Infanti inserted a flash drive that was so beat up it was basically held together with Scotch tape. "I transferred everything into Excel. There are 312 files," he said, pointing to the screen. "I'll make a copy for you."

Dante peeked over his shoulder. "There are no pictures," he mumbled with the cocktail straw between his teeth.

"No pictures of the corpses?" asked Infanti, clearly irritated. He was doing his best to put up with Dante, but it was obviously a struggle.

"Pictures of the victims before they became corpses."

"We don't have them in our systems, and you won't find them in the systems of the police agencies. At most, I could find pictures of the accidents, through the highway patrol."

"We'll just have to ask the families for them," said Dante.

Infanti was stunned. "You are joking, aren't you?"

"Yes, it's just my twisted sense of humor."

Infanti turned to Colomba. "Could you explain why you want pictures of dead children?"

She shrugged her shoulders uneasily. "We're doing some research."

"What kind of research?"

"Don't ask."

"No, I'm going to ask, and I want an answer. All I need is for any one of those people you call to complain, and it'll come out that I helped you. Why don't you tell me what I'm getting into here."

Colomba sighed. "I can't."

Infanti grimaced unhappily. He'd assumed he was helping his old superior officer, who had always displayed uncommon competence and confidence during the three years they'd worked together. But the woman he was looking at now was just a shadow of the one he remembered. Depressed, off balance, with something eating at her from within. He realized he'd made a mistake. "I'm sorry, Colomba, I've changed my mind."

Dante lunged forward and plucked the flash drive out of the slot. The computer emitted a discontented pling. "Too late."

Infanti grabbed his arm and jerked him closer; he snarled at him: "How dare you, piece of shit?"

Dante said nothing but kept his fist clenched, with his treasure firmly grasped in it. Violence was such an alien experience to him that his customary reaction to the aggressivity of alpha males or domineering individuals was to retreat into himself. Except for the two or three times in the past when he had simply lost control and gotten into trouble with the law.

"Give it," said Infanti, applying pressure.

Dante continued to oppose passive resistance, without looking the other man in the eyes. He felt extremely uncomfortable.

"Let him go, Carmine," said Colomba. "Don't be a fool."

"Tell him to give me back my flash drive."

"Let go of him, Lieutenant."

The tone of voice belonged to the old Colomba, and suddenly Infanti released Dante, dropping his eyes as he did. "This is about the child up at the mountain meadows, isn't it? You're fixated on that kid."

"None of your fucking business."

Dante unbuttoned his shirt sleeves to examine the red marks on his skin. "That's going to leave a bruise," he muttered, displaying his usual sense of humor. No one paid him any mind.

Infanti pointed at him. "Was he the one who got you into this fucked-up case? What kind of ideas did he put into your head?"

"Nobody put any ideas into my head."

"Then why are you investigating where you shouldn't be? And without the magistrate's authorization?"

"Lower your voice, everyone's looking at us," said Colomba.

It was true. The adjoining tables were occupied mostly by college students, and many of them had turned to stare at them. They all assumed it was a family quarrel or some fight over a cheating spouse. Him, her, and the other man. In the informed opinion of all the onlookers, neither of the two men was worthy of dating Colomba. One of them was skeletal and foppishly bizarre in appearance; the other one was a diminutive fireplug with a pug nose. The athletic woman sitting across from them could certainly aspire to better, and many of the male onlookers would have been more than happy to volunteer.

"Tell me what you're hoping to discover all by yourself, working with this halfwit?" Infanti continued in a slightly lower voice.

"Hey," Dante protested.

"You're turning nasty, Carmine. Let me get the check."

"No, no, I wouldn't dream of it," he said angrily, tossing a ten-euro note on the table and getting to his feet. "I couldn't wait for you to come back from leave. I never believed what everyone else was saying."

Colomba narrowed her eyes, and once again Infanti realized he couldn't withstand that green gaze that had darkened in response to his angry reaction and was now pure emerald. "Why, what were they saying?"

"Forget about it."

"What were they saying, Lieutenant?"

Infanti hesitated for a fraction of a second. "That you left your mind in Paris. And now I have to admit that it's true."

Paris? wondered Dante. Is that where whatever happened to her happened? He started reviewing in his mind the things that had happened north of the Alps in the recent past.

"You can go now," Colomba retorted in an icy voice.

"I'm really sorry for you," said Infanti, slipping his computer into his bag and turning to leave. "But maybe it really would be better for you to find another line of work."

"What an asshole," Dante commented once Infanti was gone. But he kept thinking: Paris . . . Paris . . .

