As she was ascending she felt a stabbing pain in her upper dental arch and realized that there must be microfractures in her teeth and tiny air bubbles had made their way into them; as they expanded, the bubbles exerted pressure on her roots. The legacy of one of the two explosions she’d survived, no doubt about it.
Kill the Father Page 40
