“Right now, if you’re in agreement,” Colomba replied.
“Gosh.” The doctor leaned toward her. “Excuse me, but by any chance is Signor Torre actually Tony Stark in disguise?”
Colomba limited herself to a polite smile—she didn’t have any idea who Tony Stark was—and after saying goodbye she confirmed with the head of the Shadow agency to go ahead.
When she got back to the suite, sitting on the terrace with Dante were Cesare and Luca, who were counting the illuminated windows in the buildings facing them. Maugeri Sr. was sitting uneasily on the sofa, with an espresso demitasse in his hand.
“I told Signor Maugeri that it would be better if Luca stayed to help his friend,” Dante said. “And left tomorrow.”
“I think that would definitely make him feel better,” Colomba confirmed.
“All right, fine, but I honestly don’t understand what’s happening,” Maugeri said nervously. “First you show up at my house, then you tell us to come here, as if it were a matter of life or death. Maybe I really ought to talk to my lawyer.” He flashed an apologetic smile. “I don’t have anything against you, and I know I owe you everything, but I don’t want my son to get caught up in something that frankly seems a little dubious.”
“Do you seriously think that your son helping a friend seems a little dubious?” Dante asked in the tone of voice he used when he was studying someone.
“No,” Maugeri hastened to reply, “but I’d much rather he left everything that happened to him behind him, rather than continuing to wallow in it.”
Dante narrowed his eyes. “It’s not an experience you can easily forget about, and you seem much more upset about it than he does. What’s worrying you?”
“Nothing!” Maugeri was on pins and needles by this point. “I’m just thinking about my son.”
“Is there anything we ought to know about, Signor Maugeri?” Colomba asked, going along with Dante’s tactics.
“For fuck’s sake, you already know everything there is to know,” and he stood up. “And tomorrow morning I want to be driven home, with Luca.”
“No problem,” said Colomba. She really didn’t want him underfoot a minute more than was necessary.
10
The surgical team at the clinic that Dante had rented at great expense installed its own equipment and sterilized the room, discussing the upcoming surgery with the physician guardian, who approved every step. Dante didn’t feel up to being present, and so it was Colomba’s responsibility to oversee it. And so she was able to get a look at the soles of the boy’s feet, which were covered with bubbles of scar tissue of various sizes.
For the entire time of the surgery—an hour—Luca held Cesare’s hand. When it was done, the boy’s feet were slightly reddened, and a few crumbs of dried skin had collected on the operating bed. Colomba asked Three to take the skin to an analysis lab.
“There’s something rough here,” the nurse said all of a sudden, as she was massaging Cesare’s feet with a soothing cream.
The dermatologist put on his magnifying glasses and carefully examined the spot the nurse was pointing to. “It’s a small encysted splinter,” he confirmed. “We’re going to take that out, all right, Cesare?” The boy wriggled uneasily under the medical floodlight, but Luca smiled at him reassuringly. Or actually, he smiled into the empty air: the two boys almost never actually looked each other in the face. The surgical extraction proved to be painless, because it was a splinter just a few millimeters in length, as slender as the spine of a small cactus.
It, too, was added to the small bag of evidence to be taken to the laboratory.
The results came back at dawn, to the utter astonishment of Colomba, who was used to the biblical time spans of forensic laboratories. She trudged out into the suite’s living room in her pajamas, where she found Dante wide-awake and serving coffee to all the contractors on duty. She took advantage of the chance to toss back a double espresso shot while reading the report, which had arrived in a watermarked envelope closed with a wax seal. It looked costly.
In the document, illustrated with enlarged photographs of microscopic views, the laboratory explained that what had mainly been found in Cesare’s skin fragments was dust, but that the splinter contained formaldehyde, phenol, and wood fibers.
“Bakelite,” said Dante.
