Kill the King

by Sandrone Dazieri

  “If Martina had been a diabetic, she’d have been kicked off the force. That’s a disability-level disease.”

  Dante mopped his sweat-pearled brow: the cyclists’ beverage had stopped working on him. “From the autopsy, it appears that her C-peptide was lower than normal. You know what that is, right?”

  “Pass me the walker.”

  Dante raised both hands. “Okay, okay. It’s more or less a precursor enzyme of insulin. If it’s too low with respect to the insulin levels in the bloodstream, then it means that the insulin wasn’t produced in the pancreas, but was injected externally. I learned that from the reports on suicides among paramedics in the United States, because injecting insulin is the method they most commonly use. To kill patients, too.”

  “And you think that Leo used it on Martina?”

  Dante mimed an injection. “He caught her off guard and gave her an injection in the belly, where he knew that the wound would cover up the needle mark. A powerful dose on a nondiabetic with an empty stomach can be fatal. In just a few seconds, they practically can’t stay on their feet anymore. Then he gave her some sugar to raise her blood sugar levels, and when he realized she was coming to, he impaled her.”

  “Fuck.”

  “And she experienced every instant of the agony, wide-awake, the poor thing,” Dante said with an absent look in his eyes.

  “If she’d moved away, maybe she’d still be alive,” said Colomba. “She told her landlady that she was going to be transferred, even though there’s no mention of the fact in the reports that I read.”

  Dante raised his right eyebrow until it arched over his glasses.

  “Interesting. So who can tell us if there’s anything that was left out of the reports?”

  “No one but the Carabinieri.”

  “Then I have some bad news for you.”

  8

  At the front desk, Brigadier Bruno looked at the electronic image of Colomba in the video intercom as if someone had just dumped a truckload of manure on the front steps. She didn’t have her eyes turned toward the lens, and she seemed if anything more disgusted than he was. “What do you want?” he asked into the microphone, which turned his voice into a rasping electrical buzz.

  “Lupo. Please tell him that I’ll be in the café at the corner, and that I want to talk about Martina Concio.”

  “Don’t you dare speak Martina’s name, you understand?”

  “I’d gladly have avoided it. Tell him to get out here or I’ll just go home.”

  Bruno marched the length of the hallway. Lupo was in his office reading his men’s reports about various routine activities. His bruises had healed, but he’d been in a terrible mood for the past few weeks; as a result, the messages he’d been leaving on Vigevani’s voicemail had grown increasingly harsh. “For fuck’s sake, they can’t cut me out of this,” he would shout. When Bruno gave him Colomba’s message, he seethed with an icy rage.

  “I’ll tell her to go fuck herself,” Bruno said.

  Lupo clenched his jaw. “No. Let me do it.”

  “Don’t get yourself into trouble,” said Bruno. “Don’t forget she has protection in high places.”

  Lupo didn’t even bother to reply. He put on his jacket and charged out of his office, hand instinctively resting on the butt of the pistol on his hip. Just a few yards away from the café, he recognized Colomba’s profile, but he also noticed that she was not alone. She was sitting at a table with someone who looked like a bearded version of David Bowie. That was who turned around and watched Lupo approach, gazing out over his mirrored sunglasses with an ironic glint in his eyes. “Sergeant Major, buonasera. I’m so happy to make your acquaintance,” he said.

  “And who, sir, are you?”

  “The world’s most frequently kidnapped man: three times, twice by the same person, and the third, they tell me, by ISIS. Just imagine me without a beard and without a glove.” Slipping off the leather glove, Dante showed him his bad hand.

  Lupo felt his legs give out beneath him. “Jesus, Joseph, and Mary,” he said. “I don’t believe it.”

  Dante handed him the glass of vodka tonic he’d been drinking, and which had restored his good mood and sped up his heart rate. “You can check my fingerprints. I’m in the files. When Colomba beat you up in the forest, she was on her way to rescue me.”

  Colomba nodded. “I’m sorry about that, Lupo, but I didn’t really have any choice in the matter.”

