Kill the King

by Sandrone Dazieri

  She searched through the jumble of confusion in her head. The nighttime stakeout, Caselli.

  The shadow in the snow.

  Could it be that that was her last memory? The sound of the car door opening echoed again in her head.

  The shadow on the road. Her getting out of the car …

  And then what? Did he bring me here? But where is here?

  This time she bent her head downward, a fraction of an inch at a time, maybe even less, her progress broken by fleeting intervals of unconsciousness. Beneath her, off to the right, she thought she could glimpse something glittering in the darkness. Ice, most likely, and yet it seemed to move, to ripple.

  It was a river, a mountain stream, and the moonlight was being reflected in it. She had the impression that she was flying over it. Shifting her head another fraction of an inch, she saw the shadow of her legs, which seemed to dangle in the empty air. How could that be, what was holding her up in the air like that?

  Clenching her teeth, she bent her head by a good half inch, and the image of the river disappeared. There was something blocking her line of sight. A zone of darkness that was darker than the rest. Another half inch, and now that zone of darkness completely obscured her line of sight. Something between her and the river, and when she vomited another gush of blood, and saw it fetch up against the dark zone, she realized that it was much closer than she had imagined. It wasn’t anywhere in the indefinable zone between her feet and the stream, but actually attached to her body. It was holding her up.

  Am I sitting on a branch of the tree? she asked herself. Had she fallen during her stakeout and grabbed the tree on her way down? She wanted to be able to move her hands to touch the tree and assure herself of its actual existence, but they were like lengths of yarn, completely indifferent to her mental commands. As were her legs.

  She vomited more blood, and this time she saw it oozing, establishing the outline of the branch before dripping into the void, colorless like the rest of the universe around her, made up of shades of gray. And she finally understood what someone had done to her.

  9

  Colomba showed Lupo the pictures she’d selected of a trail that ran, out of focus, behind a line of spruce trees. “I think that Melas must have followed the same route every time. This trail always turns up in his photographs, for example.”

  “It’s definitely looking south by southwest,” he said, after taking a quick glance, checking the shadows against the time code on the picture. “In the distance, that’s the Sibillini Mountains.”

  “Can you be any more specific?”

  “No.”

  Colomba scrolled through other pictures on the camera. “Look at these. They were taken on different days and in different months, but it’s always the same stuff. You see this tree, or whatever it is?”

  “Yes,” said Lupo, more interested now, staring at the twisted holm oak.

  Colomba pointed at a badly weathered gray concrete pole. “Does that ring a bell?”

  “I think those are the hills of the Val Cesana. It’s one of the old pylons of the high-tension wires.”

  “So that’s the line of hills beyond Mezzanotte, on the road from Montenigro.”

  “Keep showing me pictures, we need to narrow down the area a little more. It’s still much too extensive.”

  Colomba handed him the camera that she was using as a viewer. “I put them in sequence,” she said. Lupo ran through a sort of stop-action film clip of the trail with the twisted tree: it curved repeatedly and ended at a brick-and-cement wall. “So that’s a windowless building. What, stables?”

  “No, stables are built differently. This is a hayloft.” He pulled out his cell phone and opened Google Maps.

  * * *

  Five minutes later they were climbing into Lupo’s green jeep. It was only seven thirty in the morning, and outside the temperature was barely above freezing; the cloudless sky was starting to brighten.

  Lupo put in a call to the Portico barracks, where no one was around but the civilian employee, because everyone else was out pounding the zone in a dragnet search. Volunteers from the Protezione Civile were arriving from all over the region, and so were K-9 dog teams. He ended the radio call and then, out of nowhere, said: “I never took a bribe.”

  “Good for you,” Colomba replied, in a flat tone.

  “The only mistake I made was that I didn’t report my fellow cops who were taking them. I thought we were supposed to wash our dirty laundry strictly inside the family. Then I found out that the family I thought I belonged to had never existed. They turned their backs on me, everyone, even the guys I’d tried to protect.”

