Kill the King

by Sandrone Dazieri

  8

  While Alberti remained at the entrance to the park, awaiting the arrival of the counterterrorism squad, Colomba and Dante slipped windbreakers with a picture of the pope on the back over their clothing, and donned the cyclist-pilgrim caps that they’d purchased at a souvenir stand. Then they approached the proprietors of the café food truck, promising them a cash payment if they helped them, and threatening them with arrest if they didn’t. One of the two accepted; the other stalked off in annoyance.

  And so Colomba and Dante managed to enter the mining park, peering out at the strolling visitors from the interior of the food truck, and after circling the plaza once, remaining as close as possible to the crowd, they parked behind the tent where the faithful were gathering.

  There were no walls, just the canvas awning warding off the sunlight overhead, and so Colomba and Dante saw the crowd assembling while the priest, with the aid of a couple of altar boys, put on his ceremonial vestments. In front of the altar—a simple wooden table with an ostensorium, a cross, and a candle—was a large space without benches, reserved for gurneys and wheelchairs, already packed with old people and invalids.

  “You know that believing in an invisible, infinite, and omnipotent being can be considered a sign of mental illness?” Dante said, peering out at the faces.

  “From my point of view, thinking that the universe created itself is even more of one.”

  “So your God lets people like Leo and Caterina go around murdering people and kidnapping kids.”

  “It’s called free will. But you don’t want to get bogged down in a theological discussion at this exact moment, right?”

  “Right.”

  Colomba asked the driver to park close to the souvenir shop.

  “We aren’t authorized to park there, they’ll tell us we have to move,” the man replied. “They don’t even have sockets for us to plug in, no electric power.”

  “Just tell them that you have a problem with your engine, and that you won’t try to open for business,” Colomba said. Then, to Dante: “I’ll take a walk around and get right back, you stay here.”

  “Okay,” he said, having already spotted the liquor bottles. Colomba tilted the visor of her cap low over the bridge of her nose and stuck her earpiece into her right ear. It was flesh-colored and virtually invisible, and it connected by Bluetooth to the radio she wore at her waist, next to her handgun. She checked to make sure none of that could be seen under the windbreaker and got out.

  “Can you hear me?” she murmured.

  “Yes,” said Dante, who had the radio propped up on the counter, with the volume turned down low.

  “Yes, Deputy Captain,” said Alberti. “Esposito has just arrived.”

  “Tell him the channel,” said Colomba, and stepped into the little shop crowded with children and nuns, where she pretended to be interested in the sulfur cream for greasy skin. Next to the shop, there was an arrow pointing the way to tours of the mine the way it was a hundred years ago.

  “Are you open?” she asked the clerk behind the counter.

  “Certainly! Come right in.”

  “I can’t hear you very well, Deputy Captain,” Esposito said in her ear.

  She moved toward the shop window, between the display cases of antiqued postcards. “I’ll bet you can’t, there’s a lot of rock around here. Where are the others?”

  “They’re dribbling in a few at a time.”

  “Confirm that,” said D’Amore, piping in on the frequency. “What’s the situation? Have you identified the target?”

  “No. None of the three. But the area is enormous.”

  “Describe it to me.”

  “There must be at least twenty-five acres of land, with lots of blind spots, crumbling old buildings, and factory sheds. There are about three hundred people, all concentrated in the central space. Many black and Asian women, many priests and nuns. Two Carabinieri are in charge of maintaining public order, fire trucks and ambulances are parked at the entrance. The whole area is enclosed by a barbed-wire fence, which gives onto the fields and the township road.”

  “We’ve cordoned off the perimeter. They’re not getting out that way, unless they’ve already left.”

  “Snipers?”

  “Two, on the roof of the abandoned factory, at nine o’clock. We’ll call the front gate six o’clock, the big tent the center of the area, and the enclosure at the far end twelve o’clock.”

