Kill the King

by Sandrone Dazieri

  Dante poured himself a glass of vodka to cut the tremors caused by the mix of caffeine and Ritalin. “While I was under anesthesia, I had a dream. My brother was in it. Every so often I remember another snippet of it. While nearly everything else disappears, Leo remains perfectly clear in my mind. I can hear his voice. And I see water submerging me.”

  “Okay …” said Esposito. “And we care about this why?”

  “In my dream, my brother wanted to warn me against someone. Maybe the conversation never actually took place, maybe it’s just my subconscious, but I’d say that this is the gist of the matter. Leo killed Belyy and let Giltine destroy his magic circle of accomplices. Impossible to think that there wasn’t someone behind him, providing him with information and logistical support.”

  “Someone from COW who wanted the old founder dead,” said Esposito.

  “Most likely. And now? Does he have a new boss? Who is he killing for?”

  “Maybe for himself.”

  “Or maybe he just hasn’t finished the job,” said Alberti.

  “There you go,” said Dante. “So he must have some gray eminence from COW in his sights.”

  “And you think he lives here?” Colomba asked acidly.

  “No, you live here. But let’s take it one step at a time. Esposito, you’re a policeman with a great deal of experience. How do you catch a fugitive on the run?”

  “You try to find out where he sleeps, who brings him food, or money …”

  “But what if they’re all dead already, or out of the game, like Belyy’s magic circle?”

  “Then you look at his relatives. Or doesn’t he have those, either?”

  “No relatives. No name and no face.”

  Esposito shrugged. “Then I’d give up. I’m not Merlin the Magician.”

  “Leo can’t give up. Because he knows that the person he’s looking for, who survived the massacre, knows him and can’t wait to take his revenge. CC?”

  “Try to make sure that it’s this person who sticks his nose out of hiding.”

  “Exactly. My brother is continuing to kill so as to attract his enemy’s attention. And from the way he’s operating, he’s absolutely terrified of this enemy.”

  3

  Bart’s assistants were photographing like crazy with their special cameras capable of picking up luminous radiation invisible to the naked eye. Their jumpsuits were dripping from the ambient humidity.

  “It’s too much, Dr. Bartone,” one of them, Robin Singh, said. Robin was a young man, barely twenty years old, who already had two university degrees in the hard sciences. “Bonaccorso couldn’t have been dripping wet when he got here. Maybe there’s something in the paint that’s causing a reaction.”

  “Take samples and check the spectrometry.” Bart took off her goggles to give them a wipe. “If they match, lay out a grid and take it all home. Imagine tiles ten centimeters on a side. I want a sample for every tile.”

  “Aye-aye, Doctor,” said Robin.

  “And keep a note of where you took it from.”

  Bart put her goggles back on and followed the bioluminescent wave all the way back to Dante’s prison, where the only wall that seemed to have been contaminated by aequorin was the far wall. While the phosphorescence faded as the molecules oxidized, Bart seemed to see a shape through the shadow. She shut her eyes, then opened them again, trying to look with her peripheral vision, off to one side where the rods were more light-sensitive.

  Just as it had seemed to her: an entire section of the wall—the central portion—wasn’t giving off any light at all. The glowing wave stopped there and started up again immediately on the other side. A section roughly the size of a French door.

  Bart hurried to delineate the boundaries with adhesive markers that were phosphorescent in their turn, though in another hue and still visible in daylight.

  “Turn on the lights!” she shouted as she shut her eyes. The fluorescent overheads flickered to life, and Bart opened her eyes again and looked at the wall in front of her. All that could be seen were her markers; the rest was perfectly uniform. She tapped with her gloved hand on the section she’d marked off. It made exactly the same sound as the rest of the wall.

  D’Amore stuck his head in. “Something good, Doctor?”

  “I’d like to think so. That would be the first time that a cockamamie idea led to something good, even if it was my idea. Do you know if the military checked this with sonar?”

  “Yes. But they didn’t find anything.”

