Kill the King

by Sandrone Dazieri

  “And you’re asking me?”

  “Yes. Whatever role you might have played, you’ve been benched by now. The Father, Leo, Giltine, and Belyy are all dead; the new generation of technocrats who are bringing COW into the third millennium don’t give a damn about you. Do you want a minimum of satisfaction? Then use me. Who was Leo working for?”

  There was another extended silence. And Dante wasn’t the only one sweating in the room.

  “For no one,” the German finally said. His voice had lost all expression and sounded like a late-model GPS.

  “Then why did he go on fighting?”

  “For love,” said the German.

  In the penthouse suite of the Hotel Impero, the temperature seemed to plummet.

  “Are you quite done, Counselor?” the German asked aggressively.

  “No,” Dante replied, emerging from his momentary study. “Leo was killed, too, and by someone who put in a lot of effort to do it. Someone who loved Belyy or someone who hated the Father and all his ilk?”

  “The second thing that you said. If he could, he’d set fire to the whole world just because he set foot on it.”

  “Who?”

  The German laughed. “Look at yourself in the mirror, kid,” he said. And then he hung up.

  12

  While Dante sent Three to return the cell phone to the German’s lawyer, to ward off a situation in which someone decided to go see him first, to ask some awkward questions, Colomba tried to recover from the shock of having heard the German’s voice. She remembered as if it were yesterday the night the man had attacked her, as brutal and unstoppable as the Terminator, and every bit as icy.

  “What postcard were you talking about?” she asked.

  “It was the photograph that Leo gave me before dying. I had his lawyer mail it to him.”

  Colomba shut her eyes as she counted to ten. “Why?”

  “I wanted confirmation that it was authentic. If it hadn’t been, he’d have hung up the phone the minute he heard my voice.”

  “If he was telling the truth, the Father and Belyy went on waging war against each other even after they were both dead. A feud.”

  “Through their … creatures.” Dante sniffed at himself. “I’m going to take another shower. I smell like fear.”

  “What did he mean when he told you to look in the mirror? That the guy looked like you, or that it was all your fault?”

  “I think the first of the two,” Dante replied, slipping into his bedroom. “The King of Diamonds passed through the Father’s claws, and like me, he didn’t wind up dissolved in a drum of acid. And from the way he moves, I’d say that what happened to him is more or less the same as what happened to me.”

  “How much does all of this organization cost you?” asked Colomba, raising her voice so she could be heard through the wall. In the meantime, she prepared a cappuccino with the espresso machine.

  “Thirty thousand euros a day,” Dante shouted from the bathroom. “Plus a series of extra expenses.”

  “But do they know that you don’t have a penny to your name?”

  “They insisted on being paid in advance. Two hundred thousand euros. And another two hundred thousand as a deposit.”

  Colomba realized that she’d used almond milk: she threw it all away and opened a sugar-free Red Bull. “How did you talk Annibale into underwriting it?”

  “I didn’t,” he replied from the shower, talking through the stream of water. “It was my money, the payment for my own hard work. It’s my base fee for opening the locks of the dead.”

  Colomba ran straight into the bathroom and hurled the can of Red Bull at the silhouette behind the pebbled glass of the shower stall. The glass panel cracked.

  “Hey!” shouted Dante.

  “I’m going to kill you,” said Colomba.

  Dante turned off the water and hastily emerged from the shower stall with a towel wrapped around his waist. “For what, for having taken money that should have gone to the slush funds of the intelligence services? Money that could have gone to your friend Aftershave D’Amore?”

  “I told you not to do it.”

  “And I listened to you, at least as long as my brother was alive. Then I called up Santiago and I gave him the address and combination. The Carabinieri still hadn’t come by.” Santiago was a former member of the Cuchillos, a Latino criminal gang, a drug dealer who had broken free of his former brothers and who now made a living by doing jobs on the Deep Web. Dante trusted him to the exact same degree that Colomba didn’t.

  “How much did you get paid?”

  “Six hundred apiece. He was the one who got the money out of Italy. Now I have my own BI. It’s in the Cayman Islands. Do you want to report me to the police?”

  “Don’t talk nonsense. But you can’t do this thing without me.”

  “I thought you’d pulled out.”

  “I’m not letting you go it alone.”

  Dante turned his skinny back on her and switched on his electric shaver.

  “As you like.”

  “But I handle the troops. Tell your security contractors that from here on in, I’m the sergeant major.”

  “Be my guest. Just for your information, when it’s all said and done, if there’s anything left over, I’m going to use it to get far away from here.” A tuft of red hair fell into the sink. “And I’m not going to reappear magically in an abandoned clinic around the corner from your house.”

  “Good, because you’re a real pain in the ass,” said Colomba, concealing her dismay.

  “Go get dressed: we’re going to have visitors soon.”

