Kill the King

by Sandrone Dazieri

  “No helicopters. No camo uniforms. I trust you.” Colomba ended the call.

  “So are the troops arriving on camelback?” Dante asked.

  “Yes, but they’re going to get there after us. Until they do, we’re going to have to make do on our own,” she replied, and finally put the car in gear and pulled out.

  3

  The last details that would link Caterina to the woman who was almost done getting ready in the mine shaft were the color of her skin and the wry twist at the corner of her mouth. Everything else had changed, completely. Her contact lenses had shifted her eyes to green; the uniform of a volunteer nurse of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta, with a dark blue overcoat with leather frogging, had replaced the checkered skirt suit; and a black veil now covered her braids. She even had an ID badge hanging around her neck on a lanyard, with a recent photograph of her and yet another fake name.

  Behind the cage of the freight elevator, the woman had also found a red blanket, a pair of sunglasses, and a little white cap with the Maltese cross. And a wheelchair, neatly folded up. She opened it out and pushed it toward Tommy, who had remained sitting on the bench the whole time, banging a rock rhythmically against the wall of the shaft. He’d been doing it so long that the palm of his right hand was red and scraped. When he saw her, he clumsily threw the rock in her direction, but he didn’t even graze her.

  The woman took his face in her hands. His skin was cold and clammy with sweat.

  “I told you once not to act like a fool. Have you forgotten?” Grabbing him by the hair, she dragged him to the wheelchair and forced him to sit in it. “Stay there,” she told him.

  She went back to get the backpack where she’d found her instructions. Resisting the temptation to take another look at the photograph glued to the document, she found the syringes, took the cap off one, and hid it in her hand.

  “This is only going to hurt for a second,” she told Tommy. She planted the needle in his thigh through the denim of his jeans and depressed the plunger until the syringe was empty. Tommy twisted, losing one of his sandals, but the Seconal deprived him of strength before he could get to his feet. His head lolled back and he breathed laboriously, eyes wide open and a streamer of drool hanging from his mouth.

  The woman checked his heartbeat, then covered him with the blanket—once she’d unfolded it, she saw that at the center of it was a large white cross—and put the glasses and cap on him.

  From outside the mine, in the meantime, came the distant echo of voices and laughter.

  4

  Within a charming natural setting, the archaeological mining park offers a unique experience, allowing visitors to stroll through the environment and structures that once formed part of the industry of Sant’Anna’s yellow gold: sulfur,” Dante read on his cell phone. “Who wants to climb down into the bowels of the earth to see how they used to mine sulfur? Raise your hand.”

  “I sure didn’t know they’d built a park to commemorate it,” said Colomba, accelerating into a curve to pass a car ahead of them.

  “Maybe if we turn on the roof flashers …” said Alberti, suddenly remembering why he preferred doing the driving, when he could.

  “No.”

  Dante stopped reading and leaned forward, clutching his knees in the position they tell you to take during an emergency landing. He’d read the instructions plenty of times, even if he’d never boarded a plane in his life. The mere idea of being sealed into a flying metal tube made his stomach hurt.

  A truck driver honked his horn as Colomba swerved in front of him, cutting him off just in time to avoid hitting an oncoming three-wheeled Piaggio pickup truck loaded with wood in the opposite lane.

  “Are we still alive?” Dante asked with his eyes closed.

  “For now,” Alberti replied.

  “Tell me some more about the park,” said Colomba. “We’re almost in Sant’Anna.”

  “It opens at noon, and only on weekends,” said Dante, picking up the lit cigarette that he’d dropped on the carpet.

  “So the park is closed today,” said Colomba.

  “So much the better, at least we’ll have fewer innocent visitors to protect.”

  “The whole town must be full of sulfur dust,” Alberti commented. “They might even be outside the perimeter.”

