Kill the King

by Sandrone Dazieri

  Sitting on a snow-free rock, she caught her breath and celebrated with the last can of drink mix, then studied the little village. It was deserted and dark, like a ghost town. The only gleam of light came from the Carabinieri squad car parked in front of the Melas home, at the end of the road. She’d hoped that Lupo might at least remove the police detail from there, but she hadn’t been so lucky.

  Sliding along down the slope, Colomba reached the far end of the town’s main street, crossed it, and made her way across a little soccer field until she came to the back of the Melas home. She climbed over the gate.

  From the far side of the house, she heard the dull chug of the Carabinieri squad car as it idled, and the notes of a sickly sweet piece of lounge music in the background. She couldn’t hear the voices of the officers in the car. They were probably dozing off, half-asleep.

  Holding the end of the flashlight with her mouth, she forced open the kitchen shutters. She used the blade of her pocketknife, producing faint cracking noises that sounded to her, in the utter silence, like so many explosions. The window behind the shutter was ajar. Hallelujah.

  Colomba clambered in over the sill and landed on the floor next to the sink. The bloody objects had all vanished, and the footprints were outlined in SIS duct tape. In the bedroom, both corpses and the bed itself had been removed, but blood still splattered the walls and ceiling, dark and grainy as pitch.

  The stench was minimal at this point, and Colomba thanked the brutal cold and the farsighted wisdom of whoever had turned off the heat. She put on her latex gloves and rubber shoe covers and started searching the house.

  She found nothing hidden, no coded notebooks, no microfilm or cyanide capsule. Nothing but the physical signs of a life lived frugally, with little or no luxury. Furniture of a decent standard, with understated colors and standard decor. The occasional cheap Greek souvenir, a few articles of designer clothing, all of them belonging to the woman, while the man’s clothing was of average quality, in gray or brown, bought at Italian department stores. The only fancy suit was the one he’d worn for his wedding, carefully wrapped in a plastic dry-cleaner’s bag and, to all appearances, never again worn.

  There were no mysteries left in Tommy’s bedroom, but in the living room cabinets, Colomba found half a dozen cameras, and she remembered that Melas loved to take pictures in the forest. She turned on one of the cameras and started scrolling through the shots. Nothing but nature photography, done by someone who lacked even the most elementary artistic abilities. It was a rare picture that featured a whole bird, properly framed and in focus. For the most part, they were indistinguishable blurs of tree trunks and foliage. Often, judging by the time code, they’d been taken in rapid bursts over the course of a few minutes.

  Melas didn’t give a damn about these pictures.

  Taking pictures was just an excuse to get out of the house every day and do whatever it was he’d come to this part of the world to do. Spy on her, kill someone, meet with Leo. His wife, on the other hand, stayed home with her son. She was happy to have found someone willing to take care of them both. At the back of the cabinet shelf, Colomba found a box that contained fifty or so memory cards. Clearly, Melas didn’t want to be caught flat-footed if someone asked to see the fruit of his labors.

  Colomba changed the memory card in the camera and started the slide show again. More trees, this time with autumn colors, more out-of-focus birds, more off-kilter framings. She realized, however, that the settings repeated themselves. Hadn’t she seen that twisted tree before? She checked by putting the previous memory card into another camera and then setting the two screens side by side. Yes, sure enough, it was the same tree, taken in a different season. For that matter, the view of the mountains was very similar, too. If Melas always frequented and photographed the same places, she’d be able to determine where he went by his pictures … maybe. She scattered all the memory cards on Tommy’s bed. Each card contained two hundred pictures, so there were at least ten thousand shots to look at and flag. Trying not to think of how long it was going to take, Colomba set to work.

