"Dealing with murderers is my job."

"It used to be."

Colomba couldn't believe her ears. "Are you sure you're the same person who wanted me to keep going while I was lying on the sidewalk, practically dying? What the fuck has happened to you?"

"Nothing. I'm just worried about you. Let me do my research."

"We need to talk to the other mothers, to Maugeri, to the neighbors, to the people who were up at the mountain meadows," Colomba insisted.

"I'll take care of that. But in the meantime, you be a good girl. Okay?"

Colomba, in an outburst of exasperation, slammed a hand down on the railing. "I can't believe it. You drag me into this case, and when it finally starts to make sense, you want to take me off it."

"Colomba, the problem isn't just your personal safety. Today the chief of police asked me about you. De Angelis busted his chops, and he wanted to know what you and I were up to together. And the Ministry of Justice also wants to find out what you know that they don't."

"Who the fuck cares about the Ministry of Justice and the chief of police? We have a chance of catching him!"

"Not if we act impulsively, we don't. Rest up for a couple of days. I'm not asking you, I'm telling you."

Colomba stood looking at him for a few seconds without a word; then she turned on her heel and walked away, taking long strides, shoving aside a long-distance runner coming from the opposite direction.

When she got back, she found Dante stretched out on his back on the hood of the car.

"If that's where you want to ride, be my guest," she growled.

"I just wanted to look at the sky." He leapt to the ground and seemed to be the usual Dante again. "What does that genius of a boss of yours have to say?"

"Nothing helpful."

"Did I already tell you that I don't like him?"

"You made it clear. Let's go back to the hotel."

"Not yet. Santiago called me; apparently he's found something big online. I don't know what, because we don't feel safe talking on the phone. Are you ready to take a walk on the wild side?"

Colomba thought back to her conversation with Rovere and his advice to drop all further activity. "I can't wait," she said.

15.

Still feeling tense, Colomba drove to the outlying neighborhood of Tor Bella Monaca, where Santiago lived. It was one of the neighborhoods with the highest crime rates in Rome, where fifteen-story apartment houses were connected by internal labyrinths of alleys and tunnels, subsidized housing inhabited by poverty-stricken families, and mafiosi doing business in new and greener fields. The roundups and arrests that Colomba had been involved in there had always culminated in hails of rocks and bottles out of high windows, burning car tires, and screaming crowds. When a policeman entered Torbella-as its inhabitants liked to call it-he was entering enemy territory. Colomba knew that many of the people who lived around there were good folks who just couldn't afford to move anyplace else, old people and the unemployed held in subjugation by the face-slapping arrogance of their criminal neighbors. But that did nothing to lessen the hatred she felt for that Roman quarter, knowing as she did that out of any doorway a gun barrel might poke, ready to fire the bullet that would punch a hole in her forehead.

Dante directed her toward a group of four public housing projects six stories tall, arranged like a stretched-out C, with outside walls a smoky gray and ramshackle window fixtures. The mailboxes were blackened by the blasts of firecrackers or spray-painted various colors, while the intercom panels had been yanked out of the walls. Out front, there was an expanse of lawn that was mostly stumps and scrub, and heaps of rubble, where a group of even dirtier and dustier children was playing war, hurling clumps of dirt at one another.

All the apartment buildings were connected to the same interior courtyard, and Colomba drove toward one of the entrances. Immediately, the way was blocked by three boys on scooters. They were driving without helmets, and the oldest of the three, a Maghrebi, couldn't have been even fourteen.

He was the one who knocked on the window, right next to Colomba's head. "Who are you going to see?" he asked.

"None of your fucking business, kid," Colomba replied.

Dante leaned out almost simultaneously. "Santiago's expecting us."

"What's your name?" the boy inquired.

"Dante."

The Maghrebi signaled to one of the other boys, so tiny that he could barely put his feet on the ground with the moped stopped. "Go call him."

The littlest boy revved up the moped and vanished into the inner courtyard. The two others moved a couple of yards away from the car but still blocked its way. They lit cigarettes.

"That's the way it is here," Dante said to Colomba.

"I'd take the parents of these boys and send them directly to jail without passing Go."

"That's probably where they already are," said Dante.

After a few minutes Santiago emerged from the basement with two boys, who might have been eighteen at the most. They were South Americans, and unlike Santiago, who dressed in a nondescript manner aside from his leather jacket and colorful track shoes, they wore sagging trousers, backward baseball caps, and T-shirts with thuggish slogans. Colomba, to her surprise, actually recognized one of them. His name was Jorge Perez, and she had arrested him for assault two years ago, when he was still a minor.

Santiago slapped the Maghrebi amiably on the back and sent him away with the other sentinels, while Jorge started cursing in Spanish. "That lady's a cop," he told Santiago while making a rapid gesture in Colomba's direction that in the language of the street was a mute death threat.

She raised her middle finger in return, but with her other hand, unseen, she pulled her pistol out of its holster and propped it between her legs.

"Did you see what she just did?" Jorge asked Santiago.

Santiago ignored him. "Why did you have to bring her with you?" he asked Dante. "I told you to come alone."

"Because he doesn't go anywhere alone," Colomba replied.

"I wasn't asking you," said Santiago.

Dante got out, and Colomba felt her lungs tightening up. If any one of the three were armed, he might take Dante's action as aggressive and shoot him. But Santiago remained calm, and none of the others made a move.

"I told you I trust her. And we're in this together."

Santiago looked at Jorge and then asked how he knew her. "Cmo es que la conoces?"

"Me ha enviado a la crcel," Jorge replied, repeating the menacing gesture. She had sent him to prison.