  Colomba bit her lip. “It’s a risk. There isn’t much in the town except for the mine, unless things have changed since I was a little girl,” she said. Her grandfather had taken her there a couple of times and had told her about life as a sulfur miner. She had imagined them as the gladiators of her school history textbook: muscular, half-naked, and with pickaxes instead of swords. “It’s also true that Sant’Anna Solfara isn’t exactly an ideal spot for a fugitive. There’s just one street that connects to the provincial road.”

  They emerged from a tunnel, and just as he was shutting his eyes, Dante thought he glimpsed on an advertising poster the words SULFUR MINE.

  “Stop,” he said without looking. “Please, CC, stop and go back until we reach the sign.”

  “Dante, we’re in a hurry. What sign?”

  “The colored one.”

  Colomba slammed the brakes on so hard that he practically spat his guts out, then put the car into reverse, forcing the driver of a semitrailer behind them to veer onto the shoulder. Dante heard the driver shout, even though he had both hands over his ears. On a series of panels outside the tunnel were a number of advertising posters, stuck up one atop the other, all for concerts and food fairs dating back to the previous summer, but Colomba easily spotted the one that Dante was referring to. Against a background picture of the mines of Sant’Anna were the words SUFFRAGE MASS FOR THE VICTIMS OF THE EARTHQUAKE and—in smaller print—PRAYER AND REFRESHMENT STOP OF THE “CYCLIST-PILGRIMS” OF VIA LAURETANA.

  “That’s today’s date,” said Alberti.

  “And the time?” asked Dante, who had cautiously uncovered only one ear.

  “Ten minutes ago.”

  5

  The echo of the chatter and laughter in the mining park was covered by the metallic creaking of a metal roller gate being opened. The woman in a nurse’s uniform had patiently waited for that moment, but her heart started racing all the same. She waited a couple of minutes to regain her calm, then stood up and adjusted Tommy in the wheelchair so that it seemed as if he were sleeping; as a finishing touch, she tugged his cap down over his forehead, snug against the top of his glasses.

  From above came voices and the sounds of footsteps, drawers being opened and shut. With an electric buzz, the lights went on along the ceiling of the gallery.

  The woman pushed the wheelchair toward the exit. At the last curve, she crossed paths with a young man and young woman, both in their early twenties, wearing matching T-shirts that read ITINERARIES OF THE SPIRIT.

  “Good morning, Mother,” the young woman said with a smile.

  Mother. Right, she thought, and after greeting them with a sober nod, she walked into the souvenir shop. It was jammed to the rafters, half of the customers nuns or priests in tunics, the other half old people with walkers or in wheelchairs. Her uniform was perfect for blending in with the crowd, and she decided that everything was going according to plan.

  Before being Caterina, the woman dressed as a nurse had lived a life that constituted a succession of bad choices and worse luck, with only an occasional flash of light when she managed to pull off a job that didn’t end in a black eye or a pair of handcuffs. She drove very well, and once she had been the driver for an automotive smash-and-grab robbery of a jewelry shop in Cologne—she’d driven through the plate-glass window—organized by a pair of Polish cousins. They had studied the routines of the jeweler and his employees, they knew when the private security guard got off work for his lunch break, and they’d calculated exactly how long it would take the German Polizei to get there, as well as how long it would take them to get away. The two cousins’ precision, however, had been nothing compared to the way her life over the previous y
ear had been scheduled and predisposed. But then, the reward she’d been promised would allow her to live very comfortably for quite some time. She wasn’t even interested in the cash she’d left behind in Pala’s safe: that money, she had been told, would serve to mislead the investigation, and to point accusing fingers at the psychiatrist.

  She emerged into the open air with Tommy. The mining park had become a town fair, with food trucks selling sandwiches and grilled corn on the cob, a little cotton candy stand and a balloon stand next to it. The large dirt plaza where the mouths of the mine shafts opened out now contained at least two hundred people. There were families with children, bicyclists with their narrow black shoes, and lots and lots of volunteers and religious, with their entourage of the sick and the aged. They were gathering around the white tent where mass would be held. A pair of loudspeakers were spewing organ music and the chants of the Laudamus.

