Kill the King

by Sandrone Dazieri

  D’Amore looked at him, stumped. Dante waved his hand impatiently, as if telling D’Amore to speed it up.

  After pulling out his wallet, D’Amore replied: “Sixty euros.”

  Dante pulled out the same sum in cash and laid it on the floor.

  “Do you want to bet I know more things about you than you think I do?”

  D’Amore smiled. “I forgot that you’re a mentalist.”

  “I don’t even know what that means … Do we have a bet?”

  “Well, since all we can do is wait here anyway … You’re on.” D’Amore laid his money on top of Dante’s.

  Dante theatrically cracked his knuckles—the ones that worked, anyway. “Okay. You’ve spent a lot of time out of the country,” he said at random. This was his opening shot.

  “And you say that because …”

  “Your boots are too heavy for the season and they’re scuffed up by the sand from some desert. I know a little something about sedimentology. Those scuff marks were made by a hard silica sand. Like the kind you find in Egypt.”

  D’Amore struggled not to look at his shoes, but it was too much for him. “I was there on vacation.”

  Dante smiled. “If that were true, you never would have told me. Let’s see … Your left arm hurts you, but not too badly.”

  D’Amore said nothing.

  Dante smiled again. “You’re trying to control yourself. That means it’s something important … People act differently with recent or chronic pain. They tend to handle it better if it’s old, let’s just put it that way.”

  “I can imagine.”

  “Your pain is chronic, or at the very least you’ve had it for a while. And seeing that you’ve admitted working outside of the country …”

  “I never admitted a damn thing.”

  Dante snickered. “And you just reiterated the point, quite clearly … I’d say that your return to Italy from some sandy place and whatever happened to your shoulder are connected. War injury?”

  “Now you’re just guessing. I’ll take your money.”

  Dante pinned down the money with the tip of his cane. “Don’t you try it, gambling debts are debts of honor. Let me see your hands.”

  “Why?”

  “I’m no mentalist, but I am a palm reader. Hurry up, your money is making my mouth water.”

  D’Amore took off his gloves.

  “No recent calluses, you’ve been doing office work,” Dante said after examining his hands closely by the fluorescent lights. “You don’t spend much time at the shooting range, either, to judge from your index finger. If you look at Colomba’s forefinger, there’s a much more evident thickening of the skin.”

  “You said it yourself, I’m a paper pusher.”

  “But your fingers are covered with faint scars, from burns and razor cuts. Old stuff, and if I didn’t know who you work with, I’d have guessed a cook or an electrician. But you weren’t a cook, were you?”

  “No,” said D’Amore, and for the first time there wasn’t a trace of bonhomie on his face.

  “Bomb-disposal expert? If you’d made a wrong move with an IED, you wouldn’t be here, but the fact that you are here makes me think that you know something about clearing explosives. But then, maybe you weren’t the one who made the wrong move,” Dante said with a barb of malice. “You caught a piece of shrapnel, maybe because someone snipped the wrong wire, but it wasn’t you. You put your life at risk, and now maybe the reason you wear that Buddha bracelet is to remind yourself that you’re living your second life. A sort of reincarnation.”

  “That doesn’t—” D’Amore started to say.

  “Hush. There’s no need,” said Dante. And it was true: the microexpressions that D’Amore had kept under control until that moment were now dancing across his face. Dante could read them and guide them, using his words like a conductor leading a symphony orchestra. “Forgive me, I’ve awakened some ugly memories. I really didn’t mean to,” he said, provoking the other man. “Now that I look more closely, I can see that the bracelet was clearly intended for a more slender wrist than yours. You had to cut it and then lengthen it. Whoever made that mistake with the bomb was a very skinny man. Or a woman? Your woman?”

  “Keep your money. I’ve had enough,” said D’Amore.

  Dante gave it back to him. “I don’t want your money, I just wanted to make it clear to you that you can’t pull the wool over my eyes. And that I’m going to know if you try any funny stuff with Colomba.”

