Kill the King

by Sandrone Dazieri

  “Dante isn’t here, Bart,” Colomba said, as if she hadn’t even heard the question.

  Bart sighed. “I’ll do everything I can to figure out what’s happened.”

  “You won’t find a single piece of evidence that doesn’t add up. Leo is too intelligent.”

  “Do you think he sank the boat on purpose?” Bart asked, already well aware of the way her friend saw it.

  “Yes. I think that was his way of getting us to stop looking for him. So that he would be free to do as he pleased.”

  “Listen, Colomba … I don’t want you to start getting your hopes up,” Bart said reluctantly.

  Colomba stiffened. “You don’t believe me?”

  “Sweetheart …” Bart replied affectionately. “You feel guilty about him. You feel sorry for him. You miss him. And you’d do whatever you could to bring him home. You’d even exaggerate a little bit when it comes to the things you see. You’re a human being.”

  “What are the odds that Dante is still alive, in your mind? From one percent to a hundred percent? Be straight with me.”

  “Statistically speaking, if a person is kidnapped and they aren’t heard from after twelve months—”

  “Rule of thumb, a rough guess,” Colomba said impatiently.

  “One out of a hundred.”

  “If you’d been kidnapped and there was one chance out of a hundred of bringing you back home, you’d be praying someone would try for that chance. I know I would.”

  Bart took one of Colomba’s hands in hers. “I have no intention of throwing in the towel. But you get some rest, you look like a wreck. Why don’t you come stay at my house in Milan for a while?”

  “Because I have some things to take care of in Portico.” A sailor waved to her from the launch, and she replied with the universal gesture for “five minutes.” “In your opinion, have we found all of the Father’s victims?” Colomba asked.

  That caught Bart off guard. “Oh Lord, I certainly hope so. Why?”

  “There’s a boy near my house who has some behaviors …” She broke off. “Forget about it, you already think I’ve lost my mind.”

  “I don’t think you’ve lost your mind … I know what kind of a period you’re going through. Tell me more about this boy.”

  Colomba leaned against the side of the ship. “He’s autistic and he behaves exactly like the prisoners we liberated three years ago.”

  “So you’re saying either that someone else besides us liberated him, or else that he managed to escape on his own. What do his parents say?”

  “They were both murdered. And he’s severely autistic, he doesn’t speak. So nothing comes to mind?”

  “No. Nothing that I saw in any of my examinations pointed to the possibility of other prisoners or other prisons. But I can’t rule it out. By now, though, they would have starved to death long ago.”

  “No, not if someone was taking care of them.”

  The launch, tied up not far away, sounded its horn and made Bart jump. “Another Father?”

  “An accomplice, a partner. More than one, possibly …”

  “That sounds like the story that Dante was telling.”

  “Exactly, and I really ought to have listened to him. Because he has a bad habit of being right most of the time.”

  “Some of the time, that’s for sure. But because you kept him balanced, you were the rational part of the couple. You can’t take his place now.”

  “I was the obtuse part of the couple. Don’t make the same mistake that I did.” The sailor started waving to her from the launch again, calling her name aloud. “I have to get going. Let me know if anything occurs to you. If you find some detail in your papers, in the testimony, and so on. If I’m right about this boy, he’s already suffered more than enough.”

  “When I get home …” said Bart, dubiously.

  “And let me know if you find anything on the Chourmo,” she whispered in Bart’s ear.

  Bart, uneasily, said that she would.

  “Do it, for real. I might be out of my mind, but right now Dante can’t count on anyone other than me.” Colomba drilled into her with her eyes. “And be careful, don’t trust anybody. You never know whose side they’re on.”

  “Whose side who’s on?” asked Bart.

  “Anybody.”

  Colomba climbed down the dangling ladder and into the launch, while Bart leaned over the rail, watching her and wondering whether at long last her friend had well and truly taken leave of her senses.

  9

  The trip back to Pantelleria was shorter than the outbound journey because the seas had subsided considerably. There was no one to give her a hard time, so Colomba was able to read the online newspapers undisturbed in her seat aboard the launch. There wasn’t much news about the double homicide. Signor Melas’s corpse had been identified by his sister, who was named Demetra and had arrived from Greece shortly after Colomba’s departure. From a video shot in front of the Carabinieri station, she looked to be about fifty, with a facelift and a trout pout. She was accompanied by a gorilla-looking guy who was identified in the caption as the assistant district attorney of Pesaro, Carlo Vigevani, in charge of the investigation. He towered a good foot and a half over everyone else in the picture.

  No newspaper made any mention of possible alternate leads, no evidence was mentioned that could point to anything other than a family tragedy. Nothing that pointed to an ogre risen from the grave to devour children.

  Back on the island, she was ushered onto another helicopter, the same one that had brought Bart, and at her request she was dropped off at a military airport in Rome. From there she took a taxi to Piazza dell’Orologio, just a short walk from the Quirinal Palace. It was three in the morning, and her mother answered the door in her nightgown, her hair messy and tousled. “What happened?” she stammered.

  “Nothing. I just came to get some things out of the garage. Sorry, I didn’t have time to call ahead and let you know.”