  The woman looked around her with all the clarity of surging adrenaline. A little boy fell down and started crying; a group of cyclist-pilgrims with their bikes slung over their shoulders were walking toward one of the bars, singing a mountaineering song; the metal sausage griddle sizzled with grease when the cook tossed twenty pounds or so of fresh meat onto it; a man with a hermit’s beard and a white tunic was vigorously clanging a bell while waving a sign with photographs of undernourished African children. Tommy shifted his position. She looked closely to make sure that he was still out like a light, then she went over to a stand selling religious books and glow-in-the-dark plastic statues of Our Lady of Loreto, filled with holy water. It was ten minutes past twelve noon, and for the first time, she wondered whether the rigid program that she had followed until that moment had failed just at the crucial instant.

  Then a two-tone horn echoed from the street and a white tour bus with the Maltese cross on the side came through the front gate and parked next to the mountain of gravel, on the far side of the open plaza. The woman pushed the wheelchair in that direction.

  Her ride had arrived.

  6

  Colomba parked on the sidewalk and looked out in concern at the crowd gathering around the white tent.

  “At least they can’t run away without us seeing them, since there’s only one way out,” said Alberti.

  Dante pointed to a group of priests in tunics. “Maybe Leo disguised himself as a priest, like Nicolas Cage in Face/Off.”

  “Do you think that Caterina is about to hand Tommy over to him?” Colomba asked, intentionally ignoring the wisecrack.

  “It’s possible. Unless he wants to join the pilgrims to make his escape unnoticed. Or do both things at once. But for us, the point is another: Do we go in or do we remain hidden?”

  Colomba chewed on her lip, undecided. “If Leo, or Caterina, recognizes us, they could start shooting into the crowd. Or use Tommy as a hostage.”

  “I don’t think he expects to see us here,” said Alberti.

  “But he might have taken it into account,” said Dante. “For all we know, he might have hired half the people here in tunics that we can see around us.”

  “For all we know, he might have planted a bomb just like he did in Milan,” said Alberti. “Or he might have already strangled Tommy.”

  Colomba felt a stab of tension that shut her lungs down, and she planted her fingernails into her palms. “Fuck,” she murmured.

  “CC,” Dante broke in, “what would normal procedure be in this case?”

  “Cordon off the area, identify the hostage, move him to safety, then neutralize the target,” Colomba reeled off the steps mechanically. “But in order to do that, we’d have to wait for D’Amore … And in the meantime, Leo or Caterina could kill the hostage or hop over the fence someplace we can’t see.”

  Dante shrugged his shoulders. “We don’t have any way of knowing what my brother has in mind. So just do what your former colleagues would do in your situation: dump the hot potato into someone else’s lap.”

  “Tommy isn’t a hot potato.” Colomba shut her eyes for a second, trying to regain her calm and peace of mind. “Just tell me whether you think Leo is willing to blow himself up just to keep from getting caught.”

  Dante had a brief flash from his dream in the Box, when the water was submerging everything. This time, Leo wasn’t waving goodbye with a smile: he was peering at him closely, with a look of concern, and telling him to run.

  “He’s not a suicide bomber,” he replied. “But one thing is for sure, if he’s in here, he’s figured out an escape route.”

  Colomba nodded. “Then we need to find a way to get in without being noticed.”

  Alberti pointed to a food truck that was setting up on the main road. “What do you think of that?”

  7

  The woman who had murdered the psychiatrist whose secretary and lover she had once been stopped about thirty feet short of the white tour bus, pretending she was tucking the blanket in around the boy in the wheelchair she was pushing. Actually, though, she was looking at the group of volunteers and nurses of the Order of Malta who were getting out of the bus in small groups, accompanying octogenarians and invalids wrapped in blankets very much like the one she had found in the mine shaft. Half of the volunteers were of South American or North African or Central African origin, while the other half seemed to be made up of Asian women; they were all pushing wheelchairs that two powerfully built male nurses were extracting from the tour bus’s luggage compartment, unfolding, and then helping the nurses to get their patients into.

