Kill the King

by Sandrone Dazieri

  Zzz. Click. ZZZ. Click.

  What was Leo doing? Did he have a weapon in his hand, had he learned how to hurl lightning bolts? Colomba didn’t understand a thing anymore; the noise was baffling her and fear was mixing with the adrenaline.

  The door had a lock on it, electronic and massive, with a red light pulsing deep inside a hole that seemed to have been custom-fitted to the little cylinder hanging on the bunch of keys. She inserted it, quickly assuming firing position again the minute she heard the lock click and saw the light switch to green.

  At ten a.m. on the dot, exactly sixteen hours after the detonation of the bomb in Milan, Colomba used her elbow to press down on the levered handle and then push the door open, stepping forward into a cloud of pale-blue light that blinded her for a second. Then her eyes grew accustomed to it. She saw a human-sized doll being shaken in the air by some invisible hand, brightly illuminated by an LED spotlight.

  She saw that the doll was strapped to a million-dollar bed. The bed kept changing shape, rotating and stretching the doll, jerking it vertical, then horizontal, then bent in half, without any break in continuity.

  She saw the electrodes that covered the doll, the empty IV bags dangling from its skeletal arms.

  She saw the plastic intubation pumping air down its throat. Then she realized that it wasn’t an oversize doll.

  It was a man.

  It was Dante.

  PART TWO AWAKENINGS

  BEFORE

  The IT expert has been working without a break since the day of the Palasport massacre, a whole week in which he got an average of three hours’ sleep a night; and he’s still not done.

  He hands the flash drive to Di Marco, gets out a star-bit screwdriver, and starts dismantling the computer to remove the hard drive. He’s going to give it a ride in the microwave oven, the same way he’s already deep-baked the three cell phones he found in the apartment. With a rain of sparks and smoke, their internal memory has been definitively damaged. Better than smashing them with a sledge hammer.

  Di Marco sticks the flash drive in his pocket, leaves his squad to finish cleaning up the scene of the attack, and leaves for the Comsubin launch awaiting him, tied up at the side of the quay. As he climbs aboard, the soldiers salute him, all the while leveling their assault rifles toward the four cardinal points of the compass.

  The launch slides swiftly over the water to the port of Mestre, where an armor-plated car is awaiting the colonel and his security detail, ready to take them to the Edmondo Matter barracks. Before passing through the gray gates of the special forces headquarters, Di Marco spots the slight figure of a man standing on the sidewalk, smoking a cigarette, wearing a threadbare trench coat and an Irish tweed cap. He taps on the shoulder of the driver, who complies by braking to a halt, whereupon Di Marco gets out and goes over to the man. He wasn’t mistaken: it’s Santini, former chief officer of SIC, the Central Investigative Service, now just killing time at the Mobile Squad in Rome until he can take his pension. “What do you want?” he asks, planting himself, feet wide, before him.

  Santini flicks the cigarette away and sticks his hands in his pockets. “Did you know?” he asks in a flat, dead voice.

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “I’m armed.” Santini moves his hand, and under the fabric of the trench coat the lump of a pistol barrel appears.

  “You’re too smart to shoot me in front of witnesses.”

  Santini seems nervous, but he doesn’t retreat. “If I were intelligent I wouldn’t be here now. Did you or didn’t you know what was going to happen at the Palasport della Misericordia?”

  “No,” Di Marco replies, without moving a single facial muscle.

  “Caselli was there.”

  Di Marco takes a step back to examine Santini’s face more closely. He thinks it over, and there is practically the sound of gears clicking and grinding in his head. “She’s making it up,” he says after a few seconds. His voice has lost a bit of its arrogance.

  “She’s in the hospital, but she’s going to survive. Torre, on the other hand, is among the missing.” Santini is shaking. “They can’t have arrived in Venice by pure chance. They knew that something was about to happen at the Palasport. How could you not have known?”