  Colomba entered the apartment and took a key from a hook rack shaped like a buccaneer’s flintlock pistol. Many other keys dangled from it, where they’d hung since time out of mind, without any locks anywhere left for them to open.

  “I’ll make you some breakfast,” her mother said, still bewildered.

  “My stomach hurts.”

  Colomba went downstairs to the garage in the inner courtyard. Among her old clothing and the various Formica cabinets, she found Dante’s boxes and suitcases, which she’d picked up from his hotel. There was also the complete archive of the files from the investigation they’d conducted on the Father. Colomba filled an old backpack with documents and flash drives. She also grabbed an old laptop she’d used during her time at the Mobile Squad, and which she simply hadn’t returned.

  She came back upstairs and found her mother sitting in the kitchen, looking mild and subdued. The smell of caffe latte filled the room and made her mouth water. “Should I make you an espresso?” her mother asked her.

  “I don’t drink it anymore.”

  “Right, on account of your friend. I’d forgotten …”

  Colomba said nothing; she didn’t want to get into another quarrel. “I have to get going. They say it’s going to start snowing again. If that happens, the trains will be running late, and then it’s an unholy mess.” She gave her mother a peck on the cheek, and the scent of rosewater filled her nostrils. She walked through the whitened metropolis to the Termini train station, with stalactites of ice hanging from the fountains, and the last drunken tourists. Everything seemed fake and distant. The first regional train for the Marche region wouldn’t be leaving for an hour, and she sat waiting for it on the bench on the platform, freezing to the center of her bones. Once aboard, she wrapped herself in her parka and fell asleep, waking up by random chance at the right station. The sky was black and lowering with snow.

  She made her way to the auto repair shop at the edge of Portico, and then rode for the last part of the trip in the cab of a tow truck, complete with
a rosary hanging from the mirror and the picture of a man with a mustache who looked like an older version of the mechanic at the wheel, an athletic young man with nice hands and long wavy hair. He reeked of oil and sweat, but he had an agreeable smile. His name was Loris. “I’ve never seen you before. So you like to spend time alone?” he asked her.

  “Who says that I’m alone?”

  “I have a clinical eye.” He laughed. “What kind of work do you do?”

  Colomba turned her gaze out to the road. A television news van was taking a panoramic shot of the snow-covered fields. “I’m retired.”

  “Lucky you.”

  When they got to the last curve in the dirt road before her farmhouse, Loris braked to a halt and then hauled the Panda out of the ditch with the tow truck’s electric winch. “What kind of chains do you use, anyway?” he asked, looking at the ruined tire. “Those must be a thousand years old.”

  “They probably are. Can you fix it in a hurry? This is the only car I have.”

  “You ought to get another one, maybe used.”

  “I don’t need much of a car. How quick can you fix it for me?”

  “Only because it’s you, I’ll jump you to the head of the line,” Loris replied.

  “But we don’t even know each other …”

  “You’ve ridden in my tow truck, you’re practically family.”

  When Colomba entered the house, it was freezing. She tossed some logs in the fireplace and lit them by training her mother’s hairspray on her lighter, which had the general effect of a flamethrower. She dragged the sofa over next to the fireplace and emptied the contents of her backpack onto the floor, distributing the documents all around her. With a screwdriver, she broke the video camera and microphone off of her laptop, hooked it up to the wall plug, and then used it to read the story of the man she had killed.

  10

  The Father had been active in two distinct periods. The first had started at the end of the sixties and had continued until 1989. The victims of the first period, or at least the eight that had been identified, seemed to have been picked off in some random fashion from all over the map of Italy. One child had been kidnapped during a school field trip near Rome, another by faking his drowning among the whirlpools in the River Po in Emilia. The only thing they all had in common—all but Dante, the sole survivor—was that they wound up buried together in plastic drums of acid on some undetermined day in 1989. The documentation of the second phase, which began in the early 2000s, was as substantial as that of the first, and it concerned her and Dante, too. They had met when she had asked him for help in the investigation into the disappearance of a young boy on the outskirts of Rome. One step at a time, they’d worked their way back to the shipping containers where the Father was holding prisoner ten of his victims. All of the prisoners had been identified, but not all of them had been returned to their respective families. Some of them had been missing for years, and they had been declared legally dead. Their parents had divorced or died in the meantime, or else they had no desire to assume responsibility for the care and feeding of already highly problematic children, who had only become even more problematic during their imprisonment.

  One of them had committed suicide in the hospital, a tragedy that, Colomba remembered, had come as a terrible blow to Dante. One of us, he had said. The opinion that the investigators had formed was that the Father simply acted when conditions seemed favorable, probably after some chance encounter with the victim, and after staking out his habits and schedules. He especially loved families on the verge of a breakup, situations where the parents were likely to heap the blame on each other. Sometimes he’d also kill one of the parents, to make people think that the other parent had run away with the child. According to the findings of the commission of inquiry, the Father’s crimes had been committed in order to satisfy the “uncontrollable impulses of a gravely disturbed and schizophrenic personality.” An explanation that Colomba had chosen to settle for.

