Kill the Angel Read online

  “Or maybe just a well-furnished arsenal, more likely both the arsenal and the laboratory, or maybe a great many of both. The truth is that we don’t know a fucking thing.” He flicked the cigarette butt into a trash can that was full to overflowing. “Except that sooner or later, it was bound to happen.”

  “It could have been worse.”

  “But what we don’t know is exactly what those sons of bitches have in mind now, and we need to catch them before they try again. Go home and get some rest, you look like you’re about to drop in your tracks.”

  “I don’t think this is the time for that, Chief Curcio, sir.”

  “At least get yourself a shower, Colomba. I know that it’s not very nice to say so, but you stink like a locker room.”

  She blushed. “I’ll see you in the office.”

  She said a quick farewell to Bart, who gave her a warm, affectionate hug (“You never show your face,” etc.), then she asked an officer to take her home. He was older, nearing retirement and fearful of the impending onset of World War III. As he drove, she sat with her gaze fixed on the city rushing past the car window. When her eyelids lowered, the contorted faces of the poisoned passengers reappeared before her eyes, while the odor of disinfectant that she had on her clothing morphed into the smell of the carriage, redolent of blood and shit. And then an older stench, that of the bodies burnt and torn to shreds by a C-4 explosion in a Paris restaurant, a blast in which she had come close to losing her life. The Disaster, as she called it.

  Again she saw the old woman explode and tear limb from limb the occupants of an adjoining table, the young newlywed husband catch fire as he smashed through the window. At a certain point, Colomba actually fell asleep, and then she woke up with the sound of her own voice in her ears and an unpleasant sensation in her throat, like when you have to make an extra effort to speak. She must have been talking in her sleep, because the officer behind the wheel was glancing at her out of the corner of his eye, looking slightly intimidated.

  Colomba entered her apartment, very unsteady on her feet. Her apartment was in an old palazzo on the Tiber waterfront esplanade, a short distance from the Vatican. It was a one-bedroom, furnished partly from the Rome flea market and mostly from IKEA. Colomba had been living there for almost four years, but it still looked somewhat impersonal and not especially lived in, except for a corner of the living room with a red leather armchair surrounded by a stack of old books purchased from used-book vendors. She’d buy them by the bagful, mixing masterpieces in paperback editions with pulp novels by long-forgotten authors. She liked surprise and variety, and considering how cheap they were, it was no problem to just dump them into recycling after a few pages if they didn’t appeal to her. Right now she was slowly working her way through Maupassant’s Bel-Ami in an edition so tattered that sometimes the pages would rip when she turned them.

  She got into the shower; a short while later, as she was drying off in a Japanese-style bathrobe, she received a phone call from Enrico Malatesta. Enrico was a finance executive who had been Colomba’s boyfriend until she wound up in the hospital after the explosion in Paris, ravaged by guilt and panic attacks. Then he had vanished from her life. He had started reaching out to her again only a few months ago, with the excuse of an old photograph found in a drawer, like a line from a Pretenders song. Because he missed her, he would say, but more likely because things weren’t working out with whomever he was seeing now. Colomba hadn’t had the strength to tell him to go to hell. She had liked him a lot, and the sex had been first-rate, which was what always kept her from hanging up on him.

  “I heard about the attack,” he said. From the sounds in the background, Colomba realized that he was already at the park, probably the one at Villa Pamphili. He liked to get out early for a run; they both did. “I read on the Internet that you were there, too.”

  “Then it must be true.”

  “Come on, were you there or weren’t you?”

  Colomba emerged from the bathroom and sat down on the edge of the bed, which was drawing her like a magnet. “I was there.”

  “I thought lightning never struck twice in the same place.”

  “How tactful . . . Anyway, it’s not true. In my line of work, people tend to turn into lightning rods.” Some of us more than others.

  “What was it like?”

  “Did you call me to get the spicy details?”

  “You know that’s what I like best,” he said in a cheerful voice.

