“Apparently the Melases’ son has disappeared, too,” he said, still incredulous that another murder had taken place in his jurisdiction. “They’re searching the building, but …”
Lupo wiped the sweat off his brow. “Send all the men over there,” he said. “And alert the magistrate who’s on duty. I’ll be right over.” He hung up and went back to the others, who in the meantime had finished straightening up the rooms that they’d searched.
It was a hard blow for Dante.
“That makes no sense,” he said from outside. “They could have kidnapped him and killed him whenever they wanted. Why today?”
“We’ll worry about that when we find him,” said Colomba. “What are we going to do with Pala?” she asked Lupo. “Do you want to make it official?”
He shook his head. “No. If Tommy really has disappeared, I’ll have a good excuse for going to look for him.”
“And the money?” asked Dante, sticking his head in the door. “Split it up into equal parts?”
“I’d like to be able to say the thought hadn’t occurred to me,” said Bruno, who had just come back inside.
Colomba shut the safe door and punched a bunch of random numbers. “End of the temptation. Let’s go.”
Once they arrived at the ETC, Lupo went in to speak with his colleagues, and came back out an hour later.
“Tommy is no longer in the building,” he confirmed. “And the supervisor was hit hard in the face and then strangled with the phone cord. Vigevani will be here soon; if you want to take a look at the corpse, you’d better hurry up.”
Colomba shook her head. “I’ve had enough for today.”
“Me too,” said Dante, sprawled on the car hood smoking a cigarette. Inside, Alberti was snoring, keeled forward onto the steering wheel.
“There’s one more thing,” Lupo went on. “Pala’s secretary came in through the front entrance about two hours ago. She didn’t return her pass at the exit, but she’s missing, too.”
“So she took Tommy,” said Colomba, with a pang in her heart. “Why didn’t anyone try to stop her?”
“She seems to have gone out the back way, and anyway she could come and go as she pleased here. Pala often came here to meet with the kids, including Tommy. But the other day she came here by herself and took him for an outing. When the boy came back, he was in a state of shock.”
“Let’s go take a look at Tommy’s room before the SIS get here. Dante, are you with us?”
“I’ll sit this one out.”
As soon as Colomba and Lupo vanished into the building, Dante tapped his cane against the car window, right next to Alberti’s ear.
“Wake up!” he shouted.
Alberti lurched. “What’s going on?”
“I’m bored.”
“Please, I haven’t slept since yesterday.”
“You want some Nuvigil?” asked Dante, proffering a small white pill in his begloved fingers. “They give these to fighter-bomber pilots when they have to fly all night long.”
“Oh, God no.” Alberti yawned and opened the car door, extending his legs. “What do they say about the boy?”
“That Pala’s secretary kidnapped him.” Dante tossed the pill into the air and swallowed it dry, gesturing for the water bottle.
Alberti passed it to him. “And she works for Bonaccorso.”
“Or else for the person that my brother is looking for, or else she might even be the person that my brother is looking for. And she’d been there, under his nose, the whole time. The King of Spades might be a queen, why not?”
“That makes sense. Working for Pala, she would have known everything that was happening, without being discovered.”
“You think it makes sense? She left five million euros in cash behind and murdered another person, in full view of anyone who cared to watch. It doesn’t make that much sense to me.”
Alberti yawned again. “Maybe Tommy is worth more to her than five million euros,” he said.
8
The woman who had once called herself Caterina now had a different car, a different name, and a black wig with smooth hair. Tommy was slumbering in the back seat, knocked out by the benzodiazepine that she had forced him to drink, mixed with a bottle of fruit juice.
By now, the woman told herself, they must have found the supervisor’s dead body. And, if she’d been unlucky, there was already a manhunt under way for her. The police would already be scanning car traffic, and airports and train stations would have been alerted. There wasn’t a chance of a black woman traveling with a white boy standing six feet tall passing unnoticed. Luckily, though, she wasn’t trying to leave the region. If anything, she was heading inland, sticking to the narrow, rocky roads that she’d been forced to learn by heart. In daylight or darkness.
The landscape turned dry and withered, the cars thinned out and became infrequent, and the coloring of everything went from ochre to a dark yellow. Slowing down to keep from cracking an axle in the numerous potholes, the woman drove into an abandoned town, rolling past half-crumbling houses with their windows walled up. She finally came to a large refinery, reduced by neglect to little more than a steel skeleton, surrounded by rusted-out fences and piles of garbage. Alongside the pitted, rutted road ran the rails of a railway line, no longer in use. They terminated in a large industrial shed, in ruins like everything else.
The woman who had been Caterina opened the gate to an area that looked like an open-air gravel dump. She parked behind a gigantic rusty earth mover and texted someone on her cell phone, then hastily destroyed the phone.
From that point forward, everything needed to work without a hitch.
9
Gaspare Mantoni heard the ping of his cell phone in his pocket and immediately understood what it was about, but he didn’t look at it, not right away. He did things on his own time frame, and anyone who said differently would get a kick in the teeth. He ordered another glass of red.
“This time, give me a good one. Open a bottle.”
“Really?” asked the barkeeper. “Are you celebrating something?”