Colomba shook her head. "No. If I were in his shoes, I'd have behaved the same way. Before long, someone is going to ask me to explain just what I think I'm doing. We don't have much time."

"I'd figured that part out," said Dante absentmindedly.

Colomba made a face as she realized the direction Dante's thoughts were going in. "Well, have you got it?"

Dante blinked. "Got what?"

"I see the gears turning in there."

Dante tried to crack his sarcastic grin, but it failed him because at that moment an idea had surfaced in his mind. "How long have you been on leave?"

"Including time in hospital, convalescence, and leave? Almost nine months as of this date." Colomba gestured to the waiter and, when he came over, asked for a beer.

Dante froze. The images of devastation that had been reprised obsessively on all the news broadcasts a year ago spun through his mind. "I didn't know that there were Italian policemen there, too," he murmured.

"Just one. Me." Now her eyes had turned even darker, like an open sea. "The inquiry cleared me, but I know: those deaths, those people who were injured, it was all my fault."

18.

Even though Dante had understood just what burden Colomba was carrying with her, he was desperate to hear her version. But he'd have to wait till they got back to the hotel, because she wasn't about to tell her story in the middle of a crowd.

They took seats on the balcony outside the room, where Dante could smoke, with the lights turned off and the awnings drawn for added security. In the dim light left by the lamps down in the courtyard that filtered though the bars of the railing, Colomba felt sufficiently certain that Dante wouldn't be able to read her face and detect emotions she didn't particularly want to share.

"A year ago we got a tip," she began, "that a multiple killer was hiding out in France. His name was Emilio Bellomo."

"I know. People talked about it."

"Just let me tell the story my own way, because it's hard enough as it is."

"Sorry."

"Bellomo had been convicted of two murders, a number of robberies, and attempted murders for pay."

"Versatile."

"He did it all for the money. He'd been on the run for three years, and the last tip that had come in on him dated back about seven months, when he'd jumped out of his car at a carabinieri checkpoint and escaped on foot. The carabinieri cousins, as they were known, had opened fire, but he'd managed to get away. They thought he'd been wounded, but he hadn't gone to any local hospital, which meant he must have administered his own medical care, or else he'd found a willing physician. Because he'd committed his first murder in Rome, our district attorney's office had first shot at the investigation. We found out where he was because one of his old accomplices, Fabrizio Pinna, ratted him out. Bellomo had stayed with Pinna to recuperate after the firefight with the carabinieri and clearly trusted him enough to tell him that he was planning to go to Paris to stay with his girlfriend."

"What was her name? I can't come up with it right now."

"Caroline Wong, half French, half Chinese. Pinna only knew her first name, but we found her, even though we had to move cautiously because the minute Bellomo figured out we were onto him, he'd take off. He was clever, and he'd given proof of that already."

"Why on earth did Pinna talk?"

"Because immediately after Bellomo's departure, he found out that he had terminal cancer and didn't have long to live. Rovere and I figured he just wanted to get it off his conscience. Even though later . . ." Colomba shook her head. "Let me take things in order. Well, then, Rovere assigned me to supervise the operation with the French authorities. And I had the added benefit of knowing one of the cops over there, someone I'd met at one of the many Schengen liaison meetings we had to attend, plus I speak a little French. So we put Wong's apartment under surveillance, along with the place she worked as a coat check attendant, a deluxe Japanese restaurant atop a boutique."

"That restaurant."

"Exactly, that one. The operation was being left to the local cops, I was strictly an observer. They let me keep my sidearm as a courtesy, and I was supposed to do nothing but take custody of Bellomo once they caught him, but after two days of unsuccessful stakeouts, since one member of the team was always supposed to be at the restaurant, I went in instead, pretending to be a client. My bad luck. I was there pretending to eat when Bellomo came in. He spotted me and recognized me." Colomba shook her head, stricken. "You know the rest."

"Bellomo set off the bomb."

Colomba had gone back for a moment into the midst of the smoke and the flames. "Yes," she said softly. "And it was a massacre. He had it in the coat check room. His girlfriend was doing him a favor. I don't know if I should be mad at her or feel sorry for her."

"Sorry for her, I'd guess, seeing that she's dead. How did Bellomo manage to recognize you? Had the two of you ever met?"

"Never. There are two possibilities. Either he had an exceptional nose for cops, and from a guy like him I wouldn't have been a bit surprised, or else Pinna had described what I looked like. I know for certain that he recognized me. And Pinna had put him on the alert, from what we found out later."