  Colomba looked for it, peering carefully, but from there she couldn’t see it. “Oscar Kilo Yankee,” she said. “But remember what you promised me.”

  “Me and Espo are ready to come in,” Alberti broke in.

  “Start checking the tour buses.” Colomba thought it over for a second and added: “At eleven o’clock, more or less.”

  “I’ll send in four of my men and have them start from the other end,” said D’Amore. “There are very few of us, given the number of people.”

  “I didn’t expect this crowd,” said Colomba.

  “I’m Falcon One, my men run from Two to Eight. The snipers are Eagle One and Two. You’re Rome One, and your men are numbered progressively. Open channels.”

  “Oscar Kilo Yankee.”

  “This is Rome Two and Three, and we’re going in,” said Esposito’s voice. Without a hint of sarcasm, for once.

  “Rome Four is going to have himself a nice cold vodka and tonic,” said Dante’s voice.

  “Stop playing with the radio,” said Colomba.

  “Yessir, Signor Rome One.”

  Colomba descended into the tunnel and soon the official communications channel in her earpiece turned into hisses and bursts of static. The gallery into the mine was deserted and bare, save for the emergency lights lining the rock walls. Colomba would have sworn that it was identical to when her grandfather had taken her down there.

  She continued until she reached the locked freight elevator cage, but that was the end of the walk: after that, the gallery was blocked off by a heavy gate with a lock plugged up with dust. It probably hadn’t been opened in centuries, and that was a good thing, because who knew how many miles the galleries went on, between forking branches and communication tunnels.

  And then she noticed that behind the gate, tossed by a steady draft, something was rolling along. She stuck her arm between the bars and grabbed it on the fly: it was a bunched-up pair of fishnet panty hose.

  Colomba went running back to the souvenir shop to get decent radio reception, just as the loudspeakers were blaring out the priest’s echoing voice.

  In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.

  “Rome One here,” she said. “I found an item of clothing that may belong to the target. She used the gallery open to the public to change clothes, right behind the souvenir shop, at three o’clock,” she continued as she walked back toward the food truck.

  D’Amore asked her if there was any more evidence, and she answered no. “But find someone who has the keys, I don’t know if there’s anything else.”

  Amen.

  “Roger, Rome One,” said D’Amore. “Falcon Four and Five, head over to three o’clock.”

  Colomba waved at the food truck driver, who was smoking angrily as he mulled over the money he’d lost, then she rapped at the closed metal roller blind. “Dante, I brought you a pair of stockings to sniff,” she said.

  When he failed to reply, she leaned in to look through the narrow gap. The kitchen of the food truck was empty.

  9

  And with your spirit.

  The echoing loudspeakers penetrated into the control booth of the ropeway conveyor. The woman who had been Caterina understood that her time was almost up. She leaned over the man sprawled on the ground, who was staring up at her through his tears, his shirt unbuttoned and wide open, revealing the belly swollen with the abnormal buildup of fluid and covered with the bruises from paracentesis. In the effort to escape, he’d fallen out of the wheelchair and now he was flat on the dirty floor, incapable of rising
. His stretchy-waisted trousers had fallen down his rickets-ridden legs, revealing the adult diaper he wore because he had lost all bladder control. He’d shit his pants and reeked of it.

  The man’s daughter gazed at him without compassion.

  “You remember my mother?” she asked him. “She survived for a whole month after you left, did you know that? Even if she didn’t understand a thing anymore.” She pointed to her temple. “You broke something in her head. With your fists. And I helped the nurse to wash her. I was six years old, and I was cleaning my mother because you’d beaten her into a coma.” She hunkered down to look at him more closely. “What was it she did wrong?”

  “Nothing … nothing.” The old man’s voice scraped and hissed. “I was drinking. I didn’t mean to—”

  “I’ll tell you what she did wrong. She found out what you were doing to me. And she tried to stop you.”

  The old man flailed and struggled in his effort to speak, but he just coughed, red with the effort of breathing.

