Colomba connected the Spanish word for roof-techo-with the Italian word-tetto-and understood. "Is your brother called Santiago, by any chance?" she asked grimly.

"Yes, ma'am."

Propelled by her fury, Colomba got to her feet, overriding all objections, and strode quickly out of the room. She found herself first in a hallway dominated by a large poster of Che Guevara, and then in a small living room where Jorge Perez was playing with a PlayStation 4 hooked up to a television set that Colomba thought she must have seen somewhere before. A couple of kids in shorts and tank tops were watching, enthralled, and rooting eagerly.

Jorge smiled mockingly as she walked through the door: "Well here she is, la puta."

The children laughed and repeated the word: "Puta, puta."

"I'll show you who la puta is around here," roared Colomba, grabbing Perez by the throat with her good hand. "And quit fucking talking in Spanish, seeing that you were born in Rebibbia, right here in Rome."

"What the fuck do you want?"

"Santiago. And my boots."

Five minutes later Colomba emerged onto the roof, police boots on her feet and a blanket draped over her shoulders. Dante, who was sitting on the swaybacked sofa talking to Santiago, ran joyfully to meet her. "Ciao, CC! So good to see you!" he shouted. He was wearing his parka, which had a tear on the left sleeve that was impossible to miss and light spots on the fabric where Colomba's blood had been washed off.

She shoved him away. "So good, my ass. What am I doing here?"

Dante seemed embarrassed. "Let me explain."

"There's nothing to fucking explain. You should have just called an ambulance and had me picked up. Or called Carmine at police headquarters! Not hidden me in this pigsty!"

"They would have arrested you."

"It was legitimate self-defense!"

"Tell her, Dante!" Santiago shouted from the couch. "Si no rompe las bolas todo el da."

"You think I'm busting your balls now?" Colomba shouted back, happy to find that her voice had returned. "Let me show what I can do with my boots, I'll bust your bolas, all right." Santiago flashed her his middle finger.

"CC . . . things have kind of gone south . . ." said Dante.

"Of course they've gone south! I left the scene of the crime and went missing! Find me a phone or get me a ride to police headquarters."

"I'm not talking about Ferrari," Dante broke in. "Or not only about him."

Colomba felt a shiver run down her back, and she pulled the blanket tighter. "Then what's this about?"

Dante sighed. "Sit down, CC."

"What the fuck do you have to tell me?"

"Please. Just sit down. Otherwise I won't tell you anything."

Colomba thought about grabbing him by the neck, as she had Jorge, but Dante's sincerely worried expression dissuaded her: something really wasn't right. She sat down on a Naugahyde armchair next to the computer workstation. "Well?"

"You're wanted for the murder of Rovere."

Colomba's heart skipped a beat. "What did you say?" she said in a whisper.

"When they searched your apartment, they found traces of C-4."

Another thud to the heart, this one stronger. Colomba had to gulp twice before she was able to speak. "Who told you that?"

"Roberto."

"Minutillo? Your lawyer?"

"That's right. When you passed out I didn't know what to do, and I called him. He told me the rumors he was hearing from the district attorney's office. Luckily, he has friends there."

Colomba couldn't seem to think clearly. "They can't actually believe such a thing . . ." she stammered, and it was the first time she'd stammered in her life.

"De Angelis can't wait to throw you in prison and throw away the key, with me in the cell next to you. To say nothing of the fact that it could easily have been him or Santini who planted the evidence."

Colomba let herself slump back in the armchair. "And this"-she waved her hand to take in the roof terrace-"this was the solution you came up with?"

"I couldn't think of anything better. While I was at it, I got rid of anything that could point to you. Ferrari's car wound up in a scrap metal compactor, and now it's no bigger than this." He held his hands out in front of him. "And Santiago's boys cleaned the apartment with plenty of bleach."

"Is that why Ferrari's television set's here now?"

Dante made an embarrassed face. "I knew you wouldn't miss that detail. But we could have spared ourselves the trouble. No one seems to know how it happened, but the apartment caught fire two hours later. Someone was even more worried than we were."

"The Father."

"That's right. Like I told you, he's sensing that time is tight. And I'm afraid of what he might do next."

