Kill the King

by Sandrone Dazieri

  “Only if we want D’Amore to take him off our hands,” said Colomba. She tried shaking the door, which didn’t budge a quarter of an inch. “It’s armor-plated, you’re not going to be able to kick it down.” She turned to speak to Dante: “Whatshisface, take a look.”

  Dante bent down and scrutinized the lock. “It’ll take me ten minutes or so. I won’t break anything. There are no signs of alarms, there’s not a lot of traffic on this street, and people tend to steer clear when they see the Carabinieri.” He looked up. “Which tells us a lot about what people think of you.”

  “I can’t do anything of the sort. It’s an abuse of power,” said Lupo.

  “Then get back in your green squad car and get out of here,” said Colomba. “Because I frankly don’t give a damn.”

  The two Carabinieri exchanged a glance. Bruno shrugged his shoulders. “You decide. After all, I’m retiring soon.”

  Lupo sighed. “All right, but if we find any incriminating evidence against Pala, it’s up to me to decide what to do with it.”

  “When, and if, that happens, we can talk about it. Whatshisface, chop chop.”

  Dante extracted his lock-picking kit and with a SouthOrd “jimmy” checked the inside of the tumbler with both eyes shut, trying to make a mental map of it. He discovered that the security lock had eight pistons arranged along different axes. If you tried to use the classic “bumping” technique used by most burglars—inserting a pick and hitting it to make the pistons open—they’d go out of alignment and the lock would be frozen in place. He would have to move the pistons carefully, one at a time, determining the correct elevation to unblock them.

  “What a pain in the ass,” he muttered, spilling a chunk of the ash extending from the tip of the cigarette he clamped between his lips.

  “Wait, but who are you, exactly?” Bruno asked.

  “Inspector Whatshisface from the French Sureté, mon ami,” Dante said, putting on a Peter Sellers accent and continuing to insert increasingly slender metal picks.

  “Go get a box of gloves from the car, would you please,” Lupo said to his partner, sick and tired of that buffoonery.

  When Bruno returned, Dante was using ten or so metal picks all at once, orchestrating them in an intricate array with his fingers, even using the fingers of his bad hand. One decisive twist, and the door swung open.

  “Voilà,” he said, pushing it all the way open. “Knock yourselves out.” He sat down on the step and put his leather glove back on.

  “Aren’t you going in?” Bruno asked as he distributed latex gloves.

  “I’ll stay out here on the lookout, in case the cops pull up.”

  “Ha ha, you’re so funny,” said Bruno as he walked past him into the front hallway. Dante heard him mutter something that sounded like “slimy spy,” which led him to deduce that Bruno thought he worked for the intelligence services.

  The deserted office, illuminated by the big windows, seemed to Colomba subtly different from the other times. Grim, alienating, cold. While Bruno and Lupo were splitting up the rest of the rooms between them, Colomba rummaged through the psychiatrist’s office, where she had certainly shown Pala the worst side of herself. There was nothing that she shouldn’t have expected to find, but when she pushed aside the De Chirico painting that hung over the little couch, Colomba found a safe with a numerical keypad, roughly the size of a television set with a fifty-inch screen. Might Pala have jotted down the combination somewhere in that office?

  An instant later, she heard Lupo curse from upstairs, and she raced up the spiral staircase. In terms of style and furnishings, the residential section of the building was similar to the office where Pala received his patients, but three times the size and with all the inevitable signs of private life, duly hidden from the patients: laundry hampers, sandals and slippers, a book lying open on the bedside dresser, a pair of reading glasses. Lupo was squatting down next to Pala’s corpse, which lay sprawled on its back, half-covered by the clean laundry that had spilled down over it.

  “Fucking goddamned hell,” said Colomba.

  “Don’t go in, I’ve already made enough of a mess as it is,” said Lupo.

  “How did he die?”

  “I can’t say. There aren’t any evident marks.”

  “Wait.” Colomba remembered seeing some trash bags in the ground-floor bathroom. She ran down to get them and put two on her feet. Then she went over to the corpse and cautiously raised one arm.