  “They took out my ovaries. At age six. From the infection that you gave me. Right after my mother died.” The woman took off her veil and overcoat and hung them on the door handle. “Do you know what the nurses said?” she continued. “That it was just as well. At least that way I wouldn’t bring another miserable bastard just like me into the world, another Neger.” The woman got a waterproof white jumpsuit out of her bag and put it on, crushing her braids under the hood.

  “Forgive me,” the old man wheezed, and he made a last desperate attempt to get to his feet, but his daughter shoved him back into the wheelchair with her foot.

  “I would have forgiven you if you’d come back to get me. I would have let you do anything to me if you hadn’t abandoned me. And probably I’d be dead now, as a result. But instead, here I am. You never came back, and I grew up.”

  She pulled the box cutter out of her purse and started by cutting off the man’s nose.

  10

  D’Amore caught up with Colomba at the food truck. He was wearing a cap with a photograph of the pope and in one hand he was carrying a pamphlet listing the initiatives of the Order of Malta.

  “Did you find him?” he asked.

  She shook her head. “I looked under the tent and all around the various stands.”

  “If he’d been dragged away against his will, one of my men would have seen it. Could he have left voluntarily?”

  “I hope so.” The phantom pain in her belly was so strong that Colomba was forced to crouch. “Still, I can’t help but think that Leo organized all this to get him back. I know that’s crazy, but everything that’s happened is crazy. God …”

  “Falcon Four,” said the radio.

  “Go on,” D’Amore replied.

  “There’s a woman who matches the target’s description. She’s dressed as a nurse and she’s pushing a wheelchair with a man whose features we haven’t been able to get a sighting on, but he could be the hostage. In the area around the tour bus parking lot. Eleven o’clock.”

  “Everyone converge but maintain safe distance. Eagle, do you see anything?”

  “Negative, we’re blocked by the ropeway conveyor.”

  D’Amore put a hand over the microphone. “Are you going to come or do you want to stay here and wait for Dante?” he asked.

  Colomba planted her fingernails into her palms until drops of blood appeared.

  “Let’s go,” she said.

  11

  Dante waited until two of D’Amore’s Falcons moved away from the book stand. The two men wore hats and sweatshirts identical to those worn by the pilgrims, but it was obvious from the way they held themselves and moved and covered each other’s blind spots that they had military training. And then there were the slight bulges around belly and thigh, the hard eyes, the fake smiles, the slight tilt toward the side of the head with the earpiece.

  Dante moved around behind a little bar on wheels, shaped like a lemon, and from there he saw the Falcons cross paths with Esposito and Alberti; after a rapid exchange of observations, they all moved off at a brisk pace toward the tour bus parking lot.

  Something’s happening, he thought.

  As soon as the policemen and the soldiers vanished behind the old processing plant, Dante slipped into a crowd of schoolchildren, and after edging his way through them continued toward the small mountain of mining slag, next to which stood the sulfur kilns, a series of inclined stone basins the size of swimming pools, arranged in a stepped array. In the nineteenth century, they were used to filter and distill the unprocessed sulfur: now they were just enormous trash cans, receptacles for the garbage that people threw from the road.

  Had Colomba already noticed he’d disappeared? he wondered. He could imagine her losing her mind and cursing his name.

  But what else could he do? Tell her that while she had been walking deeper into the mine, the boring wisecracks of the cops playing hide-and-seek had vanished from the radio, replaced by just one voice that had frozen him to the spot? A voice that had persuaded him to slip stealthily into the crowd that trudged along fetidly like a thousand-headed monster, and to put up with the sticky hands of the children, the myriad bodily odors, the foul breath of strangers mixing with the air that he breathed, the particles crawling with the bacteria from their sweat?

  To the kilns, the voice had said. Alone. You’ll have all the answers you’ve been looking for.

  An instant later, communications had started up again between the Falcons and the Eagles, but Dante hadn’t heard them: he’d already stepped out of the van, worried that Colomba might arrive and stop him. He hadn’t thought it through, he hadn’t weighed the pros and cons.

