Kill the Father

by Sandrone Dazieri

  Santini did as she asked, highlighting a number of dark strips. “Dry mud. Someone wiped their feet off.”

  “Not just someone: Dante. And he wasn’t wiping his feet off. Come over here.”

  When Santini did, he saw that the strips were actually letters and numbers traced out with the sole of a shoe. “EH29” he read.

  “A partial license plate number,” said Colomba. “So you still think it’s all pure chance?”

  Santini sighed and pulled out his cell phone.

  While Santini was calling his office, Dante reawakened in his prison, and this time he didn’t faint immediately. I was given something, he realized, sensing that his thoughts were crawling along like snails. Enough tranquilizer to calm down a horse. Maybe injected directly into his neck, because it ached.

  Whatever it was, the drug was working. Not only did it slow him down, it also made it almost tolerable to be shut up in a narrow, rectangular space, twenty by ten feet, with all the openings closed off. It was illuminated by a green child’s night light tucked away in a corner; the walls were covered with insulation and wooden boards. There was a Formica counter with a sink, cabinets, a table and chair, and a bunk bed. Dante was flat on his back on the lower bunk, and there was a collar on his neck, made for a big dog, padlocked and fastened to a metal cable that was welded to the headboard of the bed. He tried to tug at it with hands rendered insensible by the tranquilizer, but the ring didn’t budge and the bed turned out to be anchored to the floor.

  While trying to figure out just how much play the cable had, Dante moved too suddenly and the collar jerked at his throat. It wasn’t much of a jerk, but he still felt he was being suffocated and the surge of adrenaline wiped away the effects of the drug. Once again, the walls around him seemed to narrow in as if about to crush him. He opened his mouth to yell for help, but he couldn’t do it. As he was passing out once again, he had one lucid thought. Of Colomba.

  She knew, he was sure of it. She was coming to get him. He just wondered whether she’d be in time.

  “No license plate,” Santini told Colomba. They were still at the farmhouse, fighting against the cold and damp. No van registered had a plate that began or ended with the letters and numbers traced in the mud, he explained. Only cars, and there were vast numbers of those.

  “Either Torre got the number wrong,” said Santini “or else we’re wrong. For all we know, someone was here the other night, maybe playing Battleship in the mud.”

  Colomba shook her head. “No. It was him. This is how he does things.”

  Santini lit a cigarette. “You think you might be a little too confident?”

  “I told you before, I know how he thinks.” But did she really? Maybe she just hoped she did, because it was the last thread tying her to Dante. “Can you call the highway patrol?”

  “There aren’t any video cameras here.”

  “But maybe the panel van pulled onto the highway. We know the time frame, and we know a part of the license number. That’s more than enough. They can just look in their system.”

  Colomba was referring to Safety Tutor, a speed camera system that recorded the license plates of vehicles passing through toll gates and sent the data to the processing center in Settebagni, where it was analyzed to catch speeders. The police could get into the database, but there were so many search requests for wanted criminals and stolen cars that if you wanted a fast response, it required either a formal request from a judge or else an inside contact. Santini had one.

  At two in the morning, as they were waiting along the county road in a bar and tobacco shop that stayed open late for truckers, Santini got his answer. And when he hung up, Colomba saw that he’d lost the weary, indifferent expression of the past few hours. “Okay.”

  “Okay what?”

  “Okay, you were right.”

  Colomba immediately dropped the stale piece of pastry she’d been trying to choke down. “Did they find the license plate?”

  “Yes. And it’s a white Fiat Ducato panel van. But according to EUCARIS, that license is registered to a Fiat 500 that was sent to the crusher.” EUCARIS is the European Car and Driving License Information System.

  “So it’s stolen. Where did the camera film it?”

  “Around Bologna, then Florence, and then in Rome. It left the highway two hours ago, at an off-ramp from Via Salaria. After that we lost it.”

  “Someone took Dante to Rome. That’s where the Father is,” Colomba muttered under her breath.