  CHAPTER II

  1

  The King of Diamonds had started playing chess at age ten. He didn’t have chess pieces, back then, or even sheets of paper to draw them on; and anyway, he’d been in such extreme pain that he often couldn’t so much as lift a finger. But his mind actually seemed to feed off that pain, growing stronger as the pain grew worse. While his body seethed and twisted, his thoughts became crystal clear and finally lifted him out of the world of flesh. In the mental chess matches that he played without interruption, he became the pieces that he moved, and he could clearly see the future of each and every one of them, as if their lives were unreeling before his eyes. He knew when a bishop was about to be taken and when a queen was going to check a king; and he knew when an apparently insignificant move at the opening of play would irremediably compromise the endgame.

  As he grew up, the King of Diamonds had come to understand that the world was all one giant chessboard, and that men and women had their fates decreed, they just couldn’t see it yet. They were dominated by the simplest of stimuli—hunger, desire, fear, and pain—and their reactions could be charted on a grid with only a few minor variants: a coward was always bound to run away in the face of danger; a lover would always plunge into the river to save his beloved.

  If he knew an individual even only superficially, the King of Diamonds was capable of guessing with a high likelihood of accuracy what they would eat for breakfast, or what magazine they would choose to leaf through in a hospital waiting room. He also knew how to force them to make specific choices, very different from what they might have chosen only moments before, obviously without their being able to guess that their future was being decided elsewhere. He would construct intricate game plans, where men fell and died in their dozens without so much as a clue to why. He planted seeds that sprouted only years later. Most important of all, he was careful to pick up on signals marking the moment in which his pawns first caught the scent of the invisible presence that was deciding their final destiny, so that he was ready to distract them, just as the hip-swiveling and comely assistant of a stage magician is busy distracting the audience’s gaze far from where the dove is hidden.

  And now, standing looking up at Dante’s hotel, the King of Diamonds realized that it was time for a diversion.

  2

  For days, One’s men had crisscrossed Italy, tracking down and interviewin
g the Father’s survivors, trying to convince them to meet with the man who had saved them. Not all of them had accepted, and not all of them were capable of putting up with the stress that the trip would have entailed, but six of them had said yes. Luca Maugeri, of course, arrived in Rome with his father: Luca excited, his father ill at ease in his too-long trousers. On the other hand, it was both of Ruggero’s parents who accompanied him; he was thirteen years old but he looked much younger, his face marked by fetal alcohol syndrome; the Father had sold video footage of his imprisonment to a pedophile, one of the many methods he used to finance himself. Then there was Luigi, age fifteen, epileptic: the Father had convinced everyone that he had been drowned in the river and that the current had swept his body away, never to be found. Cesare, close to sixteen, was the eldest of the group: autistic and with a slight case of arrested mental development; he was the one that Luca called OG; accompanying him was the doctor from the clinic in Florence where he’d been living since his rescue. Fabio’s mother and father hadn’t come, either, but then, they had a very good excuse: the Father had killed them with a contrived gas explosion. Fabio was twelve, just like Benedetto, who showed up dressed in denim from head to foot. He was the only member of the crew who had been found by his doctor to be entirely free of pathologies or developmental impediments; his parents looked around as if wondering what they were doing there.

  The contractors led them through the hotel kitchens to avoid surveillance cameras, and then sent them up a few at a time to the top floor. Waiting for them at the door to the suite was Colomba, called upon to welcome them as honored guests while Dante tried to summon the energy required to greet that group of strangers.

  She thanked them all for having accepted the invitation, and showed the adults to the living room, leaving the kids to wander freely throughout the suite. Luca started explaining to Cesare how the plasma display television set worked; the two boys seemed to have made friends quickly. Ruggero and Luigi, on the other hand, went straight out onto the terrace because, like Dante, they suffered when confined to close quarters, though not with the same intensity as him. One and Four kept an eye out to make sure they didn’t hurt themselves, and from the way that One smiled at the kids, it was clear that he had children of his own.

  “Dante would like to meet with the boys for an hour or so. He’ll do it out on the terrace, where we’ve also laid out some light refreshments. But I’m going to have to ask you to remain here, inside, for the whole time they’re having their chat; you can see the terrace from this living room, there’s railings and there are … bodyguards. You’ll be able to go and pick them up when you like, but Dante would like some privacy for the chat.”

  The doctor objected, Benedetto’s parents objected, but Colomba had no difficulty bringing them around, because they all knew that without her and Dante the boys would still be locked up in the shipping containers. What’s more, she was the “heroine of Venice,” and in the end that put an end to the protests of even the most insistent holdouts.

  Dante emerged from his bedroom only after all the boys and their guardians had been ushered out onto the terrace. He had the look in his eyes of someone who feared an outbreak of Ebola, but he put a brave face on, and when Luca and Benedetto ran to hug him, he managed not to hurl himself over the terrace railing as his instincts told him to.

  Parents and guardians went back inside, and Colomba helped the boys to get seated, distributing orangeade and pastries. The most frightened one of the group was Benedetto, but without looking at him, Luigi took his hand, and he calmed down immediately.

  “Well,” said Dante, looking at the palms of his hands. “My dear boys, as you know … um, I too experienced … eh … the same adventure as the rest of you. The same misadventure as you. I should have said misadventure.”

  “Yes, we know that, Signor Torre,” said Benedetto. “The Man from the Silo.”