Colomba's mind continued to slide. She was outside her environment, outside her world. She couldn't understand. "Why did Santiago agree to help you?" she asked.

"Because he hopes that I'll owe him a debt of gratitude, and for the money." Dante made a face. "I've run through my supplies. If we ever get out of this situation alive, I'll have to find a way to make some cash in a hurry."

"Are they accusing you, too?" Colomba asked.

Dante pulled a folded page from a newspaper out of his pocket with his bad hand. He wasn't wearing a glove, a sign that he felt more at his ease there than Colomba did. It was the front page of La Repubblica, and at the bottom right was an old photograph of Colomba and a more recent one of Dante. The headline read: "MYSTERY COUPLE STILL ON THE RUN-From the slaughter bombing of Paris to the suspicious death in the Rome hospital: what links the ex-policewoman to the boy in the silo?"

"They dragged out everything. Paris, the multiple deaths . . . your part in it. And my life, with loads of hearsay. What they have to say about me is that I'm crazy, and about you that you've probably gone crazy. And that you were holding a grudge against Rovere for having sidelined you after Paris."

"He didn't sideline me. It was me who-"

"I know. But they don't. So if you go and tell them what you do know, it will just seem like more craziness. Roberto says that the only reason I'm wanted, officially, is as a person with knowledge of events, but that if I do turn myself in, it's unlikely they'll let me go, so I'm staying clear of them and keeping you company." Dante pulled up a stool and sat down.

"I can just imagine my mother . . ." Colomba murmured.

"She went on a TV news show and appealed to you to turn yourself in. She seemed a little, how should I put this . . . a little melodramatic."

Colomba closed her eyes. This was worse than anything she could have imagined. She felt herself sink into the armchair and did her best not to move, for fear she'd plunge downward, floor by floor, to the center of the earth, into the midst of the damned souls. And the damned soul who was laughing loudest had Bellomo's face.

She opened her eyes wide. "The picture! Where is it?"

Dante pulled the photograph out of his parka and handed it to her.

Colomba waved it in the air. "Bellomo and Ferrari are connected! They'll have to investigate that."

"And what could they discover, if they discovered anything at all? Bellomo's life has already been investigated from top to bottom without finding anything linking him to the Father, and it's not going to go any differently with Ferrari. As far as your colleagues are concerned, the Father doesn't exist. And they'll probably say that the man in the picture isn't Bellomo, just someone who looks like him. If you didn't know what you do know, would you believe it?"

Colomba's lips took on a bitter curve. "Easier to think that you and I are the latter-day Bonnie and Clyde."

"Bonnie and Clyde didn't plant bombs, and their reputation has been blown out of proportion to what they actually did." Dante lit a cigarette using his bad hand, something just short of an act of prestidigitation. "In any case, at least we now know why Rovere got us into this. He started investigating the Father immediately after the bombing in Paris and the death of his wife. He wouldn't have done it if he hadn't known about a connection."

"His sense of duty would still have made him dig into it, if he'd had any actionable information."

"Alone? In secret?" Dante shook his head again. "His sense of duty alone isn't enough to justify his actions, but a sense of guilt would."

"That's a good theory, but you can never be certain," said Colomba.

"You're wrong there." Dante cracked his sarcastic grin, and Colomba realized just how much she'd missed it. "Because our man Santiago was able to break into Rovere's flash drive."

10.

To the attention of the Illustrious and most Honorable Minister of the Interior, and to the Esteemed Chief of Police of Rome, and to the Esteemed Prefect of Rome, Let me begin by apologizing for the unorthodox nature of this communique of mine, which I have composed in the past few days after careful consideration and much personal torment, but I have come into the possession of information such that it demands recourse to extraordinary measures to ensure that public safety and the welfare of the citizenry be secured, measures that only the highest authorities of our nation can hope to implement. I am writing with the full awareness that my actions over the past several months may merit, and indeed may receive, disciplinary action, but I have been compelled by the uncommon circumstances in which I found myself. Allow me in this missive to be as clear and concise as possible, even though the facts I am about to set forth present, through no fault of my own, numerous gaps and murky details.

