Colomba received the call via Signal while she was still a little over ten miles outside of Portico. She’d just ended a call with Bart, who was setting out for Rimini with her team. Bart had been drafted to redo a full examination of Villa Quiete, after the military experts had finished theirs without finding anything useful. She was certainly happy to lend a hand, but disgruntled about the lack of any advance warning and the dozens of backed-up cases she was abandoning on her desk in Milan.
“Where are you?” Colomba asked, hearing the wind behind Dante’s voice.
“At the old mill.”
“Didn’t I tell you not to go out?”
“Do you remember that you’re not my mother? In any case, I called you because we need to go to the lady carabiniere’s house. If you’ll tell me the address, I’ll try to get in on my own. Alberti will act as my lookout.”
Colomba swerved. “Just wait for me in Portico and don’t do anything fucked up.”
They all met in front of the museum, which housed the famous Roman-era Gilt Bronzes that the populace of Portico had actively defended against plans to move them to the National Museum in Rome. Colomba remembered it because her father had been one of the townsfolk of Portico who had chained themselves together as part of the protest. It had almost kept Colomba from being admitted to the officer training academy. The admissions panel took any hint of subversive family ties very seriously, even though Colomba’s father was anything but a radical. In fact, if anything, she’d inherited from him the conservative blood that ran in the family.
The meeting between Esposito and Dante was almost a tear-jerker, because Dante actually allowed himself to be hugged. “Genius,” Esposito declared, “I was sure I’d never see you again. I mean I was really, really one hundred percent sure, you get me?”
“I came back specifically to disappoint you. And you’re a smoker, aren’t you? I just finished my last cigarette.”
“I should have known …” Esposito handed him half a pack, then went on to throw his arms around Alberti. “Damn, you got big, amigo. Give me a glass of whatever it is you’ve been drinking.”
“My God, all of you are obsessed. I’m not taking anything. I just lift weights, amigo.”
“Sure, sure, of course you do …”
Colomba sent the two of them to keep an eye on the house and update each other on the day, while she remained behind with Dante, who suddenly seemed anything but exhausted. His pupils were also enormous now. “What the fuck kind of pill did you take?” she asked him.
“Nothing.”
“Do you remember the rule, ‘No lies between us’?”
“On our way here, we ran into a crowd of amateur long-distance cyclists, all of them in their early sixties, who were pumping uphill like nobody’s business. I just asked Alberti to check them out.” Dante patted his chest under the jacket. “They’d dissolved some damn witch’s brew in their water bottles, and now my heart is racing a mile a minute.”
“You’re determined to die, aren’t you? I don’t know why I even took so much trouble to find you.”
Dante pirouetted around his walker. “Because without me your life is gray and uninteresting, CC. So, how was your meeting with Luca?”
Colomba told him about the Code and Dante lost all his giddy verve. “Hey … did that make you feel sad?” she asked him.
He shrugged. “I just started to feel jealous of a group of boys who were exchanging messages with shit.”
“Jealous of what?”
“At least they had someone to talk to. For thirteen years, all I had was the Father with a mask over his face.”
“Luca and the other boys seem certain that either the Father or his successor is still in circulation.”
“Who could be better than Leo for that spot? The son who takes the Father’s place. The best son.” Dante lit a cigarette. “So, shall we go see the lady carabiniere’s house?”
“I’m not sure about that, Dante. If Lupo finds out, he’ll declare open war on us. And after all, if there was anything useful, they already would have found it.”
“Let’s trade. I’ll explain Luca’s Code and you can accept the risk.”
“Did you know it?”
“No. But I’ve just figured it out.” Dante tapped and scratched on the car hood. “I just tapped out ciao. All right then, do we have a deal?”
Colomba’s curiosity got the better of her. “I’ll make you pay for this. But yes.”
Dante held up his good hand. “Look closely. I’ll teach you a new way of counting. I learned it from an essay by Isaac Asimov.”
“I read a book of his. It was about robots.”
“That’s like saying that Raphael drew pictures of Madonnas, but okay.” He raised the thumb of his good hand. “One.” He lowered the thumb and raised the index finger. “Two.”
“That doesn’t strike me as all that innovative.”
“Hold on, now comes the good part.” He raised thumb and index finger. “Three.” He raised his middle finger and lowered the others. “Sorry, no offense meant. Four.” Thumb and middle finger. “Five.”
“Okay, I confess that I’m lost now.”
“I’m counting in binary. It’s a language created for computers—”
“That much even I get.”
Dante went on delightedly. “And it only has two digits: zero and one. In effect, instead of being base ten, it’s base two, and it’s written from right to left and it’s positional. Luca’s Code transforms the zeros and ones into dots and dashes. After that, they just lined up the letters alphabetically and numbered them starting from one, without using the codes that are normally used in binary for letters, which are longer. Here, give me that sheet of paper …”
“There’s no need, I’ll take your word for it,” said Colomba, who was starting to get a headache. “I’ll call D’Amore and see if there’s anyone who has a set of keys.”