  Are you making allusions of some kind? Colomba wondered in the tone of voice her mother would have used. What on earth are you thinking of? “There aren’t any,” she said brusquely. “Nasty dead bodies, and that’s all.”

  “I hear there’s been a claim of responsibility.”

  “So they say.”

  “And that they used gas.”

  “That’s right.” Then she added impulsively: “I came close to inhaling some of it myself. No, actually, I may have inhaled a tiny quantity.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “No.”

  “How are you?” Enrico’s tone of voice had turned warm and sincere, but Colomba wondered if he really felt that way or was just playing one of his tricky little games. Then and there, she decided to go ahead and believe him, and she let herself fall back onto the bed, her robe open over her legs. Suddenly, she felt such a burning desire for Enrico that she slid one hand between her thighs. “I’m fine, don’t worry,” she said. What the fuck are you doing? Have you forgotten that this is the asshole who dumped you while you were still in the hospital? She remembered, all right, but that wasn’t all she remembered.

  “How can you tell me not to worry? Of course I’m going to worry. Are you home? I could swing by before heading in to the office.”

  Yes, swing by. “No, I’m going back out.” Don’t pay any attention to me, and just swing by.

  “It would only take me five minutes,” Enrico said again as he sensed Colomba’s resistance start to fade.

  Yes. Come over. Right now, she thought. “No, I need to go,” she said, and she ended the call. You’re quite the slut, she scolded herself. Do you think this is the time for that kind of thing? The bed and her languor had relaxed her, and without meaning to, she let her eyes shut and she slid gently into a black hole.

  She woke up an hour later to the sound of her landline ringing. At first she didn’t recognize it because she was so accustomed to using the cell phone. She felt her way over to the phone and nearly dropped it with fingers that seemed to have been anesthetized. It was Curcio’s male secretary, who demanded that she return to the office as soon as was humanly possible: the roundups were beginning.

  6

  The investigative department of the State Police Corps was located on the sixth floor of the former Dominican monastery that housed police headquarters on Via San Vitale, just a short walk from the ruins of the Imperial Forums. Colomba walked there to make sure she was good and awake, a stroll that also included Piazza Trevi. At ten-thirty on any normal morning, there would have been a compact crowd of tourists milling around the world-famous fountain, but that day she saw only a sparse group who didn’t seem to be having a very good time. Bomb psychosis, avoid all public places, she thought, even though there had been no bombs. At least for now. Another five minutes of walking and she entered the large doorway with the Latin phrase written over it—SUB LEGE LIBERTAS (Liberty Under Law)—and climbed the stairs to the sixth floor, where the nine sections of the Mobile Squad had their offices, ninety officers sharing nineteen offices, two restrooms, one conference room, one Xerox machine, and two printers (one of which was permanently out of order), as well as a waiting room for visitors and a small detention room. Because of the emergency, all shifts and leaves had been canceled, and there were more people than usual in the hallways. Very few smiles and occasional grim glares, television sets and radios turned on everywhere.

  A few colleagues knew about her misadventure and tried to ask questions, but she sidestepped t
hem and slipped into the hot and overcrowded conference room, where she listened—with thirty other functionaries, all of them with varying degrees of exhaustion on their faces—to the instructions of the Ministry of the Interior. The terrorists had not yet been identified, and orders had been given for a sweep to acquire information and identification of Islamic extremists currently present on the national territory, along with any suspected sympathizers. In other words, they were going out to turn over all the stones they could find, and see if anything useful popped out from under them.

  “The operation has been named Finetooth,” said Curcio, turning to look at the old map of Rome hanging on the wall next to an even older map of Italy, held together by lengths of Scotch tape. “And it’s taking place, or will be in the next few hours, in all the biggest Italian cities. We’ve split up Rome with our cousins from the Carabinieri Corps and the Green Berets. Today we’re going to have to manage Centocelle, Ostia, Casilina, and Torre Angela.”

  Those locations were all on the outskirts of town, with a strong presence of petty criminals and dope dealers. Someone behind Colomba grumbled in a low voice: “Never once do we get to work on Via del Corso.”

