"So then you used us to dispel your doubts," said Colomba. She was doing her best to stay under control, but she knew she was on the verge of exploding.

"How did you figure it out?" asked Rovere.

"I was trying to make it make sense," said Dante. "Trying to make sense of why I was dragged into this investigation. Unless it was pure coincidence, it meant that you, who had involved me through the person of CC, necessarily knew more than you were telling us." Dante paused, inwardly reviewing all the reasons he ought to feel like a fool. "But I didn't understand how that could possibly be. You called CC immediately after the discovery of the corpse up at the mountain meadows. How could you have figured it all out so fast? Were you involved with the Father? Impossible, he'd never have kicked up so much dust. Had you known the victim? I ruled that out. The Father's modus operandi couldn't be identified in this kidnapping, unless you were the only one aware of a detail that would mean nothing to the others. Then I understood: the shoes. The Father leaves his victims' shoes in plain sight. It's a message. Am I right?"

"Yes."

"Do you know what it means?"

"No."

"But you already knew it before going up to the mountain meadows. Through the Palladino family?" asked Dante.

"Yes," Rovere admitted, as if talking to himself.

Colomba felt the strength drain out of her and released him, falling back a step. So. It. Was. All. True.

Feeling the pressure ease up, Rovere turned around, smoothing his jacket. "I'm sorry, Colomba. I'd have told you about it when the time was right."

Colomba said nothing, incapable of even looking at him.

"How did you get to the Palladinos?" Dante asked him.

"I can't tell you that. Not now. I can only tell you that the two of you together have performed a miracle."

"A miracle," Colomba echoed him, broken-hearted.

"This is the most important investigation of your life, Colomba. And you were the only person I trusted," said Rovere in a tone of voice that he was clearly doing his best to make convincing. "And he"-he pointed to Dante-"was the only one who could steer you in the right direction."

"You're just lucky that I detest violence," said Dante. "And that I left my baseball bat at home."

"I want to know everything," Colomba drove in with determination.

"This isn't the time. Trust me, I'm begging you. Just for a little longer. I'll try to keep you out of everything that's going to happen." And with those words, he headed off toward the stairs.

It took Colomba who was caught off guard, a few seconds before she set off after him. "Where the fuck do you think you're going?"

"Home. A patrol car goes down this street every half hour. I'd prefer they not see us together."

He tried to go upstairs again, but this time Colomba's hand shot out and grabbed him by the arm, overcoming the powerful sense of estrangement that was forcing her into immobility, like a pillar of salt. "Either you tell me what you know, or I'll call De Angelis and he can clear this up with you." She pulled out her cell phone and showed it to him, with the magistrate's number already queued up on the display.

"He'll whitewash the whole thing," said Rovere. "I still can't tell if he's merely an opportunist or a full-fledged enemy, but you shouldn't trust him."

Colomba put her finger on the call button. "Last chance."

Rovere realized that Colomba would never yield. What remained of the relationship of respect and affection that had bound them together was evaporating second by second, one word after the other. Rovere understood, to his sorrow, that it would never be restored, however hard he might try. "You have to promise me that you won't tell a soul what I'm about to tell you, unless I give you permission to do it."

"No promises. I'll decide for myself afterward."

Once again, Rovere realized he'd have to give in. "All right." He gestured for her to follow him, and together they walked up to the mezzanine. "Let's talk in my apartment."

Colomba turned to look at Dante, who stood grimly leaning against the glass street door. "What are you going to do?"

He stared at the atrium, chewing on the glove covering his bad hand. Now that the timer had turned off the overhead lights, the place looked less inviting to him. But he was interested, and how, in what Rovere had to say. "Just give me a minute to catch my breath. But don't start without me."

"In that case, get moving," Colomba replied, then caught up with Rovere, who was just turning the key in the lock.

"I'd prefer that Signor Torre not take part," said Rovere.

"What you prefer is no longer any concern of mine. Come on, get moving," Colomba ordered.

Rovere pushed open the door. In the darkness of the apartment, an electric spark glared. It was practically white, so luminous it left a ghost image on her retina. It was the last thing Colomba saw before the explosion.

