Kill the King

by Sandrone Dazieri

  Leo understood all the same. “And I don’t know who you are, little brother.”

  The crashing wave of disappointment and rage brought Dante out of it. “Then why the fuck do you keep calling me that?”

  Leo reached into his pocket and pulled out a black-and-white photograph, which he set down on the top of the low wall. “That was taken in Berlin in 1980.” It was two men sitting on a bench, against the background of a nondescript brick wall. One of the two men was lighting both their cigarettes. Dante recognized him and looked away.

  Don’t look outside. Be obedient. Be clean.

  “The Father …” he said, trembling with fear.

  “Our Father. When you were ten, we shared a cell. I was fourteen, and I was taking care of you.”

  “I was in the silo …” Dante stammered.

  “No. That came later. First you were with me, at the Factory.” Leo looked at the watch he’d fastened to one of his crutches. “We still have two minutes.”

  “I’m not letting you go …” Dante tried to say.

  “You can’t even stop me. Don’t waste your time.”

  “Who are you?”

  “Mu. I’m a void.”

  “Why Venice?”

  “Look at the other man in the photograph. You’ve seen him, only much older and much better tanned.”

  Dante looked back at the picture, his eyes half-closed as if it were gleaming with dazzling light. “Belyy. The founder of COW. Fuck. So he and the Father worked together?”

  “They knew how to plan for the future. The Cold War was over, the Soviet Union was destined to collapse. Belyy started to transfer the most promising boys, and the Father was kind enough to keep them in safe custody. I don’t know where you come from, but I spent the first fourteen years of my life inside the Box. Giltine was my sister, but unfortunately she was completely off her rocker.”

  14

  Tommy fell at the bottom of the small mountain of slag, got to his feet, and with blood streaming from his nose went on running. He tripped over one of the uprights supporting the walkway that led up to the kilns and fell again, slamming his face against the first step. This time he didn’t get up again: he curled up in a fetal position and started crying.

  Dante, thirty feet up, saw him. “The boy …” he said.

  “One of the officers who are infesting this party will take care of him.” Leo held him tight. “We still have a minute.”

  15

  60 SECONDS

  Colomba had seen Tommy emerge from behind the trees and fall on the catwalk. At the exact instant that she swiveled in his direction, gripping her pistol, D’Amore’s voice exploded in her ear.

  “Rome One. We don’t know if the hostage is alone. Abort.”

  “If they shoot me, you’ll find out,” she said, reaching the base of the sulfur kiln.

  Tommy was rubbing his face, and blood was gushing from his nose.

  Colomba bent over him.

  “It’s all right, Tommy,” she said to him. “I’m here. I’m here.”

  The boy grabbed her in a bear hug. Colomba returned the hug, gripping the pistol in her right hand. “Hostage safe. We need medical support,” she said into the radio.

  “All right. Acquire target,” said D’Amore.

  40 SECONDS

  Alberti and Esposito were the two officers closest to the sighting. They drew their handguns and ran toward the young woman who was opening one of the porta-potty doors. A little boy stepped out of the next toilet over and, at the sight of the drawn pistols, started shouting, but the young woman was unable to react fast enough. Alberti threw her to the ground and aimed his gun at the back of her head.

  “Police. Don’t move.”

  Esposito twisted her arm behind her back and, after searching her, handcuffed her. “Rome Two. We have the fucking whore.”

  Alberti took the veil off the young woman’s face. “It isn’t her,” he said, his heart lurching.

  “What do you mean it isn’t her?” said Esposito. “She was with Tommy!”

  Alberti turned the girl over roughly. “Where’s Caterina?”

  20 SECONDS

  Caterina put the jumpsuit into her purse and put the veil back over her face. At her feet was a slowly spreading puddle of blood diluted with a liquid that looked like urine, but which had issued directly from the sliced-open belly of the man sprawled on the ground. Quarts and quarts of excess abdominal fluid.

