“How long will that take?”
“Half an hour if I can find a taxi.”
There were six of them in the whole province, cooperating in a small cab drivers’ cooperative, and with all this snow they were swamped with calls. The switchboard operator told her that she’d have better luck in the afternoon. Colomba didn’t want to wait that long, so she set out, trudging through the icy chill.
11
At first, walking along under the now-clearing sky was almost enjoyable. The farmers had plowed the snow off the dirt road with their tractors, and the temperature was milder than it had been on the previous few days. Her shoulder muscles gradually relaxed and her legs loosened, the cramps subsiding. Colomba fell into an easy stride after the first three hundred yards of steep uphill climb, but that didn’t last long and about halfway down the dirt road, she stopped and leaned against a signpost, taking her hood off so she could breathe more freely. Her heart was in her mouth, her belly was pounding: she cursed the past months spent lazing about doing nothing.
She resumed walking. She went past the hut where dogs were trained, the farmhouse occupied by the beekeeper, and the farmstay, which had gone out of business long ago—the building had stood empty since time out of mind, and it now looked like nothing so much as the Castle of the Snow Queen. She crossed paths with a shivering three-toned cat, and a very few automobiles moving along at walking speed, kicking up fantails of mud. At the end of her second hour of walking, from high atop the last hairpin curve, she saw the morning sun glitter on the white rooftops of the medieval center of Portico. The smoke from the chimneys made the town look like a postcard, with the Church of Saint Gerardo dei Tintori at the center, and the stone houses pressed one against the other, stacked up like a wedding cake. Colomba stopped to admire the town—she felt a little bit of its blood ran in her veins—and decided that it was breathtakingly beautiful, a piece of Italy known to far too few, which might perhaps be why it hadn’t changed much over the decades. One of the changes had been the arrival of a cell phone and computer shop, opened by an overweight thirty-year-old who always wore a Final Fantasy sweatshirt. Colomba bought a cheap cell phone from him, along with a reloadable prepaid phone card: it felt as if it were scorching the palm of her hand.
Next to the shop was the Bar del Corso, where her grandfather used to take her as a little girl to get sour cherry gelato; until the 1930s, the building that café occupied had been a garage for horse-drawn carriages. Colomba took a seat on one of the metal benches, downloaded Signal through the town’s Wi-Fi network, and texted Bart. Hers was one of the very few phone numbers Colomba knew by heart.
The archaeologist and forensic chemist called her a minute later. “Why don’t you have your cell phone anymore?”
“Because that’s the best way to be spied upon, whatever you might happen to be doing. Is this about the Father?”
“What? No … I haven’t looked into him yet. But I did see the report from the explosives experts. There are traces of explosives along the hole in the hull of the Chourmo. PBX, a kind of plastic explosive. I don’t know much about it, that’s not my specialty, and I certainly can’t ask the military about it.”
Colomba felt her heart swell with relief. “Leo faked the shipwreck, I told you so.”
“That’s not all. The passenger didn’t drown. Someone cut his throat with a scuba diver’s knife. He was dead when he went into the water, but I can’t tell you how long he’d been dead, and it’s unlikely that more extensive testing will be able to tell us.”
Colomba felt a stab of pain in her wound. “What else do you know about him?”
“Let me look at the computer … I’m on the bridge and it’s freaking cold … All right, now, the dead man stood somewhere between five foot seven and five foot nine, average weight. He had a titanium implant between the third and fourth cervical vertebrae. The medical officer hadn’t seen it because it had broken loose: I found it in the sediment.”
“Does it have a serial number?”
“Yes. And I’m connected to the hospital system database. His name was Giancarlo Romero, he was forty years old, a freelancer. He lived in Milan. Does that ring any bells?”
“No. Could it have been a fake name?”
“Not likely. He had the operation done in a public hospital, and he filled out all the appropriate tax documents.” Bart read in silence for a few seconds. “And he used the same name for three other hospital stays over the course of ten years, and always for the same problem. Radiculopathy, a pinched nerve, resulting in chronic neck pain … lesions to his vertebrae … Probably an undiagnosed case of Klippel-Feil syndrome.”
