"Otherwise I'll call the police and you'll have to explain why you told them nothing about my father contacting you before committing suicide."

Colomba shut her eyes, and Dante waited while Stanchetti panted into the phone for about ten seconds.

"And all you want is to see me?" Stanchetti asked.

Dante flashed a V for victory. "And talk to you. I'd say an hour of your time. So shall I come by?"

"No, I'll come to you. Tell me where."

"The front entrance to the baptistry, not fifty feet from where you live. I'm in a pickup truck."

"All right. See you soon."

Dante ended the call with a triumphant grin and lit a cigarette to celebrate.

Colomba opened her window; now that she'd been able to clean up, the smoke had started bothering her again. "How did you know that Pinna had contacted him?"

"If you haven't heard from a person in twenty-five years, when someone says their name you don't react so promptly. Instead, he clearly had Pinna in the front of his mind, and from his tone of voice, Pinna worried him, too. That means he'd heard from him before the Father hanged him, and he was afraid that sooner or later he was going to be called to account."

"He might have read about him in the newspaper."

"He reacted too promptly to the nickname, too. That was just a lucky guess, but if he hadn't recognized it, we could have saved our time. Ah, here he is now," he said, pointing to a man in his mid-forties wearing a quilted tweed jacket and crossing the street. It was definitely colder in Cremona than in Rome, especially at night, when the air turned humid and dank.

"Do you know what he looks like?" Colomba asked.

"No, but just look at his shoes. They're the kind with perforated uppers, just perfect for people who suffer from hyperhydrosis. And if they called him Stankfoot, there must have been a reason."

The man pointed at the pickup truck, and Colomba realized that Dante had nailed it. She got out and extended her hand. "Signor Stanchetti? Nice to meet you. Have a seat," she said, opening the rear door.

"Couldn't we go talk in that cafe over there?" he asked, pointing to the gelateria at the corner. "It's practically empty."

"We'll be more comfortable here. Have a seat."

Stanchetti shrugged and got in. Colomba got in next to him. Dante stayed in the front but turned around so he could watch.

"And you must be Pinna," said Stanchetti.

"Remarkable hunch. But feel free to talk to my friend," Dante replied.

"I swear I have no idea what's going on."

Dante grinned. "It's called conversation."

"Why did Pinna contact you, Signor Stanchetti?" Colomba asked.

Stanchetti turned to look at her. "If I can be perfectly frank, because he wasn't right in the head."

"Go on," Colomba encouraged him.

"Fabrizio was obsessed with the idea of radiation. He said that his cancer was caused by his military service. He asked me to contact the others from the Annoni Barracks and find out who else was sick, but I'd lost touch with everyone. Like I'd lost touch with him, for that matter. When he called me, it came as a surprise." He paused. "And even more of a surprise when I read in the papers that he'd been in prison and that he was a friend of the guy who planted the bomb in Paris."

"Bellomo."

Stanchetti nodded. "Yes. Fabrizio was a brawler back in the day, just like me. We were all a little pissed off, otherwise they wouldn't have sent us to the Annoni Barracks. But then I changed. I started a family, I got my feet on the ground. He didn't."

"Definitely not," Colomba said, with a glance at Dante, who nodded almost imperceptibly: Stanchetti was telling the truth.

"What else did he tell you?" Colomba insisted.

"He asked me if I remembered a special mission we were sent out on one night. He was convinced that that was when we'd been contaminated."

"And you remembered it," said Dante. There was no question mark.

Stanchetti nodded again. "Yes. It was one of those odd things you do when you're in the army and that stay with you later. But the idea that there was radiation is pure bullshit. I work for the city, and I'm in charge of the public green spaces. There's never been a radioactive leak in Caorso. The nuclear waste remains dangerous for several million years, but now it's all in France. Then there's the nuclear core, which actually-"

"So tell us about this special mission," Colomba interrupted him.

"Excuse me, but are you a cop?" Stanchetti asked. "Because I have the distinct impression I'm being questioned."

