Kill the King

by Sandrone Dazieri

  The gate leads to a smaller-scale replica of the courtyard he’s just left behind him. The enclosure wall around it stands more than fifteen feet tall, with the barbed wire, and it runs out of the lower section of the Box, a cement foundation wider than the rest of the building and one full story high. There, windows can be seen, because that was the section of the building used by the staff. The windowpanes are shattered, and here, too, everything has been plundered and burned. He can still smell the stench, though it’s not too bad, truth be told. It actually smells like …

  Coffee.

  He knows that it’s impossible, but still he follows the track of the smell in the air. He finds himself facing the door of what had once been the kitchen. Furnishings and utensils have been stolen or destroyed, except for an oversize refrigerator overturned onto its back. Sitting atop it is a gas camp stove with a Moka Express coffeepot bubbling away. Dante thinks in rapid succession that it must be a hallucination, or a booby trap, or even an antipersonnel mine, but then he looks up and sees the man who’s using his handkerchief to clean a couple of chipped demitasse cups.

  Leo.

  He’s wearing a pair of military overalls without insignia, open over the thermal jacket beneath. He has no face mask, no jumpsuit; he seems indifferent to the radiation. “You got here just in time,” he tells him cheerfully. “The coffee’s about to boil. Come on, we have so much to talk about.”

  2

  Colomba couldn’t get a word out. She kept her pistol aimed at the front door and her cell phone in her left hand, far from her ear as if it were scorching hot. She expected to see Leo plunge into the room.

  “Who is this?” she gasped.

  “You know who this is,” said the voice, with the same unruffled tone as before. “Do I really need to tell you that you’re wasting your time? I haven’t left anything behind me.”

  “Let me speak to Dante,” Colomba said in a faint voice.

  “He’s not here.”

  “Where is he?”

  “That’s a complicated story, little Colomba.”

  Colomba managed to recover her breath. “What the fuck have you done to him?” she shouted. “Tell me if he’s alive! Tell me where he is!”

  “I can’t do that. I’m sorry.”

  “You filthy son of a bitch!” Colomba couldn’t restrain herself; her hatred and rage exploded in her voice. “I’ll kill you, I don’t give a damn if they sentence me to life without parole!”

  “If you keep shouting I’m going to hang up.” His voice had lost all intonation and Colomba realized that she was doing the exact opposite of what you need to do when you’re talking with a psychopath. She needed to be polite, conciliatory, and massage his ego. Every word that Leo let slip might prove to be an invaluable clue. She wrestled back control of herself, biting her lip as she did so.

  “Can I please at least ask if he’s all right?”

  “Change the subject, little Colomba, Colombina.”

  Don’t overdo it. Go along with him. “Why did you kill Romero?”

  “Because he was so easy to hook up with. And I’m good at hooking up with people.”

  Colomba trembled but said nothing.

  He laughed courteously. “Sorry, little Colomba, that wasn’t very diplomatic.”

  “What happened on the Chourmo? Why did the boat sink?”

  “I didn’t call you so I could answer your questions.”

  “Then why did you call?”

  “To tell you to cut it out. You’ll never find me and you’ll never find Dante. And it could be dangerous for you to go on searching.”

  “I’m not afraid,” Colomba lied.

  “Well, you should be. You know what I’m capable of.”

  She struggled to pull air down her constricted throat, and Colomba folded over onto her knees. “Please …” she croaked. “Just tell me if he’s alive …”

  “Make your choice, little Colomba. A long and peaceful life in the hill country or a quick but painful death. Choose carefully,” Leo said and hung up.

  Colomba stopped breathing. Her ears were whistling, everything was turning black and sticky. With the last strength remaining inside her, she scraped at the tiles. The nail of her left forefinger lifted away, folding back close to the base. The pain was a lightning bolt that lit up her brain.

  Fuck, she thought as she sucked on her injured finger. The half fingernail remained in her mouth and she spit it out onto the floor along with a jet of blood. She was making a mess of things, but she just couldn’t get her thoughts to connect.

  A long and peaceful life in the hill country.

  He knew where she lived. He knew what she was doing. She’d eliminated every electronic gadget that she owned, she’d been sleeping with one eye open for a year, and he’d still been able to keep her under surveillance.

  With a length of toilet paper and some bleach she removed every trace that she’d been there, and she collected the fragment of fingernail. She tossed it all into the toilet, and flushed repeatedly.

  He knew where I lived, but also that I was here. He knew it immediately.

  She stepped out of the apartment, leaving the broken door pushed to, and headed toward the stairs. Or rather, that’s what she thought she was doing, but the next thing she knew she found herself standing with her knuckles pressed against the neighbor woman’s doorbell. The young woman answered the door with a flowered apron wrapped around her waist.

  “What the fuck—” she snapped.

  Colomba pushed her back inside and shoved the door shut with her elbow to keep from leaving fingerprints. “You told him,” she snarled.

  “Get out or I’ll scream!”

  Colomba slammed her against the wall and clapped her hand over her mouth. “The person that you ratted me out to is a murderer. A psychopathic killer. And thanks to you, now he might get away. He might be killing someone else right this very second. Do you understand that? Tell me that you understand.”