  Not Dante, even if his hearing before the commission had proved utterly pointless. Colomba could still remember it in perfect detail. The hearing had been held at Palazzo San Macuto, in Rome’s Pigna quarter, which by a twist of fate had been one of the headquarters of the Roman Inquisition in the seventeenth century. A long table and a number of white plastic chairs had been set out on the cobblestoned courtyard, while fifteen or so onlookers shivered with the cold as they stood around the walls. On one side stood a couple of parliamentary journalists and a small knot of functionaries from the intelligence agencies.

  Dante sat at the center of the courtyard, huddled on one of the chairs, his painfully skinny body lost in the folds of a long black overcoat, while sitting across from him was an elderly senator, his face red with burst capillaries, nodding off under a fur busby cap. A blond woman in a loden overcoat and knee-high boots, a recently elected member of parliament, had set a tape recorder on the table and hit “record.”

  “Would you care to give us your name and your date of birth? For the record.”

  Dante was twisting the pack of cigarettes in his hands. He was nervous but lucid, without the deranged look on his face he normally had when he stuffed himself full of psychopharmaceuticals.

  “I don’t know my date of birth,” he had replied in a voice that gradually became increasingly confident. “According to the forensic anthropologist who examined me, I look to be somewhere between forty and forty-five years of age. The name I go by is Dante Torre. I have no idea what name I was baptized with at birth. If I was baptized at all, that is. I might well have been born into a family of Rastafarians, or even Pastafarians, for all I know.”

  There had been laughter from the audience and the blond woman had given him a wan smile, doing her best to conceal her irritation. “Right. Signor Torre, this hearing was authorized in order to delve deeper into several aspects of the inquiry concerning the kidnapper and murderer known as the Father, who was killed in an exchange of gunfire while law enforcement was attempting to arrest him. And in particular because you maintain that there are aspects concerning which the commission ought to be further informed.”

  “That’s correct.”

  “Would you tell us, then, exactly how you were involved in this matter? Again, for the record.”

  “The Father kidnapped me when I was a child and he held me prisoner for thirteen years. In a silo in the countryside around Cremona, to be exact. When and how he might have kidnapped me, I don’t remember and I have no idea. I was convinced I was the son of Annibale Valle and Franca Torre, but I only recently learned that that child was someone other than me. The real Dante was murdered when I escaped, back in 1989. They found his DNA in one of the drums of acid where the Father dissolved his victims. A fragment of pubic bone, in point of fact.”

  “And the Father made you forget your true identity.”

  “With a combination of isolation, narcotics, and persuasion. He was a psychiatrist and a neurologist, as well as a medical examiner. He knew what he was doing. And in my case, he succeeded completely.”

  “Why do you think that the investigation wasn’t carried out in a satisfactory manner?”

  “Because the Father wasn’t just a psychopath. He enjoyed protection and cover at the highest levels, and none of that was ever discovered.”

  “And these people protected him so that he could go on kidnapping and torturing children? Doesn’t that strike you as a little far-fetched?”

  “All around the world, children are constantly being kidnapped and used as slaves, beggars, and sex objects, and mined for their bodily organs to be transplanted,” Dante had replied tersely. “Let me give you some instances, from memory. In 2007 the Nigerian government demanded reparations to the tune of billions of dollars for illegal tests done on two hundred children from poor families with a new vaccination for meningitis. Forty-nine children died in 2008 in India during clinical trials at the Institute of Medical Sciences. All of them were poor, of course, and the tests were always performed by
subcontractors, thus making it harder to trace back to the masterminds. Therefore I would be loath to rule out the possibility that some multinational corporation or other, no doubt with annual revenues greater than Italy’s GDP, might have financed the Father to conduct in vivo experiments. He operated for forty years without being caught; do you think he was just some lucky asshole?”

  Everyone had believed him, Colomba thought to herself, even her. Only now everything appeared to her in a new light.

  She brewed another cup of tea and leafed through the dossiers on the Father’s accomplices, at least those known to the police. There were quite a few of them, but nearly all of them were dead now, either of natural causes (a very few) or of violent ones (a great many), and all of them hardened criminals: murderers, rapists, and ex-military. Some had been working with the Father since the seventies; others had been hired to kill a witness or else just to feed the prisoners. The Father’s main accomplice was known simply as the German, because no one knew his real identity. He was in his mid-sixties, but he was still strong as a bull, and he’d never once said a word about his old boss, since the day of his arrest. But there could be who knew how many others just like him.

  Colomba read police reports and court verdicts until dawn the next day and dropped off dreaming that she had been locked up in a transparent silo in the middle of the hill country. Bart awakened her by phoning at noon. In the background she could hear the muffled roar of waves. “I wanted to know how you were … and I have something to tell you,” she said.

  Colomba transitioned from sleep to anxiety. “Dante?” she asked, dry-mouthed.

  “No. I tried to reach you on Signal, but you didn’t answer.”

  Signal was an app for cell phones that encrypted the calls, a widespread favorite for pushers and anyone with something to hide. Colomba had persuaded Bart to install it on her phone. “Because I don’t have a cell phone anymore. I’ll go buy one.”