"So Pinna betrayed you?"

"He hanged himself the day of the explosion, begging forgiveness for all the mayhem. In his suicide note he explained that he'd changed his mind and had warned Bellomo 'out of friendship.' I'd imagine via Wong."

"Why didn't Bellomo try to escape?"

"Maybe he was just tired of running. Maybe he just wanted to be remembered as the piece of shit that he was. And he'd prepared a welcome for us." Colomba took a deep breath; her lungs had started to hurt. "I saw him trigger the detonator, you know. He was looking me right in the eye, and he put a hand in his pocket. I tried to pull my gun, but . . . I wasn't fast enough. The sky came down on our heads."

After the explosion, Colomba had awakened with her ears ringing and her head pounding. She couldn't remember anything from the last minute . . . What had she done? What had happened?

The power had failed, and Colomba's eyes had had to become accustomed to almost total darkness before she was able to make out through the drifting smoke the shapes of the yawning gaps that had once been windows. Flames were licking at one end of the dining room, and in that surreal phosphorescent grayness she had glimpsed one of the models who had been sitting at the central table. She was now sprawled on her back just a few feet away, her outfit ripped to tatters. The blood streaming from her mouth formed a black puddle. All around was scattered rubble, dust, flames, and more smoke. A bomb, Colomba had decided. It was a bomb.

She'd lost her earpiece, but even if she'd still had it, she couldn't have used it because the explosion had compromised her hearing. Slithering out from under the table top that had protected her, Colomba had made her way over to the model and shaken her lightly. Her head had moved like a doll's. Under normal conditions, Colomba would have understood immediately just what had happened, but she was anything but lucid. She was in shock, with severe traumatic brain injury, two broken ribs, a knee out of commission, and a sprained shoulder. But right then and there, she didn't feel all that bad, just very, very tired, and she was having a hard time focusing on anything near at hand. She thought in a muddled way that the girl was injured and needed immediate medical attention. She'd gotten up without her shoes and had cut and injured the soles of her feet, clad only in socks, by walking on red-hot rubble and broken glass. But she hadn't felt the cuts or burns, either. She'd taken the model in her arms, as delicately as she knew how, and had made her way through the smoke. She'd staggered, unable to see where she was going. She was heading for the windows, which she could just glimpse, but she'd kept stumbling over wreckage and fragments of furniture, coming dangerously close to falling or dropping her burden. At a certain point she had stepped on something soft and felt it move. She'd leaned down and seen that it was a hand sticking out from under an overturned rack of shelves loaded with bottles.

Even now, Colomba didn't know who that hand had belonged to. It seemed like a man's hand, but in the dim lighting she couldn't be sure. Whoever it was, he might have died because she didn't stop to help him, but of all the wrongs she blamed on herself, she'd absolved herself of this one. In those fleeting moments her only thoughts were for the girl she carried in her arms, and most of the time she didn't think at all. She'd continued her trek, which seemed to stretch out endlessly as she stumbled around in circles. One at a time, her ears had started to work again, and through the ferocious buzzing she'd been able to make out the sound of the fire devouring the curtains and the flakes of plaster falling from the ceiling. And the cries, weak and desperate, of those who had been left buried under rubble or too gravely injured to be able to move.

"I'll come back soon to get you all!" she had shouted, or had thought she'd shouted, her throat burning with the dust and smoke. "I swear I'll come back!" But in the meantime she had managed to make out the shape of the door that led to the restaurant's front entrance. She'd headed straight for it, and as she got closer, the air had cleared up while the draft swept away the fumes; out on the landing, which had once contained a small reception desk, an emergency light that had somehow been left intact pointed her toward salvation with its green eye. It was the staircase, and on the first steps lay sprawled the dead body of a legless waiter. In her delirium, Colomba had thought: God, how lucky we are, me and this girl. It came so close. Really close. With her load, she wouldn't have been able to make it down the stairs, but just then a small crowd emerged from the darkness. Waiters, black-clad salesclerks from the boutique downstairs, passersby who, instead of taking to their heels, were trying to help. They'd rushed toward her, all shouting and sobbing, all of them trying to take the girl out of her arms, saying "Sit down, stay calm, come here." She'd pushed them away. She'd shouted, or imagined she was shouting, "Take care of the others, the others!"