22.

The explosion hurled Dante onto the sidewalk. He was momentarily stunned, but when he recovered he found he was covered with shattered glass, but without a scratch on him. The apartment building was shrouded in complete darkness. All the panes of glass up to the fourth floor were completely gone. Dense, greasy smoke came billowing out of some of the windows. A bomb, he thought groggily, as he struggled to his feet. That was a bomb. Car alarms up and down the street were wailing and beeping. A man shouted something he couldn't understand from a window in the building next door.

"Are you all right?" the man asked him.

Dante ignored him. Around him a dozen or so people had gathered, dialing calls or taking pictures with their cell phones. He shoved through to the front entrance, doing his best to peer through the smoke. He couldn't see a thing. CC's in there, he thought, still in shock.

An elderly couple in pajamas emerged through the cloud of smoke, coughing.

Dante squared off in front of them. "There was a woman on the stairs. Tall, black hair. Did you see her?" he asked, slurring the words in his urgency.

The man cleared his throat. "It's too dark!" he said. "And the smoke . . ."

A woman in a bathrobe and a man in a suit and tie who looked as if he'd just come home from the office also emerged. The man was talking calmly on his cell phone. But no Colomba. Dante thought of her dying amid the flames and falling plaster while he stood there on the sidewalk like an idiot. He needed to go to her aid, and right now, if it wasn't too late already. The little voice that whispered bad news to him said it was pointless, that to judge from the blown-out windows, the center of the blast had been on one of the lower floors, probably exactly where she was now. That little voice, rendered even more shrill by stress and fear, pointed out that there were probably tattered shreds of her body in the dust and smoke swirling through the air. He was never going to see her alive again.

Dante silenced the voice and shut his eyes. He thought of sun-kissed beaches, blue skies. He thought of flying like a glider, running in a meadow at night. He tried to project himself back to when he lay in his bed and looked up through the glass ceiling of his balcony bedroom at a night sky filled with stars, and felt he was about to drop off into slumber. A solid minute went by, and two old people emerged, helping each other along. No Colomba.

His thermometer dropped, as did his heart rate. I can do this, he told himself, doing his level best to hush the little voice that kept insisting no, no, he couldn't, that this was sheer madness. He loosened his tie, removed it, and grabbed a bottle of water from the backpack of a high school student intent on snapping pictures with his smartphone. The student objected loudly, and the crowd murmured angrily in disapproval. They can fuck themselves, he thought. He poured the water over the tie and wrapped the wet strip of cloth around his nose and mouth, turned on his cell phone flashlight, and went in.

For a second he saw nothing. Then the smoke cleared and the LED light illuminated the foot of the staircase, which appeared to be intact. The explosion didn't seem to have damaged the building's load-bearing structure, but blackened chunks of plaster kept falling from above, along with drops of plastic from the melted electrical wiring.

"Come back!" someone shouted to him from outside.

Dante was about to do it, too, because the feverish determination that had driven him initially was starting to subside. Then he saw something light-colored moving feebly on the landing at the top of the first flight of stairs, right next to the huge, jagged gap in the wall that had once been Rovere's apartment, out of which purplish flames and toxic fumes now spewed. That was enough to push him upward, darting the beam of light from his phone to sidestep obstacles as he met them. The staircase held all the way up to the second floor. Just before the landing, a step was missing and Dante was forced to leap over it, landing clumsily on a heap of rubble. When he regained his balance, he realized that the white thing he'd seen was a plastic ceiling light panel tossing in the gusts of heat and smoke. Fuck, he thought. I can't do this anymore. It's too much. But, just as he was turning around to head back downstairs, he spotted a dark mass huddled against the wall of the hallway. By the light of the phone he made out Colomba's face, half-buried in shattered plaster. She was covered in a white powder that glittered in the glow of the flames.

Dante called her name and bent over her. Her face was covered with blood, and at first he thought the worst, but then he realized that the blood was flowing from an injury on her forehead. A surface wound, thank God.