  “That’s what happens.”

  “I imagine that you would have behaved differently.”

  Colomba shrugged her shoulders. “I can’t lecture anybody else. I made too many mistakes of my own.”

  “Which is why you’re off the force with time on your hands now,” said Lupo.

  “That’s right.”

  * * *

  The last section of the trail was too narrow to use the squad car. They got out and headed into the woods on foot. Colomba put her snowshoes back on, while Lupo relied on his knee-high Gore-Tex boots. “It ought to be a few hundred yards from here,” said Colomba, checking the direction on her cell phone.

  “But we’re not the first ones to come through here.” Lupo pointed to a series of parallel stripes along the trail, which seemed to have been drawn with an off-kilter rake. He leaned down and broke a bulge in the snow with his hand, revealing pine needles. “Someone erased their footprints with a tree branch,” he said.

  “Who could it have been?”

  “Poachers, probably. Careful where you step, they might have set traps.”

  “If they’re poachers. I’m just happy that you’re armed, at least.”

  They started down a green corridor of interwoven branches that let the daylight filter through and dropped clumps of snow on their heads as they passed. The sky was blue for the first time in many days, and everything was dripping. “That looks to me like the tree we want,” said Lupo after they’d taken about a hundred steps, and he pointed to a corkscrew-shaped holm oak that stood straight ahead of them.

  Colomba, accustomed to the snowshoes by now, sped up to get to the tree, careful not to step close to the crumbling steep edge of the trail. A section of trail had recently collapsed and there was a comma-shaped stretch of mud that contrasted sharply with the white of the snow. Colomba leaned down to look and realized that one of the trees projecting from below glittered with a color that often meant only one thing.

  The color red.

  The purplish snow was scattered over the tree trunks and was sliding toward the ground, dense as tar. The tree was a thorny medlar, and the branches looked like a gigantic version of the stalks of a rosebush. One of those branches, thick as a man’s arm and bent upward, ran right through the lifeless body of Martina Concio.

  10

  Martina’s mouth and eyes were wide open, her hands were clenched, and she was covered with blood and vomit. Colomba shoved a fist into her mouth to keep from screaming.

  “What did you see?” Lupo asked, still a few steps behind her.

  Colomba looked in the opposite direction. There it was, in the distance: the hayloft. It was made of rocks and cement and part of the roof was missing, but even from the trail, Colomba could see the padlocked chain that fastened shut the solid wood door.

  She duck-walked, or duck-ran, really, hoping that the snowshoes wouldn’t fall apart on her now, of all times. She could hear Lupo shouting her name, and then his scream of horror when he reached the collapsed trail edge.

  She didn’t stop.

  Before they had a chance to lock her up in a cell somewhere, she wanted to get a look at that goddamned hayloft.

  Lupo called in emergency support by radio, then shouted Colomba’s name in an angry voice. She ignored him. She placed both hands on the stump of an outside wall where the roof was missing to
hoist herself up to get a look inside, but all she saw was snow, garbage, and rotted beams. There was, however, an intact room, the one into which the padlocked door led. Impossible to see into it. She picked up a large rock and started hammering away at the padlock with it.

  Lupo, closer now, berated her: “You knew it the whole time! That’s why you brought me here!”

  Colomba pretended not to have heard him.

  “Cut it out!” Lupo shouted as he slammed into her. Colomba whirled around and smashed the rock into his face. She’d aimed for his chin but she hit him on the nose, which broke and started gushing blood. Colomba hit him again, on the cheekbone this time. Lupo staggered, fell, and on all fours started crawling toward her, moving blindly, completely dazed by the impact. Colomba relieved him of his pistol and slipped it into the pocket of her ski suit; then she went back to pounding on the padlock.

  “It was you,” Lupo muttered. “You killed her.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. We came here because the pictures were of this place.”

  Lupo grabbed her ankle. “You’re the one who put the pictures in order.”

