Kill the King

by Sandrone Dazieri

  “It’s a pleasure to hear from you,” he said when his secretary put her through.

  “I wanted to thank you for not telling Lupo anything,” Colomba said.

  “I promised I wouldn’t.”

  “Yes, that’s true …” Colomba didn’t know exactly what to say next. She felt as embarrassed as a young boy who wants to buy a porn magazine at a newsstand. So she said nothing.

  Pala seemed to understand. “Did you want to make an appointment?”

  “How about right now?” she said in a rush.

  “That’s not the way it works, Colomba …”

  “Five minutes and I’ll be right there.”

  It took her ten, and she parked the car with the front wheels buried in a snowdrift.

  * * *

  Caterina accompanied her in chilly silence until they reached her desk. “Are you armed?” she asked.

  “Mm-hmm …”

  Caterina held out her hand.

  “Is it enough if I give you the clip?” Colomba asked.

  “Just for today. Next time I’ll turn you away. And I want the bullet in the chamber, too.”

  Colomba racked the slide of her gun, and Caterina caught the bullet in midair.

  “Nice reflexes.”

  “Three brothers. All hunters. I grew up around rifles and bullets.”

  “So do you hunt, too?”

  Caterina smiled, pushing the pink tip of her tongue through her teeth. “Not with a rifle.”

  That evening, Pala looked like a villain in a James Bond movie, all in white, even his glasses and sandals. “How is Tommy doing?” she asked.

  “Pretty well. He’s been transferred to a group home. If the trial went against him, what would happen?”

  “People like Tommy can be tried in a court of law, and you know that yourself,” said Colomba. “The magistrates will examine the experts’ documentation, they’ll declare him mentally incapacitated, and they’ll confine him to a home for minors to serve out the term.”

  “For how long?”

  “Hard to say. But it won’t happen anytime soon. The magistrate is very cautious, he wants a smoking gun. And I’m pretty sure that it doesn’t exist.” Unless Leo plants one, she thought.

  Pala laced both hands together on his belly as he tipped his chair back. “Why did you decide to come back to see me?”

  Colomba didn’t know how to answer that question, and she didn’t have a very clear idea of what she wanted, either. “There’s a guy in Rome that I see … that I used to see, near police headquarters. He shouted all day to anyone who would listen that the pope was talking to him personally through the television set.”

  “I think there must be one in every city.”

  “I’ve always wondered what made him so sure that the pope was trying to speak to him in particular. What made him think he was so important?”

  “Have you been hearing from the pope yourself?”

  “No, but I don’t know how much I trust myself. I’m afraid that my wishes are winning out over reality. That I’m fixating on what are mere coincidences.”

  “Do you want to tell me about it?”

  “No.”

  “I understand … Do these wishes involve your boyfriend’s return home?”

  Colomba was caught off guard. “Are you talking about Dante?”

  “Yes. What’s the problem?”

  “We’ve never been boyfriend and girlfriend, or lovers. Just good friends. He helped me out with some investigations and bought me dinner a few times at his hotel, but we’ve never gone to bed together.”

  “And yet I have the distinct impression that you have an intimate relationship.”

  Colomba kept picking at her injured finger. “We’ve shared some important experiences, but he’s not my type. We’re too different. He’s the smartest person I’ve ever met, but he’s also deeply paranoid, and utterly contemptuous of common sense and the law …” She shrugged. “He believes in nothing and no one.”

  “Not even in you?”

  “Yes, he believed in me. And that was his mistake.”

  “Because you weren’t able to save him.”

  Colomba felt the bitter taste of her tears in her throat. “Fuck you. Give me a tissue.”

  Pala tossed her a box of Kleenex without a word. Colomba blew her nose and stood up. “We’ll meet some other time.”

  “We still have some time.”

  “I don’t.”