  “You could have told me so, instead of coming at me like that!”

  “You never would have believed me, not with Martina’s corpse front of mind.”

  Lupo felt his rage oozing out of his pores. “Afterward, though, I would have. I’ve spent the past month asking myself what the fuck’s going on. Who killed her? Was it ISIS?”

  “Sure, exactly, it was ISIS,” said Dante sarcastically.

  “In the person of Bonaccorso,” Colomba intervened. “We think it was him.”

  “That piece of shit was buzzing around here?” Lupo asked in disbelief.

  “You don’t know anything about the investigation because the DCT doesn’t trust you,” Dante put in, referring to the Department of Counter-terrorism. “But we’re not from counterterrorism and we’re here to offer you an olive branch. As well as something to drink.”

  Lupo sat down and ordered a glass of bourbon, even though he never drank in the daytime. The situation struck him as surreal. Here he was, having a relaxed conversation with a man whom everyone else thought was dead, sitting at a table in a café with the woman who had broken his nose. “Why would you do that?”

  “We need information. Let’s just say that we’re in a race with the DCT to find Bonaccorso first,” said Dante.

  “Obviously if you went around talking about it, we could all be charged with leaking state secrets,” Colomba said. “So keep your mouth shut.”

  “Do you really think that all Carabinieri are idiots?” asked Lupo.

  “No, that’s what I think, sheriff,” said Dante caustically.

  “Don’t call me sheriff. So do the Melases have anything to do with this story?”

  Colomba paused and, looking the sergeant major in the eyes, said: “They were the boy’s jailers. Bonaccorso killed them before leaving town.”

  Lupo shook his head. “This is just a shower of bullshit.”

  Dante loosened his tie and unbuttoned his shirt. “You see this scar? That’s where Bonaccorso stuck a tube in me to get me to breathe. He held me hostage for a year and a half. Call it whatever you like, but it’s not bullshit.”

  Lupo looked away. “What do you want to know?”

  “Did Martina have a boyfriend?” Dante asked, rebuttoning his shirt and tightening his tie.

  “Not that I know of. And I would have known.”

  “Colomba said that she had seen her with the mechanic who killed himself.” He pretended to think hard. “What was his name again?”

  Lupo snapped again. “Loris Mantoni? That junkie? Not on your life.”

  “Maybe she didn’t know he was a junkie,” Colomba put in.

  “Everyone knew it.” The waiter brought the glass of bourbon and Lupo turned it slowly in his hands. “Especially the Carabinieri. He’d been raising hell since he was a minor.”

  “Narcotics every time?”

  “And aggravated fraud and stalking, even though when he did it, it was basically just busting people’s balls. There were also a couple of involuntary mental health commitments.” He shrugged. “Lately, he’d been clean, but that didn’t last. Still, it wasn’t all his fault. His father is a real piece of shit. He beat the brains out of Loris, and by the time he was done, the boy was an idiot.”

  “Who is his father?”

  “A guy who’s always drunk and hangs around in the bar in Conigliano. He beat his wife, he beat his son, and he still beats anyone he takes a dislike to. He’s done some time behind bars, too, always for crimes on the general level of stealing chickens. Now he’s a truck driver. Gaspare is his na
me.”

  Colomba jotted that down.

  “Is there anything else you need? I have work to do,” said Lupo.

  “Just tell us why Martina wanted to get out of Portico.”

  Lupo stiffened. “Who fed you that nonsense?”

  Dante narrowed his eyes and Lupo felt as if he were being X-rayed. “Maybe you didn’t know about it. Because maybe the young woman bypassed you and spoke directly to the high command.”

  “Impossible.”

  “Then why had she given up her rental?”

  “Did you talk to her landlady?” Lupo asked uneasily.

  “And we searched her apartment, too,” Dante said, still staring at him. “Don’t worry, there wasn’t anything interesting.”

  “Why should there have been?” Lupo asked, in a tone of voice that sounded less relaxed than he’d meant it to.