  “Caselli, we need to sound the alarm.”

  “No,” said Colomba decisively. “The Father would hear about it.”

  “How?”

  Colomba shook her head. “He killed Rovere because he knew he was on his trail, and he sent the German to kill Jorge as soon as he was released from prison. He’s getting firsthand information.”

  “Do you think he’s one of us?”

  “Either that or he has someone like you on salary. In fact, until just recently I assumed it actually was you, or else De Angelis.” Colomba chewed on her lips. “Or both of you.”

  “It’s not me, and as far as De Angelis goes, you don’t have to worry now that he’s quit.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Listen, I worked for him, and not just for a couple of days. There’s nothing he wouldn’t have done to further his career, and he did favors for anyone he thought could do favors in return. But he’s no murderer. Nor is he the accomplice of a murderer.” He shrugged his shoulders. “And even if he wanted to pass information to the Father, because maybe he doesn’t really understand who he is, he wouldn’t be able to do it anymore. The colleagues all steer clear of him now. So you don’t have to worry.”

  Colomba shook her head without a word, and Santini understood that she was at a loss. It was the perfect time for him to throw in the towel, but he didn’t do it.

  “Listen to me, Caselli,” he said in a reasonable voice. “We can sound the alarm but keep it to a minimum. We’ll just report the van as stolen and nothing more. No matter how much inside information the Father is getting, he can’t know everything. And this information would come directly to my office.”

  “Which you trust implicitly, right?” she said angrily.

  “The way you’re thinking now, there’s no one I can trust. And you might even be right. But working alone, we’re not going to get anywhere.”

  Colomba chewed on her lip for a few more seconds. “How long did it take you to get up to Cremona?”

  “Four hours. Using the siren.”

  “Let’s see if we can take less time to get back.” She stood up. “Have them start looking for the van, while we go to Rome.”

  32

  Dante’s third reawakening was a terrible thing; or perhaps it was the fourth, he couldn’t exactly remember. Previously they might have given him enough tranquilizers to knock out a horse, but this time he’d basically undergone a chemical lobotomy. He was shaking uncontrollably, and in his head a carousel of overlapping, interchanging images kept spinning, merging one into the next. Some of them came from his past, others from his nightmares, but they all seemed equally real. He was plummeting into hell, he was still in the silo, he was running from an invisible enemy, he was in the restraining bed back in the clinic, on the glassed-in terrace of his home as it went up in flames.

  He was dead.

  No, he thought. I’m still alive. He still wants me alive.

  He tried to sit upright, and once again the collar choked him, but this time without triggering another attack. What it did instead was help him get back to the present; it reminded him of where he was. A prisoner in a hole, buried alive. The drug that made it hard for him to think worked this time: he didn’t pass out, and he didn’t scream.

  In an attempt to control the spasms, he swung his legs off the bed. His shoes had been taken, and the cold from the floor seeped through the cloth of his socks. The floor seemed to be made of plastic, and it sounded hollow. Whatever place they were holding him in, it
wasn’t an apartment; maybe it was another shipping container. With his good hand he grabbed the padlock on his collar. He couldn’t see it, but he recognized it by feel: a Master Lock with a forty-digit dial. Sixty-four thousand possible combinations. If he could try a different combination every twenty seconds, it would take him more than three hundred hours to try them all. And something told him that he didn’t have three hundred hours. Maybe not even thirty. He used to know a trick to do it faster, he thought desperately. He just had to fish that trick out of the sewer he now had in place of a brain.

  Little by little, a violent surge of nausea had risen inside him, and now he knew he could no longer keep from vomiting. He looked around from something to puke into and he saw . . .

  A metal bucket.

  Like the one in the silo. He’d come back.