  “Each squad,” Curcio went on, “will be commanded by a ranking officer with three officers from his own section. You’ll have the support of the squad car details, the riot police units, and a cultural mediator. Each squad will be directed by a member of the task force that’s been put together by the Ministry of the Interior to coordinate with us and the others. Don’t turn this into a question of rank and seniority, because responsibility for the operation will belong to them, and they are the ones who have the go-ahead from the intelligence services. Are there any questions?”

  There weren’t any, at least not any that made sense. Colomba found that she had been assigned the area of Centocelle, to the east of the city, because she’d had dealings with an Islamic center there: one of the people who had attended the center had strangled his wife, and it was Colomba who had handcuffed and brought in the man during the first few days of her return to active duty.

  “Let’s just bring in whatever we find, if we find anything at all,” said Santini when Colomba went into his office to receive her final instructions. He was sitting with his left leg propped on his desk. He’d had it operated on a year ago, and they’d inserted a piece of plastic tubing in place of an artery. His leg still worked less than half as well as it ought to, and it hurt him twice as much as he’d ever felt. Three times as much. “If you find so much as a single expired visa, arrest everyone and shut the place down.”

  “So we’re going to put out fires with gasoline,” said Colomba. “Nice piece of shit.”

  “That’s the way the world goes ’round, Caselli. Are you trying to call superior authority into question?” he asked ironically.

  Colomba heaved a sigh of annoyance. “Any other instructions, boss?”

  He stuck a cigarette into his mouth. He’d smoke it in front of the open window the way he always did, summer and winter. “Giubbottazzo for everyone, okay?” he said, using the slang for the heavy bulletproof vests. “And don’t get any smart ideas of your own, the way you usually do.”

  Colomba left Santini’s office, got the bulletproof vest out of the cabinet, and picked up the Three Amigos in the common room; they all jumped to their feet when they saw her. The Three Amigos were Alberti; Inspector Claudio Esposito, who was bald and had the physique of a rugby player, and had already been put on suspension twice for having manhandled suspects and fellow cops; and deputy detective Alfonso Guarneri, a slowpoke with a soul patch, as cheerful as a toothache. Alberti had come up with the name for the trio, even though no one ever used it.

  While they were on their way to Centocelle, Colomba sat in the backseat and read the updates on the investigations that she’d printed out. The dead man in the gray suit was Dr. Adriano Main, an anesthesiologist who’d worked at the Gemelli General Hospital and been on the scientific advisory board of the Villa Regina clinic in Milan. He’d just turned sixty-two, and he’d been returning home after a complex operation.

  The fashionably dressed man was Marcello Perrucca, age thirty, owner of the Gold Disco on the Via Appia Antica, as well as other nightspots. He’d just had his driver’s license revoked and was forced to travel by train.

  The woman in high heels was Paola Vetri, age fifty, and she’d been a publicist, very well known in the world of show business for having worked with such famous actors as De Niro and DiCaprio. Her death was one of the ones that had generated the most alarm and outrage.

  The old man with the walking stick jammed down his throat was named Dario Ballardini. He was seventy-two and had been a furniture manufacturer. Then he’d sold out, lock, stock, and barrel, to the Chinese, in plenty of time before the economy went south, and had been enjoying his retirement. He’d been coming to Rome to see his daughter, on the last train because he suffered from insomnia anyway, and it seemed pretty clear that he enjoyed busting his family’s balls. Orsola Merli, age thirty-nine and the wife of a Rome-based builder, was just heading home. Her car had broken down a few hours earlier, so she’d been obliged to take the train. She was the one who’d been found in the bathroom.

  The man in the Superman pose was Roberto Coppola, age thirty-eight, the most sought-after visual merchandiser in Milan, heading down to Rome to supervise the opening of a new French haute couture boutique on the Via del Babuino.