  The young woman was terrified. She pointed at the bedroom door, which stood ajar, and through which Colomba could see the arm of a baby poking out through the bars of a crib. At the very most, the infant might have been a year old. Colomba took her hand off the young woman’s mouth.

  “Don’t hurt my baby,” she said, her voice screechy with fear. “I swear to you that I didn’t tell anyone.”

  “Did he pay you? Did he threaten you to turn you into his spy?”

  “No!”

  Colomba didn’t believe her, but that didn’t make any difference. If the girl was still alive, that meant she knew nothing that could help lead Colomba to Leo. She’d made a mistake by going into this apartment. The young woman hadn’t gotten a good look at her when they’d first spoken, but now she’d be sure to remember her perfectly.

  Too bad. “Tell me something more about him.”

  “I don’t know what …”

  “Visitors. Strange behavior.”

  The young woman shook her head. “Nothing.”

  “Well, well, nothing at all. A psychopathic killer lives across the landing from you for a year and he never did anything odd,” Colomba said sarcastically.

  “He was never here for long. He didn’t talk much.” The young woman seemed to be making an effort, her eyes fixed on the baby in the bedroom. “I think maybe he liked the mountains …”

  “Did he tell you that?”

  “No, but the last time I saw him, he was wearing a backpack with those things you put on your shoes to walk on the ice. Maybe he went to the mountains …”

  “Did you go to bed with him?” she asked.

  The young woman shot her a terrified glare. “No. I swear I didn’t.”

  “I hope so for your sake.”

  Colomba went running out of the apartment building, fear starting to overwhelm her fury. She kept her head bowed forward and her hat pulled down over the bridge of her nose, just as she had on the way in to foil any potential security cameras. These days, the cameras could be anywhere, including pri
vately owned webcams focused on courtyards just for the fun of it. Handy when you’re the one doing the investigating, a little less so when what you want most is to keep your former partners from coming after you, especially if you’ve just tried to intimidate a witness.

  It’s not them that you need to worry about, she thought.

  Leo’s voice had remained inside her like a poisonous thorn and was starting to infect her. Leo might be anywhere around her, ready to lunge at her.

  Calm down!

  She dropped the car keys twice, slammed her injured finger and shouted with the pain, and finally managed to get the door open and the car started. She took the provincial road to avoid the security cameras, and then stopped for gas at a filling station and café. She started her cell phone back up and sent a message via Signal that was sufficiently desperate and riddled with grammatical errors that Bart called her back instantly. A call that she made from the restroom of the marine laboratory.

  “Tell them the name,” Colomba whispered. “It won’t do any good, but do it anyway.”

  Even with the miserable sound quality of the call, Bart understood that she was in a state of shock. “What’s happened?”

  A truck driver heading for the outside toilets smiled at her, and Colomba quickly turned away. “Leo has been using Romero’s apartment for all this time,” she said, lowering her voice even more.

  “How do you know that?”

  “He phoned me, for fuck’s sake … I was in his apartment and he called me.” She was stammering; her heartbeats were fists punching her right in the throat. “He has me under surveillance. He knows everything I’m doing.”

  “Colomba …” said Bart, making an effort to remain calm. “How can you be so sure it was him?”

  “I’m sure! Do you think I could make a mistake about a thing like that?” Colomba dried her bloody hand on her shirt. The finger continued bleeding.

  “Listen … go to my house. Ask the concierge to give you the keys. I’ll get back there as quickly as I can.” Bart lived in Milan with her two dogs, in a loft built in an old printing plant.

  “No, no … I’m almost home,” Colomba lied. “I’ll call you back.” She ended the call, deactivated the phone by inputting the wrong PIN six times in a row, then disassembled it over a trash can, snapped the SIM card in half, and threw it all away. It wasn’t enough to change the phone number; the device itself could be traced. Each phone had an IMEI code that transmitted every time it connected to a cell tower, and if you had the right technology, you could identify it. And no doubt about it, Leo had the right technology. She ought to have turned her phone off before going to Romero’s apartment, but she’d become so accustomed to not having one that it just hadn’t occurred to her.

  Idiot.

  She didn’t feel up to driving all the way home in the dark, so she got a room in a motel, bribing the attendant to let her check in without registering her ID. She waited until daybreak, watching the lights of the passing cars on the provincial road. She was thinking about Leo, and nothing else, the whole time: she just couldn’t stop. His voice was a toxin that infected her; she felt as if she were balancing on a tightrope suspended over a tank full of sharks.

  Why had he reached out now, after a year and a half? Why had he chosen to confirm that he was still alive, instead of letting her suffer in uncertainty? In Colomba’s experience, killers never called the police to challenge them, never sent signals in code, never subconsciously tried to get the cops to stop them. They ran for their lives, they killed, and they took to hiding, knowing full well that every contact added an element of risk. Old Mafiosi, with all the money they had, rarely even saw the light of day. They lived like moles in underground chambers, sending notes around, the classic Mafia pizzini, messages that couldn’t be traced on the internet.