  Bart rapped again. “But there’s definitely something here. They checked for explosives and everything, right?”

  D’Amore nodded again.

  “Robin!” Bart called out. “Let’s do another exam with sniffers and sonar. And if we don’t find anything strange, then let’s start drilling.”

  4

  Dante took a pack of cards out of his pocket and spread them on the table. He took off his glove and started to shuffle them. “My brother is looking for someone, and he’s made use of a very expensive tactic, in terms of human lives.” He turned over a card, apparently at random: it was the king of diamonds. “To Tommy, Leo is the King of Diamonds. A perfect choice of suit, considering the role played by COW’s money.”

  “Ah, speaking of money. The bitch called me while I was in the shower. She wants to meet in the late morning at the group home,” said Colomba.

  “I’ll have nightmares for years … Oh well.” He spread the cards out in a couple of fans. “So let’s say that the King of Diamonds, alias my brother, is looking for … the King of Spades, considering that the spades are swords in European decks?” He folded the fans of cards back up into a deck, and the king of spades appeared at the top of the deck. No one clapped. Dante set the deck down on the table, then continued with the jack and queen of diamonds. “These are the Melases.” The sette bello, or seven of diamonds, a crucial card in the game of Scopa. “This is poor Martina. Suggest a card for Loris, CC.”

  “That would have to be the two,” she said apathetically.

  Dante cut the deck using his good hand, and turned over the central card. It was the two of diamonds. “Here are Leo’s victims, or maybe we should say, the bread crumbs he scattered for the King of Spades to gather and follow.” He distributed the cards over the table in order of death, in a chain that culminated at the king of hearts. Or king of cups, in the Italian suit. “Which would be me.”

  “Cups, definitely. But only because there’s no such thing as a king of pills,” Colomba muttered.

  “What about us?” said Alberti.

  Covering his good hand with his bad one, Dante produced the ace, queen, and jack of clubs. “Sorry, CC, I’m going to elevate you to ace of clubs. Especially since the billy club is the universal symbol of you cops.”

  “We should club people more often, truth be told,” said Esposito.

  “We said that my brother is afraid of the King of Spades and that all the spades are dead.” He gathered all the cards of that suit into a mini deck and covered them up with his bad hand. “And that he was therefore looking for something to lure him into a trap. What do you think that would be?”

  “Dante, please …” said Colomba, not at all amused.

  “Okay, I’ll tell you.” He raised his hand. Instead of the mini deck, he now held the king of hearts. No one had noticed when he’d picked it up from the table. “Me.”

  “Why would the King of Spades be so interested in you, sir?” Alberti asked.

  “Maybe he wants to split my head open and see what the Father did to it,” Dante replied. “Because, let’s not forget, Leo has had dealings with him, too. In fact, he probably was a member of his organization, since he focused on Tommy, who was one of the Father’s victims, even if we can’t say how or when. That can’t be an accident. Maybe, once the Father was out of the running, my brother set about finding a new boss. And he decided to use me as a pawn. That would explain why Leo started pursuing me directly after the Father’s death.”

&n
bsp; “There’s something I don’t understand, Signor Torre,” said Alberti. “Why here, of all places?”

  Colomba turned her head, clearly irritated. “According to Dante, because I live here.”

  “If my brother’s enemy is interested in me, then he knows Colomba and he’s probably been keeping up to date on the things that have been happening to her. My brother made things happen here in the hopes that the King of Spades might come around here in person and stick his nose into matters.”

  “And was he successful?”

  “All I know is that Colomba, luckily, managed to find me before he could. Otherwise, who knows what would have happened to me.”

  Colomba felt her breathing become labored, and the sounds around her turned liquid and distant, as if they were coming from the far end of the valley that stretched out before them.

  “CC, are you okay? You’re looking very pale.”

  Colomba clutched at the table. The world had started to spin: no, even worse, to break up into dark patches, shadows that echoed in her ears, that slid past on either side of her field of vision.