  “Five minutes, let’s give it a try,” Pala said kindly, helping her to sit back down. “You have your limits, Colomba, like all human beings, and you suffer from the terrible experiences you’ve been through, but I doubt you hear voices through the television. You’re not here to figure out if you’re still a rational person, but whether you can trust yourself and your judgment.”

  “So what’s the answer?”

  “I’m afraid that the answer can only come from you. That’s just one more reason that life is hard. I don’t know what problem has been tormenting you, Colomba, but I’m certain that you’ll find the right path.”

  “Unless even that’s only in my head.”

  “Take it anyway and see where it leads you. There’s always an answer, at the end of the road.”

  7

  The operation was almost over. The NOA counterterrorism officers, with the assistance of officers from various other law enforcement agencies, had secured Romero’s neighborhood and interviewed all the residents. In order to help man the operation, which involved nearly five hundred officers, personnel had been streaming in from all over Northern Italy, and the local police headquarters had sent men out onto the street who normally had their asses screwed tight to their office chair. One of them looked like a gorilla with a shaved head. That was Inspector Claudio Esposito, who had successfully requested a transfer north and out of the Mobile Squad. Now he was working in HR: regular office hours, colleagues who treated him with kid gloves in order to obtain time off and personal favors, while his sidearm gathered dust in an office safe.

  Esposito had been sent out to direct detoured traffic, but after greeting the chief of police, he headed toward the only bar and tobacco shop inside the perimeter. It was jam-packed with uniforms making an infernal racket, and Santini had taken a seat at the only outside table, damp from the rain, with his overcoat buttoned up to his chin and his Irish tweed cap pulled down over his aquiline nose.

  “Have you seen what a circus this is?” he said.

  “That’s the way it always is lately.” Santini stuck a cigarette in his mouth and Esposito lit it with a Zippo lighter emblazoned with a picture of Mussolini before taking a seat. “People are saying that we’re looking for Bonaccorso. Wasn’t he in Syria?”

  “Apparently not.” Santini gave him a quick summary of the discovery of the sunken yacht. It was supposed to be classified information, but Esposito had proven he knew how to keep his lips sealed. “There’s such a thing as lifeboats and that piece of shit certainly had one,” he concluded.

  “So what did he come here for? To organize a terror attack at Linate airport?”

  “Watch out when you spout bullshit, or you might wind up believing it yourself,” said Santini.

  Esposito snickered. “I think what you tell me to think, sir.” Among Esposito’s better qualities was his utter loyalty. “What about Torre?”

  “Even if we think that Bonaccorso is still alive, and I’m not saying that he actually is, he certainly wouldn’t be dragging Torre around with him. May he rest in peace.” He glanced at Esposito sidelong from under the visor of his tweed cap. “Wipe that sad expression off your face, you couldn’t stand the guy.”

  Esposito shrugged his shoulders. “So how did the deputy captain take it?”

  “Why don’t you go pay her a visit and you can ask her yourself. She’s gone back to where she’s been living.”

  Esposito ordered a grappa. “I’d rather not. She makes me feel like a piece of shit because I’m not devoting every minute of my life to findi
ng Torre.”

  “That’s the same effect she has on everybody,” said Santini.

  A group of officers in civilian clothing walked out the front door of Romero’s apartment building, and among them was Di Marco, the only one not wearing a bulletproof vest.

  “I guess the colonel thinks he’s invulnerable,” said Esposito.

  “A genuine tough guy: he shaves by blasting the whiskers off his face with live ammunition.”

  Just then, Santini’s cell phone rang: he recognized the number of his personal extension. “Why are you at my desk, using my phone?” he asked.

  Alberti had forgotten, he’d been too busy struggling with his sense of loyalty. “My phone is being fixed, sir,” he said in a rush. “I was just putting some documents to be signed on your desk.”

  “Okay, so why are you calling?”