  Colomba stamped on his hand, then smashed the padlock with the rock again. The hasp sprang open. She opened the door with a hard shove of the shoulder. If there had been nothing but a heap of rotten wood, she’d have let Lupo arrest her.

  Instead the weak sunlight of the early winter morning illuminated a sort of rustic living room, with a wooden table and a plastic chair. On the other side of the room was a motocross motorcycle covered with a plastic tarp, a Honda CRF450. It had knobby tires that looked new. Next to the bike was a set of mechanic’s tools and a pair of summer tires ready to be installed, as well as three different helmets of various colors, and three men’s motorcycle jumpsuits, size medium. The keys were under the seat, along with another bunch of double-bit keys.

  Lupo had gotten up onto his knees and now he was fooling around with one of his boots. Colomba kicked him in the belly and he dropped a .22 derringer that wouldn’t have looked out of place in the hands of a poker player in the Wild West. It had four barrels arranged in a square and a scrollwork handle. Colomba put the pistol in her pocket, then handcuffed Lupo to a ring in the wall meant to tether animals. He swallowed a chunk of broken tooth. “You’re insane.”

  Colomba relieved him of his cell phone and radio, turned them both off, and laid them down on the table. Then she called Alberti on her own phone, catching him in the cellar room where he composed music on his computer, music that he posted online under the pseudonym Rookie Blue. Right now, however, he’d only gone there to catch some sleep, after returning home from police headquarters at four in the morning. He often did that when he got home late and didn’t want to wake up his girlfriend. Little by little, she was moving in with him, even though they’d never really discussed it, and Alberti still couldn’t say whether or not he was happy about it. “The chief is okay, he’s back from Milan—”

  “I don’t give a damn. I need something and I need it fast. A license plate.”

  “Deputy Captain, this really isn’t a very good time.”

  “It’s the last thing I’m ever going to ask you. And it’s really important.”

  “Does this have to do with Bonaccorso?”

  “Yes! For fuck’s sake.”

  “Okay. I’m listening.”

  Colomba dictated the license plate number. Alberti asked a trusted partner to run it through the system. The owner of the motorcycle turned out to be a London real estate agent, who had bought it at auction from a clinic in Rimini that had gone into bankruptcy along with its former owner. And he’d bought the clinic, too, while he was at it. In February of the year before.

  February, exactly when she’d first moved to Mezzanotte. Colomba collapsed in the snow, her lungs struggling to take in air. Another coincidence?

  Maybe Pala was wrong and she really was insane.

  She walked back into the hayloft, where she found a red-faced Lupo feverishly trying to yank the ring out of the wall. “Set me free, you fucker! What do you think you’re doing?”

  Colomba climbed onto the motorcycle and started the engine. “I’m getting all the way to the end of the road,” she replied.

  11

  One of Colomba’s ex-boyfriends, a guy she’d broken up with and left on terms that were anything but friendly, never went anywhere except by motorcycle, and at the time, she had bought herself a motorcycle to go with him on their free weekends. She’d never had such a miserable time, but at least she’d learned how to ride one. She opened the hayloft door wide and braced it in place, then she put on one of the helmets. It was too big for her head, and she thought she could smell the breath of whoever had worn it before her. Leo or Melas, either a homicidal monster or a murder victim.

  She started the engine, put the bike in gear, let out the clutch, and almost broke her neck.

  In order to control a motorcycle on the snow, you need to go fast enough not to sink, but not so fast you lose control. Making things even more complicated for Colomba were the fact that she was out of practice and her unfamiliarity with that particular bike. She fell four times in the first two hundred yards, and the last time she wound up flat on her face in the snow, weeping tears of frustration. Get up, you stupid asshole, she told herself. Do you want them to catch you here? At least try to make it hard for them.

  She got back up and fell again, but when she thought there couldn’t be a square inch of her body left unbruised, she finally made it onto the blacktop of the provincial road. As the speed increased, however, so did the wind-chill factor.