  She saw herself reflected in that disgusting gruel. She smiled.

  She was free.

  10 SECONDS

  Leo led Dante along the platform, staggering.

  “I was convinced that you were behind it all, that you were the King of Diamonds. But instead, you didn’t even play this match.”

  Leo smiled for the first time. “That’s why I’m throwing the whole deck into the air,” he said, and smashed his head into Dante’s face.

  Dante couldn’t see a thing, and he lost his balance, staggering backward toward the mouth of the sulfur kiln. He tried unsuccessfully to grab the edge.

  “No!” he shouted as he slid toward the bottom of the kiln.

  “Don’t believe anything, little brother,” Leo said from above. “Don’t believe anything.”

  ZERO

  The tanker truck being driven by Loris’s father punched through the gate around the mining park as if it were made of plywood, right at the point that the soldiers would have described as “three o’clock.” The truck was a hulking beast from the early nineties, forty metric tons on six axles, and there were very few things that could even begin to halt its forward progress, even at just five miles per hour.

  Gaspare Mantoni bumped over an earth berm and then rumbled down the long, deserted ramp of dirt, spraying mud and gravel as he went. He uprooted a hedge, then rammed aside a café food truck parked outside a souvenir shop; the food truck tipped over, landing on the proprietor, who had gotten out to smoke a cigarette, cursing all the while against his partner, who’d left him to deal with those fucking cops. The handle of the metal roller blind caught him at the base of his spinal cord, then the side of the truck crushed his head like a walnut, and it did the same thing to two young people from a local Catholic association a few feet away.

  Gaspare swerved, and after ripping out one of the corners of the tent, he headed straight for the altar. The first one to go under the wheels was the priest himself, followed seconds later by the crowd of the sick and the faithful clustered around him as they made pointless attempts to turn and run, stampeding each other underfoot in a screaming tangle.

  Gaspare, his senses dulled by alcohol, barely even noticed. He’d driven drunk for most of his life, successfully filling the tanks of half the countryside around Portico with fuel for heating and cooking, navigating paths barely wide enough for goats, so he certainly wasn’t having any difficulties here, on what was basically flat land. If he kept running over things and people, well, fuck, it was because he liked doing it.

  He slammed into a group of priests who were running for their lives, feeling like a bowling ball smashing into a triangle of pins, and then emerged into the tour bus parking lot. He swerved again and smashed into the white bus with the red cross.

  Gaspare left this world at that exact moment, when his frontal bone smashed through the windshield. The driver of the tour bus that Gaspare’s truck had smashed into was tossed backward by the airbag and, out of the corner of his eye, saw the tanker truck sail into the air like a scorpion’s tail, amid the screeching sound of twisted sheet steel. The rear of the tanker truck came plummeting down onto the nose of the tour bus, and the safety valve, jammed shut by years of neglect, suddenly popped open, freeing into the surrounding air the thirty thousand liters of liquid propane gas under forty-five bars of pressure, which immediately turned into an expanding plume of gas, shooting out at a velocity of nearly two hundred meters a second.

  The shock wave and hurtling wall of air kicked up a swirling cloud of dirt and grit that riddled the wall
s of the porta-potties and the bodies of two young women who were hastily getting dressed; the cloud then moved on to machine-gun the girl between Alberti and Esposito. But the two of them didn’t even notice it happening, because they’d been swept away an instant before, with their eardrums shattered.

  They were still in midair when the liquid propane gas entered into contact with the flame.

  Alberti saw his partner’s body sail away like a cannonball.

  The wall of air and the cloud of flaming gas and vapors overturned the vans and trucks that had been spared by Gaspare’s tanker truck, blowing them up in a chain reaction, burning the guy ropes holding up the tent, charring the benches, and slicing like an incandescent scythe through the crowd of running people, the NOA agents and the Carabinieri who had pursued the tanker truck. They hit the mountain of mining slag, which flew into the air like so many champagne corks and rained down on Colomba, her arms still wrapped around Tommy, then they tore loose the cables of the ropeway conveyor, crumbling the control booth into bits, transforming Caterina into a glowing, seething cloud, and then climbed and climbed, until they lapped hotly at the summit of the sulfur kilns.