  “He’s already starting to stiffen,” she said. “He’s been dead for at least two hours. Help me out here, I need to turn him on his side.”

  “We shouldn’t be messing around with him.”

  “I know that. When I count three.”

  And so they discovered that there were no marks on his back or shoulders, or on the backs of his legs.

  “It looks like a heart attack,” said Colomba. “But I don’t think that’s what it was.”

  “Neither do I,” Lupo snapped. “Let’s see what Dr. Tira has to say. Or your friend. By the way, is she all right? I have to say I find her very appealing.”

  “Yes, she just got a bad scare.”

  Lupo reached the hallway with a single leap. “I’ll report this to dispatching. You and Whatshisface get the hell out of here, because I don’t want to have to explain your presence along with everything else.”

  “Are you looking to have the investigation taken out of your hands again? Because that’s exactly what’ll happen the minute this becomes official. The military will arrive and they’ll put everything under judicial seal.”

  “That’s what they’ll do eventually, anyway.”

  “But we can still make sure that it happens only after we’ve checked that there’s nothing that might prove useful.” Colomba smirked awkwardly in embarrassment. “Dante trusts you, otherwise he would have steered clear of you, and I trust him. But if you want to miss out on the opportunity to understand what’s going on here, go ahead, pick up the phone.”

  Lupo nodded. “Okay.” He checked the time on his cell phone. “It’s eight twenty. What time do the patients start arriving, usually?”

  “I think at nine, or nine thirty.”

  “Bruno!” Lupo shouted.

  The veteran carabiniere climbed the stairs, jokingly complaining all the way about the effort, but when he saw the corpse he immediately turned serious. “Sweet Jesus,” he exclaimed. “Is that Pala?”

  Lupo nodded. “Move the car and shut the blinds downstairs. Let’s pretend no one’s in here. Then stay here and keep an eye on who comes and who leaves.”

  Bruno turned around and started down the stairs, but Colomba managed to ask him: “Would you send me Alberti and Whatshisface, please?”

  “Whatshisface …” Bruno muttered. “All right.”

  Dante arrived a couple of minutes later, walking with his eyes shut, and in fact he had to let Alberti lead him. He stopped at the door and pulled up his T-shirt to filter the air: Colomba had thrown open the windows, but his sensitive nostrils still didn’t like the smell.

  “There’s a dead body and it stinks,” he said, keeping his eyes shut tight.

  “It’s Pala,” said Colomba.

  “My condolences to one and all. Au revoir.”

  Colomba stopped him. “Make an effort.”

  Dante took three deep breaths, leaned on his cane, and took a quick circular look around the room, then shut his eyes again. “I looked. Can I go now?”

  “No. Did you notice anything?” asked Colomba.

  “A fat corpse and the sunlight glistening off a puddle of piss.”

  “Aside from that!”

  Dante breathed deeply again. “There’s a part of the floor that’s cleaner. And it wasn’t the housekeeper, because it’s too irregular and there are broad patches that haven’t been polished. Downstairs, in contrast, the floor has been beautifully buffed. Maybe the killer cleaned up. How did this torturer of defenseless brains meet his end?”

  “There are no signs of vi
olence, but it was painful. It could have been a stroke, or it could have been insulin again,” said Colomba.

  “Plausible. I saw that the sheets were all tangled, but are they dirty, too?”

  Lupo looked at them carefully. “Not very. A few splashes of vomit.”

  “Can you sniff them around the middle?”

  Lupo obeyed, at first hesitantly, but then with growing conviction.

  “It just smells of detergent or fabric softener. The one with the teddy bear.”

  “Try again. Tell me if it smells of sweat or of a human being in general.”

  Lupo, patiently, did as he was told. “No.”

  “As far as you know, was Pala gay or straight?”

  “Do you want me to sniff his butt while I’m at it?” Lupo asked.

  “All right, I asked for that.” Blindly, Dante grabbed Alberti’s arm. “Go see if you can find any dirty sheets in the laundry room or in the bathroom,” he said. “If there aren’t any, then the man or woman he was in bed with killed him, and they got rid of the sheets to avoid traces of things like DNA. Hi-ho, trusty steed!” Alberti led him out of the building.