  “Do you know that you just relaxed your shoulders? What were you worried about?”

  Colomba squeezed his arm. “Can I talk to you for a second, Dante? It seems to me we’re wandering a little far afield.”

  “Not so. It was Martina who put the hammer in your house, CC. And Lupo knew it.”

  9

  Colomba had seen Dante play this game many times before, but she’d never gotten used to it. He used words like electric shocks to trigger certain emotions, and then he read them. But how had he managed to link the hammer found in her backyard with Martina? She’d never suspected the young woman for a second.

  Still, there could be no doubt that Dante had hit a bull’s-eye. Lupo had turned red and was struggling to conceal his dismay behind a mask of anger. “I don’t give a fuck who you think you are, don’t you dare insinuate anything of the sort.”

  “I have no intention of telling anyone else about it,” Dante replied, unruffled.

  “You can count on my discretion, too, Lupo,” Colomba said, supporting Dante’s play. “And I can assure you that whatever you tell us will help track down Bonaccorso. Was Martina working with you?”

  “No, and I didn’t know anything about it,” Lupo grumbled after a few seconds. “I only figured it out later, on my own.”

  “How?”

  Lupo pulled his wallet out of his pocket and reached into it. He took out a piece of brightly colored cloth, which he then laid in front of Dante. “I found this among her things. If you try to lay a finger on it, I swear to God I’ll shoot you.”

  “CC … do you know what this is?”

  Colomba recognized the Disney-style patterns. “It looks like a piece of Tommy’s pillowcase. Which is what the hammer was wrapped up in.”

  Lupo nodded and put the scrap of cloth back in his pocket. “Martina was the first to arrive at the Melas home. Maybe she found the hammer and hid it, but I swear to God I have no idea why she would have done anything that fucked up. The only thing that occurred to me is that she might have been trying to protect the boy, but why she would have decided to hide it from you …”

  Dante gestured to Colomba: Lupo was speaking the truth. “I don’t believe that this was Martina’s idea. I think that Bonaccorso must have talked her into it,” he said.

  “In order to frame the Deputy Captain?” asked Lupo, who was starting to see the light.

  Dante nodded. “Bonaccorso is afraid of Colomba. He knows that sooner or later she’s going to get her hands on him.”

  Colomba was certain that Dante was lying, but she didn’t let on.

  Lupo stood up. “How long is this story of Bonaccorso going to remain a military secret?”

  “Until he’s caught, and maybe even after that,” said Colomba. “I’m sorry.”

  “I talk to Martina’s parents nearly every day. They’re sure their daughter was killed in the line of duty. I won’t allow anyone to tell them that she slipped on a banana peel.”

  “That won’t happen,” said Dante. “I promise you. And we’ll keep you briefed on all the developments in the investigation, if you’ll keep your lips zipped with the intelligence agencies.”

  Lupo pointed his finger right at her face. “Make sure you do, or I’ll come looking for you.”

  He turned to go, and Dante smiled at Colomba. “We have an ally.”

  She seized him by the lapels of his jacket. “The next time you try something like that, I’ll upend you into a ditch. Why didn’t you tell me about Martina? I’m not very fond of playing the fool.”

  “Because I just figured it out here and now.”

  “Don’t make me laugh.”

  10

  When they got back to Mezzanotte, Alberti and Esposito were finishing dinner; they’d moved the kitchen table outside and placed it on the patio. “Thanks for waiting for us!” said Colomba. “You could have locked us out while you were at it.”

  “We waited for you, but it’s ten o’clock …” Esposito justified himself.

  “We kept some pasta warm for you, Deputy Captain,” said Alberti. “Sugo del poliziotto, cop sauce, with everything we found in the fridge. And without meat for Signor Torre.”

  “Thanks, but I’m not hungry,” he said, heading around the house to his bedroom, while Colomba scarfed down the leftover pasta directly from the pan before heading off to take a shower.

  In the meantime, Dante got the two men to help him haul the kitchen sofa out into the backyard, and he stretched out on it, staring up at the night sky and ruminating while chain-smoking.

