“The Father is Italian. Dante said he had no particular accent. And a German accent is hard to miss. In eleven years, some word in his native tongue would have slipped out. And believe me, Dante would have remembered.”
Santini shrugged. “There can’t be many of them, and they’d be easier to check, but still, we don’t have the lists.”
“Check the clinic’s website.”
While Santini was searching on his smartphone, Colomba rummaged desperately in her memory. She knew there was something she was forgetting. Something Dante had told her . . . She was exhausted, goddamn it, and her brain wasn’t engaging.
“Nothing,” said Santini. “Maybe we got the name wrong. No, wait a second . . . There’s a page in German . . .” He looked over at her. “You won’t believe this, but I speak German.”
“You won’t believe this, but I don’t give a flying fuck. What does it say?”
“That the clinic went out of business ten years ago. We can skip the headache of finding a prosecuting magistrate for the letter rogatory.”
At the words “prosecuting magistrate” Colomba had a sudden satori, a blinding illumination. “Dante had to obtain a certificate that he was in full possession of his faculties,” she exclaimed triumphantly. “He must have submitted an expert report from the clinic.”
“It should be part of the transcript,” Santini pointed out. “If there’s a name, we can put it in the system and see what comes up. But if he’s Swiss, we’ll have to work with the police there or else Europol.”
“In the meantime, let’s get a copy of the court decision.”
Santini looked at the dashboard clock. “It’s five in the morning, a little early for the clerk of the court.”
“In small cities things are much simpler. On the same sheet of paper, you’ll find Spinelli’s cell phone. Call her.”
Santini objected. Spinelli had treated him like crap, and he doubted the judge would listen to them. In the end he did as he was told, though, and sat listening, open-mouthed, as Colomba buttered her up and begged her to help them, in violation of all imaginable rules and regulations. Except one: the overarching law that demanded she do anything possible to save a human life.
Twenty minutes later, an astonished clerk of the court of Cremona was dragged out of bed by a phone call. Luckily, he had a copy of the keys to the archives.
33
The Father stood looking at Dante without speaking for a few seconds; then he walked over to the table and sat down at the only chair. Dante was again seized with a wave of tremors, and he grabbed his legs with his left arm. With his good hand he continued to jerk at the lock, convulsively.
“Hello, Son,” said the Father. “It’s nice to see you again.”
His voice had changed. It was faint, weak. His pronunciation was murkier too, less crisp, the way it is when old people begin to have problems with their teeth. Dante wouldn’t have recognized it as the voice of the man who had held him prisoner. Still, it somehow rang familiar. “That’s enough . . . of this . . . bullshit,” he stammered. He was shaking. “You’re not my father.”
“I raised you. I made you what you are. Isn’t that what fathers do?”
Dante shook his head, continuing to tremble. His thermometer had skyrocketed, but the drugs in his blood were struggling to keep his soul tethered to his body. “You’re just . . . a sick monster. And you turned me into a . . . monster, too. You should have died long ago.”
The Father went on staring at him. “You’ve become stronger, but you always were strong. I’ve watched grown men fall apart and turn into nonentities after just a few months. They stopped reacting, quit fighting back, and just waited for death to come. Not you. You made it all the way to the end of the treatment.”
“You killed . . . them,” said Dante as he continued to decipher that sense of familiarity. The man before him was the Father, but it was as if his persona had been overlaid on that of someone else. “And you buried them . . . in the lake.”
“It gave me no pleasure, believe me,” the Father explained. “But it was necessary. The history of the world is made up of sacrifices, some small, some great.”
“What about the children that . . . that you put into the shipping containers . . . were they sacrifices, too?”
The Father shook his head. “Dante, Dante . . . how can you fail to understand? I was their only hope of recovery. The damage that you and Colomba have done is incalculable. I’m going to have to start over from scratch in some other country. And I just pray that God will let me live long enough to see the results.”
Colomba? Why is he calling her by name? Dante delved into his memory. But it was fragmentary and vague. “I just pray that God decides to make you die.”
“I’ll be remembered, Dante. As a pioneer. All will be forgiven. And know that I never did any of it for myself. I was never chasing glory. What I do is a gift to the world.”
Dante was too exhausted to continue that debate. “Why—” He stopped; the tremors were so violent that they prevented him from uttering the words. “Why am I here? What do you want?”
“I missed you, Dante. I wanted to talk to you. And I wanted to give you a gift.”
“I don’t . . . don’t want anything from you.”
The Father leaned toward him. “Don’t you even want to know who you were before I let you be reborn?” he asked.
Dante got the impression that he was smiling under the ski mask.
When the proprietor of the Gold bar and tobacco shop on Corso Francia in Rome raised his shutters at six on the dot, he found himself looking at a couple with an exhausted and dangerous appearance. The woman especially, with a feral glare in her bottle green eyes. He imagined that they were a pair of criminals and considered not opening the door at all. Then the man with the mustache slapped his police ID against the glass.
“Move your ass,” the man said from the other side of the glass.
The barista opened the door with a smile. “Forgive me, it’s just that I’ve been robbed twice.”
“I’ll take that as a compliment,” Santini commented.
