Kill the King

by Sandrone Dazieri

  “When was the last time you saw Tommy?” Colomba asked.

  “I went to see him the day before they left. He was sobbing like crazy. He had understood that he was going to have to leave his country for good.”

  “Now he’s back.”

  The Carabbas exchanged a glance. “Maybe they should have stayed in Greece,” the grandmother said.

  * * *

  Esposito and Alberti, again working as a team, were assigned to take on the mechanic’s father, Gaspare Mantoni. Just as Lupo had said, the man spent his time in a bar in Conigliano that was a hangout for truck drivers, when he wasn’t out driving big rigs, that is. Mantoni was sixty years old and was short and skinny, with a flattened nose, hard muscles under his checkered shirt, and veins that popped on the backs of his hands.

  Esposito decided that the man was a troublemaker the instant he saw him, with both elbows propped on the bar and a glass of red wine in front of him. Esposito flashed his badge. “Signor Mantoni?”

  “Here they are again, come back to bust my balls,” the man said to the bartender, who prudently pretended to be absorbed in the task of washing glasses.

  “We won’t take much of your time. What do you say, can we talk outside?”

  “I’m fine right here.”

  Alberti took up a stance behind Loris’s father’s back, while Esposito dragged a stool over to the counter. He turned to look at the man and said: “You think you’re scaring me by acting like an asshole? I eat jerks like you for breakfast.”

  Mantoni knocked his glass over with a jerk of the elbow, pouring the wine onto Esposito’s wool trousers. “Oops.”

  Esposito let loose with a back-of-the-hand smack in the face. But Mantoni dodged the blow with a feline lunge, then grabbed a bottle off the bar and smashed it on the edge. Alberti grabbed him from behind, forcing him to drop the broken bottle, but the other man launched a kick at Esposito, knocking him to the floor, and pinned Alberti behind him against a column. Voices were raised from the other tables, demanding the two policemen let their friend go, and glasses and bags of potato chips came flying from all directions at the officers.

  “We didn’t start it!” Alberti shouted, giving Mantoni a hard punch to the kidneys. He whipped around, windmilling his callused fists, but Esposito tackled him around the legs, sending him sprawling onto the floor. The two cops rolled him out onto the sidewalk in front of the bar, while Alberti shouted at the other bargoers to remain seated.

  Esposito reached into his pocket for his expandable steel baton and snapped it open with a flick of the wrist. “You want me to stick this up your ass?”

  Mantoni laughed and pointed at the red stain on the front of Esposito’s trousers. “You forgot to put in your tampon, you little pussy.”

  Esposito smashed the baton into his teeth, crushing his lips. “I’ll put your tampon in for you, you piece of shit.”

  Mantoni whipped around on all fours, spitting blood and chuckling. “All right. What the fuck do you want?”

  Esposito slammed the baton down again, this time on his back. “I want to talk about your son. You understand, you dumbass mule?”

  The man leaned back against the wall and rolled himself a cigarette, soaking it in blood. “What the fuck do you want with him? He’s dead.”

  “We’ll ask the questions,” Esposito replied, letting the steel baton swing back and forth right in front of the man’s nose. Mantoni didn’t seem especially daunted. “When was the last time you saw him?”

  “At the morgue. They brought me in to identify him.”

  “Before that!”

  “Two months ago. I went to his shop to get a new set of tires.”

  “And you never saw him alive again?”

  “No.”

  “Did you know that he was doing drugs?”

  “I thought he’d given that up, but people like him never quit.” Mantoni lit his crumpled, red-stained cigarette. “They just take a break, so that they enjoy it more when they start up again.”

  “Maybe he needed some help,” said Alberti.

  Mantoni shrugged. “Maybe so. But who the fuck am I to try to teach other people how to live?”

  “So the whole month before he killed himself, you never once talked to him?” Esposito asked.

  “On the phone, a couple of times.”

  “About what?”

  “What the fuck do you care?”

  Esposito slammed the baton down onto the man’s thigh.