  “Silo!” Luigi shouted. Cesare laughed.

  “You can call me Dante, and I hope we can be on a first-name basis,” he said. “We are colleagues because we’ve lived … well, I already told you, I think. In any case …” Dante picked up a small set of bongo drums that sat on the table. “I haven’t turned into a beatnik, even if you probably don’t even know what that means, but with this you can hear me more clearly.” With stunning speed, he tapped and scratched on the drums for thirty seconds or so, but it only took a few seconds before the boys all fell silent, in astonishment. When he stopped, they all laughed, except for Ruggero, who imitated the others only at the end. Benedetto even clapped his hands, and Dante bowed with a smile, triggering new and even more fervent rounds of applause.

  “Do you mind if I ask what you told them?” Colomba whispered.

  “The German has stinky feet,” he replied.

  3

  The German was taken back to the cell where he lived twenty-three hours a day, after the sixty minutes of fresh air in the deserted prison yard. That was the one time a day when he ventured out, aside from the shower, which he also always took alone. He had no books and no newspapers, and he watched no TV, except for the news first thing in the morning. The rest of the time, according to those whose job it was to keep an eye on him, he did nothing but stare at the wall or exercise. He seemed not to suffer in the slightest from his isolation.

  The one activity he indulged in was reading the dozens of letters he received every week, after they had been subjected to the study of the prison censors, of course. His case had prompted a great deal of curiosity … and much more than that. Directors wrote to him, offering to make a movie about his life; writers who wanted to help pen his memoirs; women and men who wanted to marry him; women and men who wanted to string him up by the testicles for what he had done to dozens of children in the service of the Big Bad Ogre.

  The German read everything and responded to none of them, but the photograph of the Father and Belyy in Berlin hadn’t gone into his wastebasket with everything else. Dante had arranged to have a few phrases printed on the back to make it look like an old postcard and had mailed it from someplace outside of Rome, with anodyne greetings from his lawyer.

  The German got up to go to the bathroom, and without letting himself be filmed by the surveillance video camera, he pulled out the photograph.

  The bathroom of his cell was a toilet with a sink, concealed behind a low wall that stood about five feet tall, so that the guards could always monitor what he was doing while still offering him a bare minimum of privacy. The German sat down on the toilet and laid the postcard in the small sink. He put the stopper in the drain and turned on the faucet.

  He came back half an hour later for another “session.” In the sink, the water had turned faintly greasy; the photograph, drenched, had stuck to the bottom of the sink.

  Pretending to wash his face, the German leaned over the sink.

  “Good boy,” he murmured. Then he drank all that disgusting water.

  4

  An hour later, Dante’s hand ached and he was drenched with sweat, but with all the furious pounding and scratching of the Code that he’d done on the bongo drums, he’d managed to involve all the boys in the conversation. Luckily, he’d also discovered that there are abbreviations capable of making it all go much faster, like the ones used in texting.

  Aside from Luca, every one of them had spent between two and four years imprisoned in the shipping containers, and the Code was an old, nasty habit buried deep under their skin, impossible to root out. At the same time, though, Dante understood that it had saved them, at least in part. In the darkness of those months and years, they’d been stuffed with psychopharmaceuticals, subjected to electroshock, left to freeze or to boil away in torrid heat, exactly like what had happened to him.

  They’d been abandoned without food for days, they’d been forced to sleep with the stench of their own feces, and then to do crossword puzzles and tests like the ones from school, in exchange for a little drinking water for every correct answer. But thanks to the Code, at the en
d of each “exam” or “treatment,” they’d had friends to comfort them, someone to complain to, someone to share their thoughts with.

  And now, through that same Code—and then, a little at a time, through actual words—Dante managed to learn from the survivors things that had never been revealed to their parents and therapists. Such as, for instance, that Ruggero hadn’t been able to prove he was capable of behaving like a “son,” and so he had been left to his own devices for sixteen months; no tests, no challenges of any kind: the Father had simply abandoned him, even though the German and the other henchmen continued to bring him food and water. Benedetto, on the other hand, had rebelled, whereupon he’d been strapped to his bed for months on end, forced to defecate through the hole in the cot that the Father called the “cuckoo.” And then Cesare, who had been subjected to sleep deprivation until everything around him had turned first white, then black; the next thing he’d seen was the face of the policeman who had opened the door of his shipping container. At the time, he still didn’t know he’d lost a year of his life.

  Dante listened and concealed behind a forced smile all the anguish, sadness, and horror that swept over him with every new discovery that actually didn’t really qualify as a discovery, because it felt to him that he’d been listening all the while to the story of his own life. He drank vodka and liquid benzodiazepine without letting the boys see him do it, and he knew that now he’d start having recurring dreams of the silo, but still, he remained focused, even when Cesare told how the sleep torture took the form of a combination of deafening noises and blinding lights, which were turned on and off again at a series of irregular intervals.

  “And none of you even noticed the noise?” he asked the others.

  Luca and Benedetto shook their heads.

  “OG was in shipping container two, right?” Dante asked.

  “Two,” Benedetto said, and Luigi confirmed by tapping out the same number.