“They’d quarantined you,” Dante murmured.
“It was Santini’s job to coach me, before I came into contact with civilians or investigators. The cover version was that you and I had been on holiday in Venice, and that we’d fetched up by chance at the Palasport della Misericordia.” Her former commanding officer’s voice still echoed in her ears. There were forty-nine deaths! Forty-nine. And you knew that it was going to happen. “Santini told me that if I told the truth, I’d be charged with failure to prevent a massacre, obstruction of justice, and criminal conspiracy to commit mass murder.”
“But you tried to warn them …” said Dante.
“They arranged to get rid of all the reports where I explained that I suspected Giltine’s existence. Santini knew that he was an accomplice to a criminal act, but he also told me that he’d had no choice in the matter.” That day he’d been wrecked and half in the bag. “Because if my version was accepted, he, his boss, and everyone who had refused to listen to me would wind up in deep shit, right alongside me.”
“I’d have tried anyway,” Dante said angrily. “God, I would have loved to see them drown in shit.”
“I would gladly have run the risk of going to jail, but I wouldn’t have risked your life. There would have been indictments, counterindictments, commissions of inquiry, and scandals, and any time a magistrate tried to open up the investigation again, he would have found himself facing the hostile ranks of everyone I’d gotten into trouble.”
Dante lowered the head of the bed, and then raised it again, punching the button furiously. “In the documentary, they say that you were given a medal.”
“I never went to pick it up.” Colomba pulled the blanket over her feet; it was cold out. “When they transferred me to the hospital in Rome, the real circus began. The journalists snuck in everywhere to try to get a firsthand account. Then there were all of your fans who wanted me to confess that I’d murdered you. That was a rumor that started to circulate, too.”
“I know. The Truth about Dante Torre. I’m almost proud of it.”
“One guy disguised himself as a nurse to get into the hospital to force a confession out of me, but luckily they caught him at the entrance.” The man had borrowed a smock from a friend of his who was a baker, covered with flour, to serve as his lab coat, and carried a knife. “The people I felt worst about, though, were my fellow cops.”
“Why?”
“Because they just weren’t finding you. I had become an oathbreaker, and no one knew where I was. I was rude to everyone. And even before I finished the initial period of convalescence, the psychophysical evaluation arrived saying that I was no longer fit for active duty. The best I could have hoped for would be to be put in charge of the passport office, or something like that. Anyway, I had no interest in staying on the force. Not after what I’d done. I turned in my resignation and left.”
The first time, she’d managed to drive exactly three miles before fetching up against a Jersey barrier and totaling her car. The anti-anxiety drugs made her dopey, and her reaction times were flattened. The second time she’d taken the train and established residence in the old family house. And there she had remained.
“There was nothing I could do to find you. And there was nothing new about you. Ever,” said Colomba. “There were plenty of times when I thought I should have just told the truth and hoped for someone better than Di Marco or the magistrates who’d taken over the investigation to come along. I continue to think it. Maybe someone else would have found you faster.”
Dante rolled from one side to the other, like a caterpillar in agony. “No. Get that idea out of your head,” he said. “You did what you could.”
“No, I got it all wrong.” Colomba sniffed. “I couldn’t stop Giltine. I ran the risk of getting you killed. I told lie after lie. And all for nothing. They just let you rot.” Colomba sniffed loudly again.
“But that wasn’t your fault, CC. I’m furious at that crowd of spies and politicians who rewrite history as they please. And who blackmail decent people.” He shook his head. “Nothing new about that, it’s never been any different. Luckily, once I get out of here, I’ll never have to deal with any of them again.”
Colomba sighed. “Speaking of which … There’s another thing you need to know.”
5
Colomba told Dante about her meeting with D’Amore. “He asked me if I wanted to work with the counterterrorism division.”
“And you told him to go to hell, I trust?” Dante scrutinized her face.
“No, I didn’t.”
He pulled a pack of cigarettes out from under the covers and lit one.
Colomba lunged at him. “Have you lost your mind?” she screamed. She tried to grab the cigarette out of his hand, but Dante made it disappear between his fingers like a magician practicing sleight of hand, only to pull it out of his ear a second later. He pretended it came as easily to him as it had in the old days, but to judge from the grimace on his face, the cigarette might as well have been made of lead.
“CC, I’m an adult, registered to vote and legally responsible,” he said, taking a puff in the style of Humphrey Bogart.
“And you’re convalescent.” Colomba tossed cigarette and pack into the courtyard. “You can be as angry as you like, but it’s not a good reason to commit suicide. In any case, if I did accept, I wouldn’t really be working for them, I’d just pretend, and then we could use the things that they know. The information would travel in only one direction.”
“Why would you want to do such a thing?”
“To find Leo. Don’t you think that’s a good enough reason?”
“Definitely not.”
“There was a time when Leo was an obsession for you. You’d have given I don’t know what to lay your hands on him,” Colomba said in her astonishment.
“Then he laid his hands on me and I got over my obsession.”
“I have a duty to find Leo, too.”