  Leo might be crazy as a waltzing mouse, but he knew that contacting her was dangerous. If he’d done it, he must have a good reason, one that at least made sense to him.

  A long and peaceful life in the hill country.

  Crampons for the ice.

  Leo had stayed in Italy instead of running away, he knew where she lived, he was out there wandering through the snow. The invisible tightrope beneath Colomba’s feet lurched and wobbled, coming dangerously close to making her tumble into the void. In her vertigo, she relived the brief vacation that she had taken at the Bagni Vecchi spa in Bormio with Dante, in the aftermath of the Father’s death. While she was swimming in the heated pool, Dante had answered his cell phone. A stranger on the other end of the line had congratulated him for having survived, and before hanging up, had informed him that he was his brother. No names, the self-proclaimed brother had never called back, but that phone call had changed everything. Dante didn’t remember anything about his own early past, and everything he had thought he knew turned out to have been false memories implanted in his mind by the Father during the long years of childhood isolation. It’s easy to influence a child cut out of the world at large, and no doubt about it, the Father knew what he was doing. And for Dante, knowing that he had a brother out there somewhere, the search for his own past had become a genuine obsession. There was someone who had the key to open the door inside his head, there was a person out there who could tell him who he really was, or who he’d really been, anyway.

  And that person was Leo. Leo had admitted it while he was kidnapping Dante and she was slipping into a coma. If it was true, then what had his relationship been with the Father? Was he the accomplice who’d murdered Tommy’s parents?

  Leo had been capable of pretending to be a fellow cop for weeks, just so he could arrive in Venice in the middle of the bloodbath. He planned things out, he followed a painstakingly drafted script. Someone like him could certainly arrange to have one of the Father’s prisoners transferred to a spot two miles from where she was living, but to what end? Was he just interested in tormenting her?

  With her finger, Colomba wrote Leo in the condensation on the windowpane. The headlights of a truck lit it up. The Melases had been murdered the day that the Chourmo was found. Maybe Leo was burning his bridges. Or maybe he had a deeper, darker reason. And unless she managed to stop him, more blood would flow.

  3

  The Portico Carabinieri station was a small three-story building no different from any of the others that lined the road leading to the museum, that is, aside from the barbed wire and the yellow sign warning that this was a military complex, and that there was absolutely no admittance. The door for the general public was on the ground floor, and admittance required passing through a metal detector. The second floor, on the other hand, was strictly for Carabinieri, including a small interview room, which was also used for conversations between suspects and their lawyers. Lupo lived on the third floor. In the smaller Carabinieri stations, it was quite normal for the commander to live on-site. There wasn’t enough staff for the night shifts, so he simply answered emergency calls in the off hours.

  Inside as well as out, the station looked more like a private residence than it did a military barracks. The standard furnishings provided by the procurement branch of the Ministry of the Interior were spruced up here and there by a couple of counterfeit Magritte paintings, done by a local forger whom Lupo and his squad had arrested a couple of years ago. They were on display in the lobby, next to the photograph of Italy’s prime minister, because Chiara liked them. Chiara had been the only civilian employee in the station, and a sort of commander in chief, particularly irascible when it came to logistics. When Chiara had finally retired, her position had been taken by a part-time switchboard operator hired with funding from the law on the handicapped: his name was Donato, and he was deaf in one ear and a double amputee.

  Right after Chiara’s office (that’s what they still called it, as if her spirit continued to hover over the place) was the door to the galley kitchen, where the Carabinieri made espresso or heated up something to eat in the microwave oven purchased the previous Christmas with a collection taken up among the
barracks staff. There was also a small fridge packed with food brought from home, in airtight containers. There were no names written on the containers, as everyone was perfectly capable of recognizing their own. At eight in the morning, two Carabinieri on duty were there, having their second breakfast: Master Sergeant Nerone and Brigadier Bruno, both sipping espressos from the Neapolitan espresso pot that Bruno alone—born and raised in Mergellina, outside Naples—was authorized to operate. Nerone had the physique of an ex-rugby player, with a belly and a beard; Bruno, almost eligible for his pension, was tall and skinny. Martina came in with a thermos full of Herbalife smoothie that she hoped might take a couple of inches off her hips, and the attention of her two partners immediately focused on her. Martina was no top model, but she was still the only woman to be found in that latter-day variant on the all-male monastery.

  “Buongiorno, Master Sergeant Nerone, ciao, Bruno. Is there any left for me?”

  Bruno lifted the lid on the Neapolitan flip coffee pot. “Not much. You want me to make some more?”

  “No, it’ll do, thanks.” Martina poured the coffee into a little paper cup. “I’ve already had two.”

  “Did you bring the Melas boy here?” Nerone asked.

  “Yes, Master Sergeant.”

  Upstairs, in fact, a meeting was under way with the magistrate and the court’s child welfare expert to discuss Tommy’s situation and legal standing.

  “Too bad you can’t take your children back to the store if they turn out to be defective,” said Nerone. “Just think how convenient it would be. Is your son an idiot? Send him back.”