Colomba pointed to the sign on the door that read: FAXES AND PHOTOCOPIES. “Does your fax machine work?”
“Yes, of course it does,” the barista replied.
“What’s the fax number here?”
The barista provided the number and then went to prepare their order—two double espressos and a grilled ham-and-cheese sandwich—while Colomba called back Spinelli and gave her the fax number to give the clerk of the court so he could send her the documentation.
“I’m going to have to open a file on the disappearance of Signor Torre,” said Spinelli.
“I’m begging you to wait, I just need time . . .”
“I’m required to do it, it’s my fiduciary duty. But no one can criticize me for waiting until office hours. Nine thirty.”
Colomba understood that that was the final deadline. “Thanks. I’ll try to make that do.”
“Don’t thank me,” Spinelli said before hanging up. “We’ll probably both get into deep trouble for this.”
Colomba gave the cell phone to Santini, thinking to herself that she didn’t care what happened to her once she managed to find Dante. And she cared even less what would happen if she failed. Chewing on a mouthful of grilled ham-and-cheese sandwich, Santini quickly typed a text on his phone.
“Should I be worried?” Colomba asked, eyes narrowed.
Santini swallowed. “About what? About this?” He turned the screen toward her, showing her the text he’d just written.
I won’t be able to come pick you up, Stellina. It’s work. Give my apologies to your mother, too. Kisses to you, Papà.
“You have a daughter?” Colomba asked in amazement.
“Part-time, I do,” he replied. “What’s the matter? Do you think people like me have no right to reproduce?”
She shrugged. “I just had you pegged more for home, office, and ass kissing, mostly I guess.”
/> He nearly crushed the cell phone in his fist. “I can’t wait for this whole case to be over so I never have to lay eyes on you again.”
The barista leaned over the counter. “Excuse me . . . a fax is coming in, and I think it’s for you.”
Colomba and Santini hurried to the fax machine, which stood on a shelf in the tobacco products sales booth. It was a race to see which of them could grab the first emerging sheet. Colomba won by default. It had nothing on it but the emblem of the court; she crumpled it into a ball and threw it into the trash.
“If you need anything, just let me know,” said the barista, clearly intimidated.
“Yeah, sure,” Santini replied brusquely.
Colomba crumpled up the second sheet as well and tossed it into the trash. “I hope they don’t send us the whole text of the decision . . .”
“When we get the names, I’ll forward them on to my office. Is that all right with you?” asked Santini.
Colomba nodded. “I’m thinking that we could also compare them with the names from Silver Compass. That was the support center for children with problems where Ruggero Palladino went, along with half of the others who were being held prisoner in the shipping containers.”
Santini looked at another sheet of fax paper, and this time he placed it on the shelf. On it were the names of the judge and the clerk of the court who had drawn up the document. Those might prove useful.
“I know that Spinelli has had the place under investigation, but for now nothing has emerged. Most of the people who worked there were well-meaning volunteers. It’s going to take time.”
Santini crumpled up another sheet of paper after quickly scanning it: it was all legal boilerplate. “The undersigned,” “the above-mentioned,” and so on and so forth.
There was a pause in the transmission; then came a sheet that didn’t have the typewritten text of the court. On the top right was a logo that depicted a stylized oak tree and, beneath it, the name EICHE KLINIK.
“Here we go,” said Colomba.
It was the expert evaluation by the physician in charge of Dante’s case, who vouched for his recovery. Luckily, it had been translated into Italian. The evaluation was five pages long, and the signature on the last page was that of Dr. Maja Hutter.
“A woman,” Colomba noted with disappointment. She’d hoped to hit a bull’s-eye the first time, even though she knew the Father would never be so reckless as to risk exposure.
“Maybe she has a deep voice.”
“Dante wouldn’t have fallen for that,” Colomba replied, though she’d thought the same thing for a few seconds.
“Anyway, I’ll have her tracked down,” said Santini, pulling out his cell phone.
But the fax still wasn’t finished. Another page came out. The heading on this one was WISSENSCHAFTLICHE AUSSCHUSS, again with the clinic’s logo. Colomba showed it to Santini. “What does that mean?”
He answered with the cell phone pressed to his ear. “Hunh. Wait a sec, Wissenschaft . . . Wissenschaft . . . ‘science’ . . . it’s a ‘committee of scientific advisers’!” Then he started speaking to his subordinate, who answered in a weary voice.
The fax emitted another soft beep and then turned itself off. Colomba took the last sheet that had just come out of the machine. It was a list of the members of the scientific advisory committee. When she got to middle of the list, she felt all her blood drop into her feet. She staggered and was forced to lean against the glass front of the sales booth.
Santini covered the mouthpiece with his hand. “Are you feeling sick, Caselli?”
She shook her head and put her finger next to the name, incapable of speaking. When he saw it, Santini hung up, even though his underling was in the middle of a sentence.
The Father came back into the camper, this time carrying something bulky in his arms, wrapped in a length of cloth. He set it down on the table and stood there, saying nothing. He had left immediately after telling Dante what his gift would be, to let him savor the idea.