  “I think I might have fucked up … I helped Deputy Captain Caselli get a name. I thought it was just a routine inquiry …”

  Di Marco was heading straight toward him, and Santini shut his eyes and imagined he was piloting a jet fighter straight back to his office in Rome, where he could machine-gun Alberti through the window. “A name in Milan, I’m going to have to imagine.”

  “Yes. But she never told me that—”

  “You know that there’s only one thing that she cares about, don’t take me for a fool,” Santini interrupted him.

  There was a moment’s silence. “Also, she asked me about a double homicide near her house. Do you think that’s connected to all this, too?”

  Santini bit his cigarette filter so hard that it snapped in half. “Write up a report and put it on my desk, that way at least I know what hellish fate awaits me. And keep your mouth shut. If this gets out, you’re finally done for.”

  Santini hung up. The colonel had stopped next to the table.

  “Let the colonel have your seat, Esposito.”

  “There’s no need, let’s take a little stroll,” said Di Marco. Santini went strolling slowly with him toward the back of the building, where the office coordinating operations had been set up, and where the armored vehicles were all parked. That was also where all the foreigners who had been found with their visas and residence permits not perfectly in compliance with regulations were being held, thirty or so of them, from the Middle East or North Africa, both men and women. All of them were complaining loudly, and the police were yelling back at them, while the children wailed.

  “Have you found anything in the apartment?” Santini asked, looking away. He was sick of those scenes.

  “Not even a molecule, for now. But the neighbor woman gave us a perfect description of Bonaccorso. He was there for more than a year, even if he tended to stay out of sight. Then he took off when the Chourmo was identified.”

  “Someone alerted him. The Libyans?”

  “That doesn’t much matter for the time being.” Di Marco looked up toward Romero’s window. “The neighbor woman described another person, too, who assaulted her last night, threatening to kill her and her son. An attractive woman, with short hair and green eyes …” Di Marco stopped to look at him, and Santini showed no reaction whatsoever. “Well?”

  Santini picked at his mustache. “Well what? I didn’t know that Caselli had come here, but I’m not all that surprised, either.”

  “Caselli is your problem, and it’s your job to keep her in check.”

  Santini lit another cigarette, and as he did so he realized that he’d stolen Esposito’s lighter. He concealed Thunderjaws, as Mussolini was jocularly known, in the palm of his hand. “She’s no longer on the force and she doesn’t even live in Rome anymore. And you’re the one who decided to bring her along to the grand underwater maneuvers.”

  “I was hoping that she’d identify a corpse and stop busting our chops. What are the odds that Caselli could have found something useful and taken it away?”

  Santini opened his mouth to say that he had no idea, but he never got the words out. A red-hot blast wave shoved him from behind with the force of an onrushing semitrailer and slammed him into Di Marco, and then the two of them into the air, swept away by a roar that erased everything, even their screams. Santini hit his chin against the curb. Di Marco let himself fly loose-limbed the way he’d been taught in boot camp, but he landed on a manhole cover and broke both his wrists.

  Neither Di Marco nor Santini lost consciousness. So they were able to see Romero’s neighbor throwing herself in flames out of the third-floor window with what looked like a baby boy in her arms.

  CHAPTER IV

  1

  Dante looks at what was once the kitchen of the Box, though now little or nothing remains of it. The big window is broken, the wall is riddled with holes.

  Leo is sitting on an overturned crate. Next to him is the refrigerator, lying flat on the floor, and on it he has placed his camp stove. Leo gestures to Dante to come closer. And Dante obeys. What else can he do? Run away? He’s exhausted and cold, his internal thermometer has exploded.

  “You stabbed Colomba,” he says with all the horror he is capable of mustering in his condition. “You killed her …” He feels himself being dragged down into the maelstrom; he’s forced to let himself sink into the mud of that infamous place.

  “She’s fine,” Leo says.

  “I saw the blood, I saw—”

  Leo tosses him a pack of Marlboros and a lighter. “I didn’t say I didn’t hurt her. Have a smoke and relax.”

