Kill the King

by Sandrone Dazieri

  “What the fuck do you want from me?” Colomba said listlessly.

  “I want you to get out of here!” Santini shouted, his back increasingly bowed as he leaned toward her. “Get out! This is no place for you. You have no right to be here.”

  Two plainclothes policemen pushed their way through the crowd. They were Santini’s security detail, and they must have been worried when he’d rushed off without warning. One of them locked arms with their superior officer.

  “Sir,” he said. “Please, let’s go. It’s not worth it.”

  A glint of lucidity appeared in Santini’s eyes, and he took a couple of steps back. “Just make sure she gets far away from here.”

  There was no need: Colomba let the procession stream past, and soon she stood all alone on the deserted cobblestones. In the end she headed off through the streets of Rome, navigating toward a home that no longer felt like it was hers.

  She walked past the Hotel Impero on Via del Corso, but she didn’t stop: she didn’t feel up to it, not yet.

  3

  In the week that he’d spent on the rooftop veranda of the penthouse suite of the Hotel Impero, drinking straight vodka and espresso, smoking cigarettes and tossing back pills, Dante had been forced to manage another lost piece of his life, starting with the ten hours spent in the belly of the sulfur kiln before the Protezione Civile search teams managed to dig him out.

  The bottom of the ramp had been smeared with motor oil and Dante wouldn’t have been able to climb up and get out under his own power, even if he’d been sound of mind. But he most certainly wasn’t. After the explosion he’d lost any sense of self. His rescuers had found him half-naked, covered with soot, bellowing inarticulate phrases and animal sounds. He’d even tried to attack them. Fortunately, among the rescuers was the emergency room doctor from Portico who had admitted him to the hospital under the name of Signor Caselli after Villa Quiete, and he had put in a call to Colomba, who was still combing through the rubble in search of Dante.

  By now it was impossible to continue to keep news of his rescue a secret, and so the chief of police had issued an official announcement, stating that the leader of the ISIS cell that had kidnapped him had been killed during the massacre at the sulfur mines.

  Dante had no alternative but to lock himself away in his suite at the hotel, avoiding everyone, without distinction: journalists, rubberneckers, but also old friends. Even Roberto Minutillo, his lawyer and friend for many years, was unable to get in to see him.

  Only his adoptive father, Annibale Valle, had refused to stop trying.

  He was a bearded Falstaffian man in his early seventies, who managed to hold his nearly 450 pounds of weight upright with the aid of a couple of canes. Now, though, he was sitting on a pair of chairs that had been pushed together and staring at Dante, who was in turn doing everything he could to ignore him.

  “You can’t just stay in here, avoiding everyone, for the rest of your life,” Annibale said as kindly as he could.

  Dante put out the butt of his cigarette in the melted ice at the bottom of his glass.

  “Forget about it, Dante,” Annibale went on in a gentle voice. “I’ve been watching you fight and suffer your whole life, and maybe the time has come to stop. For your own sake, as a way to protect yourself. Those things that you think you know—”

  “Things that I think I know,” Dante interrupted him, parroting his words. He got out a clean glass and poured ice and Beluga vodka into it. “That’s what you used to say even when I was trying to explain to you that the Father was still alive.” He flashed a nasty smile. “Before I found out that I wasn’t the real Dante. Before I found out that you had lied to get out of jail, since you were accused of having killed me. Sorry, of having killed your son.”

  Annibale looked down. “Dante … what do I have to do to get you to forgive me? I love you, Dante.”

  “I don’t have to forgive you for anything,” Dante said as he lit another cigarette. “The first thing I learned the minute I got out of the silo is that people lie, and you’re no different.” Then, after a long silence, he asked: “Do you ever think about him? Your real son?”

  Annibale sighed. “You’re my real son, too—”

  Dante threw the glass hard onto the floor. It didn’t break, but the vodka started dripping over the edge of the balcony down into the garden below. “Do you ever think about him?” he asked again, without raising his voice.