  He grabbed it and vomited bile. For a long minute he was lost. Then he came to, curled up on the bed, an acid taste in his mouth, trying to convince himself that the silo no longer existed, that he had been a free man for twenty-five years, but he knew he was lying to himself. His imprisonment had never ended. It had only been expanded to include the whole world, and now it had been shrunk again to the size of a jail cell. At that moment a section of the wall in front of him swung open, and Dante discovered that he had been looking at a carefully disguised door. He finally understood where he was: in a camper or a large trailer. The amber light of a streetlamp slanted in toward him.

  Don’t look out the door, his voice as a child said to him. It’s against the rules. You’ll be punished.

  He resisted the impulse to shut his eyes. He glimpsed what looked like a packed-earth courtyard and, in the distance, what seemed to be aluminum roofs. Next to the door was a man in his sixties whom Dante had seen before: he was the driver of the panel van, the one who had taken him at the farmhouse and who had given him the first injection. He’d recognized him instantly, even though he’d been much younger in the photo that Colomba had found in Ferrari’s apartment. He was one of the German’s men, sitting on the truck with his combat boots hanging around his neck, the one making the thumbs-up sign.

  The man withdrew immediately, and the door frame was filled with another figure. A tall, skinny man, wearing a factory worker’s jumpsuit, with heavy gloves and a full-face ski mask. His eyes were covered by a pair of mirrored sunglasses.

  So many years had passed, and the body was no longer the one he remembered. Skinnier, more hesitant in his movements. But when he came in and the other man closed the door behind him, he tilted his head to one side as if to observe him from another viewpoint. That movement, more than anything else, ensured that Dante recognized him.

  This time it really was the Father.

  The bad news came just after Florence. Santini had nodded off, hanging off his shoulder belt, while Colomba drove with the window partway open, a stream of wind battering her face. Santini’s cell phone rang, and he grabbed it with his eyes still closed. “Yes,” he muttered. “Did they check?” he added faster. “No, forget it.” He hung up.

  “The panel van?” Colomba asked, her guts and her back both aching from the tension.

  “Yes.” Santini rubbed his eyes. “They found it near the Foro Italico. Empty. They must have changed cars, but there’s no way to know what they’re driving now because there are no video cameras there. And I doubt that was a coincidence.”

  Colomba pounded the wheel. “Fuck!”

  “We can send the Forensic Squad to see if they can find anything,” said Santini.

  “The Father would find out, and we don’t have the time.”

  “Caselli, we don’t have anything left.”

  Colomba heaved a deep sigh. “Listen. The Father pulled that ruse at the hotel to give himself more time, and we need him to keep thinking we’re further behind than we are, otherwise Dante’s dead.”

  “More time for what?” Santini asked.

  “Whatever it is, it’s nothing good for Dante,” Colomba replied with a quaver in her voice. “But if we put out an APB, he’s going to know everyone’s after him. He’s the murderous monster, the boogeyman who steals children. Thousands of tips will pour in, and one of them could be the real thing. So he’ll disappear, but before he does, he’ll get rid of Dante. We need to keep a low profile until we’re truly desperate.”

  “Caselli, I’m already desperate,” Santini said. It seemed as though he really was, and his exhaustion couldn’t have helped. “This isn’t the first kidnapping I’ve worked, and there’s one thing I’ve learned: finding a hostage is a long process, and you can’t do it without a team.”

  “We’re the team.”

  Santini shook his head. “We’re not enough.”

  “We have our brains. And we know everything about the Father. All we have to do is figure out what he’s doing now.” Colomba grabbed a bottle of water and drained the last gulp, then tossed it onto the backseat. “Let’s start with the kidnapping. How did he know where to find Dante?”

  Santini lit a cigarette. Colomba put up with the smoke; they’d argued it out in the first mile. “He followed him from the minute he left the hotel,” Santini replied. “In fact, the minute he left the hospital.”

  “Dante is convinced that the Father was watching him earlier than that.”

  “Since when?”

  “Since the day he escaped from the silo.”

  “I don’t know if that’s true, but I can guarantee you he didn’t escape,” said Santini. “They let him go.”

  Colomba glanced over at him for a moment, stunned, then turned her eyes back to the road. “Why?”