“You’re a victim just like I am, CC. And a victim’s only duty is to try to feel better.” A shadow passed over Colomba’s face, and she looked away. But Dante noticed that, and in his head another piece of the puzzle fell back into place: him on the train to Venice, watching Leo and Colomba leave the compartment together, with the same glint in their eyes. “You fucked him.”
Colomba chewed a fingernail. “I knew it was too much to hope you hadn’t noticed. Anyway, it’s none of your business who I go to bed with.”
Dante raised his voice and coughed until he couldn’t speak. “He kidnapped me! And he’s my brother! If he’d gotten you pregnant, now I’d be your child’s uncle!”
“Stop talking bullshit. And Leo’s DNA shows no connection with yours.”
“Where’d they get the sample, from the crotch of your panties?”
Colomba threw a combat boot at him, and missed him by a whisker. “Asshole! They did the test on a hair, but I’ll say it again, it’s none of your fucking business. I feel guilty toward myself for having fallen for it, not toward you.”
The late-afternoon light hit the side of Colomba’s face. Dante had a familiar stab in his stomach. My God, she’s pretty, he thought. And he realized that he felt something deep inside he’d never experienced before: jealousy. It was a feeling he despised, and his tone of voice turned even harsher. “Okay,” he said without looking at her. “Sorry. It’s been a bad day. But you can go ahead and tell D’Amore that I won’t work for him.”
“It’s me he wants,” Colomba replied in an icy tone.
“Don’t fool yourself. They’re using you to try to get me to change my mind. That’s the way Di Marco manipulates people.”
“I’m not so easy to manipulate.”
“Did you tell Leo that when you were locked in the bathroom on the train together?” Dante asked, and he regretted it as soon as he said it.
“Fuck yourself.” Colomba hopped over to get the combat boot and left.
6
Colomba leaped into her car with a welter of
rage, shame, and disappointment in her stomach. How the fuck could Dante be so ungrateful, such a complete oaf …
When she felt as bad as this, Colomba usually went for a run, but that morning she’d already taken one around the hospital and she wasn’t sufficiently back in shape to go for another one. So she headed toward Conigliano, a small town not far away that had a shooting range in a large industrial shed in the countryside. She’d planned to go see the place one of these days. The owner sold her two boxes of fifty bullets each and took her out to the firing line. There were twenty ranges, most of them occupied by shooters of every sort, ranging from a bodybuilder covered with neo-Nazi tattoos to an old man who cleaned his glasses after every shot.
The proprietor gave her a pair of shooting earmuffs. “From the way you handle your weapon, I can see that you know what you’re doing, but the law requires me to give you the basic safety instructions, since this is your first time here.”
Colomba nodded her head. The man showed her how to load and unload her gun, and how to move on the range. He fired three shots in rapid succession at the silhouette of a man with hat and pistol, at twenty yards, and got a pretty good score in spite of the way he squinted behind the thick lenses of his eyeglasses. Then he handed her the weapon. “It’s all yours.”
Colomba reloaded. The instructor noticed how she moved her fingers. “Army?”
“Police. Retired.”
“Many of your fellow cops don’t even know which way to point the barrel.”
“Many of my fellow cops never needed to know, which is just lucky for them.”
Colomba emptied the first magazine with slow, careful shots. She was an average marksman, and her lack of exercise wasn’t helping any. She hit the lower belly of the target instead of the chest, then she raised the gun slightly and hit heart, throat, and face. The instructor nodded. “I’d say you can take it from here. Enjoy yourself.”
Colomba emptied eight magazines and reduced ten silhouettes to tatters, then she bought another hundred bullets and shot those off, too, this time in rapid fire. When she was done, her wrist and shoulders ached, but she felt much more relaxed. She cleaned her sidearm and then went to say goodbye to the proprietor.
“I noticed that you’re not using a holster,” he said. “If yours is worn out, I have a couple at an affordable price.”
“I’m just used to doing it this way,” said Colomba, slipping the pistol into her jacket pocket: the lining was full of holes and soaked in gun oil.
The proprietor raised his goggles. “Signorina, if I were twenty years younger, you’d be my dream woman.”
“Thanks. That’s the nicest thing anybody’s said to me in quite a long time,” she replied.
She walked out into the deserted parking lot, her ears still buzzing from the gunshots. In spite of an orange streetlamp, it was much darker than when she had parked, but Colomba was too relaxed and charged with endorphins to worry about that.
Then she felt a breath on the back of her neck.
7
Colomba tried to draw her sidearm, but she wasn’t fast enough. She felt someone grab her by the hair and shove her violently against the window of the Panda. Her nose crunched, her lungs contracted. She screamed with her lips smeared against the glass, but no sound came out.
Leo.
Another shove, this time slamming her down on the car’s hood. Sounds turned soft and echoey, her mouth filled up with the taste of blood. In that frozen moment she relived all the times that she’d imagined him in a flickering shadow, in a soft creak. The gloved hands clenched down hard around her neck and darkness grew denser and thicker.
All right, okay, she thought, and in some strange fashion she felt strangely lightened. At least now it will be over.