“Never heard of it.”
“A hereditary syndrome; its disease gene is GDF6, in case you were wondering. I have his whole medical file in front of me, and it perfectly matches the bones that I have on the table. It’s him.”
“Was he reported as a missing person?”
“Never, as far as I can tell.”
Colomba jotted down the details on a napkin that had an ad for sour cherry liqueur. “How long do you think you can keep this information hidden from the military?”
“Five or six hours,” said Bart. “Don’t do anything stupid.”
Colomba ordered a beer, and then used the same app to call Alberti. He had Signal already installed and answered, in a calm voice, from Santini’s desk: his boss was still out on the open sea with Bart and the others. “Deputy Captain, how are you?”
“Alberti, you’re a cop now, and I’m not one anymore. So stop calling me deputy captain. Leave that for the rookies.”
“Sorry. Force of habit.” Since the official status of their relationship had changed, Alberti constantly tried to use impersonal pronouns and neutral conjugations of verbs to avoid having to use the Italian informal, much less her first name. It just didn’t come naturally to him; he felt reverential awe when it came to his onetime superior officer. “How is the deep-water search going?”
“I’m not on the ship anymore. I need you to check out a name for me.”
“At your orders, ma’am … I mean, go ahead.”
“Giancarlo Romero, a resident in Milan, age forty,” she said. “Can you confirm that there haven’t been any missing reports on him?” She dictated his details.
“Just a second, Deput— whatever.” Alberti typed his way into the CED, the interforces data-processing system, where the uniforms kept all the data concerning everyone else in the world. “Confirm that. He lives in Milan.”
“Does he have any priors?”
“Just public indecency. He likes getting blow jobs from trannies in the park,” he said, summarizing the man’s file.
“And that’s the only record he has. Are you sure of that?”
“Yes. He changed his registered address in October two years ago. I’ll give you the new address.”
“What date in October?”
“The thirtieth.”
Two weeks after the massacre. If the Chourmo really had been sunk right away, then Romero would have been dead already. Four old men were playing cards at the table next to hers. Coincidence or fate, she saw the king of diamonds flash past. “There’s something else I need. Do you still have friends in the ‘cousins’?”
Alberti had been a carabiniere during his mandatory military service.
“A few …”
“There was a double homicide around where I live now, three days ago. See if you can find out anything. The Melas family. And ask if anyone knows Sergeant Major Lupo, in charge of the barracks in Portico.”
“Does he have anything to do with Romero?”
“No. I’ll explain later.”
Colomba rushed to the auto repair shop, coming close to being run over by a snowplow. Loris emerged from the mechanic’s pit, from under a Toyota without wheels. “Listen, I haven’t started on your car yet, angel.”
“Listen: please never call me angel,” Colomba said with a shiver. “Just lend me any car you have. Yours would be
fine.”
“You just drove your Fiat Panda into a ditch. Do you seriously think I’d give you my pride and joy?”
“If I break it, I’ll buy you a new one. This is important.”
He seemed to give it some thought. “Martina says that you’re a cop, just like her. Is that true?”
“Ex-cop. Who’s Martina?”
Loris described her: she was the lady carabiniere with red hair. “She also said that you were in Venice and that you got shot by ISIS,” he said.
“At her age I wasn’t such a chatterbox.”
“Is it true?”
“More or less. But if you want to know the rest, you can read a newspaper.”
Loris laughed, reached into the pocket of his overalls, and tossed her a set of keys. “Leave me your ID. And if you damage it, I’ll sue you. I won three Grand Prix races in that car.”
The car was a Peugeot 208 with rally bodywork, covered with logos. Colomba took off, tires screeching and leaving a cloud of rubber smoke behind her.