  Annibale nodded. “All the time.”

  “And what do you think about?”

  “Come on, Dante. It’s not fair …”

  “Please.”

  Annibale blew his nose on a paper napkin. “About … about what he would have been like when he grew up. Whether he would have been like you,” he said in a broken voice.

  Dante grinned. “I’m not like anyone else. Except for a psychopath who helped to murder a bunch of people.”

  “I’m a void,” Leo had told him.

  “It’s all over now. You have to move on.”

  For the first time, Dante turned to look Annibale in the face. He looked old to him now, with those cheeks that sagged like a turkey’s wattles, and the veins standing out in sharp relief on his hands. He thought to himself that children should never see their parents get old, that everyone should be born and grow up alone, to avoid the pain of saying farewell. “Without a past, there is no future,” he said. “Just a really shitty present.”

  “You’ve almost been murdered three times. Isn’t that enough for you?”

  Dante reached down to pick up the glass and filled it up again. “I’m a gambler, Papà. I keep betting until I break the bank. Or somebody breaks me.”

  4

  Colomba didn’t have many friends left among the ranks of law enforcement, but she hadn’t alienated them all. The guard at the front desk of the morgue at the Umberto I Hospital wrote her a pass and put in a good word for her with one of the attendants.

  “No more than twenty minutes, Signora,” the attendant told her, after pulling out the correct body tray in the mortuary refrigerator, and then he left her alone.

  Colomba sat down on the stool, and after heaving a sigh, loosened the straps and pulled down the sheet. Leo’s half-frozen face—greenish, with the chin askew and the eyelids lowered—didn’t frighten her in the slightest. Whoever he had been while alive, mercenary or psychopath, was no longer there. But the autopsy had revealed old wounds that might date back to his adolescence, and his DNA, which didn’t match the samples previously on file, had been useful in reconstructing a piece of his family: Giltine really was his sister, as he had told Dante; or actually, half sister, because they’d had a different mother. All they had in common was their father.

  Belyy.

  “I believe that hell exists,” she told him. “And that you’re there right now, burning and suffering for everything you’ve done. But if the devil is actually an impartial judge, he ought to acknowledge that you had a few mitigating factors.”

  She lowered the sheet a little further, uncovering his chest, ravaged by the autopsy and burns almost certainly dating back to the wreck of the Chourmo, since the burns from the liquid propane gas explosion were concentrated primarily on the back of his body.

  “Because what Belyy did to your mother, the things you experienced as a child, it all helped to make you what you were.” Now she pulled the sheet all the way down and looked at his amputated legs. The irregular flaps of the scars. “Though I also believe in free will, in personal choices. And you made your choices … and you chose that strange sort of life you lived.”

  Leo was killed by the shock wave and the heat from the blast, an impact that was too much for an already debilitated body: that’s what she had been told at the last meeting of the CASA select committee that she was invited to. If he’d been just fifty yards farther away, he would have survived.

  “But you didn’t want to survive, you wanted to die before I could find you and kill you myself. You even denied me that last fucking
satisfaction. I didn’t even get a chance to tell you to your face how you disgusted me. How much you …”

  She burst out sobbing so hard that she couldn’t even catch her breath. She got down off the stool and curled up in a corner of the chilly, tile-lined room.

  And that’s how Bart found her.

  5

  Bart helped Colomba to her feet and forced her to go out with her to get a bite to eat, in spite of the fact that Bart herself was dropping with exhaustion: she’d come down to Rome to take part in the meeting of the National Committee for Order and Public Security, and she’d come by the morgue only to make arrangements to transport Bonaccorso’s corpse to LABANOF, where she planned to do further testing.

  It was still cool out, but they nevertheless took seats at an outdoor table in the San Lorenzo quarter, not far from Dante’s old apartment. People did come around to take pictures of the place, but nobody seemed interested in buying it, because of the radical renovation that he’d had done on it. Bart ordered a full meal, from antipasto to dessert. Colomba ordered just a salad. The thought of food turned her stomach.