Then she caught a whiff of the stench of the man who was strangling her. It was an acid odor, reeking of filth and sweat. Colomba remembered Leo’s odor, the taste of his mouth, the shape of his body.
This wasn’t Leo.
This wasn’t Leo.
Her rage pumped her up with strength. Colomba slammed her foot backward and behind her felt an ankle collapsing beneath the sole of her combat boot. The compression of the hands around her throat subsided, and her lungs opened to the outside air. She managed to get turned three-quarters of the way around. Her assailant was a skinny man with a ski mask and the jumpsuit of a blue-collar worker.
This isn’t Leo, she told herself for the third time.
Colomba tried to yank her pistol out of her pocket: the man knocked her over with his full body weight and she slammed onto the pavement; her pistol slid far away.
She felt one of her incisors chip against the dirty cement, she tasted burnt oil and diesel fuel. She twisted her face and snapped her teeth shut, blindly, biting deep into the muscles of a thigh. The man howled in pain, and Colomba heard a familiar note in that voice, though she couldn’t quite place it because the ski mask camouflaged the sound. She rolled away, without even trying to get to her feet, and slid under the Panda. She lay there, flat on her back, monitoring the moves of the man, pulling her switchblade knife out of her left boot. She opened it slowly, silently, hoping that her assailant would bend down so she could slide the blade into him. Instead she saw the tennis shoes running away, and an instant later she heard the sound of something metallic scraping across the cement of the parking lot.
My gun! Colomba thought as she dragged herself toward the front wheels. The man with the ski mask knelt down and fanned the gun as he fired, sending the bullets in a spreading array underneath the car. One bullet ricocheted off the chassis’s underframe, hitting the cement on a trajectory perpendicular to her face. Colomba yanked herself out from under the car with all the strength in both hands and started running when she was still down on all fours. The man with the ski mask fired again, and the bullets went astray, spewing sparks in the darkness. The side window of one car shattered into smithereens, and the siren of the alarm went off.
Zigzagging at a dead run, Colomba crossed the parking lot back the way she’d come, taking shelter behind the corner of the industrial shed that housed the shooting range. She flattened herself against the wall, clutching the knife with both hands, spitting out blood and saliva. No sign of the man with the ski mask. Colomba cautiously looked behind her: the parking lot was deserted and darkness had enveloped the surrounding fields.
All of the customers who had been in the shooting range were now arrayed outside the front door, alerted by the shouting. Colomba announced that she’d been attacked, and that she would personally file a criminal complaint. “Do you have security tapes of the parking lot?”
“The only security cameras are inside and at the front door. I’m sorry,” the proprietor replied.
Of course, thought Colomba. “In that case, a list of your members.”
“Signorina … there are regulations concerning privacy …”
Colomba rubbed the blood from her nose and then wiped her hand off on the proprietor’s shirt. “If you don’t get moving, I’ll take this place apart, piece by piece.”
The proprietor got moving.
8
It was ten o’clock by the time Colomba arrived back at the hospital, covered with blood and oil. Alberti, who just then was chatting with a male nurse outside the front entrance, took off toward her at a run the minute he saw her. “Deputy Captain? What on earth happened to you?”
“Mind your own fucking business,” she retorted. “And it’ll be your ass if you buy cigarettes for Dante again.”
The tent was glowing faintly in the darkness. Colomba went in through the ambulance entrance and shoved the mosquito netting aside. Dante was sitting on the bed, smoking a cigarette while he watched TV.
“They made a special just about me,” he said, quickly tucking the new pack away under the bedsheets. Then he got a look at her. “Oh, fuck. Who was it?” he murmured.
“It’s not as bad as it looks.”
“I hope not, because it really looks awful,” said D
ante. “Let me call the doctor.”
“No. I want to find the asshole who attacked me.” She sat down stiffly on the edge of the bed. “Take a look and tell me if you see anything.”
“Blood,” Dante replied, on the verge of panic.
“Look again. You’re my only alternative to the Forensic Squad, seeing that I can’t alert the cops.”
“And why can’t you alert them?” Dante asked, moving away from her dirty jacket.
“Because it might have been one of Leo’s accomplices.”
“So you have to find him all by yourself, you against everyone.” Dante shook his head. “It would certainly help if you could tell me what happened.”
“A guy attacked me in the parking lot at the Conigliano shooting range.” She told him all about it, while Dante delicately removed her jacket and examined her, mostly in an effort to keep her calm.
“This doesn’t seem much like Leo’s MO,” said Dante cautiously.
“Do you seriously believe that you know how he thinks?”
“I definitely think that it’s possible to find more efficient killers than whoever attacked you in such a clumsy way.” Dante sighed. “Lift your sweater, please.”
Colomba did as she was told. “You might be right. It could have been that asshole Lupo … He couldn’t take the way I made him look like a fool.”
Dante directed the swing-arm side table lamp to illuminate her neck. He saw blood, dirt, and bruises. “Um.”
“Um what?”
“Um, I don’t know. Was he wearing gloves?”
Kill the King Page 19