  Santini lowered the window to flick out cigarette ash. A small whirlwind formed. “You go to all this trouble to create some kind of clone of another person; well, don’t you want to see how it behaves? They were road-testing him.”

  “According to Dante, they were shutting down the project,” Colomba said, unconvinced.

  “And by pure chance he’s the only one who got away?”

  Colomba realized that Santini was right. She hadn’t really thought about it because she’d instinctively tended to believe Dante’s version. “If the Father really was watching him, how did he do it, in your opinion?”

  “The usual things. Bugs in his apartment . . . ambient surveillance,” Santini replied. “And of course, seeing that this is a medical experiment, I’d have kept an eye on his charts, his exams, so I could keep track of how he was doing.”

  Colomba was suddenly struck by an idea, and she swerved slightly, even though at 110 mph. “The clinic!”

  “What clinic?”

  “There’s a sheet of paper with some phone numbers in my jacket,” Colomba said, ignoring his question. “Dial Valle’s number and put it on speaker.”

  “How about next time you let me drive. I’m tired of being your secretary,” said Santini, but he did as he was told.

  Valle’s rheumy voice filled the car. “Who is this, and what’s happening?” he wheezed.

  “It’s me, Caselli.”

  “What’s happened? Is this about Dante? Is he in trouble?”

  Is he really worried about him, or is he just putting on a show? Colomba wondered. “No, he’s not in trouble. I just need to ask you a quick question. Do you remember the Swiss clinic where you sent Dante?”

  Valle coughed. “Yes, of course I remember.”

  “What was it called?”

  “Can’t you just ask him?”

  “What the fuck was it called!” Colomba yelled. Santini jerked in his seat.

  “Eiche. It was called Eiche . . .” Valle spelled out the name. “It was in Erlenbach, near Zurich. On the lake.”

  Colomba gestured to Santini to write it down. He pulled a pen out of his jacket pocket and wrote on a utility bill he found in the glove compartment.

  “Why there?”

  “What?”

  “Why did you send Dante there? How did you find it?” Colomba was shouting again.

  “Someone recommended it.”
<
br />   “Who?”

  “I can’t remember.”

  “You can’t remember something that important?” If she’d had him within arm’s length, she would have strangled him.

  Valle’s breathing became even more labored. “Someone at the hospital. Christ, it’s been twenty-five years!”

  “Someone who?”

  “I can’t remember! Will you just tell me why—”

  Colomba turned off the speaker with a flat-handed slap to the control on the steering wheel.

  “Why are you fixating on the clinic?” asked Santini.

  “For two reasons,” she replied as she checked the GPS device to see how long it would be till they reached Rome. At least half an hour. She passed a truck that pulled over to let her pass when it saw her flashing roof lights; there had been no need to turn the siren on, because there was no traffic. “First: the Father is a doctor, or a scientist who has some connection with the medical field. He deals in drugs and was in charge of treatments for the Italian MKUltra.”

  “That story doesn’t really convince me all that much, Caselli.”

  “Well, you’d better get convinced, because it’s the only one we’ve got right now. Second: for four years after his liberation, Dante was locked up in this Eiche clinic. If the Father wanted to know how he was doing, that’s where he needed to go. And just possibly it was he who arranged to have him sent there in the first place through an accomplice.”

  “Do you think he might have been one of the doctors?”

  “That’s what I’m hoping. Maybe he wasn’t in charge of him directly, because Dante might have recognized him, but I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if he was in the room next door. Or maybe he just took a stroll through the ward every now and then, taking advantage of the pliability of his colleagues.”

  “You’re stumbling around in the dark, you know that, don’t you?”

  “Do you have anything better in mind?”

  Santini thought it over for a few seconds. “No. Still, even if it turned out to be true, Eiche is a Swiss clinic. To get staff lists from twenty years ago, we’d need an international letter rogatory. And even if we did have the lists, I doubt that next to the specialties of each physician we’d be likely to find the word ‘kidnapper.’ ”