  Di Marco pauses to think, and his gears tick away some more. “Get in the car,” he finally says.

  Santini staggers, in a mixture of drunkenness and sheer surprise. “What for?”

  “I’ll tell you something you don’t know yet.” He points to the front gate of the barracks. “In there.”

  “My ass I’m going in with you.”

  “Your mistrust is ridiculous. I’m the chief of counterterrorism in a country that’s just suffered the worst terror attack since the end of the war. I have nothing to fear from you, so you have nothing to fear from me.”

  It’s a threat, but Santini is concentrating on another issue. “You’re not the chief of counterterrorism.”

  Di Marco flashes him a smile that is nothing more than a stretching of lips. “Everything is changing, and in a hurry, Santini, after what just happened. There will be the drowned and the saved. Which group do you want to be in?”

  CHAPTER I

  1

  Dante was unstrapped from the million-dollar bed and loaded onto an ambulance by a group of paramedics. First, though, the firemen blasted open the lock of the main gate of Villa Quiete, seeing that those keys weren’t in the bunch in Colomba’s possession.

  Under the name of Signor Caselli, Dante was examined by the emergency room staff at the hospital of Rimini, who all wondered what the hell could have happened to that poor wretch, not so much because of his miserable state of general health as because of the surgical implants in his body. The patient had a PEG valve next to his belly button, for force-feeding, and it was covered with a filthy gauze bandage, while in his arms there were two venous catheters, and in his trachea the tube from a mechanical respirator, so someone had at least started to care for him. Not anytime recently, though: all of those surgical implants were dirty and infected, surrounded by swollen necrotized flesh; what’s more, the patient was undernourished and dehydrated, shriveled up and seemingly crippled, filthy, reeking of excrement and rot.

  One nurse suggested he might have escaped from some other hospital before hiding out at Villa Quiete. A friend of hers, a head ward nurse, had once had a patient vanish on her, and the old woman had only been found six months later in the boiler room in the basement, stiff as a mummy. But she had had Alzheimer’s, while the brain of the patient from Villa Quiete looked perfectly healthy on the CAT scan, without any sign of trauma or disease. So why had he remained confined to bed for so long?

  “I don’t know,” Colomba replied, in specific response to the specific question posed by the chief physician. Exactly as she had answered practically all the other questions.

  “Do you know what they gave him to keep him sedated?”

  “No.”

  “But what is his condition? What is he suffering from? Why is he intubated?”

  Colomba shook her head once again, and the doctor wondered to himself whether the woman really was in any state to understand his questions. The green eyes that she kept fastened on the door to the wards were feverish and glistening. “We need to remove the infected implants and clean his wounds,” he said. “We need the consent of a guardian or a next of kin. You’re his sister, isn’t that right?”

  Colomba signed without even glancing at the papers.

  “Will he get better?” she asked.

  “He’s very debilitated, Signora. And I’m not going to hide the fact that this operation involves a degree of risk, given the state of his metabolism.” He hesitated. “Do you want to speak to the chaplain?”

  Colomba shook her head. “He’s not a believer.”

  Half an hour later Dante was being wheeled into the operating chamber. Colomba, standing in the hallway, saw him go by and walked with him as far as the elevator. When t
he metal elevator doors slid shut again, she saw Alberti and Santini reflected in them.

  “Fucking hell,” said her former boss, from behind her. “Jesus Christ, you actually managed to do it.”

  2

  The power of the domino effect: the firefighters at Villa Quiete had alerted the police, the police had called the Carabinieri high command, the Carabinieri high command had alerted the chief of police of Rimini, the chief of police of Rimini had reached out to the chief of police of Rome, and the chief of police of Rome had phoned Santini, who at that moment was sprawled out on the sofa having basically overdosed on pain pills. The gist of the phone call was this: What the hell was “the heroine of Venice” doing in an abandoned clinic in Rimini with a dying man? Was she working undercover or had she finally and definitively gone insane? In either case, this was Santini’s problem to handle.