  6

  At twenty to five, Lupo was fast asleep in his apartment on the top floor of the Carabinieri building, which was furnished in a mix of government-issue and Tex-Mex. The little living room, for example, combined a Formica-topped conference table with a large green plastic cactus, and one of those old posters featuring a sepia-toned photograph of Billy the Kid leaning on his rifle. You could be sure that the decent-quality stereo system would blare out American country western music even before you turned it on. In the bedroom, on the other hand, there was a poster-sized picture of Lupo on the Harley-Davidson he’d driven coast to coast in the United States, the finest vacation of his life.

  The phone call from the Vice made him sit bolt upright in bed. “What is it?” he asked, mumbling into his cell phone.

  “Martina is missing.”

  Lupo woke up all at once. “What do you mean, missing?”

  “I couldn’t sleep, so I called her to ask if she wanted me to spell her, or maybe keep her company. I know that you don’t like it when we trade shifts, but still—”

  “We can talk about that some other time,” said Lupo, who knew that the Vice was still trying to get his direct report into bed, even though he’d been given clear orders to knock it off.

  “I tried to call her over the radio, but there was no answer. Same with her cell phone. So I went out to see. The car is still sitting there, but there was no sign of her.”

  “What about Caselli, is she there?”

  “The lights are on, but for now, I’ve stayed away from the house. If she left and Martina was following her, she would have called it in.”

  “Wait for me at the start of the dirt road.”

  Lupo put the espresso pot on the flame while he got dressed and drank the scalding-hot brew as he read the temperature on the window barometer: −1° C. It could be worse. He poured the rest of the coffee into an empty fruit juice bottle and put a plastic cap on top, then he went to meet Nerone in the green jeep they’d inherited from the Forest Rangers. The Vice signaled his position with his highway flashlight, set to red. The crimson glow made him and the vegetation look like something out of a nightmare.

  “Here you go, it’s still lukewarm,” said Lupo, handing him the juice bottle through the car window.

  “Thanks, Chief.” The Vice unrolled ten feet of scarf and downed the coffee at a gulp. “I tried calling her again, but no response. Same thing at her home number.”

  “Could she have gone into Caselli’s house? Maybe she needed to pee.”

  “She’d sooner have pissed her pants. Give the girl some credit, she’s working her ass off.”

  Lupo pretended he hadn’t heard. “Let’s all communicate by phone, let’s leave the operations switchboard out of it for now. And give me your flashlight, my battery’s dead.” He grabbed the flashlight out of his hand and headed down the dirt road in first gear, stopping a few yards short of the abandoned car, and then continuing on foot. The keys were still in the ignition, and on the passenger seat were Martina’s cell phone and bag. No traces of blood, at least.

  He changed the color of the flashlight and illuminated Martina’s footprints, which could barely be seen. She had gotten out of the car when it had only just started snowing, and now all that remained of each print was an evanescent outline, covered with fresh snowflakes. Just as Colomba had done only a week earlier, Lupo started following the footprints with his pistol drawn.

  Unlike Colomba, however, he was an expert in the field. When your last name is Lupo—Italian for “wolf”—you need to make your mind up early in your childhood to find a survival strategy. Back then he’d been skinny and scared at the idea of getting hurt, so he’d invented a Native American ancestry on the part of a nonexistent grandfather, who was named Lupo just like him, but with a different first name, Grigio. Gray Wolf. They’d given him a Christian name just because he had to live in Italy, but where he came from
, he was known as Little Brave. The story had only worked for a while—at age ten he’d been shown for a pathetic liar in front of all the other students, out on the blacktop—but he’d always had an abiding passion for the tribes of the Free Peoples. And he’d done his best to learn their skills and adopt their ways. He knew how to identify the tracks of hundreds of different animals, as well as their spoor, though he never talked about it much. And he could also see how fast an animal was moving. Whether it was grazing peacefully or running in panic from a predator.

  Martina’s footprints showed she was running.