  Dante puts a cigarette into his mouth with his gloved hands. The taste of tobacco is wonderful, and he imagines the nicotine kick. Instead he spits it out after taking half a drag and tosses the pack back to its rightful owner. A weak throw that doesn’t even reach the refrigerator upon which his captor is pouring coffee into two little plastic cups. “I don’t want anything from you,” says Dante. “And you can stick that coffee up your ass.”

  “Quit getting yourself all worked up. If I’d wanted to kill Colomba I would have twisted the knife in the opposite direction. Zip, and there goes her artery.” He sips the coffee.

  Leo is such an accomplished liar that Dante can’t manage to detect the signs of it. And what if he’s telling the truth? “Do you care about her?”

  “We don’t have time for idle chitchat.” With a sweep of his arm, Leo knocks the camp stove aside, and the coffeepot overturns, spraying black liquid in all directions and rolling toward him. Dante decides that he can use it as a weapon, but when he reaches down to grab it, he finds that it’s vanished under four inches of water.

  “What the fuck is happening?” he asks, moving his feet. It seems that the water is filtering up out of the kitchen floor. Radioactive water.

  “Nothing.”

  The water has already risen to his ankles. It’s falling from the ceiling, too, now, and running down the walls. It stinks of ozone and diesel fuel. Dante tries to make it to the door, but he slips and falls backward. He lies there, bobbing on his back, in the dead man’s float. “Help, the radiation!”

  “That’s the last thing you need to be afraid of, little brother,” says Leo as he bends over him.

  Dante flails around, unsuccessfully trying to get back up on his feet. His jumpsuit keeps him afloat like a life preserver, but it also keeps him from standing up. “So what should I be afraid of?”

  “Not what. Who.”

  Leo says something else, but the sound of rushing water swallows his voice. Dante is swept away like a bobbing cork.

  Now Leo is a dot amid the ruins. His voice is an electric buzz. He waves goodbye, then disappears among the waves.

  And the water closes over Dante’s head and devours everything.

  2

  As the day drew to an end, Colomba returned the Peugeot 208 to the Portico repair shop. Loris was just about to close up for the night, but he let out a shout of joy when he saw her. “I thought you’d absconded with my pride and joy. Did you treat it well?”

  “With kid gloves. What about my junker?”

  “Finished it half an
hour ago. I didn’t know how to let you know.”

  “So much the better.” She tossed him the keys.

  Loris painstakingly checked over his “pride and joy,” then led her to the Fiat Panda. The old jalopy had been washed inside and out; the hubcaps gleamed. It seemed, well, maybe not brand-new, but at least not stolen from a junkyard. Compared to the Peugeot 208, though, the engine sounded like a fart.

  “I even changed the air filter and the clutch,” said Loris. “And you had a wasp’s nest under the back seat, luckily empty. I can get you one in better shape for not much money.”

  “It’s a memento, it has sentimental value.”

  “Why?”

  “It was my dad’s. He only used it to drive down into town and then back up to Mezzanotte, the way I’m doing. For long trips, he had a Škoda.” She could still remember the smell of the perforated leather steering wheel cover.

  “So you really are from around here.”

  “Only on my father’s side of the family. My grandfather worked in Sant’Anna Solfara, and when they shut down the plant, he moved to Rome. Do I have to sell a kidney to pay for the work?”

  “That’s not the body part I’m most interested in.” He smiled.

  “Funny guy.”

  Inside the office, a twenty-inch television set was reflected on the sliding window used to pass documents from room to room. Her eye caught a flash, and so Colomba raised her head to see the words overlaid on the spray of water from a fire truck that was trying to put out a seething blaze spewing out black smoke. The footage changed into an overhead view from a helicopter flying at low altitude over a carpet of emergency vehicles and police cars and, last of all, the apartment building that Colomba had visited not even twenty-four hours previously: it had collapsed inward like a cement soufflé, leaving nothing standing but the outside walls.