  D’Amore tried to come up with a witty retort, but he was interrupted by a beeping sound from the radio.

  “We’ve found something,” said the soldier on the other end of the line.

  “I’m on my way,” D’Amore replied. “It was a pleasure to chat with you, Signor Torre.”

  Dante smiled complacently. “Of course it was.”

  * * *

  Down in the boiler room, D’Amore found Colomba standing in front of the sewer outlet. The grate had been removed and just then a bomb-disposal technician, covered with mud, was emerging from the main.

  “C-4,” he said, after removing his helmet. “There’s enough to bring down half the neighborhood. They’ve mined the whole perimeter of the hospital and then poured two feet of cement over top of it. We can’t get rid of the explosives until we find the detonators.”

  “It must be connected to the wall of the room where Bart is,” said Colomba.

  The bomb-disposal technician shook his head. “We haven’t found anything that runs that far. The sewer runs in the opposite direction.”

  D’Amore grimaced. “Let me take a look,” he said, putting his mask back on.

  He took a lot more than a look, because he was down there for half an hour, taking over as supervisor, moving cautiously through tunnels that were so narrow he could only crawl through them. At last, between two sewer drainpipes, he found a narrow rubber tube that disappeared into the cement. He pushed a fiber-optic cable through next to the tube, and found that it was connected to a sort of sealed glass case, about the size of a television set.

  “Here you are, you piece of shit,” D’Amore said.

  CHAPTER II

  1

  The glass case was connected via the slender rubber tube to a space in the hollow area behind the wall of the room where Dante had been held prisoner. With great care and a few prayers, D’Amore sealed it, blocking the suction of the air; Bart let go of the drill, sobbing from the pain in her arm. One by one, the soldiers isolated the wires leading to the glass case, and then they took it away in an armored truck. They opened it with a robot, and inside they found a child’s balloon. In a vacuum, it had remained inflated because what little air it contained had expanded, but if the glass case had filled with air, the pressure would have flattened it and set off a passive switch.

  “I’ve seen plenty of booby traps, but this one is unusually twisted,” D’Amore said to Colomba. By now it was seven in the morning, and the sky was brightening. “To say nothing of the amount of time it must have taken someone to set it all up.”

  “He had time on his hands …” Colomba murmured. How many other innocent lives were in potentially mortal danger at that exact moment?

  “I can’t quite see what his line of thought is,” said D’Amore. “If he’d planted a bomb under Torre’s bed, that would have made sense. He would have killed the hostage and the rescuers. But planting a bomb in a wall that might be demolished by sheer chance, and maybe in twenty years … what kind of sense does that make?”

  “None,” Colomba lied.

  “But you suspected it anyway.”

  “Dante is the anxious type.”

  They looked each other in the eyes, glimpsing nothing there but a wall of exhaustion. “We can talk about it at the briefing.”

  “Not today. I have things to do.”

  “Major Tom to Paloma Blanca,” her radio crackled, as if in confirmation of the words she’d just said.

  “Cut it out,” Colomba replied, “this is the e
mergency channel.”

  “We’re falling asleep out he—” Colomba stepped out into the garden and the communication turned into a burst of static: the scramblers had been activated and they blocked the signals the minute you set foot outside the building.

  Dante and Bart were on a bench in the park, wrapped in a thermal blanket.

  “You look so cute, the two of you,” said Colomba as she reached them.

  Bart laid her head on Dante’s shoulder, while he wrapped an arm around her. “You can be our maid of honor.”

  Colomba felt an unreasonable pang of annoyance. “Come on, let’s get out of here. Alberti is warming up the car.”

  Dante put his dark glasses back on to protect his eyes from the rays of the sun. “Why don’t you come with us?” he asked Bart. “We can celebrate the narrowly averted danger. I have some infusion coffee slow-brewing, a fine Sulawesi aged in whiskey barrels, perfect for iced coffee, even though the temperature outside isn’t exactly ideal yet.”

  Bart smiled. “I love that brew and I’d be happy to drink some. But I think I’ll just go take a nap and get back to work—that is, if there’s anything left to find after the bomb-disposal technicians are done sweeping the place.”