  Mantoni rubbed it. “Fuck off. One of the tires was worn out, and I wanted to return it, but he never opened the repair shop up. Both times, he hung up on me, with some excuse.”

  “What excuse?”

  “He said that he was talking on the other line. But don’t ask me who with or what about, because he didn’t tell me.” He spat the cigarette butt down a sewer grate and stood up. “Can I go now, or do you want to count the hairs on my dick?”

  “Do you know that we could arrest you for assaulting a law enforcement officer?” said Alberti.

  “Then arrest me, what am I supposed to tell you?”

  “Fuck off. Go on, get out of here.” Esposito gave him a shove.

  Without turning around, Mantoni gave them the finger. “If you change your minds, I’m right here.”

  12

  While the two policemen were recovering from the brawl with Loris’s father, Colomba came back from Biella and managed to drag Dante off the sofa in order to go meet Demetra Melas. The woman had moved to Caglio, a small town not far from Portico, but a bit farther down in the lowlands. She was in a farmhouse that had been adapted for use as a group living facility, for the most part inhabited by old people who kept chickens and rabbits in their patches of the garden. Demetra used her patch of land to sit at a small plastic table, smoking, yelling at her neighbors if they made noise, and throwing rocks at the chickens. She kept a pair of Doberman pinschers she’d had sent to Italy directly from Athens. When the dogs saw Colomba and Dante arriving, they leaped to their feet snarling.

  “The lady ex-cop has come to pay a visit.” Demetra laughed. “And she even brought her handicapped friend along for the ride.”

  “How could I miss such a gracious social occasion?” Dante stepped away from his walker and extended his good hand toward the dogs’ snouts.

  Colomba clutched the pistol in her jacket pocket with the torn lining. “Don’t do anything stupid.”

  Dante scratched the Dobermans behind the ears, and the two dogs immediately stopped barking and greeted him delightedly. “Don’t do anything stupid like what?”

  “Don’t touch my dogs!” Demetra yelled.

  “And don’t you keep them on chains,” said Dante, unhooking them.

  Colomba put her hand on the grip of her sidearm again, but the two Dobermans ignored her and trotted around the courtyard, peeing repeatedly. Demetra went to get them by the scruff of their necks, and angrily locked them up in her mini-apartment.

  “Do you mind telling me what else you want from me?” she asked.

  Dante leaned on the walker. “To tell you that you’ll never see your brother’s money,” he said laconically.

  Demetra’s eyes narrowed. “It’s Tommy’s money.”

  “The money is going to be placed under judicial seal because it’s the proceeds of illegal activities. When the investigations are complete, you’ll be lucky if you aren’t under judicial restraint yourself.”

  Demetra laughed wholeheartedly. “How idiotic. Your brain is as lame as your legs.”

  Dante took off his glove. “My name is Dante Torre. Your brother changed my IV bags for a year and a half while I was being held prisoner by a terrorist named Leo Bonaccorso.”

  Colomba hauled him away. “Are you planning to tell everyone every single detail? I mean, okay if it’s Lupo, but even this slut—”

  “If you’d rather torture her, be my guest. Otherwise, this is the only thing we have to offer in exchange. In any case, if she’s had anything to do with this, she already
knows all about it, and she knows that we know, too.”

  Colomba huffed in annoyance. “So be it, but if you keep this up, they’re going to shut down this investigation before we can even get started.” She grabbed two chairs and turned to look at Demetra. “Now let’s have a chat.”

  Demetra surprised them both by pulling out a cheap, outlet-brand bottle of brandy from under the table. “Then let’s drink to your health, Torre.” She poured the liquor into two plastic cups: Colomba didn’t even touch hers, Dante grimaced after sniffing at his. “You’re famous, even in Greece. Someone kidnapped you in Venice, right?”

  “Right.”

  “It’s obvious that my brother had nothing to do with it, but I’m not interested in running any risks. How much money do you want?”