The affair to which I draw your attention was brought to my attention at the end of last year during the investigation that led to the capture of the fugitive and murderer EMILIO BELLOMO, grimly known to our office, first, for the homicide of his cohabiting girlfriend ROSSELLA CALABRO, and subsequently for a series of criminal acts covered in the reports attached. During the course of this investigation, my office came into contact with a friend and confederate in wrongdoing of Bellomo's, a certain FABRIZIO PINNA, with prior convictions for embezzlement, breaking and entering and burglary, and armed robbery, at the time terminally ill with lung cancer. Pinna, when interviewed by the investigating magistrate and by my office, denied having any information that might be useful to the investigation but subsequently entered into direct contact with me at the medical institute where he was undergoing chemotherapy and where I was accompanying my wife to receive the same treatment. Perhaps feeling a certain kinship to me given the circumstances, Pinna, apologizing for the intrusion, explained to me that he wished to get a burdensome weight off his chest before his illness came to its unfortunate but undoubted conclusion, provided and agreed that it was I who took the weight of this knowledge from him and spoke not a word about it to anyone else. He stated, and I have no reason to doubt his word, that he had chosen to make his confession to me because he was certain that he was speaking to an "honest policeman," as well as one who could understand the state of health that afflicted him.

Having willingly agreed to the oath of secrecy, a promise that, let me assure you, I never had the slightest intention of keeping, and after obtaining authorization from the investigating magistrate, I promptly proceeded to have a series of meetings with Pinna, who gradually opened up to me, telling me in great detail about his relationship with Bellomo, a relationship that began, according to his account, in December of the year 1989.

In that period Pinna was performing his military service in a so-called punishment unit for having seriously assaulted a superior officer during his compulsory term of military service. That assault earned him a two-year sentence in military prison, after which he was transferred to an armory barracks in the vicinity of the nuclear power plant of Caorso.

In the dark of a December night-he was uncertain as to the exact date-Pinna and five other fellow soldiers, all of whom had also been assigned to the same punishment battalion, were awakened and loaded without advance warning onto a canvas-top transport truck and taken out into the countryside, at the boundary with the neighboring province of Cremona. Pinna and the others, including one soldier whom Pinna had nicknamed "Stankfoot," were thereupon assigned the task of completely emptying a military storehouse that stood "in the middle of nowhere," to quote Pinna's own words. This storehouse contained, aside from furniture of military description, cartons of clothing and medical equipment, as well as books and victuals. All of it was to be burned by them in the adjacent field, and whatever proved not to be combustible was to be reduced to its smallest possible component parts and buried. No explanation was furnished to them, but Pinna had noticed that all activities were overseen and supervised by soldiers from another unit, who wore camouflage jumpsuits devoid of insignia and who were apparently accustomed to what was happening. Among the members of this unit without insignia was Emilio Bellomo, who was an acquaintance from Pinna's childhood in the province of Latina. Bellomo and Pinna exchanged only a few brief words, but Pinna gathered from their short conversation that Bellomo was not unused to similar assignments. The conversation had been brief, especially because Bellomo had told Pinna that he was afraid of his superior officer, nicknamed "the German," according to Bellomo a dangerous and violent person. This German was present at the scene of the operations in question and, according to Pinna, did not seemed pleased at the sight of the two men talking. Pinna described the German as a man of average height and powerful physique, with a bull neck, blond hair, and eyes of a distinctive light blue.

According to Pinna's account, he and Bellomo lost track of each other during the rest of his mandatory military service but saw each other again the following year, in their home town, where Bellomo was living a life of comfort and ease, on the verge of downright luxury. Bellomo had shown himself to be friendly and generous to Pinna on more than one occasion, but he was unwilling to talk about the period of obligatory military service. Pinna told me that it had been his impression that Bellomo was worried and felt uncomfortable about something that had happened during that period.