Dante sat up on the bed, resting his head against the wall. He was shaking less now, though he was weak and had a hard time breathing. His heart was racing in his chest. “Have you brought me another gift?” he laboriously got out the words.
“No, not exactly. We could say that this one is a gift for me,” the Father replied. He tugged open the wrapping and pulled out a cardboard file folder, a tourniquet, a bottle of hydrogen peroxide, and a syringe. Then he let the cloth drop to the floor, and Dante saw that the bulky object that he’d had difficulty carrying was an old hand-operated professional paper cutter, a sort of hinged scimitar with a wooden handle, connected to a metal base. They were used in printing plants to square reams of paper or trim the edges of books.
When he saw the razor-sharp blade, Dante shivered. “A gift for you?”
“Proof that you’re the man I think you are.” He pushed the table toward Dante’s bed until its legs almost touched him. Then he pulled up the chair and sat down. Now the two of them were less than a yard apart, the length of the chain. The Father had calculated that Dante still couldn’t reach him, just the table. Just the paper cutter.
“What am I supposed to prove to you?”
“Your strength of will,” the Father replied. “And your determination.” He picked up the cardboard file folder. “In here is everything I knew about you when you were chosen. What I learned about your parents: where you lived, where you went to nursery school . . . everything that there can be to know about a four-year-old boy.”
“I was six when you took me,” Dante objected, feeling an urge deep inside to shout and rave. He controlled himself by studying the profile of the man in the ski mask, the shape of his head, of his neck. He wasn’t wrong. He knew who he was. And that made him stronger than he’d ever been with respect to the Father or the thought of him. He was no longer an anonymous phantom, no longer a shadow from the past.
“I’m afraid not. You were four and a half, to be exact,” said the Father. “You’ve forgotten nearly everything about your first few years in the silo. That was necessary to make sure your story matched up, you understand? We spent almost thirteen years together, not eleven like you thought. Like I made you believe,” he added with a hint of satisfaction.
“Thirteen years,” Dante murmured.
“But maybe after you learn who you really are, you’ll remember that, too. Who can say? I’m eager to find out. But first”—he pointed to the paper cutter—“first you have to pass this test. The last one. The most difficult. Sacrificing a part of yourself.”
Dante felt his stomach knot up. “Speak clearly.”
“I want your bad hand.”
Dante was frozen in shock. “You’re insane,” he whispered after a few seconds.
“Truth has a price, Dante,” said the Father. “You’ve always known that. And what I’m asking you now is a small price. Without that hand but with your name, you’ll be much more complete than you are now.”
“No.”
“Don’t be afraid. I’ll help you do it the right way.”
“I’m not afraid, I just don’t want to give you the satisfaction.”
The Father nodded gravely. “The choice is yours. But I’m going to give you one more minute to make up your mind. Then I’ll walk out of here and I’ll never come back. You’ll lose your last chance to discover what has been denied you for your whole life, your identity.” He leaned over him, though never crossing the security line, the safe distance. “Are you really willing to give that up?” he added. And even though the Father was doing his best to speak in a neutral voice, Dante detected pride and pleasure.
“You’re enjoying yourself, aren’t you?” he asked.
“I’m only doing what’s necessary.”
Dante shook his head. “You pretend to be a scientist, and maybe you were one in a certain period of your life. But now you’re nothing but a sadist with a sick lust for power. The suffering of your victims excites you. You take pleasure from it. And you ju
st want to use me for the last time.”
“You still have twenty seconds.” The Father touched his forehead with his begloved hand. “I have a stopwatch in here.”
“Do you really not realize what you are? Or are you lying to yourself, too?”
“Ten seconds.” The Father tried to wipe his mouth, forgetting that he was wearing a ski mask. “You won’t feel a thing, I guarantee. Or not much pain, anyway. I’ll help you to hit the center of the joint.” He pointed to the syringe. “You’ll use anesthetic. And then I’ll stitch you up. The way I used to when you’d cut yourself in the silo. You remember?”
“You may even believe you’re doing the right thing.”
The Father shot to his feet. “Time’s up. I expected something more from you,” he said. He strode toward the door, but Dante called him back.
“Okay,” he said.
The Father froze to a halt. “Okay? Are you sure?”
Dante had turned even paler. “Let’s do it. The bad hand just reminds me of you. At least I’ll finally get rid of it.”
The Father again tried to wipe his lips. His hand was trembling slightly. “Good boy . . . good boy.”
He came back and sat down at the table. He took the tourniquet and tossed it to Dante.
“Tie it just below the elbow.”
Dante took off his jacket. “You’ve been watching me all these years?”
“I’ve been keeping tabs on you,” the Father replied. He grabbed the bottle of hydrogen peroxide and sprayed some on the blade, drying it with a rag.
“I always knew it,” said Dante.
“I know.”
“Just as I always knew you’d come get me again. It was just a matter of time.” Dante started to undo his shirt.
“Get moving,” the Father ordered, stroking the edge of the blade with his begloved fingers.
Dante pulled off his shirt. “I thought about having a location-tracking chip implanted, but there are none that can actually fit under your skin the way they say. If they are going to be found by a satellite they’re the size of a cigarette pack, and you have to change the batteries frequently.”
Kill the Father Page 48