  “I’m not trying to blackmail you, Demetra. There’s nothing I can do to help you to inherit that money by proxy. Tommy’s money is going to remain frozen for years, unless it turns out that your brother was innocent. But … that’s impossible. Your brother really did act as my jailer on Bonaccorso’s behalf. When the story becomes public, you’ll know all the sordid details.” Colomba realized that Dante was playacting once again.

  Though she didn’t like it, she could guess at his objective.

  “It wasn’t him,” said Demetra.

  “How can you be so sure?” Dante asked.

  “Because he wasn’t a bad person. He was a coward, like all men, but he wouldn’t have hurt a fly. Plus, it would have disgusted him to care for you. He couldn’t even bring himself to get a tick off a dog.”

  “I never said that it had been his idea.”

  Demetra crushed her cigarette out on her heel. “If he did it under duress, then he was innocent.”

  “That depends on how badly they threatened him and how much he got out of it. There was certainly a lot of money in his account …”

  “If you say so in court, they’ll believe you,” said Demetra. “Or are you trying to avenge a death?”

  “We need evidence,” said Colomba. “Revenge has nothing to do with it.”

  “Then let’s get back to the reason we came here in the first place,” said Dante. “To see Tommy. To ask him some questions. His money is none of my concern, but if I do find something out, that’ll be to his benefit as well.”

  Demetra looked at him, mulling it over. At last, she said: “As you can imagine, he’s not in my custody yet. Otherwise I’d have left for Greece, taking him with me. The judge says that he has to wait until the completion of the investigation into my brother.”

  “But can you visit him freely?” Colomba asked.

  “Yes.”

  “The next time you go, tell the director that you want to have him examined by a psychiatric expert.”

  “There’s already that clown Pala.”

  Dante glared at her. “Do you want to get your money or not?”

  “Okay.”

  “Trust me, you need to speak in person to anyone you reach out to,” Colomba weighed in. “Don’t forget that you’re still a person of interest and that they’re probably monitoring your phone calls.” She wrote down her cell phone number on a used train ticket and handed it to her. “Call me from a pay phone. And don’t use names.”

  Demetra took the rumpled ticket with the tips of her fingers, the nails spangled with tiny enamel stars, and slipped it under her bottom. “There’s one at the intersection. I’ll use it. In any case, if there’s anyone who was blackmailing him, it was Tommy’s mother.”

  “You already told me that she didn’t like you.”

  “That’s not the only reason … Aristides and I had been quarreling for years, mainly on account of his ‘girlfriends,’ if we can dignify the term. But he never held a grudge with me for more than a week. He’d send me a gift from some corner of the world, or he’d call me to send his best wishes. This time, he didn’t do it.” A drip of mascara ran down her cheek, under her left eye. “I ought to have reached out to him. It’s the only thing I blame myself for in this whole fucked-up story.”

  13

  That evening they had dinner with Bart at the Mago Merlino farmstay, while the policemen stayed home to count their bruises. This was the first time that Bart was seeing Dante wide-awake, and for half an hour the two of them talked uninterruptedly, partly about the last year and a half, partly about Dante’s state of health, which he claimed had never been better, though he was always exhausted by the time evening rolled around. The two women had passatelli al ragù di carne, while Dante picked at a dish of black truffle bruschetta—black truffles were easy to find in the forests around there. Bart updated them on her investigations at Villa Quiete, which so far hadn’t produced results any different than the findings of the military scientists.

  “It was a public building and there are thousands of genetic imprints, but the only one we were able to identify was yours,” she said, looking at Dante.

  “Not even the Melases’?” asked Colomba.

  “No. The same thing for the fingerprints and other strange particulate matter. Whoever it was, they were very careful.”

  “Did you do the exam on my brother’s samples?” Dante asked.

  “Yes, but he isn’t your brother,” said Bart.

  “Leave that alone,” said Colomba. “He’s fixated about this thing.”

  “I’m not fixated … So you collected them personally in the NOA dormitory?”

  “I did, with my team, why?”

  “Dante is convinced that Leo intentionally left the samples to be found,” said Colomba.

  Bart thought it over as she ate her tiramisu; she was the only one who had ordered dessert. “If you don’t take the samples directly from the person, there’s always a margin of risk, I suppose.”