“Didn’t they used to make telephones with Bakelite?” Colomba asked, yawning so hard she almost dislocated her jaw. It seemed impossible that only a short time ago she had decided to give up the hunt for the King. Now she was working hours that were longer than when she’d been on full duty at the Mobile Squad.
“Yes, and View-Masters, molds, toys, costume jewelry, buttons, and about a billion other things,” said Dante, trying to assume the full lotus position on the sofa, unsuccessfully. “Fucking arthritic joints I have …” he muttered. “Is there a colorant?”
“Traces of dark pigment, either black or dark brown,” Colomba read on. “Now that I think about it, the rifle I used at the police academy had dark brown Bakelite parts. It was a relic, a genuine antique.”
“OG! Fuck!” shouted Dante, rolling as if in a delirium to grab his laptop. “What an asshole. What an idiot I am. I should have realized it immediately!” He turned the screen so she could see it: he’d gone to a page on warisboring.com, where there was a photograph of a submachine gun with a folding stock that looked distinctly vintage. The submachine gun was called an OG-43.
“I even knew about this gun. I studied these things, for fuck’s sake!” He pointed at the grip on the perforated barrel. “It looks like wood, but it’s Bakelite. Bakelite!” he shouted again, and collapsed on the bed. “God … why does the world have to be so small, why do I always wind up right back where I started from?”
“Start explaining or I’ll lock you in the closet,” Colomba threatened him.
He jumped off the bed and his legs almost gave way beneath him. They hadn’t fully regained their strength. “The OG-43 submachine gun was developed for the Fascists of the Republic of Salò, after the armistice in the Second World War,” he said. “You know, the ones who preferred the Nazis to the Americans.”
“Go on …” said Colomba, who was starting to get irritated.
“There was only one factory that produced it. Only one, you understand? The Manifattura Armaguerra. After Italy’s Liberation, it was converted into a repair shop, and then it ran out of repair work as well, and ever since the sixties, the sheds just stood there, gathering dust. The place is falling apart by now, but four or five years ago they started clearing it of asbestos.”
“How do you know that?” Colomba asked, unable to grasp the reason for his excitement. “Do you know the history of every Italian manufacturing plant?”
Dante, who was wheeling around the room like a dervish, suddenly slammed to a halt, red-faced, his frogged jacket wide open, vents flying. “The reason I know it is I used to ride my bike past there! That fucking place is in Cremona, CC. The Father’s Factory has always been there, right under my nose.”
CHAPTER III
1
The officers of the correctional police banged the cell bars every night to make sure they were still perfectly intact, but when it came to the German, they did it first thing in the morning, too, as well as at the start of each shift, because they didn’t trust that muscular, taciturn son of a bitch any farther than they could throw him. For the same reason, they never went into his cell if there were fewer than four guards in the group. They were accustomed to seeing him work out when they entered the cell, so they were astonished to find him sprawled on his cot, with his face turned to the wall.
“On your feet, Kraut,” said one of the guards. “Come on, show yourself.” The German didn’t react, and with a caution he’d never shown even with Cane Pazzo, whose name meant Mad Dog and who was a Camorra torpedo, the chief inspector reached out and gripped the German’s shoulder and turned him over. The German was stiff as a board: his eyes were open wide and he was trembling
with fever, his skin yellowish and cold; the blanket was soaked in vomit.
The officer tried to bring him to with a couple of sharp slaps to the face. “This guy is going to die on us,” he said.
“Let him die,” his partner retorted. “He killed children, this piece of shit.”
“Don’t talk bullshit, we’d be the ones to get in trouble for it.” They handcuffed him and dragged him off down the hallways, because he was a heavy man and could barely stay on his feet. When they finally got to the infirmary, the German retched again loudly and spewed bile onto the cot they were trying to lay him down on. The doctor on duty took one look at his eyes and hurriedly checked his heart rate. “Looks like poisoning. Did you find anything odd in his cell?”
“We didn’t check,” the inspector replied.
