Kill the King

by Sandrone Dazieri

  She saw herself sitting on that armchair for all the years to come, slowly getting covered with dust just like the stack of used books on the floor next to the armchair. She’d bought them all at the used book stand across from the Teatro Adriano. On top of the stack was Gravity’s Rainbow, which Colomba had given up on after the first few pages, and which she now had no desire to pick back up, with all its stories about cocks and missiles. Dante might like it, with his maniacally obsessed interests.

  That’s enough thinking about Dante, she told herself, and mechanically started rummaging through the books in search of a title that appealed to her.

  Then D’Amore knocked on her door.

  8

  D’Amore was wearing a charcoal-gray suit and a white shirt, and he had a trench coat folded over his arm. He didn’t seem lighthearted right now: he was just a soldier in civilian attire.

  Who’s just had to go bury his men, Colomba thought.

  “Am I intruding?” he asked her. “They told me you’d gone home and I just wanted to check in on you.”

  Colomba gestured for him to come in. “Are you still keeping me under surveillance?”

  “I left a squad car parked downstairs. Just for the first little while.”

  Colomba shrugged her shoulders and went back to sit in her armchair, kicking off her combat boots. “I don’t have a fucking thing to offer you, except for the nocino walnut liqueur that my partners gave me after I got out of the hospital.”

  “I used to drink it when I was a kid.”

  “Then pour yourself a glass and feel young again. It’s under the sink, next to the Comet scrubbing powder.”

  D’Amore took off his jacket and went into the kitchen. His formal attire looked good on him, Colomba decided as she watched him go. She wondered if that was a mask, just like his lighthearted demeanor, or whether that was actually the real D’Amore … assuming that there was one, of course.

  He came back with the walnut-shaped bottle and poured a couple of fingers of the brown liqueur into two colorful plastic cups. He handed one to Colomba and took a sip of his own.

  “Exactly the same as I remember it: too sweet and too bitter, at the same time,” he said, and sat down in the armchair facing Colomba. “I heard that Santini started a quarrel with you at the funeral.”

  “He was drunk and he had a good point. I should have left Esposito alone, let him live his life.” A knot surfaced in her throat and she focused on her glass.

  “You had perfectly good reasons to get him involved.”

  Colomba nodded imperceptibly. “I trusted him. But I treated him badly. He must have died cursing my name.”

  “We’re all heading in the same direction, Colomba. And once you come to the end of the road, it makes no difference.”

  “Is that your philosophy of life?”

  He looked up for a second; his eyes were bloodshot. “Do you have a better one?”

  “Not right now. Were you friends with any of them?”

  D’Amore poured himself some more nocino. “No. Still, I sent them to their deaths.” He toyed with the pendant that dangled from his wrist. “I shouldn’t have had a field command, I’m no longer an operative.”

  “But you were once.”

  “That’s something we have in common. Have you thought about what you want to do, now that Bonaccorso is dead?”

  Colomba shook her head.

  “Are you going to go after the King of Diamonds?”

  She looked at him over the top of her glass. “No courtesy calls in your line of work, are there?”

  D’Amore gave her a weary smile. “No one sent me here, I swear to you. Can’t I just worry about the well-being of a colleague?”

  “If you’re not worried about men who died needlessly …”

  D’Amore gripped his glass. “Now you’re being unfair.”

  “In spite of your official versions, you know perfectly well what happened at the mines: someone wanted to kill Leo and they did it by unleashing a massacre. Unfortunately, you lot have no interest in finding out who that was. Or else you already know, and you want to keep him as a friend.”

  “I can’t be friends with someone who killed my men,” said D’Amore. “And we aren’t going to interfere with the civilian magistrates as they conduct their investigations.”

  “They aren’t going to find out anything without help from the intelligence agencies, and you know it.”

  “I may not like that, but there’s nothing I can do about it.”

  Colomba raised her glass. “Give me some more.” Her eyes had taken on an olive-green sparkle. D’Amore leaned toward her and Colomba let herself lean against his shoulder. She felt his breath on her ear, with pleasure. For a second. Then she straightened up.

  “No,” she said.

  D’Amore retreated. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to make you uncomfortable—”

  “Oh, I’m not. But you’re going to have to look elsewhere for a quick fuck to chase away grief.”

  D’Amore picked up his jacket and trench coat and got to his feet. “I’d better go. Will you stay in touch, every so often?”

  This time, there was no need even to reply.

  D’Amore smiled and left. After getting into her pajamas, Colomba noticed that he’d left a flash drive on the armchair.

  9

  Colomba scrolled through the files on the flash drive, and since she didn’t understand a thing she was looking at, she put her combat boots back on and went out the door.

  It was 1:30 a.m., and outside her front door there weren’t many parked cars. And only one car had two people inside. It wasn’t hard to guess that they were D’Amore’s men, but Colomba had absolute confirmation of the fact when they followed her taxi all the way to the Hotel Impero.

  The night desk man was a new face, and since she wasn’t wearing the fancy clothing of the hotel’s usual guests, she was forced to announce her visit.