  Santini had called Alberti and they’d assembled a team, and the whole way Santini had been praying to just die. But after he’d actually laid eyes on Dante, alive, he’d thanked his lucky stars that he’d gotten there immediately. He walked Colomba to one of the armchairs in the waiting room, carefully relieving her of the .22 and the other sidearm tucked under her belt. It was a Glock 17, not her usual Beretta.

  “Where did you get this?” he asked, slipping the handgun into his trench coat pocket.

  “Lupo,” Colomba murmured from somewhere very far away.

  “Lupo?”

  “He’s the sergeant major of the Carabinieri in Portico,” Alberti put in. Up till now he’d been standing, watching silently, overwhelmed by everything that was happening.

  “I don’t even want to know why you know that,” Santini replied. “What’s happened, Caselli? What the hell do the Carabinieri have to do with Torre?”

  Colomba let out the story in dribs and drabs, helped along by a grappa that Alberti went down to the hospital bar to fetch her. When she got to the part about having handcuffed Lupo to the hayloft wall, Santini hurried to make a couple of phone calls.

  3

  Lupo, chilled to the bone and cursing furiously, was liberated by two of his own men. In spite of the fact that the left side of his face was twice the size of the right and his nose was broken, he refused medical treatment and stayed there to supervise the recovery of Martina’s corpse by the alpine rescue team. To avoid compromising the autopsy findings, they simply sawed off the branch, leaving it in place in the wound, and lowered the corpse, stiffened by rigor mortis, dancing in the sling of a cable hanging from a winch. There was also a medical examiner, dressed in the style of an old-time barber surgeon, his beard encrusted with ice.

  In accordance with his instructions, the corpse was unhooked from the winch and laid on the folding gurney. The branch that Martina still had in her viscera acted as a pump. There was a gushing sound, and from her belly there emerged two gigantic tremulous lips that spewed blood on the search and recovery team. This was her peritoneum, lacerated and pushed out by the internal air pressure. The medical examiner, Dr. Tira, wiped the round lenses of his eyeglasses with a silk handkerchief; the EMT attendants hurried to cover the corpse with a sheet.

  “I want a warrant for the preventive custody of Colomba Caselli. And I beg you not to nitpick about it this time,” Lupo said to Vigevani, walking with him behind the corpse. In private they were on an informal basis.

  “Are you sure you can justify the charges, Wolf? If she testifies that you were the first to put your hands on her, that might put you in a bad situation,” the magistrate replied.

  “And am I supposed to have just handcuffed myself?”

  “You ought to know that wouldn’t actually be all that hard.”

  Lupo stopped walking, forcing Vigevani to turn around. “If you don’t believe me, just go ahead and say so.”

  “No, no, of course I believe you … But come on, the idea that Caselli killed Concio?”

  “Why not?”

  “She’s been a straight-arrow cop, Wolf.”

  “Exactly. She’s been. She was almost killed in Venice, someone kidnapped her boyfriend—”

  “I don’t think that she and Torre were an item.”

  “And before that she worked on a serial killer case,” Lupo went on without listening. “I’ve seen cops resign from the force after a single shootout, whereas she’s had more gunplay than Buffalo Bill. She’s pushed well past the breaking point; who knows what could be going through her head.”

  The ambulance with Martina’s corpse took off, heading in the direction of the autopsy room at the hospital of Pesaro. The only cars left in the clearing belonged to Lupo and his boss, Vigevani. Vigevani’s driver got out to open the door for him, but the magistrate waved for him to wait and walked Lupo to his jeep. “So how are you thinking events unfolded? Describe the mechanics of the thing to me, since a motive is unnecessary, if she’s insane.”

  “She left her house and Martina followed her to see what she was getting up to. Caselli hit her over the head, loaded her into her car …”

  Vigevani huffed in exasperation. “Then she brought her here, took her car back to Mezzanotte, and set out on foot toward the Melas home where you found her, because she was sure that you’d turn up there.”