  “Gaspare Mantoni had a colorectal carcinoma,” said Bart. “And even though he was penniless, he left his wife a million euros. In an offshore account.”

  Colomba toyed with her fork and said nothing.

  “Whereas the other guy that they found, torn to bits in the control cabin, was Pala’s secretary’s natural father. He didn’t have long to live, either.”

  Colomba nodded. “They told me about that, too.” Caterina’s real name was Andrea Muruts, and Muruts was her mother’s surname. She was a second-generation German citizen, a prostitute and an armed robber who had spent most of her life behind bars, first in institutions, and later in prison. “They found out that Teresa met her as soon as Muruts was released from prison. Probably, Teresa was the one who recruited her and sent her to work for Pala.”

  “At the behest of the King of Diamonds …”

  “He was really good at recruiting well-chosen individuals. But the counterterrorism magistrates have established beyond the shadow of a doubt that he’s dead, and good riddance to him.”

  As soon as she said it, Bart realized that she might have picked the wrong subject. “How is Tommy?”

  “I haven’t seen him once since he was admitted to the hospital.” Demetra had shown up with a battalion of lawyers, claiming the court had given the boy poor treatment and exposed him to an array of risks. “All I know is that he’ll be leaving soon for Greece.”

  “Maybe his aunt isn’t as much of a bitch as she seems.”

  “No, she’ll milk him for what he’s worth and then abandon him in some shitty institution.”

  Bart sighed. “Sweetheart, you can’t fix all the world’s problems …”

  “Usually I just create new ones,” Colomba replied bitterly. “But don’t worry, I really am retired now. It’s all over, as the intelligence agencies state in their official version of events: Leo organized it all and now he’s dead. The Melases were his accomplices, Loris and his father helped him to kill Martina. Caterina, or actually, Andrea, helped him to kill the Melases and to steal their money in exchange for his help in taking revenge on her father. The young woman who helped Andrea is dead, and she was doing it for money. Certainly, Leo simply made an honest mistake with the tanker truck, he should have made his escape earlier, but so much the better, right?”

  Bart sighed. “You have to admit that from a certain point of view, it’s all eminently plausible.”

  “Leo was at the mines to save Dante, not to kill him. Pala was clean but in his safe he had 4.8 million euros with the fingerprints of the Melases all over them, and he didn’t run away when he could have. But why look for anything else, at the risk of having something else come out that it might be better to keep quiet?”

  “Are you planning to pull any more of your bullshit moves?” Bart asked, with a hint of worry in her voice.

  Colomba spread both arms wide, in her jacket. “When they put an end to my consulting deal with CASA, they revoked my permit to carry a firearm and all my security clearances. And after all …” She shrugged. “Who the hell cares? If I hadn’t persisted, Esposito would still be alive.”

  “And Dante would be dead.” Bart looked at Colomba. “Why are you making that face?”

  Without looking up, Colomba answered: “When he recovered consciousness in the hospital, he told me that he loved me.”

  Bart almost dropped her fork. “And what did you say?”

  Colomba didn’t answer. Exactly as she had done with Dante, before taking off at a dead run out of his tent at the hospital.

  6

  Dante managed to convince his adoptive father to get out from underfoot without plunging into another crying jag, then he made himself an espresso with a blend of Arabica and Indian coffee beans, and then he went back to the rooftop veranda, staring up at the transparent ceiling. He turned on his iPad and connected to the virtual hard drive that he had on a secure encrypted site, and on which he’d placed all the documents he’d received from the intelligence agencies concerning COW, along with everything he’d found online about private security agencies. Ever since Bush Jr. had authorized them in the Second Gulf War, private security agencies had become economic powerhouses, publicly quoted on the stock exchange.