  His legs wobbly beneath him, Dante walked up the wooden catwalk that climbed to the kilns, his heart racing, drenched with sweat. Sitting on the central sulfur kiln was a man. The minute he saw Dante, he grabbed a couple of crutches and rose from his seat.

  “Hi, little brother,” he said. “We have three minutes. Don’t waste them.”

  12

  Tommy shouted.

  The young woman who’d taken delivery of him leaped to her feet in surprise, banging her head on the tour bus’s luggage racks: she’d hoped he’d sleep longer than this, but instead he must have just awakened. And now he was looking around in terror.

  “Be good, Tommy,” she said to him. “Soon you’ll be home.” Tommy started struggling and twisting and he emitted another shout. She rummaged through her purse and found the syringe, but he was moving too vigorously, and without meaning to, he swatted her with a flailing hand. The syringe rolled away down the central aisle of the bus.

  “Everything all right back there?” asked the driver.

  “Yes, yes, it’s fine. Don’t worry about him,” the young woman replied, doing her best to hold Tommy still. But it was an impossible challenge. He was fast, and he was big. And very strong. He tore off her veil, and when she tried to put it back on, he crushed her against the armrest, swatting at her with his open hands. She was forced to stand up again, and once again she hit her head against the overhead luggage rack. Tommy climbed over her and started pounding on the rear door.

  “Hey, look out, he’ll break it!” said the driver.

  “I don’t know how to calm him down!” she replied, slipping into a state of panic. “He’s having a crisis.”

  “If you don’t know how to control him, what do you think I can do about it?” asked the driver, opening the doors.

  Tommy teetered, but managed to hold himself upright by grabbing at the doorframe. He shouted again, and this time a couple of passersby turned to look; it must have been a fairly common sight, that day, because soon the two strollers looked away and continued along the way.

  The young woman grabbed the syringe and hit Tommy in the back with it, but she had forgotten to remove the cap and the needle snapped off.

  “Please, calm down,” she said.

  Tommy paid her no attention, leaped to the ground, and started running, waving his arms as he
emitted shouts and incoherent yawps. Blinded by panic, the young woman got out in her turn, but instead of chasing after the boy, she headed for the porta-potties.

  13

  Dante’s brain had exploded, unable to withstand the force of the satori: everything he had ever imagined, everything he had ever believed, had been wrong.

  “What the fuck happened to you?” he stammered.

  Leo smiled under the network of scars that rendered his face unrecognizable. “I fought the war, little brother. And I lost.” He no longer had any fingers on his right hand, and his legs terminated above the knees. His left eye was half-closed by scar tissue. “You were there when it happened, but you’ve forgotten all about it.”

  A fragment of the dream scratched at Dante’s memories. The water. The odor of kerosene. “The shipwreck,” he said.

  Leo nodded and sat down again. “When the second fuel tank exploded, I was too close to the Chourmo. The explosion stunned me and the current dragged me under. You had the life jacket, and they got you out of the water right away.”

  “Who took me away?”

  “If I knew, they’d be dead by now. You may not remember, but we had a long conversation on the boat. I explained that you had to help me catch him. You were … stubborn, but I knew that you’d understand in the end.”

  Dante’s head spun, and he, too, sat down on the wall, remaining a few yards away from Leo. “You can’t have killed Martina. Not in the state you’re in.”

  “And I wouldn’t have done it like that. I really liked her. She always brought me coffee.” Leo gave him a crooked smile.

  “Jesus … you worked for Lupo.”

  Leo nodded. “I put his phone calls through.”

  “So it wasn’t you who locked me up in Rimini.”

  “No.”

  “And you didn’t kill the Melases.”

  Leo shook his head.

  “And …” Dante stopped: it was the only question he really cared about, but he couldn’t ask it. The mere thought of turning it into actual words drained him of all energy.