  A couple of minutes later, she saw a bald, muscular man wearing a jacket and tie walk toward her.

  “Let me show you the way, Deputy Captain,” he said.

  “Excuse me, but who are you?” Colomba asked in surprise.

  “I work for Signor Torre. Please, come with me.”

  The man accompanied her to the door of the suite, knocked once, and then opened it with a key of his own.

  Colomba had expected to find Dante awake, but more importantly, alone. Instead, two men dressed just as nicely as the bald guy were scanning the room for bugs; they’d even dismantled the ceiling lamps.

  Dante was out on the terrace, and his eyes looked like he’d been getting high. The material that had cluttered his bedroom in Portico was now scattered all over the suite around him, including his espresso machine, now paired with an automatic coffee brewer. In spite of the fact that the sliding windows were all wide open, the air was impregnated with tobacco smoke and coffee.

  He waved hello. “Insomnia?” he asked wearily.

  “Of a sort. Who are these people?”

  “Contractors,” he replied as he lit a cigarette.

  Colomba straddled a chair. “Have you lost it?”

  “I made a well-considered decision to choose an Italian company that has never worked with our government. You see? I don’t need you. You can stop worrying and go home.”

  Colomba heaved a sigh. “Dante, I care about you. You’re my best friend.”

  “Well, welcome to Friendzone.com then … What do you want? Were you sick and tired of drinking the stale old liquor you have at home, so you decided to come on over to Dante’s open bar?”

  Colomba tossed him the flash drive. “D’Amore left me this. But it’s all numbers, not my field.”

  “Three,” Dante called out, “could you come here for a second, please?”

  One of the two well-dressed technicians came out on the veranda. He checked the flash drive, probably with an eye for explosives, viruses, and microbugs, and finally gave it back to Dante. “Clean,” he said. “We’re done in there
.”

  “How many bugs did you find?”

  “Just two, Signor Torre. Standard-issue ministry equipment.”

  “They underestimate me. Thanks, we’ll see you tomorrow.”

  Three and his partner left the suite.

  “What the fuck kind of name is Three?” Colomba asked.

  “I got it from watching House. Like him, I don’t want to establish terms of familiarity with someone who might die on my account.”

  “Why do you think you’re in danger?”

  “I don’t,” Dante replied. “But when I track down the King or the Queen of Spades, I’m going to need protection and logistical support in order to kill him or her. They’re also going to testify in my defense, if I wind up having to act in legitimate self-defense.”

  Colomba wondered if she was dreaming. “Jesus, Dante. What on earth have you got into your head?”

  Dante took a sip of coffee. “You wanted to find my brother. I want to find the person who killed him, along with a bunch of other people.”

  “You want to risk your neck to avenge a murderer?”

  “One of us, CC.” He held up the flash drive. “Do you or don’t you want me to read it?”

  Colomba nodded. “Please.”

  Dante stuck it into the port on his laptop and scrolled through the contents. They were all Excel files.

  “These are monetary transactions,” he said after chain-smoking a couple of cigarettes. “From four years ago, credits and debits from a business industry in Belize. BI’s are shell companies used to put money through offshore banks, for purposes of tax evasion.”

  “What about those?” Colomba asked, pointing to several highlighted account entries, both outgoing and incoming.

  Dante studied them. “They’re not on the original document, so I’d have to guess that these are notations made by your friend or someone working for him. By the way, did you take a tumble in the hay with him? You’ve got his aftershave all over you.”

  “If you think you’re embarrassing me, you can forget about that.”

  “Too bad, it’s lots of fun to embarrass cops,” he said. “Ah, here’s the legend of the accounts. Does Markopoulo Mesogaias mean anything to you?”

  “That’s where the Melases had their boat repair yard.”

  “One of the most active accounts comes from there. Hundreds of millions of euros.”

  Colomba yawned. She was having a hard time keeping her eyes open. “And the account belongs to?”

  “That’s not shown. But on the same account we see incoming transactions, money from …” He stopped, truly interested for the first time since he’d opened the file. “BlackMountain. And White Elephant!”

  Colomba remembered that name, too: it was on the counterterrorism list.

  “All the transactions start and end on the same date,” said Colomba.

  Dante hesitated for an instant, then said: “Let me check a couple of details,” and then he did some quick Google searches. At last, he shut the laptop, satisfied.

  “Well? After all, I know you can’t wait to tell me,” Colomba said to him.

  Dante clasped both hands behind his head. “The war between Leo and the King of Diamonds? It was the Father who triggered it.”

  10

  The suite had a guest bedroom with its own bathroom. Colomba had slept there frequently before Dante was kidnapped, and she found the mattress exactly as she’d remembered it, collapsing on it fully dressed, taking her clothes off only at the first light of dawn, just so she could get up and lower the blinds and then go back to sleep.

  When she finally got up, Dante was in the living room, looking like Adam Ant, talking to Three and the bald guy who had come down into the lobby the night before to usher her up to the suite.

  “Sorry,” she said. “I’ll make a quick cup of coffee and then leave you to your work.”