  The death star at the center of COW’s mercenary galaxy was F3, originally founded in South Africa by Belyy immediately after his escape from the Soviet Union. Half a million employees, two-thirds of them in the Middle East or Africa. In the last two years it had been supplying governments and multinational corporations not only with soldiers but also with risk evaluations and strategic analyses. It had revenues of thirty billion euros a year, and it had also recently acquired Atlanta, one of the world’s largest companies specializing in security technology.

  Then there was Fegiz Protection Services, with headquarters in London and offices in Afghanistan and Bahrain. Until Venice, it had taken in more than three hundred million euros a year for support services to the American army in Iraq, finally ending up in serious trouble because of a video that showed several of its men shooting civilians. After Venice, it had subcontracted its Pentagon assignments to a company specializing in mercenaries from Latin America, acquiring a leading company in the automation field. SonDy Corp, on the other hand, had been founded in the nineties as a private airline, and it was in the business of transporting personnel and heavy machinery to and around high-risk areas. Along with F3, the year before it had acquired White Elephant, one of the world’s largest cybersecurity corporations, with headquarters in Berlin. White Elephant had, in turn, acquired a majority stake in the American company Atomic Ray, which produced military drones purchased by, among others, the Italian Army. And Atomic Ray in turn owned a Silicon Valley incubator for facial recognition systems.

  Dante crumbled a Provigil tablet and mixed it into a glass of straight vodka as he continued leafing through documents and internet sites. In spite of what Leo had told him, he couldn’t find any link between the Father and Belyy … until a name leaped out at him: BlackMountain. It was a financial holding company with headquarters in Portland, Oregon, that had millions of shareholders around the world. It distributed to several of the Father’s accomplices a sort of pension, and it was also the chief investor in a chain of group homes for disabled children called Silver Compass, and it was there that the Father had hooked and reeled in a number of his victims. Dante discovered that, after Belyy’s death, BlackMountain had invested heavily in all the new operations of the former COW companies.

  It wasn’t much, but it was enough to reassure Dante that his brother hadn’t lied to him till the bitter end. For the umpteenth time in the past week, he asked himself what he felt about him, and in particular about his death. Relief? Sadness?

  It would have been nice to talk it over with Colomba, but there was still that whole story of what had happened in his tent at the hospital … He picked up the room phone and called
the hotel’s director of security.

  7

  Could you really not have noticed a thing?” Bart asked.

  Colomba huffed in annoyance. She’d quickly regretted her decision to accompany her friend to her hotel, because Bart simply wouldn’t stop talking about Dante. “I’ve spent half my life working in close contact with men,” she replied. “Stakeouts, late nights in the office … If they don’t try anything, then I just keep to myself.”

  “But Dante didn’t try anything.”

  “Which is actually a pity. I would have just told him to go take a cold shower, and that would have been the end of it.”

  “I would have hopped right into his bed.”

  Colomba turned to look at her. “How much have you had to drink?”

  “Two beers. But Dante is definitely hot, plus he’s intelligent and easy to get along with … And I’m single.”

  Colomba shook her head, unsure whether Bart was yanking her chain.

  “Did the two of you ever talk about it again?” Colomba’s friend asked her, for the second time.

  “No. But I’m afraid that sooner or later the topic is going to resurface. For now, I’m just avoiding him.”

  They’d reached the Hotel Romano, and suddenly the brightly lit city, with its streets and thousands of years of history, struck Colomba as very beautiful, in spite of everything.

  “Isn’t it strange that when Dante disappears, you search for him, and when he’s around, you’re the one who disappears?” Bart asked as she was waiting for her key at the reception desk.

  “Those are two different things.”

  Bart gave her a hug. “Sure, but the mechanisms are universal, sweetheart. Don’t be a stranger, come see me soon, all right?”

  Colomba called for an Uber to take her home, and flopped down into an armchair in her living room. Once that chair had been her favorite: now it seemed as lumpy and alien as the rest of the apartment. It reeked of dust and dampness, and the three cactuses that she had once tended on the balcony were now brown and dry. And then there was the life of the city, something she was no longer used to, the sound of the traffic coming in through her window, the smell of the Tiber.