  Not from the start. When she’d stepped out of the squad car, she’d been moving at normal speed, and then, after a couple of yards, she’d accelerated in a straight line along the edge of the dirt road. Here the trunk of a tree that had been felled marked the beginning of a narrow path, almost invisible, that cut across the fields, in the opposite direction from Colomba’s farmhouse. Immediately after the tree trunk, Martina’s footprints seemed to be following another pair that were clearly preceding her. They were only the vaguest of ghost prints by now, and Lupo couldn’t tell if they were a man’s or a woman’s shoes, much less their actual size. Martina got out of the car and chased a person. And then what?

  The footprints vanished entirely under the fresh snow, but Lupo was still in time to identify the point where the first and second series of footprints had met. There were two crescents, the mark a foot leaves when you turn on your heels, dragging the tip of a boot across the ground.

  The new arrival had stopped, and Martina had caught up with him. He had turned around.

  And then?

  Lupo could see a confused scene of bodies locked together in the darkness, and he imagined a shout of terror. But there were no signs of a struggle on the trail. No signs of fallen bodies, no blood, no broken branches. The footprints were invisible by now, but those other traces would have been visible. So did that mean they walked off together?

  He continued along the trail as the sky cleared, until he reached the edge of the woods, two thousand square miles of trees spreading out over the hills. Countless trails intersecting beneath the branches of the firs and the larches. So Martina could be five feet away, or fifty miles.

  On the way back, Lupo called Nerone, who had climbed back into the car. “Martina was chasing someone.”

  “Caselli?”

  “Who knows. I’m going to go take a look at her house. But you wake everyone up and alert the Protezione Civile. Call the local priest, Don Vito, too, find out if he can send anyone to help us search. You organize the search teams, I want you all out looking before daybreak.”

  Lupo climbed over the gate and knocked at Colomba’s front door. There was no answer. He walked around to the back of the farmhouse, where he immediately spied the footprints heading down into the fields, prints that were already disappearing under the fresh snowfall that was coming thicker and faster now. The policewoman had clearly done her best to avoid being spotted by Martina. Or had she just gone the long way around so she could take her from behind? Lupo realized that that wasn’t a credible hypothesis, because the footprints were pointing toward the far side of the valley. Toward Montenigro.

  Practically falling down in his haste, Lupo ran toward his car.

  7

  Colomba was awakened by the sound of the door lock turning and for two seconds there was nothing in her head but a pulsating void, like a television set tuned to static. Then she remembered that she’d fallen asleep like a rock on Tommy’s bed after scrolling past the millionth blurry picture of birds and trees. She leaped to her feet and hid behind the bookcase, scattering memory cards all over the room. She even had one pasted to her forehead, and when she peeled it off it left an impression of the logo on her skin.

  Her wristwatch with the old-fashioned glow-in-the-dark hands said it was ten after six. I wasted an hour, and now I’ve been caught like a fool.

  The second lock turned and the door swung open, and Lupo entered the house. Colomba’s hope that he might have just happened along for no reason to do with her shattered on contact with his words. “Deputy Captain. If you’re in here, show yourself,” he said. “And I know that you’re in here.”

  “I’m not armed,” she shouted, remaining hidden.

  “Come out into the open.”

  Colomba peered out at him, from behind the doorjamb. Lupo was spattered with mud up to his ears, his sidearm was still in the holster, and he was scratching the back of his head, his thoughts clearly elsewhere. She walked toward him. “How did you find me?”

  “Maybe I’m less of an idiot than you’ve taken me for. So, breaking and entering. For now, I’ll just arrest you, and then Vigevani can make up his mind. Let’s go.”

  Lupo grabbed her by the arm, and Colomba repressed her instinct to kick him. “Hold on a second, Lupo. Let me catch my breath. What’s happened?”

  Lupo huffed. “Martina walked away a couple of hours ago, and she’s not answering over the radio.”

  “Walked away from where?”

  “From staking out your house.” He yanked on her arm again, this time just to make her look him in the face. “Did you see her? Do you know something you’re not telling me?”

