Dante put out his cigarette and set the glass back on the nightstand. "Two conversations were very brief because the misunderstanding emerged immediately. One conversation was a little longer because the mother got worried."

"Zardoz was looking for a very particular child. He wasn't interested in any other."

"Yes. The autistic son of a lonely woman. Who would do anything for him."

"How did he introduce himself?"

"As Dr. Zedda of the National Health Service." Dante shook his head. "I checked, there's no such person. But I needn't have bothered. Zed is a character in the movie, the man behind the flying mask."

"Zed, Zedda," said Colomba.

"Exactly. Dr. Zedda said that the doctor at the clinic had talked to him and had reported the child's worrisome symptoms. Then he started asking questions, trying to determine whether the child was distracted, absent, sad, and so on. When the mother started to seem puzzled, he inquired about the child's appearance and then apologized for having mixed up the files. The fourth mother, however, was so worried that she said yes to everything. Zedda made an appointment to meet at the Termini train station. He pretended to be passing through Rome for a conference. She waited for him, but he didn't show up. He had figured out that she wasn't the right person."

"Fuck, that was a close call," said Colomba, but the tense expression on Dante's face told her there was something else. "Or was it?" she whispered.

"She says that while she was leaving, she had the feeling someone was watching her and . . . maybe she was mistaken, but maybe . . ." He snickered, though he'd never seemed so tense. "Maybe she saw him."

13.

The wrong mother was named Chiara Pacifici. She was drinking a hot chocolate at Castroni, one of the favorite cafes of upper-class Rome, with a St. Bernard dog that was dying from the heat. Another hundred or so people were packed in among the refrigerators and shelves piled high with gourmandises at jewelry store prices. Colomba showed her police ID and asked her to sit down at one of the outdoor tables outside the bar next door to avoid the crowd.

"I had no idea it was such a serious matter," said the woman, nervously.

"Oh, it isn't, signora, it's just a normal administrative check," Colomba lied.

"But if you came all the way here to talk to me . . . Tell me the truth, who was the man who called me?"

Dante ineptly tried to block the question. "A stalker, signora," he replied. "He pretends to be a doctor so he can lure women to meet him, and then he molests them."

"Oh, Lord . . . but what if he comes back? If he wants to hurt me . . ."

Colomba grabbed Dante's arm to make him shut up. "You misunderstood, signora," she said. "The man we're looking for isn't dangerous, and he isn't violent. He's-"

"-an exhibitionist," Dante concluded.

"Someone who goes around exposing his thing?" the woman asked.

"Exactly, he goes around exposing his thing."

"Disgusting," the woman commented, more relaxed now. "It's a good thing he didn't try it with me."

"But he has tried it with many other women, and we're trying to track him down," Colomba explained. "He's sick in the head, he's not a criminal."

"How can I help you?"

"You said you might have seen him."

"I can't be sure it was him. He was near where I was waiting, and that's where I would have been if I had been waiting for someone myself. I don't know if that makes sense to you. But . . . maybe he was just someone who . . . who was looking at me. I mean, some people think I'm not horrible to look at."

Dante didn't pick up the cue until Colomba kicked him in the ankle. Then he put on the fakest smile she'd ever seen in her life. "I'd certainly say you're not, signora."

"But if it actually was him, it would help us a great deal if you could describe him for us," said Colomba.

"I'm not sure how well I remember him."

"Still, he made an impression on you," Dante insisted, his patience stretched to the limit. "Otherwise you wouldn't have told me about him." He pulled a notebook and a pencil with a silver clip out of his pocket and held the pencil in his good hand. "If you describe his appearance . . . I can try to do a sketch of him."

"Like one of those police sketches you see on TV?"

"Exactly. Creating identikits is sort of my specialty. But to do it, I'll have to take off this," he said, holding up his bad hand covered with the black glove. "It's awkward to hold the edge of the paper with my glove on. I had an accident, and it's not a pretty sight."