“A funeral.”
“Whose?”
“Mine.”
The barkeeper laughed, but stopped instantly when Gaspare glared at him, eyes narrowed in a way that scared him.
“Hold on, are you not well?” the barkeeper asked.
“Never felt better in my life,” the other man replied. “Open the bottle, for fuck’s sake, or I’ll come back there and get it myself.”
The bartender uncorked a bottle of pinot noir for him and filled a clean glass. “Don’t do anything stupid, now, you’re one of my favorite customers.” Gaspare tossed the glass back in a single gulp. “Put it on my tab, I’ll be back later,” he said, laughing silently at his own wisecrack.
Out in the street, he read the text—it was exactly what he expected it to be—and stuck his cell phone under the spray of a public drinking fountain. He’d been hoping for an arc of electric sparks, but to his disappointment the screen simply flickered and faded, and then turned off entirely. Gaspare then hurled the phone at the outside wall of a church, laughed in the face of an old woman who’d turned to stare at him, and climbed into the cab of the tanker truck that awaited him on the parking plaza, the symbol of the Eni oil company on its side.
When he went to insert the key into the ignition, however, he realized that his hand was trembling. He got mad at himself, and at the empty feeling he had in his belly. It occurred to him that he was still in time to pull out, go home, and pretend nothing had happened …
Yeah, nothing, at least until he started shitting blood. And from then on it would only get worse, until he became a completely useless waste of oxygen. A farting old man dying like so many other farting old men. His fellow truck drivers wouldn’t give a damn about him, just like he didn’t give a damn about them, and they’d forget he’d ever existed the day after his funeral.
Gaspare Mantoni turned on the engine, and he felt the rumbling vibration fil
l his whole body. Was it the engine that was wreaking havoc in his belly, or had it just been the food in prison? Not that it much mattered, by this point. He turned around and headed off down the provincial road.
They’d remember him. Oh, how they’d remember him.
10
Wait, why did you bring this nut job here?” asked Nerone, standing guard at Tommy’s room, when he saw Colomba arrive.
Lupo was exhausted and on edge. “Speak to me in that tone of voice one more time and you’ll be in a world of shit,” he told him. “Go on, take a hike. Get out of here!”
Nerone turned beet red. “Sir, yessir,” he said, and then did as he’d been told. Colomba and Lupo shut the door behind them. The room stank of dirty socks, but it was clean and big enough to accommodate two single beds with patchwork covers, a pair of small desks, and a clothes closet. Colomba immediately identified Tommy’s side of the room: his bed was definitely the one that had been neatly made, and the same applied to the desk with books and crayons perfectly lined up and tidy.
“What are we looking for?” asked Lupo.
“Anything,” Colomba replied.
They lifted mattresses and rummaged through clothing, without finding anything interesting, however. Colomba opened the twin doors of the clothes closet and had no difficulty identifying Tommy’s clothing: it was twice the size of his roommate’s. Here, too, however, not so much as a crumb, in the pockets or in the cuffs. But his size 13 work boots, on the other hand, had left a sprinkling of dust on the bottom of the closet.
While Lupo went to make peace with Nerone, Colomba took the shoes in a bag to be tested, along with a handful of coloring books, and brought them to Dante. He was still sprawled on the trunk smoking a cigarette, while Alberti had gone to wash his face in the restroom of the dayroom.
“Now it’s your turn to take a sniff,” she said, extending the exhibits in his direction.
Without changing position, Dante took the coloring books and waved them in the air. “If I finish coloring them, will you give me a piece of candy?”
“I’m starting to get sick and tired of you. Why are you so twisted?”
“Because I don’t understand a fucking thing in all this. I was convinced I was the chosen prey, instead I discover that it’s Tommy. And if that’s the case, then I was left in the hospital to slowly die as nothing more than a piece of decoy bait. I’m just a discard.”
“Put aside your wounded pride and see if you can do something useful. If the coloring books aren’t good for anything, then at least look at the rest.”
Dante put the bag down on the hood and studied the boots. He even took out the insoles.
“What can I tell you that you don’t already know? They were purchased in Italy, and used very little.”
“What about the particulate matter?”
“I don’t have bionic eyes. All I know is that it’s full of sulfur.”
“What do you mean, sulfur?”
“You know that stuff they have on matchsticks? CC … All right, I get it that you’re not a chemist, but the color is unmistakable, and so is the smell. They use it in agriculture as a fertilizer, and all around here is nothing but fields.” He picked up a pebble the size of a pinhead and held it against the light. “Even though this doesn’t seem to have been refined …”
Colomba didn’t wait for him to finish talking but called loudly for Alberti, who came running back from the dayroom.
Dante slid to the floor, using the cane to brace himself.
“Why are you so upset?” he asked, baffled.
“Do you know what my paternal grandfather did for a living?”
“No, what?”
“He was a miner.”
CHAPTER III
1
The little town was called Sant’Anna Solfara, and it had started to die at the end of the fifties, when the sulfur mines had been shut down. Digging the mineral out of the ground had become less and less profitable, in spite of the fact that the miners were paid a pittance and worked under inhumane conditions, always at risk of breathing firedamp, as they called methane.