  “Deputy Captain, good morning,” the two men said, practically in chorus.

  “I slept in the guest bedroom.”

  “Good to know,” said Three.

  Colomba cursed herself for an idiot. What godly reason had there been to specify that detail? Dante handed her a mug as big as a washbasin, filled with coffee he’d made with the brewer.

  “Do you really have to sweep for so many bugs?” she asked him.

  “No, Deputy Captain, we just need to make one phone call highly secure,” Three replied in his stead, and from his valise he extracted a laptop, which he connected to an external audio chip and to a cell phone. “Unfortunately, it’s not possible to completely encrypt the call, because both sides would have to be using the same software. We can only cover up Signor Torre’s voice by using low frequencies. Every time that Signor Torre speaks, anyone tapping the line will hear a very staticky communication.”

  “You should have just told him to download Signal, that certainly would have cost less,” said Colomba, trying to be funny.

  Three shook his head, still the complete professional. “The individual is in solitary confinement in the special high-security wing of Rebibbia Prison.”

  Colomba was left breathless for a second. “Are you trying to talk to the German?”

  Dante nodded. “He has the right to call his lawyer, in view of an upcoming appeals hearing.” He pointed to the cell phone connected to the computer. “Borrowing his phone cost me an extra twenty thousand euros.”

  11

  The phone calls that convicts make from prison are always monitored and recorded, except for the ones to their lawyers. But the German was an exception to that rule.

  He seemed to be in his mid-sixties, but he was still muscular, with a powerful neck, long white hair, and a boxer’s broken nose. He had scars from knife wounds and gunshots all over his body, as well as three consecutive life sentences without parole for his acts as the Father’s accomplice.

  That was all that the investigators knew about him, more than three years after his arrest.

  What his real name was, and whether or not he was even German, remained a mystery. For that matter, the German had never opened his mouth, and when a prison trustee in charge of sweeping floors had asked him one too many questions, the German had shoved the broom handle down the man’s throat.

  At exactly half past noon, he was taken out of his cell by two officers of the correctional police, carefully searched, handcuffed, and led to the booth of the officer who was in charge of security at one of the wing gates, a tiny broom-closet-sized room. Around the booth was a cordon of MOG officers, the Mobile Operating Group, the SWAT teams of the correctional police. Normally, the phone calls were done in the visiting room, but the German was an exception when it came to that as well.

  The switchboard dialed the lawyer’s number.

  Dante answered with an exaggerated rendition of the lawyer’s Neapolitan accent, and was put through to the German. Colomba had rarely seen him so vibrant with tension.

  “Good morning, Mr. German,” said Dante, almost in a falsetto.

  On the other end of the line, there was a moment’s hesitation. The German knew that when his phone appointment rolled around, he wouldn’t actually be talking to his lawyer, as the correctional police believed; he didn’t know, however, who he would be talking to. “Good morning, Counselor.”

  “Did you receive the postcard?”

  “Yes.”

  Dante nodded to Three, who started up the low frequency. “From this moment on, only you can hear me, but the eavesdroppers will be able to hear your voice loud and clear. Do you understand?”

  “Yes.”

  “Complain about the poor quality of the line.”

  “I’m afraid I can’t hear you, Counselor,” said the German.

  “I imagine that in a couple of minutes someone will interrupt this call, so let’s waste no time.” Little by little his tone had become more confident.

  “I don’t have anything to tell you, Counselor.”

  “In fact, I’m the one who’s talking to you. And you’ll be listening.”r />
  “As you think best, Counselor.”

  “I’ve seen the accounts, and I had a little chat with Leo before he died. I know that the Father and Belyy worked together before the fall of the Wall.”

  Without so much as an instant of hesitation, the German replied: “I told you the last time we met: look out what you poke your nose into.”

  Dante remembered that phrase very clearly, as well as the circumstances in which he’d heard it. Shortly before being kidnapped in Venice, he’d gone to see the German in Rebibbia Prison, in search of information about Giltine. It hadn’t been a friendly encounter and, just at the thought of it, Dante felt a rivulet of sweat slide unpleasantly down his collar.

  “The Father used a financial shell company to pay people like you. It was called BlackMountain. And from a close study of your savings account, I’d say that you had profitable dealings with a few companies that have recently taken over COW. Here’s the way I see it: Belyy was an old beat-up relic of the Cold War, and he believed in his soldiers, whereas the Father liked to compare himself to Mengele, and he believed first and foremost in the development of scientific research. In the end, the Father was ready to challenge Belyy for the throne, but he died before he got the chance. If there was ever a King of Diamonds, it was him.”

  “I don’t know what you’re referring to, Counselor. I don’t know much about that kind of thing.”

  “In fact, you were strictly a discard. Leo was the real face card. Judging from the things he did, it’s obvious that he had plenty of military experience and highly placed connections. He was a contractor, one of the children that Belyy probably had by raping female prisoners. The Father took him and turned him into his own remotely guided missile against Belyy. I just want to know from you why, once Belyy was dead, he decided not to stop.”