  “They’re not going to accept my nose as evidence in court,” said Lupo.

  Colomba didn’t answer. She’d suddenly been illuminated by an image: Caterina catching her bullet on the fly.

  So do you hunt, too? Colomba had asked her. Not with a rifle, Caterina had replied.

  “We need to find the secretary,” said Colomba.

  4

  The Educational and Therapeutic Community of the Guardian Angel of Portico, familiarly known as the ETC, was a trio of square buildings in the industrial zone, surrounded by a couple of acres of grounds. The males lived in one building, the females in another; the smallest of the three buildings served as a daytime activities center. It housed eighty or so residents, all between the ages of fifteen and twenty. Some had been sent there by the juvenile court, others by social services. Most of them had themselves been the victims of abuse and mistreatment.

  In the immediate aftermath of his parents’ murders, Tommy had been sent to the boys’ building, and he’d practically never emerged since, in spite of the invitations the social assistants had extended to Demetra to take better care of him. Since he’d been at the center, Tommy had turned completely inward, and by now he interacted with no one, except to some very bland and minimal extent with the staff and the volunteers, and even in those rare cases without ever speaking; if they tried to force him to speak, he’d shout and pound himself in the head with his fists. Most of the time he was calm and well behaved, though. He tied his own shoes all by himself, and ate with a spoon, put away his coloring books when he was done with them, and stayed inside. They’d given him a roommate to make sure he didn’t hurt himself: a sixteen-year-old boy who’d been drawn into the social service system when he was twelve because he’d been abused by his mother’s boyfriend.

  Laura Patti, the supervisor, was sixty years old and gray-haired. She had accompanied Tommy to his parents’ funeral, and in that context she had shown considerable skill, because she’d managed to keep him calm the whole time. Laura loved the work she did and the kids she took care of. And that spelled her fate when the woman who had been Pala’s secretary turned up at her office door, on the second floor, above the daytime activities center.

  “I wasn’t expecting you today,” Patti said, shaking hands with her. “Tommy’s in his room, but pretty soon he has a meeting with a consultant sent by his aunt.”

  “I know, that’s why I’m here. We’d rather have Tommy meet the consultant in the office, with Sandro. I’ll take him and bring him back this evening.”

  The supervisor leaned against the edge of the desk. “Tommy doesn’t like being out in the open air.”

  “I’m trying to get him used to it …”

  “According to my experts, it’s not doing him a lot of good. The other day, you took him for an outing, and he was upset all night long. We had to sedate him. Tell Sandro that we prefer for him to have his meetings in our institute.”

  “Certainly, starting next time—”

  “No. You have only the best intentions, and I understand that, but now the boy is my responsibility. And you’re not a psychologist, unless I’m mistaken?”

  The woman who had been Caterina looked up at her. Her eyes were enormous and very dark, veined with a melancholy you often see in certain veterans when they come home from war. “No, I’m not a psychologist.” Laura Patti raised her hands to defend herself, but she wasn’t fast enough.

  5

  Pala’s corpse was turning increasingly gray and ashen, but Caterina couldn’t be reached on her cell phone; Bruno had gone to find her, even checking her home address, but in vain.

  “What do we know about her?” Lupo asked as he finished unscrewing the shade on a lamp in the office.

  “Alberti!” shouted Colomba. “Tell us about Caterina.”

  He leaned down from the spiral staircase. “Italian, of Eritrean birth. A degree in philosophy,” he said. “She’d been working for Pala for three months. No prior offenses, a magnificent résumé featuring previous employment as a dental hygienist and a private nurse. Nothing suspicious.”

  “But she should have been here already,” said Lupo.

  “I know,” said Colomba. “And there’s not a fucking thing here.”

  Lupo pointed to the safe. “There’s this bitch. Do you think Whatshisface would know how?”

  “I’m an escape artist, not a thief,” Dante shouted from outside.

  “So what happens if they lock you up in a safe?” asked Colomba.