"Do I seem like a cop to you, too?" Dante asked.

"No, I'd say you don't."

"That's a relief."

Stanchetti smiled. "Well, then, I don't remember the exact date, but it was in December, before the holidays. The sergeant yanks us out of our cots, then he chooses six of us for a special job. They load us onto a truck and take us out a few miles. Middle of the countryside, blistering cold. There's a military warehouse, and they tell us to dispose of everything that's inside."

"And what was it you disposed of?"

"Furniture, medical supplies, books, but especially bags of clothing."

Dante stiffened. "Clothing?"

"Yes. Used. Civilian clothing, not military. It disgusted me to touch it, because the clothing stank and it was filthy. But it was nearly all wrapped up in plastic bags. We burned it all. I remember that Pinna was especially horrified to see the clothing."

"Why?" Dante asked, his eyes drilling into him.

Stanchetti hesitated. "It's been so many years."

"Give it a try anyway," said Dante, his eyes unwavering. He looked like a snake face-to-face with a mouse.

"He said the clothing was too small for an adult. Something little children would wear. Or kids, anyway."

Colomba and Dante sat in silence.

Embarrassed, Stanchetti went on. "But probably he was wrong. We burned most of the bags without opening them. And after all, what can a bunch of kids have to do with the army?" Dante and Colomba continued to say nothing, and Stanchetti started to worry he'd said something wrong. "On the phone, Fabrizio told me he thought it was clothing that had belonged to children killed by the radiation. That that place was some kind of a secret hospital, to keep the contamination under cover. But like I said, he was clearly raving . . ."

Colomba snapped to and pulled the Polaroid out of her pocket. "Pinna said that there was a group of soldiers that came from another barracks. That they wore camouflage, without insignia. Is this them?"

Stanchetti looked at the photograph. "I'm not much when it comes to remembering faces . . . I remember that the guys from the other barracks scared me, but now these guys look like ordinary kids to me. Aside from this one," he said, pointing to the German. "He scares me even now. Maybe he was the one who was in command, but I can't be certain. I'm sorry." He handed back the photograph.

"What else do you remember?"

"What I told Fabrizio. That I saw the guys from the other company load drums of diesel fuel onto a truck. Fabrizio asked me if I was certain it was diesel in the drums, and I told him I wasn't sure at all." First he looked at Colomba, then at Dante. "On account of the nuclear theory."

"He thought they might have contained nuclear waste?" Colomba asked.

"Exactly. But I told him that we'd all have been contaminated in that case, and that doesn't seem to have been the case."

"Why?" asked Dante.

"Because I know where they dumped them."

"How do you know that, Signor Stanchetti?" Colomba enquired.

Stanchetti leaned against the truck door. His neck was starting to hurt from turning to look the woman in the face for so long. Though she was worth looking at, in spite of the ridiculous hair color. "Like I told you, I work for the city. I've surveyed the gravel quarries in the area, and I'd know if there was any radioactive contamination. Gravel quarrying is one of the mining activities that's pretty prominent in the province of Cremona. Gravel and topsoil. Though most of the quarries have been shut down for years now. Some of them have been turned into dumps for asbestos processing, or else they've just been abandoned."

"Thanks for the explanation," said Colomba with some impatience. "Let's get back to the drums."

"I heard a guy from the other company talking to the driver of the truck. He mentioned the Comello quarry, between Piacenza and Cremona, on the Adda River. It had already been shut down then."

"And is it one of the quarries you surveyed?" Dante asked.

"Yes. I remembered it after I got Fabrizio's phone call. You know how these things work, you don't think about something for years and then it suddenly pops up . . . I searched through the documents. In 1989 it had been decided that it would be turned into a dump for the processing of industrial waste. That was still possible under the old law."

"But it didn't happen," said Dante.

"No. It became a wildlife repopulation area." Stanchetti's cell phone vibrated. He glanced at the display but didn't answer. "It's my wife, she's starting to get worried. I really ought to get back home now."

"Just give us the address, please."

Stanchetti jotted it down and practically jumped out of the car.