  But Dante had focused on her first sentence. “When have you ever tried Sulawesi?”

  “A couple of months ago, at Starbucks.”

  “You went all the way to Seattle? I know that they have a reserve of Sulawesi there …”

  “No, they’ve opened a boutique roastery in Milan.”

  Dante looked at Colomba with the eyes of a child who’s just been told he slept through the New Year’s fireworks. “You didn’t tell me …”

  “You just narrowly escaped being blown sky-high, and you’re worrying about Starbucks?” Colomba snapped.

  “I’m a time traveler, the world changed while I was sleeping. Did we get Pizza Hut, too?”

  “No pizza. And we’re not going home. We have an appointment with Tommy, remember? So up you get, on your feet.” She gave him a hand and pulled him to his feet.

  “What about 7-Eleven?”

  Colomba settled the fedora low on his head, pushed down to the bridge of his nose. “Enough’s enough.”

  * * *

  As soon as she was in the car, Colomba fell fast asleep, like a rock, and woke up half an hour later, more tired than before, and with the mark of the seat belt pressed into her cheek. Behind her, Dante was ending a phone call.

  “Who were you talking to?” she asked him.

  “Lupo. I told him about the bomb in Rimini.”

  “Jesus, you really don’t know how to keep your mouth shut, do you?” she asked, shutting her eyes again.

  “Around here, Lupo is Big Brother, and if I want to get information I have to give something in exchange.”

  “This time, whose turn was it?”

  “Loris’s turn. We found proof that Leo was manipulating him with the Driller, but why him? How did he choose him? When I was delving into his past, I chanced upon an interesting coincidence.” Dante lit a cigarette, and Colomba rolled down her window. “When he enrolled in therapy following the abuse, they sent him to the same treatment community where Tommy has just been transferred. Pala has been working with that community for years. So probably he and Loris met there.”

  Colomba shook her head. “Di Marco’s men went over it with a fine-tooth comb. And after all, Pala’s been living in San Lorenzo for twenty years, he wasn’t catapulted here by Leo like the Melases.”

  “But don’t forget that he’s Tommy’s therapist. Maybe my brother didn’t pick him at random. He didn’t know the territory and he needed information about the victims.”

  “Listen, I may not be as good as you at reading people, but after being fooled by both the Father and Leo, I’m a lot less trusting than I used to be. But Pala is clean.”

  “Maybe he just talks too much at the corner bar. Maybe my brother put a microbug under his chair. But you’ll admit that it’s possible?”

  Colomba nodded. She looked at the clock on the dashboard. “We have time to swing by his place before we go see Tommy,” she said. “Hit the siren.”

  Alberti turned on the roof flashers and accelerated well over the speed limit.

  Dante gripped his seat belt tight and shut his eyes.

  2

  Sandro Pala could see himself in the mirror of the half-open door of his clothes closet, lying stretched out on one side in bed, and he didn’t like what he saw one little bit, in spite of the gentleness of the faint early-morning light.

  “I’m too fat,” he said. “It’s not just a matter of looks, it’s a matter of health. I’m at risk of heart attack, diabetes, and all kinds of cancer.”

  “So why don’t you go on a diet?” asked Caterina, sitting up and leaning back against the headboard. She, too, was naked, but without an ounce of excess fat, fit enough that it was clear she worked out with weights on a daily basis. She stroked his hair.

  “Because it puts me on edge. And that doesn’t go well with the work that I do.” He looked at the reflection of Caterina’s face, next to his now. “Now that we’re on the subject, I have an ethical misgiving.”

  “About what?”

  “About you.”

  Caterina laughed and wrapped herself around his back. Feeling her legs clamped around his hips, Pala stirred. “About me,” she whispered in his ear.

  “I’m twice your age and you work for me,” Pala replied. The condom he was still wearing creaked with his new erection. “Did I take unethical advantage of my position? Did I seduce you by playing on my role as an authority figure, a father figure?” He gripped her thigh. “Did I coerce you into this in any way?”