The sole indiscretion that Pinna was able to pry out of Bellomo was that the cause of his discomfort had to do with "a little boy," whereupon at first glance Pinna had suspected that Bellomo had a history of child molestation, even though his sexual conduct in that period had seemed to be normal and he was in a stable sexual relationship with Rossella Calabro, the woman who would later become his first victim. After going on the run in the aftermath of Calabro's homicide and without any other means of support, Bellomo subsequently joined up with Pinna and began a criminal conspiracy, committing a series of burglaries and armed robberies, a chain of crimes that ended with Pinna's arrest and subsequent imprisonment in 1999. During this period, Pinna declared that he had broken off all contact with Bellomo. Pinna knew only that Bellomo's flight from the law was ongoing and that, according to several mutual acquaintances, he might be outside of Italy.

Pinna, already sick, had been released from prison in 2010. He'd found work as a manual laborer for a construction company; according to him, he had ceased all interactions with the criminal world. He had been greatly surprised when, at the beginning of 2013, he was paid a visit in the middle of the night by Bellomo, in Pinna's home. Bellomo, wounded in an exchange of gunfire not far from Latina during a routine traffic check, was seeking shelter in the justifiable belief that he was the object of a manhunt. On that occasion, he told Pinna that he intended to cross the French border on foot in order to take refuge with his lover, a certain Caroline Wong, of Franco-Chinese descent. Wong worked as a coat check attendant in a fashionable Paris restaurant. Bellomo moreover revealed, according to what Pinna quoted him as saying, that he had made a grave error when he had accepted, in his desperation, a "job" offered him by his former superior officer, the previously mentioned German. In the days required for his complete recuperation from his wound, while being cared for by Pinna, Bellomo had gradually added various details. That the job in question, which remained otherwise vague, had taken place near the city of Fano, in Marche, and that Bellomo had accepted in payment enough money to start a new life. He had also stated that what he had done weighed heavy on his conscience, because once again a young boy had, in his exact words, "paid the price." After staying at Pinna's place of residence for a week, once his wound had healed Bellomo left for France, informing Pinna of how to get in touch with him in case it became necessary. Since Pinna had never betrayed his trust, even during his incarceration, Bellomo considered him to be a safe and trustworthy individual.

I feel obliged to inform you that Pinna's testimony, which I have here reported in a concise and chronological fashion, actually took place at various junctures, in some cases at my home, at other times at Pinna's, on occasion at the hospital, and that it took an often muddled form, interspersed with outbursts of anger, weeping, or complete blank silence. During one of the moments of greatest turbulence, Pinna revealed to me that the reason behind his decision to collaborate with the law but to speak only with me had to do with the fact that he trusted neither the corps of magistrates nor my colleagues. Over the years, in fact, he had come to the belief that the mission he had been sent out on in December 1989 as a member of a military detail operating in support of the unit to which Bellomo belonged had actually been meant to cover up a critical nuclear accident that had occurred in the Caorso area, an accident that the authorities had concealed from public knowledge.

Pinna believed that the individuals who had been contaminated were secretly treated in the warehouse he had helped to dismantle and that the boy mentioned by Bellomo on the occasion of their first meeting had not been a victim of Bellomo's pathological lust, as he'd originally believed, but had instead been killed by radiation. As proof of the truthfulness of his statements, he gave me a tin whistle left behind by Bellomo when he fled to Paris. Pinna believed that the whistle had belonged to the little boy in question and that Bellomo had jealously kept it with him over the years as a sort of sorrowful memento, a reminder of the guilt he carried with him. Pinna added that he was certain his own disease had come about as a result of his exposure to that radiation, due to the mission performed that night in 1989 without any protective garb or equipment.

As you can easily gather from my account, Pinna's story appeared to be nothing more nor less than the ravings of a madman. In spite of that fact, while awaiting the information needed to capture Bellomo, I felt it my duty to perform further investigations. I discovered, as I had already supposed, that no incident of any major importance had ever taken place at the Caorso nuclear power plant, with the exception of a leak of only slightly radioactive dust that occurred in 1985, contaminating several plant workers though without any negative consequences for any of them. If there had been other accidents in the years that followed, they would surely have been brought to the public's attention, since the monitoring activity of the self-proclaimed antinuclearists at that time was very intense, as demonstrated by the fact that the previously mentioned leak was given extensive coverage in the press and was even the subject of a parliamentary inquiry.