  She avoided the highway on account of the security cameras and instead rode along the dark sea and the deserted beach that in the summer months turned into a playland. The dank, chilly humidity got under her skin. When she reached Rimini, a pearlescent day was dawning, and she found her way thanks to a highway sign that still featured the name of Villa Quiete, even though the clinic had long since gone out of business. With Google Maps, she would have found it more quickly, but she’d removed the battery from her cell phone, in order to keep from being tracked down too soon.

  The clinic was located in a residential neighborhood, just a short walk from the waterfront, a slab of a building sheathed in ceramic cladding the color of a highway rest stop. It stood three stories tall, and was surrounded by untended grounds littered with garbage. Colomba parked the motorcycle in a side alley and stood observing the clinic from a distance. It wouldn’t be hard to get over the top of the gate, in spite of the sharp tips of the bars, and there were only two security cameras at the main entrance … or anyway, only two that were visible. Was this another one of Leo’s hideouts, after the apartment in Milan? Did he and Melas use this place to meet? Was this where they had readied the explosives that Leo had detonated in Milan?

  She clambered over the top of the gate and dropped over on the other side to the untended park, running bent over toward the building, careful not to let herself be seen from the street, even though there was practically no one out and about. The windows were shut tight by roller blinds and it was impossible to see into the interior. Colomba avoided the central doors and instead chose to try the personnel entrance on the side of the building, screened by a stand of trees. Like the other doors, this one was made of shatterproof glass and further protected by a metal accordion gate. The lock took a double-bit key, and she thought back to the bunch of keys she’d noticed under the motorcycle seat. She went back to the motorcycle, and the third time she climbed over the gate, she understood that she wouldn’t be able to do it a fourth time: she was exhausted.

  She tried the keys in both directions, each time praying to heaven and the Almighty to help her. The third key turned, so easily that at first Colomba was afraid that she’d broken the lock. Instead, the gate opened without difficulty, and the door behind it opened with a simple turn of the knob. She found herself in a short hallway where it was colder than it had been outside. There was dust and cobwebs everywhere, and
the filthy floor was covered with footprints, coming and going.

  Colomba hoped that they were recent, that Leo really was sleeping in one of the wards of the former hospital, blithely unaware of her arrival. She imagined herself waking him up to the taste of a pistol barrel in his mouth. So you think I’m afraid of you? she would bellow into his face.

  A metal door swung open, leading into the clinic lobby, long since plundered of nearly all its furniture; the fluorescent overhead lights were shrouded in spiderwebs. A large mosaic depicted the Virgin Mary watching over a sleeping patient. Strips of light came in through the shutters, and Colomba was just able to read the numbered map on the wall. The clinic was subdivided into two long hallways on the second and third floors, while the offices were on the ground floor.

  Colomba checked the offices first, creeping along silently with both of Lupo’s sidearms gripped firmly in her fists, which were shaking from the rush of adrenaline. The offices were empty and smelled of dead rats.

  She found the waiting room, and then the stairs leading up to the second floor. She cautiously, slowly climbed the stairs, keenly aware of the slightest noise. The only sounds came in from the street, except for an electric motor buzzing who knew where in the building.

  The hallway was painted a pastel hue, lined with rooms without doors or beds. Empty.

  Hanging on a bulletin board was an official directive whose yellowing sheets of paper instructed all hospital personnel to learn the correct operation of the new hospital beds, which looked like spaceship berths for patients incapable of autonomous movement, and that’s when Colomba realized that it wasn’t a normal clinic at all, but a chronic care unit for the comatose.

  The buzzing of the electric motor was louder now, and Colomba noticed another crucial detail: it was coming from the top floor.

  More stairs. The pistols were heavy, and Colomba stuck the .22 into her belt, keeping Lupo’s regulation sidearm outstretched, gripped with both hands, aimed high, her body moving in time with the weapon. By now the buzzing had turned into the shrill noise of a dentist’s drill, accompanied by the rhythmic creak of a mechanism. Zzz. Click. ZZZ. Click. A room on the third floor still had a door. From underneath it filtered a pale-blue light that juddered in time with the creaking noise.