  “I’d die immediately.”

  Alberti’s head appeared again over the railing. “I found Pala’s cell phone,” he said. “At least, I think it’s his. It’s locked.”

  “Where do you keep your ATM passcode?” Lupo asked Colomba. “And don’t tell me you remember it by heart.”

  “On my cell phone, with a fake area code. You think it works for safes, too?”

  “Well, I’d give it a try, at the very least.”

  “Alberti, unlock it,” said Colomba.

  “How am I supposed to do that?”

  “With a thumbprint,” said Colomba.

  “You aren’t thinking of …” said Alberti. He stopped talking.

  “Put a couple of bags on your feet,” said Lupo with a hearty laugh. Alberti vanished.

  The corpse’s thumb did the trick, and in the phone directory they found a name that they all agreed was suspicious: Le Chiffre. The first attempt to use the combination was unsuccessful, but when they entered the supposed phone number backward, the safe door swung open, leaving them all slack-jawed.

  The safe was packed with cash. All of them two-hundred-euro notes. Colomba checked a couple of wads of bills: they were real.

  “You can certainly make money as a psychiatrist,” Lupo commented.

  6

  The woman who had once chosen the name of Caterina left the ETC office, dangling the supervisor’s bunch of keys in one hand, with a small red stain on her light gray boot. She noticed it while she was walking through the garden, and she discreetly wiped it off on a bush. Then she cut through the vegetable patch where some of the boys were putting young seedlings into pots, and headed decisively toward the dormitory. She moved with confidence, smiling at everyone she met, and no one was surprised to see her in the area that was off-limits to visitors: she’d already been there dozens of times, and they all knew her.

  Tommy was in his room, kneeling on the bed; he was coloring a drawing of a palm tree and he had chosen to use black for the fronds. When he saw her, he emitted a loud and inarticulate bellow, leaped to his feet, and started rocking on his heels.

  It was the first time that she’d seen him do anything of the sort, and she was afraid that it was the onset of a fit: he was twice her size, and she didn’t know how to calm him down on her own. She smiled at him.

  “Ciao, Tommy. I’ve never been able to tel
l if anything I say gets into your head when I talk to you, but I hope so. We need to go for another drive. Come on, I’ll buy you some ice cream.”

  Tommy continued rocking on his heels. The woman regretted having used up all the insulin.

  “Don’t make me mad, Tommy,” she said sternly. “Be a good boy and put your shoes on. Get moving!”

  Tommy accelerated his oscillations back and forth, accompanying them with a sort of ululating howl that seemed like a fire alarm. The woman gave him a smack in the face. Tommy fell silent, rubbing his reddened cheek, his eyes darting around in search of an escape route.

  “You don’t want another one, do you?” the woman asked.

  Tommy shook his head, shuddering.

  “All right, put those fucking shoes on and come with me. And you’ll be sorry if you open your mouth again.”

  Trembling, Tommy put on his fur-lined clogs and, jerked along by the woman, descended the building’s stairs. A few people greeted him, others said hello to the woman, but she kept walking, eyes straight ahead. Thanks to the supervisor’s bunch of keys, she was able to open the building’s service door, emerging onto the courtyard where the employees parked their cars. Tommy dug in his heels at the doorway, shielding his eyes against the sun with the back of his hand. After ordering him to stay there, the woman opened the gate, ran to get Pala’s car, and pulled into the courtyard in reverse.

  “Get in,” she said, leaving the engine running.

  Tommy shook his head, twisting his wrists.

  She opened the trunk of the car and pulled out the lug wrench. The morning sun gleamed off the chrome plating. “Get in or I’ll crack your skull and stuff you in the trunk. You decide.” Tommy reluctantly climbed into the car.

  As she drove out of the courtyard she crossed paths with a volunteer on a moped, who took advantage of the open gate with a friendly wave of thanks. He had an appointment with Laura Patti, so he was the one who found her body.

  7

  Fifteen minutes after the call from the ETC had been put through to the Portico Carabinieri station, Master Sergeant Nerone phoned Lupo.