"CC!" Dante shouted. Colomba's eyelids flickered. "Can you hear me? CC!"

A blast of smoke enveloped them, and Dante coughed until it felt like his lungs were splitting, in spite of his drenched tie. When the cloud thinned, another light had appeared in the hallway. It was a camping lantern, in the hand of a tall, powerfully built young man in shorts who had a wet handkerchief pressed to his face. The young man kept his distance. "Are you all right?" the young man shouted, to make himself heard over the crackling of the flames.

"Help me carry her out of here," Dante replied from under the tie.

"We need to wait for the ambulance before moving her. That's what they always say," the young man replied.

"We can't leave her here," Dante insisted. "We don't know whether the building's going to come down."

"Then maybe we ought to get out of here, don't you think?" the young man pointed out.

"Not without her," said Dante.

A father, a mother, and three children came running down the stairs, all in pajamas. The man was seeing his way by the light of a torch made of flaming newspapers. What an idiotic thing to do, Dante thought, right after an explosion. As they went past, a large chunk of plaster fell between Dante and the young man, who took a step backward in fright.

"Wait! Don't go." Dante bent over Colomba again. She'd opened her eyes. "Can you hear me?" he asked her.

"Yes . . ." she replied weakly.

"Move your legs. Move them!"

"What?"

"Your legs! I have to see if you have spinal damage."

She weakly twisted first one foot around, then the other, clenched her hands into fists.

"How is she?" the young man asked.

"She can walk if you give me a hand," said Dante, hoping with all his heart he wasn't making a mistake. But he wanted to get Colomba out of there as quickly as he could. And himself with her.

A new cloud of smoke billowing out of the apartment enveloped them. This time it reeked of burning paper and wood: the fire had reached the bookshelves in the living room.

The young man finally came closer and helped Dante get Colomba to her feet.

As soon as she was standing erect, she vomited dust and blood. "Rovere," she stammered. She was standing on her own, but she was still confused and weak.

Dante thought: Let him burn. A second later, though, he realized that he wanted what Rovere knew, and he wanted it more than he wanted fresh air. "Can you get her out of here on your own?" he asked the young man, amazed that he was still able to speak at all.

"Yes. I think so."

"Take her down and wait for the ambulance. Don't let her out of your sight until it gets here, or I swear I'll track you down."

Dante's glare was sufficiently fierce that the young man nodded. "Don't worry."

"Careful of that top step."

Dante reluctantly turned away from the young man and Colomba and moved toward the entrance to the burning apartment. The explosion had demolished the apartment's central wall, blasting rubble in all directions and twisting rebar out of the perimeter wall its entire length. It had also shattered the ceiling, so that the living room of the apartment upstairs had collapsed down into this one. It was through that hole that most of the smoke was being channeled, sucked upward and out the blown-out third-floor windows. That was the only reason Colomba hadn't died of suffocation, why Dante was still there to play explorer. The adrenaline was pumping in such quantity that his heart was bursting in his ears. He stuck his head through the enormous ravaged gap. The flames were crackling violently at the end of the front hall, and the heat made it impossible to venture any farther forward. A marble table from the upstairs apartment had plunged down into the floor, and it was pure chance that it hadn't made it collapse like the floor above. The rest of the furniture had been splintered and was starting to catch fire.

There wasn't a trace of Rovere. Dante played the beam of light around the apartment again, then decided he couldn't go on, because the nightmare was slamming down on him like a slaughterhouse sledgehammer. He imagined himself trapped under a section of wall, struggling, with his face covered in plaster and dust, unable to breathe. Actually, rather than imagining it, he was perceiving it. He needed to get out of there now, while he was still able to put one thought in front of another, before the mercury in his internal thermometer rose to the top and triggered alarm bells. As he was taking a last look around, he thought he saw the apartment's front door, blown off its hinges, move slightly. It was an armored door, the only thing that had saved Colomba's life. Almost completely intact, it now lay on one side of the hallway, atop what seemed to be a heap of rubble, but that Dante now realized was a human head. Rovere's smoke-blackened head. The door had landed atop him and was pinning him down, flat on his back, from the waist down. With his free arm, Rovere was trying to touch his face.