  Dante was still sliding toward the bottom when everything became intolerably bright. His brother’s silhouette at the top of the kiln became a patch of color in the white.

  And an instant later, he was lost in all that whiteness.

  PART FOUR THE CHILDHOOD OF EVIL

  BEFORE

  When the door opens and a tentacle of light makes its way into the small, exposed-brick room, the boy without a name snarls and crouches, ready to lunge. He spends much of his time on all fours, because in the world of darkness where he grew up, that’s the safest stance. Where he grew up, you recognized others by their smell. Where he grew up, if you weren’t a predator you soon became food.

  The man in the doorway is tall and skinny; he wears a loose factory-worker jumpsuit, and dark glasses over a silk ski mask. As soon as he sees him, the boy without a name lowers his eyes and stops snarling, because he is now in the presence of the man who will decide his fate. He calls himself the Father, he speaks Russian with a strong foreign accent, and he expects absolute obedience.

  “Come,” he says to the boy, turning his back on him without waiting so much as a second. The boy could attack him. In the dark world, no one ever turned their back on anyone. But the dark world is far away now, and he doesn’t even know how far away because one day he woke up and he was already here, between these walls, and he must have slept for days, maybe months, because the faint daylight that filtered down through the high ground-level windows had been enough to make him scream from the stabbing pain in his eyes.

  The Father heads off down a long dusty hallway, lit by bare lightbulbs, and the boy follows him, hunched over, knees bent, hands ready to clutch, feet ready to kick. He sniffs at the new smells, listens to the old sounds that filter from behind the endless succession of closed doors: shouts, sobs, screams, and the sound of flesh tearing beneath repeated blows.

  “You grew up in a hostile environment,” says the Father, still in Russian. “And that made you what you are … it made you a good Son. But now you need to learn to be something else. Because the secret of survival is the ability to adapt to your environment, do you understand?”

  “Yes,” the boy whispers, even if it’s not entirely true: many of the words that the Father utters are completely unfamiliar to him.

  “Your reflexes must become a choice, they have to stop being an imposition of the worst part of you … the beast part. Do you understand?”

  “Yes. Beasts die.”

  “Very good. Whereas you are going to survive. And you’re going to have a roommate.”

  The Father stops in front of a door. He pulls the bolt and opens it. The crude glare of a fluorescent light illuminates a skeletal young boy bound to a cot with leather straps, foam dripping from his mouth, an IV inserted into his vein. He’s wearing an open hospital gown, and there’s a hole in the cot to let his excrement drop into a bucket beneath.

  The stench makes the boy’s eyes water.

  “A difficult patient,” says the Father. “He has a stubborn, oppositional, whiny personality.” He raises the ski mask to uncover his lips, and pops a licorice stick into his mouth. “I’m having quite a hard time overcoming his resistance. In spite of the terapia.”

  He’s uttered the last word in Italian, and the boy looks at him, uncomprehending.

  “Terapia means treatment.” The Father points to the IV tube. “Insulina,” he says, in Italian again. “In the proper dosage, it provokes a shock that starts the brain up again, and that I hope will eliminate certain forms of rigidity. He receives the treatment twice a week, alternating with perineal electromassage and baths. There have been some improvements, but he’s not cured yet. Do you understand?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m counting on you to make sure he learns obedience. In return, he will help you to learn to reason. He has a very elevated intelligence quotient and a superior ability to process ideas, even if it’s often hindered by his morbid sexual proclivities.” The Father takes a rag off a hook on the wall and uses it to mop the prisoner’s sweat-drenched face. “I hope I won’t have to use techniques that are more invasive than these. I’d just as soon leave him intact. But il medico pietoso fa la piaga puzzolente,” he adds in Italian. Roughly speaking, it means a doctor must be cruel to be kind. He pulls the IV out of the prisoner’s vein and puts a bandage on his arm. Then he lifts the bound boy’s head and helps him to drink a glass of water and sugar. The boy spits most of it out, his eyes rolled up into his head. “I’m going to leave you here with him. Once he recovers, take him to your room. From this moment forward, you’re bound together, do you understand?”