  “Don’t be silly. If I’d waited for you to make a move, I’d be an old lady by now,” she said.

  Surprised, Pala glanced at the reflection of Caterina’s face in the mirror, next to his own: she had a harsh expression he’d never seen before. Pala felt a sudden sharp stab of pain in his ear.

  “Shusssh,” she said as she pressed down the plunger of the hypodermic needle that she had slid into the shell of his ear. Pala pushed it away and tried to get out of bed, but the rapid-acting insulin was already taking effect. A diabetic normally injects between twenty and fifty subcutaneous units: Pala was dealing with more than a thousand suddenly coursing through his bloodstream, destroying the sugar in his blood and transforming it into reserves to be deposited in his liver and bones. It was the equivalent of sucking all the gasoline out of a car’s engine and filling a spare tank for potential future needs, but leaving nothing for the pistons to burn. Suddenly deprived of fuel, Pala’s body was starting to shut down. First he lost his vision, then his sense of balance.

  “Help, help me,” he mumbled, but his words turned into a scream when a terrible stabbing pain burst into his head. His brain was hungry, but there was nothing for it to eat. It was desperately filtering his blood in search of crumbs of nutrition and pushing water out of his pores. His heart rate shot up to 200: Pala vomited his breakfast into his lap and fell to the floor, drenched with sweat and cramping violently.

  With his last conscious thought, he tried to grab hold of the dresser, pulling down over him a stack of shirts neatly ironed by the housekeeper; they covered him like a funeral shroud. But he wasn’t aware of it: he’d slid into a hypoglycemic coma and the tremor had turned into convulsions. Pala slammed the back of his head and both his heels against the bedside carpet, and his eyeballs rolled up into their sockets.

  Caterina, who had been standing watching him the whole time from the foot of the bed, bent over to check his physical state. His heartbeat was very faint, his skin was cold and clammy. He was still alive, and he remained alive while she was gathering the sheets off the bed and the condom from the puddle of piss that was collecting between Pala’s legs. Then she put on a pair of latex gloves and her shoes and made the rounds of the bedroom, wiping the places she had touched with her bare flesh—the nightstand, the door, the head o
f the bed she’d grabbed with both hands while pretending to come while Pala was on top of her, and of course, his body, in places that an employee normally wouldn’t touch.

  She put her checkered skirt suit back on and checked the psychiatrist one last time: Pala’s breathing was shallow and fast, he wouldn’t be around much longer. Caterina wiped the acid sweat from his hands, then went to pick up the bag she’d left in the lobby that morning.

  It was very heavy.

  3

  When they reached Pala’s office, Lupo and Bruno were already standing outside the front door.

  “I’m not going in,” said Dante.

  “Sure, don’t worry about it.” Colomba helped him out of the car, a little roughly. “Just remember that Lupo knows who you are, but the rest of the world doesn’t, so do your best not to be noticed.” After a second, she added: “Sorry, I take that back, it’s pointless.”

  She went over to join the Carabinieri, who turned around to look at her for a second, briefly interrupting their thunderous pounding on the door.

  “Good morning, gentlemen,” Colomba said. “What seems to be going on?”

  “Nothing, for now. And if you get back in your car and drive away, nothing will happen a minute from now, either,” said Lupo.

  “Let’s skip the threatening preamble, shall we, for just this once?” said Colomba.

  Lupo pointed at Dante, who was unsuccessfully trying to hoist himself up to the windows by hooking his cane onto the sill. “Your friend … Whatshisface … got me thinking. I checked with Martina’s parents: Pala had been her therapist after a nasty skating accident that was giving her nightmares.”

  “That’s a nice coincidence …”

  “I just want to have a short talk with him, and see how he reacts. I come in peace, at least for the moment.”

  “Too bad he isn’t home.”

  “And that he isn’t answering his cell phone, either,” Bruno weighed in.

  “Can you trace his phone, CC?” Dante asked from behind, brushing the plaster dust off his jacket.