  Shadows that were screaming.

  Colomba threw herself to the floor on all fours, knocking her chair over behind her, and took a punch at the portico, skinning her knuckles against the wood.

  Dante dropped down beside her and put his arm around her shoulders. “Breathe, CC … just breathe.”

  She shoved him away and threw another punch. And then … her lungs were suddenly uncorked. Slumped on the floor, Colomba started breathing again, feverishly, wiping away tears of pain.

  “CC … what happened? What did you see?” Dante asked her.

  “If Leo had something in mind at the clinic … Are you sure there’s no danger right now?”

  Dante understood and cursed himself for an idiot. “Bart,” he gasped in a whisper.

  5

  Bart’s staff had redone the environmental analysis twice in Dante’s room at Villa Quiete, without once turning up traces of explosives or toxic substances. Just to make doubly sure, they also took samples from the wall and the ceiling, but all they found was paint, cement, and dead bugs.

  At that point, Bart ordered the battery-powered drill with vacuum attachment brought to her. There was a clear plastic bell around the drill bit which allowed the dust and residue from the drilling to be sucked away and then conveyed through a corrugated hose into an airtight container at the worker’s feet. Two advantages at once: no environmental contamination and the possibility of preserving samples from the drilling.

  With Robin’s help, Bart took just a couple of minutes to penetrate the cement barrier, punching through into what seemed like a gap between the brick walls. The tiny electric motor of the vacuum cleaner started straining, and for fear of burning it out, Bart hastened to turn it off: those gadgets were as delicate as porcelain and every bit as expensive.

  Robin pointed to the clear plastic shroud. The cement dust had clustered along the length of the drill bit instead of being sucked away toward the mouth of the vacuum hose. “There seems to be a pressure differential,” he said.

  “That’s odd …” Cautiously, Bart tipped the handle of the drill ever so slightly. The plastic bell was clamped to the wall, like a suction cup … as if there were a vacuum on the other side of the wall. The pull wasn’t that powerful, and if Bart had released it, the drill would have fallen to the floor, but something told her that wouldn’t be a very good idea.

  The assistant with the heart-shaped glasses called her from the far end of the hallway, waving her cell phone. “Doctor,” she said.

  Like everyone who was working in the “hot” zone, Bart had left her cell phone outside in order to avoid interference with the delicate equipment and machinery. If they had decided to bother her, it must certainly be something urgent. “Who is it?” she asked.

  “He says that he’s a friend of yours who just got back recently. He seems to be very upset.”

  “Bring it here, please,” she said to Robin. “I’d rather not move the drill.”

  “If you want, I can take over …”

  “No.”

  Robin hurried to get her phone and held it up against her ear.

  From the earpiece came Dante’s voice, sounding upset: “You need to get out of there immediately.”

  “Why?” she asked.

  “I’m afraid there’s something dangerous in there that just hasn’t been found yet. The bomb-disposal technicians are on their way, but until they get there, make sure you don’t touch anything.”

  Bart felt the drill suddenly become very heavy in her hands.

  “I’m afraid it’s just a little too late. Have you ever heard of bombs that work on a vacuum?”

  Dante took a minute to answer. “No, but … there are certainly altimetric detonators …”

  “… that trigger an explosion when they detect a shift in atmospheric pressure,” Bart finished his sentence for him, while a trickle of sweat ran down her back.

  The silence from the other end of the line was more explicit than a thousand words.

  “All right,” said Bart, doing her best to seem less terrified than she actually felt, “then I’d better keep my finger in the dike, here, like the little Dutch boy from the story. Do your best not to waste any time.”

  Robin put the cell phone away and looked at her, worry stamped on his face. “So, Doctor … What do we do now?”

  Bart massaged her right forearm, which was already starting to ache from being held motionless. “Get everyone out of here. But first bring me some silicone and a chair.”