  “Yes,” says the boy without a name, looking at the prisoner and wondering whether it might not be better to kill him immediately, suffocate him the minute the Father turns his back. “Does he have a name or is he like me?” he asks.

  The Father lowers the ski mask again.

  “You can call him Dante.”

  CHAPTER I

  1

  The operations required to recover and identify the victims at the mining park lasted two weeks, because the miles of tunnels required the intervention of teams of spelunkers.

  But the most challenging area to inspect actually proved to be the parking lot, where the sheet metal and steel beams of the tour buses had fused with the structures of the ropeway conveyor, producing a razor-edged tangle of twisted metal. In the end, there were thirty-nine corpses recovered, but everyone agreed that there would have been a far higher number of victims if Gaspare Mantoni had plowed directly into the parked buses instead of playing a demented game of Grand Theft Auto in the middle of the crowd: even with all the ensuing panic, the ones who didn’t wind up crushed beneath the wheels of the tanker truck had managed to escape, making it to a safe distance from the epicenter of the explosion.

  Among the thirty-nine confirmed victims, there were nuns and monks, a number of park personnel, the clerks at the souvenir stand that burned to the ground, the cotton candy vendor and his colleague who sold balloons, the priest who was saying mass, the woman called Caterina and her father, the young woman who had helped Caterina, three NOA officers, two Carabinieri, and a policeman from Rome who had been slammed against a brick wall.

  His name was Claudio Esposito.

  2

  Esposito’s funeral was held with high solemnity at the Basilica of Saint Paul Outside the Walls, along with services for the other police officers and soldiers killed in the massacre.

  Among those attending were Esposito’s widow and two children, who were living through their worst nightmare come true. Among those attending were the highest authorities of the Italian state, including the prime minister, who delivered a speech decrying the dangers of Islamic extremism. Among those attending were Di Marco and the highest ranks of Europe’s armed forces and intelligence services, who all appl
auded respectfully. Among those attending was D’Amore, breathing with some difficulty as a result of his cracked ribs, with a distant look in his eyes as he thought of other deaths in other lands. Among those attending were Martina’s parents, as she was commemorated among the other innocent souls, fallen to the violence of terrorism. Among those attending were Lupo and Bruno, still in a state of shock at the discovery that Bonaccorso had lived among them for months without anyone noticing. Among those attending was Alberti, his arm in a sling and his head covered with burns, supported by his girlfriend as he sobbed helplessly: in what seemed like the blink of an eye, he’d lost two partners with whom he had been sure he’d grow old.

  Also among those attending was Colomba, riddled with bruises from the collapse of the hillock that had protected her and Tommy from the explosion. She didn’t approach her former colleagues or the family members of the deceased, but remained among the ordinary people who were attending out of a sense of fellow feeling or in order to be able to see themselves on television. With her hair in a buzz cut and her eyes blackened, no one recognized her. No one except Santini.

  “This is all your fault, you miserable bitch!” he shouted at her, after pushing his way through the length of the procession. He was stinking drunk and could barely stay on his legs.

  Colomba tried to change direction to avoid him, but Santini followed her. “Esposito was in the personnel office!” he railed. “Why the fuck didn’t you just leave him in peace? Why did you drag him into your insanity?”

  The procession continued to stream past, and the mourners pretended not to see them. Colomba tried once again to move away, and once again Santini planted himself in her path.