  “If something’s happened to Martina, then the one who did it is the same person who slaughtered the Melases and planted the hammer at my house. That’s all I know for certain.”

  “You’re still sticking to that bullshit theory …”

  “It’s not bullshit! And the Melases definitely had something to hide.” Colomba pointed to a photo on the wall. “Just look.”

  “It’s a woodpecker,” said Lupo. A pileated woodpecker, to be exact, one that can’t be found in Europe, but Lupo kept that detail to himself. Little Brave didn’t want to come across as a hopeless nerd.

  “Purchased at a bookstore. Because none of the pictures that Melas took in a year are worth blowing up. I’ve seen half of them, and I know just how bad they are. So why did he hike around in the woods all day snapping pictures?”

  “All I care about is finding Martina again. Everything else comes after that.”

  “How can you be so sure that the two things aren’t connected? That Martina didn’t see something she wasn’t supposed to see?” Lupo hesitated and Colomba noticed. “What are you thinking about?” she asked him.

  “There were some footprints next to your house, footprints that were made a long time after we left it,” Lupo said, reluctantly.

  “Did you send anyone to see where they led?”

  “They were already being erased by the snowfall, otherwise I would have followed them myself. Anyway, I put all available men out on the street.”

  “Then you can afford to waste a little bit of your precious time trying to figure out what Melas was actually doing in the woods. We could find out the identity of the man or the woman who left those footprints. And figure out whether they’re involved in Martina’s disappearance.”

  “You’re diabolical, you know that, right? You’re taking advantage of my concern for that young woman.”

  “Yes, I’m taking advantage of that fact to try to get you to listen to reason,” Colomba admitted. “But the devil I’m really afraid of is out there, in the middle of the snow.”

  8

  When she was a girl, Carabinieri Corporal Martina Concio had been a promising young figure skater, the next Denise Biellmann, according to her trainer, especially her spins. At age thirteen she was a national junior finalist, until she suffered a nasty fall that took several teeth out of her mouth and some of the grit out of her determination to excel. Like everyone who has pursued a goal and then given up on it, she’d been left with an open wound that she picked at relentlessly in her dreams, either by skating over the ice at supersonic speeds or else by crawling along on the same surface as slowly as a snail. Right now she must be dreaming, because in front of her was a tree trunk sheathed in ice and she couldn’t move. She was cold and it was dark out. She turned back into a gir
l for a second, and she thought she could hear her trainer shouting to look out for her supporting leg. She opened her eyes again: the icy tree trunk was still in front of her. She was starting to be able to feel her body again, along with something creeping inside her, on the level of her belly. A serpent of flame and ice, the hand of the Hulk, her first Cuba Libre at age fourteen.

  Pain.

  When she’d been taken to the emergency room after her fall, the examining doctor had asked her name, and then had said: “My cousin is named Martina, don’t you think that’s a nice coincidence? Now tell me, from one to ten, how much does it hurt if I move your leg like this?”

  Thirteen-year-old Martina had shouted, “Ten,” but now she would have had to shout a hundred, or a thousand. She tried to, but when she opened her mouth all that came out was a sort of belch, and then a spray of blood and slobber. She couldn’t say what position she was in. Was she flat in her bed, standing up, or seated? It was as if her body were floating on a cloud. She couldn’t feel her arms, she couldn’t unclench her fingers. She tried moving her feet and the pain stabbed her in the belly again, surging up her throat with a sickly sweet burst of taste. Her feet could touch nothing beneath her. Not the ground, not the sheets of a bed. Just thin air.

  What’s happened to me? What was there behind the tree? She tried to turn her head, but once again her belly screamed out. Something inside her was lacerating her flesh with every breath she took. She spat out more blood.

  I shouldn’t move, I’m injured. Probably she’d been in a crash of some kind, but she was still alive. And she was experiencing pain. That’s a good sign. If you’re gravely wounded, you feel nothing, right? Right?