  “Maybe she was looking for something and so she just made up the story, right then and there.”

  “So that she could convince you to come here and make sure you found the corpse, and then hit you in the head with a rock and make her getaway on a motorcycle that she’d taken care to hide here in advance?”

  “When you’re out of your mind, logic doesn’t matter.”

  Vigevani shook his head. He added: “Let’s do this, I’ll take your theory to the preliminary investigating magistrate, but then you’ll have to go in and convince him.”

  Lupo felt mortified, and his rage ballooned. “Fine, okay, I’ll say that maybe, and I mean maybe, Caselli didn’t kill Martina, all right. So she’s not crazy, okay. Then she had a reason to kick my face in, and I want to know what it was. Assaulting a law enforcement officer, theft of military weapons, kidnapping, grand theft auto … She may have survived the attack in Venice, but sweet Jesus, you can’t amnesty all of it.”

  A strange expression appeared on Vigevani’s face—a sincere surge of concern, Lupo would have been willing to bet—but then he turned around anyway and headed for his car, walking as if on eggshells to keep from slipping and falling. “Hey, are you just leaving like that?” Lupo yelled after him.

  Without turning around, Vigevani asked: “Do you know what joke is going around at the attorney general’s office about Venice?”

  “No,” he replied.

  “That if ISIS had a good lawyer, they wouldn’t serve a day behind bars for the massacre at the Palasport della Misericordia.”

  “Is that supposed to make me laugh?”

  “It’s supposed to make you think. Be careful what moves you make, Wolf. As far as I’m concerned, this is probably the last time I’ll set foot around here.” And he drove off, leaving Lupo standing in the snow.

  4

  Santini let Colomba look at Dante for a few minutes through the plate-glass window of the intensive care unit—the operation had been successful, but it was too soon to tell whether the infection would react to the antibiotics—but then he accompanied her to the car that was awaiting them both at the hospital entrance. Waiting inside the car were two men who looked like brothers: musclebound, with crew cuts and padded leather jackets. Colomba was still pretty much out of it, but she understood that Santini had alerted the counterterrorism division.

  “Was that absolutely unavoidable?” she asked him.

  “And you even bother to ask?” he replied.

  They took them both to the special forces headquarters in the Gamella barracks in Pisa. Santini accompanied her down the corridors and past armed guards, then left her standing in front of a closed door.

  “If you want my advice,” he said, “cooperate.”

  “Fuck yourself,” Colomba replied,
having recovered somewhat during the drive. She went in.

  Di Marco was waiting for her in an office with just one desk and two chairs. Both his wrists were in casts, hanging from a sling around his neck, with his usual dark blue suit and his usual smug arrogant face. “Excellent work, Deputy Captain. Next time, give me a call before throwing half the country into a frenzy.”

  Colomba had one last surge of energy. “You goddamn son of a bitch!” she shouted, kicking the desk hard enough to make pens and pencils roll across the top. “Dante was in Rimini! Not at the bottom of the sea or in a cave in Afghanistan. In Rimini! Where the fuck were you even looking for him, all this time?”

  “Deputy Captain, I’m as surprised as you are. It’s an unexpected development.”

  “Oh, really? With all the men at your disposal, with the whole army at your fingertips, you couldn’t find him, right under your own noses! Maybe you didn’t want to find him.”

  “Stop being childish and sit down.”

  Rather than give him the satisfaction, Colomba would have popped her ligaments, but she finally ran out of strength and her legs gave way beneath her.

  “I ought to have had you arrested when you went snooping around in Romero’s apartment, Deputy Captain,” said Di Marco. “Instead, thanks to Colonel Santini’s good offices, I’m going to try to keep you out of prison for the second time. You ought to be grateful.”

  “Grateful? I can’t wait till I have the chance to tell everyone how you left Dante to rot,” she said.