Kill the King

by Sandrone Dazieri

  They moved over to the point that they’d identified, Dante struggling along behind her, resting his weight on the cane. “I think we’re going to have to start digging again.”

  He clicked the microphone. “Ten thousand euros to anyone willing to come give us a hand.”

  “Sorry, boss,” One replied. “We can’t. But thanks for the offer.”

  When they were done digging—Colomba took care of most of the work—they’d unearthed a cement manhole, covered by a number of wooden boards. Colomba shoved it aside with her feet. Underneath was a hole big enough to fit into, and through the cobwebs and roots it was possible to glimpse a metal ladder that ran down about fifteen feet, terminating just above a pool of stagnant water.

  “Sure you don’t want to come along?” she asked Dante.

  “Not awake, and if I was unconscious I wouldn’t be a lot of help. But have them send the drone, so I can follow you from overhead, live. That way I can tell you what you need to do.”

  “You can tell your grandmother what she needs to do.”

  Dante threw both arms wide. “I’m so sorry, but I don’t even know who she is.”

  Holding the drone like a video camera, Colomba descended a couple of steps, checking to make sure the ladder was solid. It didn’t even creak. “I’m going. If I don’t come back, send scuba divers,” she said.

  Dante leaned over, pressing his face close to hers. “I wouldn’t want to have any regrets, just in case you never come back,” he said. And he gave her a kiss on the lips.

  Colomba was caught off guard, but she grabbed his head to keep him from pulling away. “I’m not a little girl.” She pulled him closer and stuck her tongue in his mouth. “This doesn’t mean a thing, do you get that? I’m not in love with you and, physically, you’re not even my type. But I love you, and I don’t want to lose you, okay?”

  And she slipped down into darkness.

  9

  Colomba went down the steps, the drone clamped under her arm, her mouth smacking of the taste of tobacco and alcohol. The taste of Dante. Had she done something stupid? Probably, but this wasn’t the time to think about it, all the more so because her foot was meeting nothing beneath it now: she had reached the bottom of the ladder. She slipped the drone underneath her jacket and grabbed the bottom rung.

  “I can’t see a thing,” Dante told her.

  “Don’t bust my chops,” she replied, and after extending her leg until it touched the surface of the water, she let herself go, finally landing on the floor below. The water reached up to her ankles and it instantly started leaking into her combat boots through the eyelets for the laces. It was cold, but tolerable. Something moved and darted away: Colomba just hoped that it wasn’t a hungry rat.

  On one side of that sort of well was a metal door that didn’t seem old enough to date back to World War II, locked with a heavy chain and a padlock the size of a fist.

  “Do you want to come down and open it?” she asked, framing it with the drone.

  “If you want, I can teach you …” said Dante.

  “Forget it.” Colomba set the waterproof tactical backpack down in the water and pulled out a small sledgehammer. It took about fifty or so blows from the hammer, but in the end the hasp of the padlock broke away.

  “It takes a gentle touch …” said Dante.

  Colomba opened the door, braced against the gust of smoke from the flashbang, and stepped in.

  It was a hallway of unfinished cement, with a row of doors very much like the one she’d just opened, but all without padlocks; as she went by, the water swirled and agitated, churning up whirlpools of rotten leaves and dirt. It felt like walking through a sunken ship, but that was a thought that brought back bad memories, so she forced herself to focus on the present. “Dante, can you hear me? Can you see?”

  “Yes,” he replied in a faint voice. “Those are cells. The Father held people prisoner down here.”

  Colomba kept walking. “Wait before you say that, maybe it’s just storage.”

  “No. No. Oh God … I’m about to vomit.”

  “It’s all okay, Dante. Please, just calm down.”

  “I was down there, CC. They kept me down there …”

  “And now I’m down here. And I need you. So get a grip on yourself,” she said in an intentionally harsh tone.

  Dante remained silent for a few seconds. “Okay,” he finally said in a firmer voice. “You’re right. Let’s see what’s in there.”

  Colomba opened the doors. They were rooms measuring roughly seven by ten feet, with a ceiling tall enough not to have to stoop, all of them windowless. The first room was empty, while in the second she found a rusted cot with a hole in the center. In the third room, an old, worn, barely legible sign read OG-43—STORAGE.

  “Cesare,” said Dante. “He was in there.”

  Because of the goggles, Colomba couldn’t make out the details very clearly, so she lifted them off her face, but that only plunged her into utter darkness. She turned on the flashlight and shone the beam of light onto the walls. They were covered with scratches, and she didn’t doubt for a second that those scratches had been made by human fingernails. She imagined a child locked up in there, desperately trying to get out. She imagined a young Dante. He was making strange sounds in the microphone, and Colomba realized that he was crying. “Stay tough, Dante.”