"Don't worry, I'm not easily frightened," the woman said, but after Dante bared his hand, her expression changed. "You poor thing. Does it hurt?"

"Only when I play the piano . . . Shall we give it a try? Let's start with his physique."

"Big."

"Big?"

"Not so tall, but built like a truck driver."

"Broad shoulders?" asked Colomba.

"And a bit of a gut."

"Age?" asked Dante.

"About sixty, I'd say. Maybe a little older. He was wearing a suit and tie, and he was carrying a valise. A briefcase."

"Eyes?"

"Blue. A very light blue."

Dante's good hand twitched so violently that he dropped the pencil. He froze in place, his eyes fixed in the middle distance.

Without letting the woman see, Colomba squeezed his leg. "We've been rude, Dante. We haven't even asked if the lady would care for something to drink. Why don't we go get her whatever she'd like?"

"I'd love a Coke," she said.

"We'll be right back," Colomba replied, clenching her fingers around Dante's thigh again, but harder this time. He snapped to, and they stood up together, with Colomba supporting him by the arm, all the while doing her best to seem kind and considerate and nothing more.

"Not inside," she murmured to him as soon as they'd walked a short way. "Too many people."

She pushed him around the corner. Dante leaned back against the wall, trembling uncontrollably. Colomba took his good hand in hers. "Everything's okay. Dante . . ."

Colomba's voice came to him from an infinite distance, as her face vanished and a gray wall appeared between them. The wall of the silo. The crack in the wall. The Father who looked at him from the meadow with a knife in his hand.

"It's him, CC," he said so softly that even he couldn't hear it.

Colomba delicately held his face, forcing him to look at her. "Stay with me, Dante."

Dante closed his eyes for a moment; then he opened them again and was back. "I'm here," he announced, with a rasp in his throat.

"Good boy. Do you want me to clear the cafe so you can go in and wash your face?"

He smiled weakly. "It's the kind of thing you could do."

"That's nothing."

Dante curled up, holding his belly and breathing slowly. "Thank you. Go back and talk to her while I get myself calmed down, and then I'll go find a waiter. Okay?"

"Can I rely on you?"

"Don't think twice."

Colomba went back to the cafe table while Dante continued to control his breathing and started feeling better. The Father was no longer an abstract entity, he was no longer a phantom fluttering invisibly in the air around him. He was a human being, flesh and blood, who breathed and talked on the phone, who wore a tie. He was a person.

He was fallible.

He stood away from the wall, found a waiter, and asked him to bring the drinks. Then he went back to their table and sketched for the next half hour, following the instructions of the woman who had seen him. Colomba was astonished at how precise his hand was, like the lines of the old sketch artists the police used to use before graphics software. And how he managed to stay out of the process: he didn't add any details, he didn't embellish, and he made no suggestions. When the sketch was complete, the man looking out at her from the sheet of paper had the concrete quality of reality: a man over sixty with a large neck and flesh sagging beneath his chin, haggard cheeks, a protuberant nose, and a brutal expression. The gray hair was trimmed short and receded from the forehead, which was furrowed by three deep creases, like scars. Dante had also sketched his hands, which the woman remembered well: veins stood out on the backs of his powerful hands, broad thumbs with squared-off nails. A farmer's or a factory worker's hands, certainly not the hands of the refined intellectual that Dante believed him to be. The hands of someone capable of cutting off heads and slitting throats.

Once Dante had finished, Colomba thanked the woman and said good-bye, reassuring her and promising to keep her apprised of any developments. She asked her not to mention the investigation to anyone, and she reiterated the point more than once. The wrong mother seemed to take the point, though Colomba felt certain that the woman would get on the phone and tell all her friends every detail as soon as she got home.

She waited until the woman had left; then she ordered a granita al caffe for herself and a straight vodka for Dante, who didn't trust the quality of the cocktails.

"You know why that foolish woman is still alive?" asked Dante. "Because the Father doesn't know he was seen. Otherwise we'd have three corpses; that is, assuming there aren't other corpses out there we don't even know about."