12
Romero’s apartment was in a five-story building between Milan’s eastern bypass ring road and Linate airport. The area was a distinctly Milanese mix of green areas, buildings dating from the sixties, and old brick hangars that had once been the production site of the glorious old Caproni aircraft plant, dismantled in the years after World War II. It took Colomba only a little over three hours to get there, the whole way bitterly missing her old flashing roof lights. She parked nearby and waited for another tenant to enter the building, slipping stealthily in after them. The building had no doorman, and Colomba cursed under her breath: with an adroitly offered bribe, you could usually get a doorman or a concierge to let you into the apartment or at least disgorge a little information. Luckily, the names on the mailboxes also indicated the floor, and Colomba climbed the stairs to the third floor. A young woman was watering a flowerpot of geraniums. She was about twenty-five, and she had ripe red cheeks as round as apples, and impressively large breasts. Colomba hesitated just a second too long.
“Who are you looking for?” asked the young woman as she dried her hands on her housecoat.
Colomba unfolded the story that she’d concocted during her drive. “Giancarlo Romero. He’s been out of touch for a while and his folks …”
“He lives right there,” the young woman interrupted her, pointing to a door at the far end of the landing. “When he gets back I’ll tell him that you were looking for him.”
The young woman’s tone of voice made the hair stand up on the back of Colomba’s neck. “But when did he leave?”
“Monday. Why? Did something happen?”
A drop of cold sweat ran down Colomba’s back. Up until that instant, she’d assumed that Romero was one of Leo’s accomplices. But now everything looked radically different. “His parents are looking for him,” she said, forcefully recovering her lost breath. “But we might not be talking about the same person. Just to make sure, is he short, fat, and bald?” she asked, tossing out a description at random.
“No, he’s tall, with dark hair and glasses.” The young woman laughed. “And he’s anything but fat. He’s plenty athletic. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I hear my baby crying.”
“Thanks,” Colomba managed to cough out. In the pocket of her parka, she was gripping the butt of her pistol so tightly it hurt her hand. She waited for the young woman to go back into her apartment, then she broke open Romero’s door lock, taking a running start and giving it a solid flying kick. She’d seen it wasn’t an armored door, and in fact it flew open easily, though with a resounding crack. Colomba shut it hastily behind her, pressing it closed with her back and then leaning against it and holding her pistol with both hands. She could hear someone’s voice echoing up the stairwell, loudly complaining about the ruckus, but no one seemed sufficiently motivated to investigate.
She stepped forward, deeper into the apartment that lay shrouded in the dim light filtering through the roller shutters, and so badly reeking of bleach that it brought tears to her eyes. Three rooms, a few sticks of nondescript furniture. No clothing, books, or articles of any kind. No sheets on the bed, and the mattress had been drenched with bleach. The floors and the walls, too, had been scrubbed with bleach, dissolving and staining the paint. Even though she was no white jumpsuit, Colomba was pretty sure that all organic evidence had been eliminated. She wrapped her hands in the makeshift mittens of her parka sleeves and opened a window to clear the air.
You know who he is, right? You know that he lived here all of this time.
The cell phone vibrated, and the words Unknown Caller appeared on the display. Bart and Alberti would have used Signal and she hadn’t given out her new number to either of them. She knew only one person capable of finding her that fast. The same person who over the past year had taken Romero’s place and pretended to be him, living in his apartment.
Only one person.
She answered the call.
“Ciao, Colomba, I’ve missed you,” said Leo’s voice.
CHAPTER III
1
The temperature outside the warehouse is close to freezing, but Dante is hardly surprised at that. He knows exactly where Leo has taken him; he’s recognized the building of his nightmares: the cement cube known informally to its prisoners as the Box. It’s just that Dante thought the Box had been destroyed, because it stands just a few miles outside of Chernobyl. The dead city. Populated now by no one but old folks waiting to die of cancer or some other lingering aftereffect of the radiation. The same radiation that Dante now feels prickling on his flesh. Like so many tiny needles. How long will it be before he’s covered with blisters? Minutes or hours? The city was considered to be at low risk for short stays, but who ever believed that? When there’s money to grease the skids, there’s always a way to paint a rosy picture.