  “Yes, yes … But we need to get Bart here, we need to figure out who was here.”

  “As soon as we get out,” she said.

  The last door was painted green, but the paint had all flaked away. Behind it, Colomba found a gynecological examination bed with stirrups for the legs. “Dante … the Father never took girls, did he?”

  “No.”

  “Strange.” She checked the rest of the room with the flashlight. There was an old file cabinet, green like the door but in better condition; the drawers were empty, though, except for a few sheets of paper that seemed to be handwritten medical reports, unfortunately now completely illegible on account of the damp. Colomba stuck them into her backpack and illuminated an old blackboard standing nearby: there was a single word written on it, the chalk seeming to have carved and scratched the black surface.

  SKOPTSY.

  “Do you know what that means? Dante?”

  His voice reached her as if he were being suffocated: he was still trying not to cry. “Yes, yes. I know. That goddamned bastard. That monster.”

  Colomba turned off the flashlight and, after putting the night-vision goggles back on, she retraced her steps. “Is it the name of some Russian?”

  “No, it was a Christian sect in eighteenth-century Russia. They practiced mortification of the flesh and suffering. They believed that their God wanted offerings … The same offerings that psychiatrists once implemented with the patients who were too agitated, whether adults or children. Cleansing, they called it.”

  “So, what you’re saying is … ?” Colomba asked.

  “They castrated them, CC. And now I understand why the King is so full of hatred.”

  10

  Climbing out of the well proved more strenuous for Colomba than entering it had been. When she emerged onto the surface, Dante was kneeling on the ground, tears streaming down his face.

  Colomba felt herself being assailed by a wave of rage, but also a strange sense of melancholy. She was just sorry that she hadn’t been there when Dante, still a child, was kidnapped by a maniac who decided on a whim what tortures to inflict on him. She wished she could have taken him by the hand when he emerged from the silo, and when he’d been bounced from one clinic to another, entrusted to doctors who, perhaps, in their own past careers, had done the same things that the Father had inflicted on generations of patients: electroshock, ice baths, physical restraints … and castration, as she had just discovered. She wished she could have been there when Dante had seized his own independence, concealing his fragility behind a tough and coarse attitude toward the world. But I’m here now, she thought. Even if it’s not exa
ctly the way he’d like.

  “I’m sorry,” she said to him.

  Dante raised his head. “It’s the history of the world, CC. It’s not just the Father. People like me have undergone the worst tortures for centuries. And they continue to undergo them today.” He wiped his face, smearing dirt on it as he did. “There was a doctor—his name was Moniz—who had invented a method for calming his patients, a method more efficient than castration and electroshock: he trepanned their skulls and injected alcohol to burn the cerebral matter.”

  “In concentration camps?” Colomba asked in a faint voice.

  “In hospitals. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for medicine, CC. The Nobel Prize.” Dante sighed and, leaning on his cane, got to his feet. “Castration provokes long-term effects, and one of those effects is osteoporosis. We’ll have to ask Bart to—”

  One’s voice interrupted them. “There’s a problem.”

  “Go ahead,” said Colomba.

  “The traffic isn’t flowing the way it ought to. I’m afraid they’re cordoning us in.”

  “Okay, we’re heading out now.”

  She didn’t have time to finish that short sentence before her cell phone vibrated in the backpack. She was only able to find it on the tenth ring: it was Lupo. “Caselli, you have two minutes to get away from there.”

  “From where?”

  “You know perfectly well.”

  Evidently, the head of the Shadow agency had been right about the traffic. “How the fuck were you able to find us?”

  “There’s a bug in your car. We put it on you when you were at a service station, getting gas. Di Marco isn’t happy with what you’ve been up to.”

  “I understand, but we haven’t broken any laws.”

  “He’s going to prove the opposite. D’Amore is missing and the German has escaped, he’s beside himself with rage.”

  “And what do you have to do with all this?”

  “It’s very difficult to do my job without getting dragged into the messes that the intelligence agencies keep creating. A friend of mine tried to warn me about it, and now I see that he was right. So I had a moment of doubt, and I made the wrong phone call. Get going. Before much longer, you won’t be able to get out of the area.”

  “Hold on …” Colomba took a breath. “Under the Factory there’s an old bomb shelter. The Father held children prisoner down there. Don’t let Di Marco get rid of what’s in there. Many families might finally have answers about children who vanished without a trace.”

  At the other end of the line, there was a pause. “I promise you that I’ll do my very best,” said Lupo.