She'd regained consciousness at Paris's Sainte-Anne Hospital, and through the dull daze of the sedatives, a sad-faced doctor had told her that the girl she'd carried, the Albanian fashion model stuffed with cocaine, had died instantly when a table-the same table that had saved Colomba's life-had shattered her skull. But Colomba had learned the news with almost total indifference. She no longer had guts and organs, she no longer had anything. She was a void held together by a thin layer of skin. And the fact that that void should go on breathing and maintain the appearance of a human being would have seemed incredible to her if she'd still had the capacity to be amazed at anything. She'd hardly uttered a word for the first week. She hadn't spoken to her fellow cops or to her mother, who came to embrace her, to the representatives of the major institution, who "stood with her, deeply moved, in solidarity and fellowship," to that piece of shit who had once been her boyfriend but who now fled from her side in the months that followed, unable to put up with her in this new incarnation of a sick and suffering creature.

Interacting with them would have forced her to feel like a human being again, and Colomba had neither the ability nor the desire. She wanted to be a section of wall, a bedsheet, one of the flowers in a vase that the chief of police had sent her, "with deep affection and immense sympathy." An ordinary everyday object that could feel nothing, a thing among things. She couldn't actually do it, but she'd still whiled away the time making the attempt, while they were operating on her to adjust her tendon and shoulder, while they were trying to force her to eat, finally talking her into it, but only moments before resorting to force-feeding. And not even Rovere's visit had been able to shake her out of it; when he had sat down beside her and had understood and had told her that it wasn't her fault and had gone on saying it in the days that had followed, while the panic attacks started coming, along with the nightmares and the hearings of the internal affairs panel. Rovere, who was every bit as tested by the ordeal as she was, perhaps even more because he was fresh from the loss of his wife-one sorrow piled atop the other-and weighed down by the sense of guilt for having sent Colomba to what could so easily have been her death.

"In the end, the internal affairs panel acquitted me. But I'd have willingly accepted a guilty verdict. I felt and I still feel that I made a terrible mistake," Colomba concluded her story.

In the dense darkness that surrounded him, and in the darkness evoked in that account, Dante almost hesitated to breathe. "CC . . . But why should it have been your fault? What could you have done differently?"

"Stop him before he got into the restaurant."

"But you didn't spot him until the last minute."

"I didn't. But my colleagues down in the street did. They'd seen him come in through the front entrance of the boutique. But I told them to wait. That we had him now, that he was certainly coming upstairs to see his girlfriend. That I'd keep an eye on him and wouldn't let him shake me. The exits were all under surveillance, he had no escape route, we could do things on our own schedule. Technically, I wasn't in charge of the operation, but my French colleagues took my advice. And they wrote in the report that they'd done so, 'relying on my experience and knowledge of the subject,' their exact words. We're talking about the worst foul-up committed by the French police in the past half century, and possibly in all of Europe. No one wanted to take responsibility for it. The city prefect resigned, the French chief of police was looking wobbly for a while, things got vicious among the embassies. And ever since, relations between us and them haven't been good."

"I'm sure you had your reasons. I know the way you think."

"I knew Bellomo's priors. I was afraid he might be armed and could start shooting in a crowded place. That someone might be hurt. But I let something even worse happen."

"He'd have set off the bomb in any case the instant he sensed you were about to capture him."

"That was the finding of the internal affairs panel, and they made sure my name was kept out of the newspapers and I wasn't kicked off the police force. And that's what I keep telling myself. But the fact remains that I made the wrong decision. That's why I can't do my job anymore. Not because of the panic attacks. You can get over those. But because I no longer trust myself and my judgment."

Dante slid down on the chaise longue to get closer to her. Now he was just inches away, and he felt the sorrowful and almost irrepressible desire to hold her. God, how he missed wrapping his arms around a woman, and in that moment of fragility Colomba appeared, a simple silhouette against the light, as the very essence of what he wished he could feel pressed against his body. As he formulated that thought, Dante surprised himself and caught himself in the midst of reaching out to take her hand. That wasn't a good idea, decidedly not. He leaned back against the chair. "CC, I'm not much when it comes to comforting other people. I've wallowed in self-pity for so long that my strategy when other people are in pain is just to wait for them to get over it. But I can tell you something. I feel sure that if you had been working on my case when I was locked in the silo, you'd have found me."

Colomba snorted. "That came out nicely."

"Really? It just popped into my head. Do you want to get some sleep?"

"No." Colomba stood up and stretched, making the vertebrae in her neck crack. She felt a pleasant numbness in her leg muscles from the run that afternoon and once again told herself that she needed to amp up her training. "I don't know if I would have found you, but I do want to free that child in the video before he turns into someone like you. The world only needs one Dante Torre."