  The other four dead people were far less glamorous: the two stewards, or whatever the hell it is you call the guys who bring you coffee on a train, were Jamiluddin Kureishi, age thirty, and Hanif Aali, age thirty-two, the first one an Italian citizen, the second with a working visa, both of Pakistani origin. The intelligence agencies were investigating whether either had any contacts with Islamic extremists, but so far nothing had turned up. The two others were the onboard janitor Fabrizio Ponzio, age twenty-nine, and the conductor who had opened the door to the compartment.

  Thanks to the appeals on television and the cooperation of the Italian railways, most of the other passengers had been tracked down, though not all of them. Their accounts of what had happened were being sifted through but with no results so far. Fortunately, none of them seemed to have been contaminated, even though there had been scenes of panic and mobs in the city’s emergency rooms.

  The police were also going over the thousands of hours of video recordings compiled by the security cameras scattered all over Milan’s Central Station and the Termini Station in Rome, in the hope of finding out who had boarded the train to plant the tank of gas, but so far it had just been a boring and pointless chore. On the other hand, there was no counting the delusional lunatics and false alarms being called in the length and breadth of the Italian peninsula.

  In order to handle the situation, the Ministry of the Interior had assembled a pool of magistrates who in turn coordinated the operational task force under the supervision of the intelligence agencies. The chain of command was so branched out that Colomba wondered who was actually going to make the important decisions. Probably no one, in perfect Italian style.

  In the personnel of the coordinating pool, Colomba was surprised to find the name of Angela Spinelli, a magistrate she’d worked with on a case involving a number of corpses buried in a lake. Another one of the many memories she wished she didn’t have, and which hovered behind her eyelids when, without realizing it, she slipped into sleep, rocked gently by the motion of the car. She was reawakened by Alberti’s light and embarrassed touch on her arm. “Deputy Chief, we’re here.”

  She sat up straight with a head that seemed to weigh as much as a watermelon. “Thanks.”

  Esposito, behind the wheel, extracted a golden cross from under his collar and let it dangle over the front of his extra-large bulletproof vest. “For extra protection,” he said.

  “We aren’t the Inquisition, put that away,” said Colomba.

  He obeyed with ill-concealed reluctance, tucking it back under his T-shirt in co
ntact with his hairy chest; he had hair everywhere on his body except on his head. “If you want my opinion, Deputy Chief, a little Inquisition wouldn’t do any harm around here. And a fist to the teeth every now and then.”

  “She doesn’t want your opinion, Claudio,” said Guarneri. “By now you ought to know that.”

  “Fine, fine, but don’t complain if you all wind up roasting in the flames of hell later,” Esposito muttered as he parked.

  The Islamic center of Centocelle was a former two-story auto repair shop that still had traces of the old sign that said 500 and AUTO-something, covered over with spray-painted tags and phrases in Arabic and Italian. It was at the far end of a dead-end alleyway, which ended against a chain-link fence enclosing an empty lot littered with garbage and old discarded electric appliances where, at night, illicit couples and dope dealers lurked.

  Colomba and the Three Amigos arrived at noon, and there were already dozens of armored Riot Police vehicles and police squad cars on the scene. Three rows of police officers in riot gear were lined up in the narrow street, and between them and the front door of the center, a hundred or so Middle Easterners were shouting slogans in Arabic. There were also some children.

  A plainclothes policeman was facing off against the demonstrators. It was Chief Inspector Carmine Infanti, another member of the Third Section, and Colomba realized that he had been promoted to the task force. That wasn’t good news for Colomba, because Infanti was an asshole. “I’m telling you, you all need to get out of the way, and you need to do it now!” he was bellowing, red-faced.

  “We don’t have anything to do with the caliphate,” a man in a brown suit said in good Italian. “We’re among friends here. And you come here like the Gestapo.”

  “Listen, my friend, we’re just doing what we’re told to do. Now get out of our way, and get the others out of the way, too!”

  “This isn’t right! This is our church!” the Arab protested again. Three or four others behind him shouted their approval. New slogans began to be chanted.