Colomba couldn't seem to take her eyes off the identikit. "She's not that big of a fool if she recognized him," she said. "But maybe he was some average Joe on his way to catch a train and we're building a complicated plot based on a chance encounter."

Dante pulled a folded sheet of paper out of his pocket. It was the identikit of the man he'd seen through the crack in the silo wall, the one drawn up by the Cremona police. He lay it down next to the other one, and the resemblance was so striking that it took Colomba's breath away. The same shape of the face, the same small ears, and especially the same eyes. Even if the rest was incomplete, the sketched-out lines of the old identikit overlaid the new lines perfectly, despite the marks of time. It was the same man, twenty-five years older. Dante had been right from day one.

14.

An hour later Colomba parked the van in Largo Martin Luther King, across from one of the entrances to Villa Pamphili, and turned off the engine.

"Do you think you can be left alone for ten minutes?" she asked Dante. He was practically stretched out, with the back rest of his seat tilted all the way back. He'd wrapped his tie over his eyes to keep out the light, and the effect was more comical than pathetic.

"Go on," he said.

"Don't start popping those crap pills of yours."

He stuck out his tongue, and poised on the tip was a two-tone capsule. "Already have."

She slammed the door and walked into the park, filling her lungs with the smell of freshly cut grass. She reached the Ponte Nanni, the bridge stretching across one of the ponds, just as a team of runners crossed it, iPod earbuds in their ears. She saw Rovere standing motionless at the middle of the bridge, leaning on the railing and smoking with his head bowed. He seemed even older and wearier than he had when she'd last seen him in the mountain meadows. He noticed her and waved hello, with a tense smile. Colomba went over and stood next to him, careful to stay upwind of his cigarette.

"Thanks for calling me," said Rovere. "After yesterday, I thought you were angry with me."

"Oh, I'm angry with you, all right, for having gotten me into this mess. But I certainly can't go forward all alone. Especially not now." She handed him the identikit, and Rovere's eyes opened wide. For an instant, he looked scared to Colomba. "Do you know him?" she asked.

"No . . . it just caught me off guard. Who is it?" he asked, without taking his eyes off the sheet of paper.

"The man who kidnapped the Maugeris' son. And held Dante Torre prisoner."

Rovere stared at her feverishly. "Are you sure?"

"Yes. He used Montanari to find his prey; then he killed him. Online, he uses the name Zardoz. He's good at disappearing, and he's been on the loose for thirty-five years committing all kinds of foul crimes. Dante saw him kill a boy before escaping."

"I remember," Rovere murmured. "But it was never proven that the boy even existed."

"Either the cops who investigated were bumbling idiots, or else he, Zardoz, the Father, or whatever you want to call him, really is a genius at making corpses disappear."

Rovere had recovered from his astonishment. "Someone who kidnaps children isn't a genius. He's mentally ill."

"If so, he's the healthiest mentally ill person I've ever heard of. He knows what he wants, and he takes it."

"A well-organized serial killer," said Rovere. "He wouldn't be the first."

"Yes, but this organized is something well beyond the levels described in any textbook case. He uses accomplices, he palms himself off as a doctor, he surfs the Web like a pro, he confidently manipulates crime scenes . . . And he does all this so he can play sadistic games with children and then murder them as soon as they get too old." Colomba shook her head. "It doesn't hang together, but I can't come up with a better explanation."

"Who saw him?" asked Rovere.

"One of the mothers he contacted when he was trying to find the Maugeris' son."

"And does he know that he was seen?"

"Luckily, no. Now what do we do?"

Rovere folded the sheet of paper and put it into his jacket pocket. "I'll put the identikit into the system and see what comes out. In the meantime, you and Signor Torre stay put."

"Excuse me?" asked Colomba.

"Until just a short while ago, we were operating in the field of hypothesis, but now we're certain that we have a murderer at large. I don't want to put you in danger."