The woman who had been Caterina got out of the car, shoving Tommy into the dust.
“Get walking,” she told him. “Pretty soon, I’ll leave you in peace, and if God is willing, I’ll get a little peace of my own.” She said it to him in German, a language she hadn’t spoken in years, afraid it might ruin her Italian accent. After all, it didn’t make any difference to Tommy: all he understood was rough treatment. She pointed him to the entrance of the nearest mine, with a rail car parked in front of it, piled high with yellowish rocks.
“There. Come on. Get moving,” she ordered, giving him a swift kick in the ass. Tommy started crying, but he did as he was told. They reached the bars that prevented access to the mine, but the woman simply opened the padlock, shoved Tommy inside, and shut the gate behind her.
The mouth of the mine had been transformed into a little museum, with vintage photographs on the walls and shelves loaded down with sulfur soap bars and other souvenirs. Behind the museum was a gallery that led to the shaft that went down to a depth of a thousand feet. There were lights marking the route, but they were turned on only for paying visitors; at that moment, the entrance looked like an arch done in black paint, like the tunnels created for Road Runner by Wile E. Coyote.
“Get moving,” said the woman who had been a great many different things, none of them true, poking Tommy in the shoulders with her keys. Cautiously, Tommy stepped into the darkness. They descended, following the rails of the mining carts, and when the outside light had vanished entirely, she reached into her pocket and pulled out a little flashlight. The gallery resonated with the muffled echoes of their footsteps and the distant sloshing of running water.
Once they had descended fifty yards, the woman identified the wooden bench she had been told to look for. She told Tommy to take a seat and, rummaging around behind the bench, she found a waterproof backpack, damp and covered with dust. Inside was a badge holder and lanyard to hang around her neck, an ID with a photograph of Tommy, and a ticket for The Wonders of History. The backpack also contained several short hypodermic syringes with plastic caps protecting the short, sharp needles.
By the light of the flashlight, she read the final instructions printed on a sheet of paper.
The syringe contains Seconal.
The rest of the equipment is behind the freight elevator cage. Arrival is scheduled for noon.
On the back of the sheet of paper was a photograph of an old man with black skin.
The woman looked at the picture and wiped her eyes: she was crying.
2
Colomba got in behind the wheel, where Alberti usually sat, but before driving away, she rested her hand on the gearshift, undecided.
“What are you worried about?” Dante asked, stretched out as usual in the back seat.
“I’m not worried, I’m just remembering,” she replied. “The last time I decided to operate on my own, forty-nine people were killed.”
Dante sat up behind her and leaned closer. “Put it like that, and you seem like a mass murderer, but you know it wasn’t your fault.”
“Ninety-nine percent of me knows it, Dante. Otherwise I never could have survived. But that one percent will torment me forever. Caterina can work alone or with an army, she might be the Queen of Spades or a simple henchman, but she has Tommy in her hands.”
“And you think you’re going to help him by informing the Carabinieri? Have you ever heard of friendly fire?”
“I wasn’t thinking of the Carabinieri.”
“CC … the military is only going to fuck things up.”
“So far, I’ve done all the fucking up that needed doing,” said Colomba, picking up her cell phone.
* * *
D’Amore read the text from Colomba in the hotel in Rimini where he was staying. He’d just finished showering, and a network of fine scar tissue glittered on his chest and back. As requested in the text,
he downloaded Signal and used the app to call her back.
“It’s the office phone,” he said. “Let’s be careful we’re not being monitored. What’s going on?”
“I’m going to give you a piece of news you’ll be receiving soon anyway. Tommy has been kidnapped by Pala’s secretary.”
“The psychiatrist? How is he involved?”
“He’s dead. Don’t ask me how I know.”
“I long ago stopped asking that kind of question.” D’Amore picked up the hotel’s pad of letterhead notepaper and used his teeth to take the cap off a pen. “Where’s the corpse?”
“At his house. But right now, what I’m interested in is Tommy. Maybe I know where Caterina is taking him, but I don’t know if she’ll be waiting there alone, or with an army.”
“Tell me what I can do to help you.”
“First I want assurances from you: you won’t do anything that would endanger the boy.”
“Absolutely, I would never.”
“D’Amore … if you were your boss, I wouldn’t even try this, but I’m telling you this in the hope that you aren’t rotten to the core, the way he is. I want you to swear it to me, I want you to swear it on whatever it is you hold dearest.”
D’Amore heaved a deep sigh. “Things can get complicated in the field, and you know that better than I do. I can’t promise you that everything will turn out fine, just that I’ll do my very best. Is that good enough for you?”
Colomba thought it over for a moment, covering the microphone even though there was no one talking in the car.
“Okay,” she said at last. “I hope that I haven’t made the stupid mistake of the century. There’s a small town twenty miles outside of Portico. It’s called Sant’Anna Solfara. Probably Tommy and his kidnapper are there, somewhere close to the mines.”
D’Amore checked the route on his online map. “I can get there in an hour, using the men I have here in Rimini. Maybe a few minutes faster if I can get a helicopter to take off from Pisa, but I’m not certain.”
Kill the King Page 30