He ought at least to return inside the warehouse’s solid cement walls, but if he did that, he’d only be doing it so he could wait around till he died. Outside, at least, he can hope to find a way to escape.
He’s already starting not to be able to feel his feet anymore. The courtyard, as big as three soccer fields, is surrounded by a two-story apartment building and, on the other side, by the gate leading to the Box. Dante runs across the ice-cold cement, broken here and there by stubborn weeds, until he reaches the apartment building. There, he peers in through the front door; someone else has beaten him to it, and has plundered what must have been a ground-floor office, now reduced to a shambles. The few desks remaining have been stacked up and burned, machinery and electric cables have vanished, everything that ever had even a smidgen of market value has been broken up and hauled away. All that remains is ashes and assorted human and animal excrement. Dante screws up his nerve and walks in, crunching underfoot—barefoot—the filth that covers the floor. He must be contracting millions of mutant diseases; he’ll become a monster like Matango.
He climbs the stairs, taking care not to stop on fragments of broken glass and the cartridge shells ejected by the Kalashnikov that had peppered the picture of Andropov on the wall with bullet holes.
On the second floor he finds a corpse. He’d sort of been expecting it; that was all that was missing in this nightmarish spot. Still, he’s disgusted at the sight. He’s even more disgusted by the thought that now he’s going to take off the corpse’s radiation suit. Dante wants it for himself, and if he can, he’d like to put it on before he faints from the cold and the stale air.
He kneels by the body, careful to keep the window in front of his eyes. It’s covered by a grate, and over the grate is hanging what seems like a liana vine out of Tarzan, but still there’s a speck of moonlight shining through the leaves. God bless whoever invented the moon.
The jumpsuit that the dead man is wearing also seems to be a relic of the Soviet era, old and threadbare as it is. The rubber-and-transparent-plastic hood is equipped with a filter that Dante judges to be largely ineffective, and which is in any case held together with spit and duct t
ape. The rest of the jumpsuit is as porous as a sweater. But better than nothing. He knows that it will do little if anything to protect him from contamination, but at least it’ll keep him warm. But first, there’s the small matter of extracting its contents. A corpse, no big deal. Not really all that different from a living person, just a little more unresponsive.
He tugs on the hood, which makes a liquid noise as it pulls away from what’s underneath. Dante was afraid of an explosion of fluids, but the old man’s face that emerges seems like the relic of a Catholic saint. The microclimate inside the jumpsuit has transformed him into a leathery mummy. Dante has certainly seen worse, and he’s certainly touched worse. He unzips the jumpsuit, which makes the bones creak, then he rips it off the corpse in a furious unequal wrestling match that transforms Dante into a fountain of sweat.
The old man is also wearing a sweater and underwear and undershirt and socks, but Dante decides that he won’t be able to get those off. He’ll make do with the jumpsuit, which, once in contact with his body heat—or what remains of it—starts to stink terribly. Dante staggers outside, his bare feet in the rubber boots that make ducklike quacking noises. He’s probably going to have to get them cut off his feet once it’s all over.
The cold has become tolerable. From the center of the courtyard, he stares at the Box again. It has no windows, a six-story building the size of a public housing block without a single fucking window on the upper floors. They built it that way intentionally, because what happened inside there wasn’t meant to be known about in the outside world. And no one confined inside was supposed to ever leave the building alive.
He doesn’t know how Leo has managed to get him over the Ukrainian border, much less why he would do it. He doesn’t know why, before kidnapping him, he should have told him that he was the brother Dante had never known, or if that’s even true. The only thing he’s sure about is that he won’t survive much longer there, jumpsuit or no jumpsuit. He’ll eventually fall asleep somewhere and that will be the end of him. Already he’s having a hard time staying on his feet, he has no idea of how to get home or find help, and he can’t hear the noise of cars or overhead electric lines. He goes toward the Box, the only strategy available to him. A monument to the only god Dante fears, the god of confinement, made up of darkness and impenetrable walls.
Kill the King Page 8