Dante kneeled down beside him, cleaning the rubble and dust away from his eyes and mouth. "It's me, Torre. Hang tough."

Rovere opened his mouth, unable to speak, and Dante saw that he no longer had teeth. His mouth was filled with a clotted clump of blood, dust, and bone fragments. Stifling his revulsion, he stuck in a finger and extracted the bolus, allowing Rovere to breathe a little more freely. The blood oozed out so dark it looked black, but Rovere opened his eyes. He grabbed Dante's bad hand with a spasmodic grip.

"It won't be long," said Dante. "I think I can already hear the sirens. They're coming to get you." Suddenly he didn't give a damn anymore about the man's secrets. All he wanted was to get out of there.

The grip grew stronger still. Rovere was afraid, a fear that was stronger than his. A fear of being abandoned in that inferno of heat and death.

Dante closed his eyes for a moment. Blue skies, seas, meadows, cosmic space. "All right, I'll stay here with you. Let me see if I can get this thing off you." He set his phone down on the floor so it could illuminate his movements. "Let go of me for a second. I swear I won't go anywhere," he said, short of breath, gently sliding his hand out of Rovere's clasp. Using both hands, he grabbed one side of the door and tried to lift it, but he couldn't budge it a quarter inch. Maybe he could slide the door off him if he could find something to use as a lever, but first he needed to check on Rovere's condition.

He knelt down to look underneath and let his breath out in a long sigh of horror. A section of the door's armored metal had been twisted into a rough triangular blade and had pierced Rovere through, right below the sternum, penetrating the spinal cord and nailing him to the floor. The blood had formed a broad puddle that dripped into a crack between the slabs of marble floor tile, falling to the floor below as a red drizzle.

Dante got back on his knees and looked into Rovere's desperate eyes, trying to come up with a reassuring lie to tell him. Then he realized he couldn't do it. No one deserved a lie as their last farewell from the world.

He stroked his forehead. "You're a goner," he said quietly. Understanding flickered in Rovere's feverish eyes. "I'm sorry. Whatever fucked-up thing you've done, to me and to Colomba, consider yourself forgiven. Okay?"

Rovere murmured something else, which Dante heard but didn't fully register. By now he was living in a dream state, and everything seemed so surreal that it made him feel strangely calm. Maybe he himself was dead and didn't know it yet.

He sat down and gently touched Rovere's forehead. "Does it hurt?"

Rovere moved his eyes to say no.

"Then that'll make it easier. You're about to make the journey, you know? The most important journey of them all. The only one that really counts. Trust me, it will be beautiful. Soon you'll know everything there is to know about everything. There will be no more mysteries, no more shadows, no more fears."

Rovere's breathing started to slow.

"Now the journey is about to start. Just pretend you're boarding an enormous airplane, as transparent as the air around us," Dante went on. "You see it? It's already on the runway. It's tossing in the wind, it can't wait to get up off the ground and into the sky. There are lots of people sitting on board, just waiting for you. Because where it's going, time doesn't exist and you can meet anyone you want. All your friends, anyone who's loved you, people you thought you'd lost forever. Just look how many there are . . . You never knew there were so many, eh?" Rovere smiled faintly and closed his eyes. "Wait, wait, don't just sit down in the first seat you find. There are lots of people who want to say hello to you. There are your parents. You see them? Look how good they look, in their best outfits, dressed for a special occasion." Dante gulped down a bitter taste. "And there's your wife. Look how lovely she is, how happy she is to see you! She's been waiting for you so long! You feel her arms around you?"

Rovere's breathing grew ragged.

"Now you can go. And the wonderful thing is that everything you always thought was important is actually worth less than a minute of this journey . . ."

Dante fell silent because Rovere had stopped breathing. Meanwhile, outside, the first responders had arrived.

Before they could start up the stairs, Dante started searching the corpse. As he did, he thought back to the last words Rovere's bloody lips had managed to utter: He's not alone.

He's not alone.

- VII -.