Santiago spoke to Dante again. "No."

"You've already done the job. Do you really want to give up the money?"

"This is how I make money," said Santiago, snapping his fingers in front of his face.

"You want to give up a friend like me? I've been useful to you in the past. I might be useful again someday."

Santiago looked down at the toes of his shoes, uncertainly. "Do you vouch for her?"

"Certainly."

"If she's going in, we have to search her," said Jorge.

Colomba stuck her handgun back in her belt and got out. "Just try it, you dickhead."

"If she has a gun, she can't come in," Santiago stated. "That's a point I can't meet you halfway on, Dante."

"Your people are armed."

"My people aren't cops."

Dante looked at Colomba. "I'm going to have to ask you to trust them, then."

"No gun because I'm a cop?"

"Exactly."

Moving slowly and holding it out by the tips of her fingers, Colomba pulled the gun out of her belt and slid it into Dante's. "He's not a cop, is he?"

Santiago laughed. "No, Dante's not a cop."

Jorge tried to object, but Santiago shut him up with a kick to the seat of his pants, and warned him not to make him lose his temper. "Cllate antes de que yo me enojo, OK?"

Dante looked at the dark, narrow tunnel running beneath the building and felt his breath fail him. "Can't we talk here? It looks a little tight in there."

"Don't worry. I know your tastes," said Santiago. "We'll go up."

"Up?"

Santiago pointed to the roof. "That's where I have my office."

They started off toward the entrance. Dante let Colomba walk by his side. "I don't feel particularly comfortable with this," he said, pointing to the butt of the pistol.

"Shut up. And stick close to me. Right now you're my walking holster."

The elevators in the building were out of use, the cables long ago snapped. They climbed up a long metal fire escape that rose up, attached to the interior facade of the main building.

For Dante, even climbing that staircase was no laughing matter, because he froze with every creak and groan of the structure, and they were frequent. In the end, he closed his eyes and Colomba was forced to act as his seeing-eye dog during the ascent. Taking care not to be noticed, she studied the place. It was structured like a full-fledged fortress, with lookouts standing sentinel, almost all of them young men, boys, or even little kids, keeping an eye on every access point, either straddling the saddle of their moped or else standing at windows. There were also watchmen at each floor, on the landings of the fire escape. On one of those landings, she even noticed a junkie shooting up. The others ignored him, and Colomba did the same, though the urge to call for uniformed reinforcements was almost overpowering.

"Are we here?" Dante asked in a faint voice.

"Yes, you can open your eyes," said Colomba. "And you have no idea what a lovely spectacle you missed on the way up."

They'd reached the rooftop, the area that had once been designated as a shared common space where residents could sunbathe or hang out laundry to dry. Santiago and his gang had transformed it into an open-air rec room, dragging up there a half-dozen or so swaybacked sofas, as many plastic tables, and a refrigerator pirating electric power through a cable that disappeared down the interior stairwell. Next to one of the sofas stood a hookah that was more than a yard tall, with four mouthpieces made of corrugated rubber. The cement surface was littered with cigarette butts, empty bottles, and bird shit-all except for one perfectly clean corner. There, under a plastic canopy with a drape down the sides to keep off the rain, was a little electronic workshop, with two brand-new desktop computers, a thirty-inch screen, and a digital disc burner, all of them hooked up to a satellite dish antenna.

Noticing that Colomba was looking at it, Santiago patted the dish. "For our connection, we go directly via satellite. The ping is high, but no one can sniff the network."

Colomba nodded, baffled by the contrast between Santiago's general attitude and his unmistakable technical prowess.

Dante had recovered from the ascent. "What did you find that's so interesting?" he asked Santiago.

Santiago pointed to his two fellow thugs. "Your friend Zardoz did good work. I've never seen so many sites burned down in a single night. But even he made a couple of mistakes. He used another site for his business. He burned that one down, too, but not all the way to the ground."

"I found it," said Jorge, lighting himself a joint. "He used it five months ago."

"Are you talking about another darknet site?" asked Colomba, making everyone present shudder in horror.

"You watch too much TV, cop lady," said the second gangster, who up until that moment had remained silent. On the back of his hands he had the word "MIRRORSHADES" tattooed, "MIRROR" on the one hand, "SHADES" on the other.

"Anyway, it was another e-commerce site. No PayPal or any of that shit, strictly Bitcoin," Santiago added.

"Electronic cash," said Colomba.

Everyone smirked again. "All right. What you said," Jorge conceded.

"And what did he buy with Bitcoin five months ago?" Colomba asked in alarm. "More videos?"

"That's the weird thing; he didn't buy, he sold," Jorge replied.

"And he sold it for un montn de dinero. Twenty thousand euros," said Santiago. "He might have sold other stuff, but we can't find out. And if he did . . . puff . . . it all disappeared."

"What did he sell?" asked Dante.

"We can't tell from the burned site. But we tracked back to the buyer. He's a French maricn. I found his virtual hard drive. Just full of shit. Kids and animals, lo entiendes?"

"You can't leave him at large," said Dante, his eyes hard as glass.

"That's not my problem. It's not our job."

"I'll pay you extra," Dante said. "Screw him."

Santiago looked over at his laconic fellow gangster. "We can do it. We can just send an anonymous email to the police in his country, with a link to his hard drive. After all, I removed the one he bought from Zardoz."

"Do you have it here?" asked Colomba.

"That's why we asked you to come," said Santiago.

Dante ran his tongue over his dry lips. "How bad is it?"

"Not very. It's just . . . extrao."

"I can look at it if you don't feel up to it," Colomba suggested to Dante.