  “Don’t give him any leeway, Bart …” said Colomba.

  “Then my brother’s DNA really could be in that clinic.”

  “I’d have noticed. We used yours as a baseline. Certainly, if Leo wasn’t your blood brother, then we’d have no way of knowing.”

  The waiter arrived. “Would anyone care for an espresso?”

  Dante smiled. “We all would, but not here. My survival kit has arrived, at last.”

  14

  Back in his room at the farmstay, Dante’s survival kit consisted of twenty or so cardboard boxes packed with clothing, bags of whole-bean coffee, assorted pharmaceuticals purchased on the Deep Web, two laptops and a desktop, an iPad, a countless array of chargers, three Kindles, a sixty-inch OLED television set, a Pure radio, a ring-shaped Dyson air purifier, and, most important of all, a professional-grade espresso machine on a base, which Dante lovingly preheated with all the focused care of an astronaut performing maintenance on his spaceship. He’d stealthily rummaged through the survival kit, found a couple of tablets, crushed them into powder, and snorted them, and now his pupils were enormous again. Bart and Colomba pretended not to notice and waited while he ground a handful of blackish and irregularly shaped coffee beans in a wooden hand grinder. As he turned the handle, it made as much noise as a jackhammer, then he filled the espresso machine’s filter baskets with the fine powdered coffee.

  “At last, I can put an end to my abstinence. Let’s celebrate with a little something from Misha’s Mundi Coffee. Peruvian. Probably the rarest brew on earth. I already wanted to let you try it before Venice, but it was vacuum-packed and it’s kept perfectly. Notes of tropical fruit, hay, and brandy, among other things.”

  “And does it come out of the butt of some wild animal?” Colomba asked suspiciously.

  “Mmm … yes.”

  “Oh, come on now …”

  “It’s not my fault that digestive enzymes have exceptional effects on the coffee beans. This was processed by South American ring-tailed coatimundi. They’re members of the raccoon family, and I assure you, they weren’t mistreated.”

  “All they have to do is poop out coffee so we can drink it,” said Bart, sprawled on Dante’s bed. She’d been working till all hours at the clinic a
nd she was exhausted.

  “The coffee beans are rinsed of the excrement and then roasted at four hundred and fifty degrees Fahrenheit. And there is excrement in everything we eat, like the peanuts on the counter of a bar. Half of them contain traces of fecal matter left by the waitstaff.”

  “That’s true,” Bart confirmed.

  “I’m going to throw up now,” said Colomba.

  Dante sniffed at the filter basket before twisting it into place. “How long has it been since you had any, CC? I’ve never seen you drink an espresso since you thawed me out.”

  “More or less since when we lost you,” said Colomba, gazing into his eyes.

  Dante remained motionless for a few seconds, then turned around and faced the espresso maker to keep from showing how deeply moved he was.

  Dante put five porcelain demitasse cups under the spouts and started the machine up. The room instantly filled with the sweet aroma of espresso. Colomba took her cup, her hands trembling, and not just because she was afraid of dropping it; Bart’s eyes were glistening. Alberti took a cup for himself and another for his partner, concealing the bottle of grappa he planned to use to spike it. Dante tossed back his cup in little more than a sip, then made two more for himself in rapid succession without another word. Colomba had no sooner finished hers—it seemed a little bland, she thought, but she kept her impression to herself—before she asked for another, even if the caffeine had immediately set her heart racing. “You’re actually back. I still can’t quite believe it.”

  “Maybe this is all a dream, and you’re bleeding out right now, dying on the floor of the Palasport back in Venice,” said Dante.

  “Don’t even joke about it.”

  Bart asked for a refill. “That’s the problem with the brain. It processes all the incoming information from the sensory organs, but sometimes it just creates new information out of nowhere, and there’s no real way of telling the difference.”

  “Will the two of you just cut it out?” Colomba grumbled. “I have nightmares as it is.”

  “She hates science,” Dante said to Bart with a complicit smile.