“Could you send someone to do that, please, and right away?” the doctor asked. “And we need to alert the warden’s office: we need to take him to the hospital.”
The inspector nodded, but with a smirk. Who the fuck cared.
* * *
Stopped at the front gate of Rebibbia Prison for the standard search, the veteran ambulance driver explained to his young colleague the way things worked.
“If it’s a chicken thief, they’ll just put a guard in the ambulance with us and an escort team in a squad car to follow us. If he’s dangerous, they might put two guards in the ambulance, and two escort cars. If he’s very dangerous, then four guards will ride in the ambulance and there will be more follow-up cars than a presidential procession.”
When they finally brought out the German, four guards got into the ambulance—all of them full MOG officers in riot gear—while there were six escort cars, including an armor-plated vehicle. The patient was handcuffed to the gurney, hand and foot, a security precaution that the older paramedic had never seen in his career, especially not with a convict who was in his sixties.
“Who is this, anyway?” he asked the MOG officer next to him. “Dracula?”
“Basically,” said the other man, with his jaw clenched, as the ambulance took off, heading for the Sandro Pertini Hospital, where there was a penitentiary medicine ward with twenty or so beds. Bars everywhere, but private rooms: for someone coming from Rebibbia, it was like going from a cheap bed and breakfast to a five-star hotel … but the level of security was just as high. The drive from the prison took only twenty minutes. More or less halfway there, they drove over a viaduct across the Aniene River, one of the twisty-turny tributaries of the Tiber, and it was as they were crossing that bridge that, without warning, the ambulance swerved into the opposite lane, crashed through the cement parapet, and plunged into the water running between tree-lined banks thirty feet below. The vehicle slammed nose-first into the rocky riverbed and then slumped over onto its side.
The escort vehicles following behind it screeched to a halt and the MOG officers leaped out of their cars, guns leveled. In the wreckage below them, nothing was moving. The head of the escort left some of his men to halt traffic and keep their weapons trained on the partly submerged ambulance, and climbed down with the rest of the unit to the bed of the river, making their way down the steep bank, littered with broken bottles and plastic bags. Forming a human chain to keep the current from sweeping them away, and holding their weapons over their heads, they finally reached the ambulance. The front of the vehicle was completely submerged, and given the murky condition of the water, they couldn’t even see the person at the wheel. The head of the escort pulled open the ambulance’s rear door, and the air from the cab gurgled beneath the surface of the water, producing a red bubble that burst upward, splashing violently and momentarily blinding him.
When his vision cleared, the first thing that the chief officer of the armed escort saw was the head of one of his colleagues. He had a pair of handcuffs stabbed into his eyes.
2
Dante was looking out the rear window of the armor-plated car, tormenting his Star Wars tie clip. He’d dressed formally—except for the tie clip—the way he always did when he set foot back in Cremona, in a subconscious attempt to seem a little more normal. Or maybe just as a form of self-protection.
When he was far from Cremona, he was able to avoid thinking about his fucked-up past, but whenever he came back to the city, it all bobbed to the surface again, making him feel like more of a phantom among men than ever. After battling with himself, he finally called Annibale and let him know that he’d be coming to Cremona. “I don’t know what time it’ll be, but I’ll try to swing by to say hello.”
“So this visit is business, not pleasure,” said Annibale, resuming his worried tone.
“No, I’m still trying to break the bank. And there might be something in Cremona that can help me. Chill a good bottle for me.”
Colomba, who had nodded off, her head against the car window, woke up with a start.
“Where are we?”
“We’re almost in Cremona. It won’t be long now.”
All around them, the landscape had turned into the flat expanse of the Po Valley, an unbroken procession of wheat fields, tiny towns, and huge farmhouses in varying states of disrepair. For Dante, the setting for a nightmare. When he dreamed of the Father, he’d often see him chasing him down the rows of plants, while he, little more than a child, ran barefoot, unable to outrun him.