  6

  When Dante and Colomba, accompanied by Alberti, arrived in Rimini a little after midnight, the Italian army’s NBCR (Nuclear, Bacteriological, Chemical, and Radiological) teams had already surrounded the clinic. Colomba had had dealings with them before, two years ago, when she’d been packed into a train contaminated by cyanide: she hadn’t enjoyed that encounter, but she knew how very efficient they were.

  Bart’s assistants were waiting outside the perimeter, closely watched by soldiers in camo uniforms, but Colomba had only to say her name and she was ushered through the cordon. With the assistance of a female suit wrangler, she undressed in a van and put on a uniform very much like the ones worn by the NBCR team, which included an absorbent full-body undergarment and another airtight suit in yellow Tyvek; she also dangled a gas mask around her neck, but didn’t put it on.

  Alberti waited in the car; Dante, as expected, refused to ruin his look and only agreed to wear some heavy boots and a glove for his good hand. He was on edge and Colomba would have preferred not to have him come along, but he had threatened to throw himself under the tires if she’d tried to leave him behind in Mezzanotte. What’s more, he had an unbeatable argument.

  “I don’t know what value my brother places on me, or for that matter what his adversary thinks about me,” he had said, putting on a show of confidence, “but they definitely won’t pull any funny stuff if I’m in there.”

  And so, for the first time, Dante saw the place where he’d been held prisoner. Brightly lit by halogen floodlights, the clinic appeared to him in a diabolical guise, with the cooling towers on the roof looking like twin horns and the main gate identical to an ironic, gap-toothed smile. Panic froze him to the spot before he could even enter.

  Colomba noticed. “Would you rather stay outside?”

  “No. I’m tired, that’s why I’m walking slowly,” he lied, with a quaver in his voice. “You go ahead, I’ll catch up.”

  Guided by a soldier, Colomba went to Bart’s side, where she continued to hold the drill. Now Bart was sitting on a folding chair, surrounded by members of emergency teams who were monitoring her condition in real time. They had unscrewed the vacuum hose and sealed the hole, and then they had slipped two upright boards beneath her arms, fastening them with duct tape to help her to support the weight of the drill. But there was no way to pull it out of the wall without letting air into the hole, and the plastic
dome prevented them from being able to loosen the chuck holding the drill bit. Around the rim of the little plastic dome a thick bead of silicone had been applied; Bart could hear it creak every time she relaxed her muscles even slightly. The pain in her arms filled her eyes with tears.

  Colomba stroked her hair. “Maybe it’s just a random air bubble,” she said.

  “Air bubbles push the air outward,” Bart replied, panting slightly. “This one’s sucking the air in. If it’s a booby trap, whoever laid it thought it through very carefully. The inverse pressure also prevents the escape of particulate matter and chemical traces from whatever explosives might be in there.”

  “I can’t take over for you, can I?”

  “The soldiers asked me the same thing, but I’m afraid even to take a breath. Nothing sticks to this fucking wall,” Bart said, clenching her teeth. “And after all, I’m the one who pulled the boneheaded move, I don’t want to drag anyone else into it. So I’d just prefer you get somewhere safe, outside of the blast zone.”

  “You always say we don’t spend enough time together, and now you’re trying to send me away?” Colomba retorted, sitting against the wall. “I’m used to keeping desperate cases like you company.”

  In the meantime, Dante had managed to make his way as far as the lobby. He had just taken a seat on a radiator right beneath the unsettling mosaic depicting the Virgin Mary and the sleeping patient when a man walked up to him. The new arrival took off his gas mask and stuck an e-cigarette in his mouth.

  “Do you want a real one?” Dante asked, lighting up a cigarette of his own.

  “I’ve given up smoking, but the nicotine helps me to stay awake.” He stuck out his hand. “My name’s D’Amore, I work with Colomba.”

  Dante didn’t shake the extended hand. “Di Marco’s bagman,” he said.

  D’Amore laughed. “You don’t even know me, and already you dislike me?”

  Dante huffed in annoyance. “How much money do you have in your pocket?”