As far as Bellomo's military service is concerned, the information in my possession also fails to match up with Pinna's report. I requested information from the Ministry of Defense, and I received in return a brief note informing me that Bellomo had been discharged as unfit for duty. For that reason, and in fear that Pinna might be considered a wholly unreliable source, I wrongly reported to the investigating magistrate only the last part of my conversation with him, the part regarding Bellomo's new location in Paris, considering it to be reasonably solid. I then proceeded, in concert with the French authorities, to move forward with the operation that was meant to lead to his arrest. Given the sensitivity of this case, I assigned it to my most trusted collaborator, Deputy Captain Caselli, in part to protect my office in the eventuality that Pinna's account concerning Bellomo proved to be the fruit of pure fantasy.

But two grim events undermined my confidence about how much might be fantasy and how much reality in the story Pinna told me. The first of those two events was the horrible outcome of the operation designed to culminate in Bellomo's arrest, a massacre of which I hardly need remind you. The second was Pinna's death as a result of suicide by hanging in his home on the same day as the unsuccessful outcome of our attempted arrest.

In those terrible days, made even grimmer for me by the death of my wife, while I was performing with great sadness the duties of my office, a doubt was, however, worming its way into my mind. However hard I might try to dispel that doubt, it insisted on returning to torment me with ever greater insistence. I wondered whether, setting aside the fanciful hypothesis of nuclear contamination, Bellomo's unit without insignia might actually have existed. Pinna's account of his meeting with Bellomo was vivid and rich in details that, in contrast to other accounts, appeared completely rational and sequentially linked. And if that were true, it meant that the ministry was concealing the truth out of national interest, that same national interest that, it is sad but necessary to point out, still covers part of the activity of the state agencies responsible for the fight against terrorism. I wondered whether the responsibility for what had happened was mine because I had, as the saying goes, opened the proverbial Pandora's box of a military secret that had been successfully concealed over the years, perhaps concerning intelligence operations into the last lingering offshoots of the subversive activities of the seventies, which were focused on the area surrounding the controversial nuclear power plant.

The nighttime mission to the warehouse that Pinna and Bellomo took part in might perfectly well have involved the dismantling of an eavesdropping and surveillance center, kept secret and properly so, even though nothing could justify the repeated reference to a little boy who was a victim of that activity, with the possible exception of the cover-up of an accident that had taken place during the unit's service and that might even have been kept secret from their own superior officers.

If such was the case, however unlikely it might appear, it could mean that the bomb set off in the Paris restaurant and Pinna's death were not unconnected events, due simply to the mental instability of isolated individuals, but rather actions taken in order to deflect duly appointed investigators by what remained of the platoon without insignia, in order to prevent the authorities from learning the truth about what had happened in the past. I know, it may seem from this text that I have contracted the same madness as Pinna, but I felt the responsibility for those deaths weighing upon me, and I needed, for my own peace of mind and conscience, to find out how much truth there was in his words.

In the weeks that followed I therefore burst into a frantic round of research in an attempt to find any confirmation of what Pinna had told me, a story I had at first dismissed. I started with the most recent events, that is, the "job" that, according to Pinna, Bellomo had done in early 2013, a job in which another boy had been a victim.

My attention had been attracted by the sad story of a terrible accident that had occurred during an excursion to the sanctuary of the Blessed Rizzerio in the township of Coda di Muccia, in the province of Macerata. In January 2013, during the festivities of Epiphany, a minivan traveling to the sanctuary in question plunged into a ravine, as a result of the driver's having lost control of the vehicle due to a mechanical fault believed to have resulted from normal wear and tear, compounded by the failure to perform proper maintenance. Riding in the minivan were several adults-two priests and a female elementary school teacher-and two children, ages six and eight, from the parish church of Sant'Ilario in Fano; they all died on impact. That impact was so devastating, and was further complicated by the rare event of the resulting combustion of the gas tank, that the recovery and reassembly of the bodies had presented a significant challenge. What struck me was the extraordinary coincidence in terms of place and date, according to Pinna's account, with the "job" performed by Bellomo, a job that had triggered in him the crisis of conscience described above. What if that job had involved sabotaging the vehicle in order to cause another senseless massacre? But why? Should this too be filed under the category of cover-ups of past activities? Was there someone in that minivan who needed to be silenced once and for all? It was sheer madness, I realize and I repeat, even to think it, but the idea never left my mind.