  After the surge of excitement of the first day’s investigation, he’d plunged back into the deep well of sadness that always followed any time spent thinking about the Father. He hated the man, but the Father was also a part of him, the person who had been there as Dante grew from a child to a man, his captor but also his mentor. Dante thought back to the silo, where he’d been confined for thirteen years, only snippets of which he could even remember, snippets that were hard to place. In his memory, everything unfolded the same way, over and over: the Father’s visits, studying, the intelligence tests, and the grueling puzzle sessions … to say nothing of the pain from the clubbings he was forced to inflict on his own hand every time he behaved like a “beast that had to be punished.” He couldn’t remember the day of his kidnapping. He could only remember the day of his escape, when he’d caught the German off guard; everything that surfaced in his mind from his life prior to that moment was a lie, Dante knew it: false memories shaped by his jailer, day after day, year after year. Could Leo really be the solution to the mystery of his identity? Or were the memories of the Box nothing more than a nightmare?

  “Still got the blues?” Colomba asked him, sticking her head out of the glass door. She’d changed into her usual threadbare track suit.

  Dante sat upright. “I’m just thinking about the past, a past that never dies. And I wonder what my brother had in mind, when he decided to bring the war here.”

  “What war?”

  Dante gave her his usual wicked grin. “The war between Good and Evil, no? Why didn’t he leave you be? Why did he abandon me like a bag of garbage?”

  “I was hoping you could tell me that.”

  Dante tapped his fingers on his forehead. “There’s nothing but empty space in here. And you’re the cop, after all.”

  “Ex-cop …” Colomba muttered.

  “That’s right, you’re a civilian consultant.” He smiled. “Do you think the intelligence agencies might have anything useful on the mechanic?”

  “Maybe so, but I don’t intend to ask them about him. They haven’t linked his suicide to Leo, and I don’t want to be the reason they connect the dots. The same thing applies to Tommy and the Father. Every piece of information we ask for is another piece of information we give them.”

  “Won’t Di Marco notice that he’s being cut out of the loop?”

  Colomba made room for herself on the sofa and tugged a piece of blanket over her. “I spent ten years managing superior officers who wanted immediate results. I know how much rope I can take.”

  “So how do you plan to operate?”

 
“In classic tradition: wearing out shoe leather.”

  11

  During the week that followed, while Dante recovered his strength, a little more each day, Colomba and her team tracked down friends and family of Loris and Martina, doing their best to figure out whether the two of them had met anyone who could have been Leo or an accomplice of his. They came up empty-handed for the most part, however: Martina had confided in a couple of girlfriends that she expected a future promotion, but she hadn’t said anything more than that, while Loris’s friends—few in number and by and large junkies or alkies—told them that in the past month Loris had cut all ties and just stayed home getting fucked up; and what’s worse, without offering any of his old friends so much as a taste.

  Colomba also went to meet Tommy’s elderly grandparents, the father and mother of Teresa’s first husband. They lived in the city of Biella, in a gray apartment house; their skin was the same color as the building. If she’d ever seen anyone who was doing nothing but waiting to die, that would have been the elderly Carabbas. From her meeting with them, Colomba learned only two things: that they hated their daughter-in-law, and that they considered her to have been responsible for their son’s death, if only morally speaking. Teresa liked to live life large, constantly busting her husband’s chops for not making enough money, and doing everything she could to get rid of her son by placing him in an institute somewhere, in spite of the fact that her husband had been opposed to that course of action, because he loved Tommy.

  “Tommy’s therapist claims that they had a good relationship, Teresa and the boy,” said Colomba, who had introduced herself as a social worker.

  “Maybe now,” said the old man. “Back in the day, I think that she was just sorry that Tommy hadn’t been killed along with his father.”

  “What about after his death? What happened?”

  “What happened is that Teresa left, no more than six months later, taking Tommy with her. She wanted to make money in Greece as a tour operator. And she said that the saltwater would be good for the boy.”