“Maybe there’s some truth in everything that Belyy and the Father imagined,” Colomba said suddenly. “Maybe the treatment really can create people capable of thinking and acting differently.”
Dante snorted. “Electroshock and isolation only damage the mind.”
“And yet Leo managed to outsmart the counterterrorism agencies of the whole world, and the King maneuvers other people like so many puppets, and you’re one of the most brilliant people I’ve ever met …”
“Maybe we were all born geniuses. We were destined to do great things, like inventing engines that can run on tap water and teleportation devices. The Father kept us from doing that, the same way he kept everyone he dissolved in acid from ever doing anything again.”
One, at the wheel, turned to look at them. “We’re here.”
3
The contractors parked their three cars next to a roundabout along the road that ran past the former weapons factory. The structure consisted of a series of industrial sheds with pitched roofs and large windows, standing on bare ground amid patches of trees. Some of them were still in good condition; others, deeper into the vast property, couldn’t conceal the effects of decades of exposure to weather and vandalism. In contrast with what Dante remembered, on one of the outside walls, thousands of square feet of solar panels had been installed. A sign stated in large letters that construction would begin soon on a large outlet store.
“If there was ever anything here, it’s gone by now,” Colomba said, pressing her face between the bars of the gate.
“I don’t expect to find anything remarkable,” said Dante. “But until more or less five years ago, Cesare was a prisoner in here. And someone had work done on the solar panels after the Father was killed and the German wound up in prison.” He turned to Three and Four. “How is it going with the drone?”
“Two more minutes and we should be ready, Signor Torre.”
“The drone?” asked Colomba.
“That’s included in the price,” Dante said with a grin, but a very strained one. He lit a cigarette. “If that’s the Factory Leo was talking about, then a piece of my life took place in here.”
“Are you hoping that you’ll be reminded of something when you see it?”
“Quite the opposite,” he said. “I already have plenty of fucked-up memories.”
* * *
While cars raced past all around them, Three and Four readied the Snipe. It was a tactical military drone, no bigger than any toy drone, utterly silent and equipped with both a normal video camera and an infrared camera; it weighed a mere 140 grams—about five ounces. They flew it over the area, piloting it with the greatest of ease by means of a
tablet, and then Dante asked them to concentrate on the section where the buildings were in the greatest disrepair. The Snipe didn’t have a great deal of autonomy—the batteries had to be switched out every fifteen minutes—but in no more than an hour’s time they had an eminently acceptable mapping of the area, which Dante, lying in the back seat with his laptop propped up on his thighs and the radio earpiece in his ear, compared with the official plans he’d found online.
“Maybe we ought to go in on foot,” said Colomba. She was outside the car, leaning against the side and looking at the surrounding area. The contractors, dressed casually so that they didn’t look like a group of Mormons, were pretending to be passersby or rubberneckers, except for the IT experts, who were hunched over in the car behind them. “After all, sooner or later we’re going to have to do it anyway.”
“It’s 220,000 square feet,” Dante retorted. “If we don’t know where to look, it would take us a lifetime.”
“Are you sure you don’t just want to have fun playing with the drone?”
“Would that be so bad?” Dante activated the radio’s microphone. “Let’s make another circuit, maybe next to the storage shed, the light-colored one with the round roof, but this time let’s use the thermal sensor.”
Three and Four obeyed and in the streaming video on Dante’s computer there appeared, poking out from amid the shrubbery, a half dozen pink circles, invisible to the naked eye; one in particular was next to a pile of bricks. “What do you think those are?” he asked Colomba, who had stuck her head into the car.
“All I know is that they’re slightly warmer than the ground around them. Maybe they’re air vents from some sewer line or other. You can get that effect if there’s rainwater running through them, which has absorbed the heat of sunlight and is starting to evaporate.”
“From the vintage photographs, there don’t seem to be any air vents,” Dante replied. “Let’s go in.”
Kill the King Page 38