Utilizing my own free time and the time off that I had accumulated in considerable quantity, I therefore went to the site of the accident and consulted with the local police in order to learn more about the previous investigations. I found that during the expert examinations, nothing had emerged that might point to any tampering with the vehicle-tampering that someone like Bellomo, an experienced mechanic, could certainly have undertaken-but that nonetheless all the investigators were unwilling to accept the virtually uncanny coincidence that had resulted in the deaths of all the passengers. The minibus, in fact, had gone off the road at precisely the most dangerous spot on the route, where the steepest drop yawned, and where a powerful and swollen river scattered and further lacerated those unfortunate remains. Far from satisfied with what I'd discovered, and in fact even more deeply tormented by the thought that the "coincidence" could instead have been the product of a specific strategy, I went to meet with the relatives of the dead, in search of any potential link between them and the elusive platoon without insignia. I will spare the reader any account of the immense pity I felt for those families, deprived of their loved ones. Their irreparable sense of loss and guilt only further reinforced my determination to find out whether there was some other truth cloaked behind the facts.

The only odd detail, if I may say so, obtained during this personal investigation of mine, was related to me by the parents of one of the children killed; they declared that they had found their child's shoes left on their doorstep, a detail that was never explained. A few months later, this detail would prove crucial in showing me that my suspicions might actually have a basis in fact, but upon departing the city of Fano I was left with nothing but doubts and coincidences . . . and a sense of uneasiness that I couldn't stifle. While the investigations attributed the responsibility of the massacre of Paris to an act of insanity on Bellomo's part, I continued to search for anything that could refute or confirm my theories. I therefore began to delve into both Bellomo's and Pinna's pasts, in search of any evidence confirming that anything in particular had actually happened on a December night in 1989. And as I researched what had happened at that time, I stumbled upon the case, notorious though shrouded in the mists of time, of the so-called boy in the silo. It was then that That was how Rovere's file ended, with a brusque white space. The flash drive contained a few other files on individuals implicated in the case, but nothing more. Still, what Colomba had read was enough to bring back the Rovere that she knew, the boss who had always helped and supported her, the honest man incapable of looking the other way. He had kept his secret in order to defend the institutions he believed in, and as the secret had begun to spill out someone had put an end to his life.

11.

Dante grinned when Colomba looked up from the sheets of paper, though he looked much less cheerful than his usual self. By now the sun had set and the rooftop terrace was lit only by a few solar-powered Ikea lamps and the embers of Dante's and Santiago's cigarettes; Santiago was sitting in front of the computer with Jorge and the guy with the tattooed hands, talking in low voices and typing.

Colomba ran her hands through her hair and sighed. "So that means Rovere planted the whistle; it wasn't the Father at all."

"Yes, he did it to rope me in to the investigation."

"He was clever, that one."

"Chi per la patria muor vissuto e assai," said Dante, quoting an Italian opera, as if sensing Colomba's thoughts. "He who dies for his country has lived well and truly."

"Hush," she snapped.

"Take as long as you need to process the information. It took me three days, and I'm still not done. Too bad he didn't tell us everything right away, your boss," he added sarcastically. "Maybe we'd be a little further ahead right now."

"He didn't want to-" Colomba began, but she cut herself off immediately.

"Yes, I know," Dante went on with some irritation. "He thought he'd just stumbled onto one more of the ten thousand Italian secrets, and he was afraid of unleashing a scandal. Too bad that the child Bellomo was talking about was me. Or the kid I saw murdered."

"You can't be sure of that."

"Of course I can. Look at the dates. December 1989. That was when I ran away. And the Father's little squadron eliminated all the traces. But Rovere was afraid of the scandal. Muddying the reputation of the institutions." Dante got to his feet and leaned back against the rooftop railing, a black shadow against the city's white light reflected off the clouds. "But he was wrong. It's been twenty-five years. Who do you think gives a damn about a couple of kids who got caught up in some military maneuver? They'd have just covered it all up, anyway."