  The woman spotted a skinny little volunteer waiting for her ration of skinny old bones; the other woman had an age and a complexion roughly compatible with her own. When she saw that the young woman had been assigned a mountain of human flesh, she realized that she’d found her match.

  Like in some elaborate choreography, nurses, caregivers, and patients spread out in an intricate array over the sandy ground, in an alternating pattern of white uniforms, dark-blue overcoats, and red blankets. The skinny woman stopped near the locked entrance to a mine, and after letting herself be overtaken by the colorful tidal wave, she headed toward the tent where the Te Deum was now being broadcast.

  The woman pushed Tommy’s wheelchair toward the wheelchair pushed by her “colleague,” who shot her a worried glance and, on the verge of tears, said something to her in French.

  “Italian or German,” the woman retorted.

  “Is that you?” the other woman asked nervously in Italian. “Are you Caterina?”

  “I used to be.”

  The nurse raised the cap covering the face of the mountain of flesh, revealing a swollen face and a warty schnozzola.

  A mixture of horror and pleasure seethed in her belly. “What’s happened to him?”

  “Cirrhosis of the liver. He’s in the final stages. I gave him a sedative.”

  “Did you talk to anyone on the bus?”

  The young woman shook her head. “I never once took off my gloves, I never once took off my veil, I was never here. Before I leave I’ll go into one of the bathrooms and I’ll change my clothes, then I’ll take the train and go home,” she said as if repeating a lesson from memory. Then she added, without changing her tone of voice: “I just needed money. I want to go back to my country.”

  “You don’t have to justify yourself to me. Where did you find him?”

  “In Rome. He lives alone. But I didn’t find him. I was told where he lived.”

  “Did you see who gave you your instructions?”

  “No. Did you?”

  The woman who had been Caterina shook her head, then pinched the old man’s cheek. He didn’t react. “How am I supposed to wake him up?”

  The young woman looked around, then handed her a hypodermic needle wrapped in a piece of toilet paper. “Whatever it is you need to do to him … do me a favor, and do it in a hurry. I want to get out of here.”

  “I’ll be back here before the end of the mass. In the meantime, you take this one aboard the bus and wait for me. If the driver asks you a
nything, just tell him that your patient is tired and needs to sleep.”

  “They’ll notice it’s not the same person.”

  “And they aren’t going to give a damn. Just put him in the last row. And if he starts to get worked up, there’s a syringe for him, too, in the pocket on the back of the wheelchair.”

  The woman took the old man with her and pushed him toward the control cabin of the ropeway conveyor that years ago had brought the raw minerals to the refinery, and which now consisted of nothing more than a bucket hanging thirty feet off the ground. The cabin, which still held some portion of the original controls, had once been locked, but the last time she’d been here, the woman had replaced the old padlock with a new one. And so she had no difficulty opening the lock, pushing the wheelchair inside, and shutting the door behind her. No one saw her. If it had been a different kind of party, there would probably have been kids everywhere rolling joints or making out, but this was a party for good Christians, and good Christians never go where they aren’t supposed to. The woman took out the hypodermic needle wrapped in toilet paper, and only at that moment did it occur to her that she didn’t know what was in it, and whether this should be an intramuscular injection or a venous one. She chose his deltoid. For a good thirty seconds, nothing at all happened, then the old man started trembling and coughing. Another two minutes went by before he regained consciousness; the whole time, she stood right in front of him, savoring every second.

  Finally the old man opened his bleary eyes and focused on her, but he didn’t recognize her. And how could he, if the last time he’d laid eyes on her she’d been six and covered with blood?

  The woman felt a pleasurable sensation of warmth rise from her belly.

  “Ciao, Papà,” she said.