Colomba got back behind the wheel, entered the information into the GPS navigator, and put the car in gear. They left the center of town and in less than twenty minutes were driving down a country road. "It's not exactly going to be easy to find a bunch of fuel drums in a dump twenty-five years later," she said to Dante, who had the look on his face that meant his brain was spinning especially fast.

"Didn't you hear what Stankfoot said? They never turned it into a dump."

"But the drums can't be visible. Otherwise someone would have removed them. Maybe the same people who put them there."

"There's a way to find them, I'm sure of it. Don't the police have those ground-penetrating radar devices?"

"Sure, we do, and we use them to find buried bodies. But remember, we aren't the police." Not anymore, Colomba added mentally.

"We can buy one. Or we can get a metal detector, the kind that treasure hunters use. My father has plenty of money; we can even hire a hundred or so people to help us out."

"While we wind up in prison."

"It won't matter at that point."

"Do you think that all the answers are in the drums?"

"Not all of them. But one answer is, for certain."

"To which question?"

Dante didn't answer, just pointed to a sign on the county road, just past a small scattered group of houses. The sign read: FORMER QUARRY OF COMELLO-NATURE RESERVE. The arrow pointed to a dirt road, barely visible in the darkness. Colomba turned down it and slowed the car as it bumped over the potholes. When the road ended, they continued on foot, lighting their way with the flashlight they'd found in the pickup truck. It wasn't hard to identify the gravel quarry: in fact, it was impossible to miss. Now they understood what Stanchetti had been talking about when he mentioned a wildlife repopulation area.

Gravel quarries are located above shallow water tables, and once you stop quarrying, especially if you've dug too deep and you haven't capped the site, the water starts to rise.

The secrets that the Father and his men had sealed in the drums were now buried under millions of gallons of water. The quarry had turned into a lake.

18.

The sixth-floor office on Via San Vitale reeked of stale cigarette smoke and the leather of the old red couch pushed against the wall. Listening to the street noises coming in through the glass window panes, Curcio decided that every city had a different voice. Sometimes in the morning with his eyes closed, half-asleep, he had a hard time remembering where he was; he'd try to figure it out by listening to the sounds. Even the light changed, the dawns and sunsets were never the same. But the sounds remained the same.

At ten at night, awake now for twenty hours, Curcio was struggling against exhaustion. He crumpled the empty candy pack and looked under the desk for the trash can, remembering a second later that he didn't have one yet. The office had been readied in great haste, installed in a conference room of the Anticrime Division, until Rovere's old office could be emptied of his personal effects after the state funeral scheduled for that Sunday. That was fine with Curcio: he was in no hurry to sit in a dead colleague's chair, though it would hardly be the first time he'd done it.

Someone knocked at the door. It was a young police officer, fair-skinned, with freckles here and there; on his nose a large bruise was starting to fade.

"Officer Massimo Alberti, sir," he said as he snapped to attention.

"Take a seat." Curcio pointed him to the chair. "I have a few questions I'd like to ask."

Alberti hesitated for a moment, then obeyed, sitting stiffly. "Captain . . . have I done anything wrong?" he asked in a worried voice.

"That's what I'm trying to figure out," Curcio replied. "Deputy Captain Caselli called you the night she escaped from the hospital. We see that from the phone records."

Alberti blushed violently. "Captain, sir . . . I didn't know what she'd done."

"If someone thought you had, you'd be in handcuffs right now," Curcio said sternly. "What did she want from you?"

Alberti stuck a finger in his collar, as if it were throttling him. "She wanted me to look up a name for her in the system." His voice dropped. "The name was Luciano Ferrari. But she didn't tell me why. I didn't know he was . . ." Alberti broke off.

"Dead. I can imagine. You just assumed you were doing a favor for a superior officer, even if she was on leave."

"That's right, sir."

"You realize that you could go on trial for what you did? Especially for not having reported it. You've barely started, and you could already have derailed your career."

Alberti looked down. "I know that, Captain, sir," he murmured.