  “Thanks.” Colomba broke the cell phone against a rock, then threw away her earbuds. “Leave everything behind, Dante.”

  “What about the team?”

  “There’s nothing we can do for them, and they certainly have good lawyers. Do you think you can climb over the fence on the side where the solar panels are?”

  “No …” he replied.

  “Okay, then, let’s just wait here until they come and arrest us.”

  Dante heaved a sigh of frustration.

  11

  Before he was kidnapped, Dante had been far more agile than Colomba; but now, instead, she had to help him by pushing from below. When he landed on the other side, he dropped his cane and wasted time trying to retrieve it.

  “Can’t you just get another one?” Colomba asked, urging him to get moving toward the first fork in the road leading to town.

  “It’s a Ham Brooks classic, I told you that before.”

  “And I still don’t know what the hell that means. Is it valuable?”

  “Have you ever heard of the Man of Bronze?”

  “No, but I know lots of people who definitely deserve no better than a bronze medal. Is that good enough for you?”

  They heard the turbocharged engines even before they saw the cars, and they threw themselves behind the hedges that lined the road, letting the troop trucks filled with NOA agents rumble past them. From a distance they could hear sirens wailing and excited, shouting voices: the team had been captured.

  Dante snapped a sharp military salute. “Farewell, it has been an honor to serve the fatherland at your side.”

  “A burden, if anything. At least now you’ll save a fair bit of change.”

  “No, I’m afraid not. Shadow is going to be able to keep the deposit. By now, I think that all I have left is enough to get far away from this country.” Dante was starting to pant, and he slowed his pace. “I’m sick of living here, surrounded by spies and state secrets.”

  Colomba shoved his shoulder to restore his sense of brio. “Like where?”

  “I’ve heard good things about Sweden.”

  “It’s fucking freezing and they speak an incomprehensible language.”

  “Well, I never leave the house anyway.”

  They’d walked a mile or two away from the area around the Factory, and Colomba decided they could afford a brief halt. The fog had descended, and they could see very little around them.

  “Okay,” she said, “we’re covered with mud, we don’t have a cell phone, I have a handgun I have no right to carry, and we’re in the middle of nowhere, without a car. Any suggestions?”

  “Let’s steal one,” Dante replied promptly. “I know how to start one without the key.”

  “Next suggestion?”

  “Cremona is in that direction, about four miles away,” Dante said, pointing randomly. “And at Annibale’s house I have some changes of clothing.”

  “They’ll come looking for us there, too.”

  “But not right away, I hope. All we need to do is get changed and get him to lend us his car. Even if it isn’t obvious just where we could drive it.”

  “One step at a time,” said Colomba.

  It was a long walk, and one that was burdened by the weight of fear, because somewhere around them was the King of Diamonds, busy searching for them, as well as the German, out on the loose. But at least the fog helped to conceal them.

  Annibale lived in an eighteenth-century palazzo in the historic center of Cremona. By the time they reached the building, it was eleven at night. Dante hit the buzzer three times in rapid succession.

  “That’s the family buzz,” he said. The street door clicked open and he and Colomba walked into the main living room, the size of a parade ground, with all the windows wide open. Dante looked at them with utter relief. He knew this house, and like any familiar place, he had a hard time being shut up in it. Still, even there, it was better to have the windows wide open.

  “The housekeeper must be in her room, asleep,” he said. “Papà, are you awake?” he called.

  “Upstairs.”

  Like the first and last time that Colomba had been in that building, Annibale Valle was awaiting them in his bathrobe, sitting in an armchair. Unlike the last time, however, he wasn’t alone.

  Standing behind him, with a hand on his shoulder, was Tommy.

  “I thought you’d never get here,” he said.

  12

  Colomba fell to her knees as her lungs tightened so violently that she expelled all the air in her body in a single gasp. The room had filled with darting shadows, and Dante’s screaming voice seemed to be played on a disk spinning far too fast. Everything was wrong, she thought, certain that she must be dying. But above all, Tommy was wrong. It had been his face that felled her, dropped her to her knees—not her surprise. It no longer had the kind gaze and the vacuous expression: his eyes were hard as stone and they glittered with intelligence and hatred.

  Dante shouted again, Valle twisted uncomfortably in his armchair, and Colomba tumbled over onto her side as the shadows devoured her, shrieking with electric hisses. Tommy laughed, and it was the most horrible sound she had ever heard in her life, bad enough to outstrip even the sound of the shadows that were looming closer now, flickering out one after the other. In the black void that was consuming her, she heard the sound of a slap, and then a hot burn on her
cheek. The shadows backed away, slithering out of her field of vision. Dante had slapped her in the face.

  Colomba bit the floor, chipping a tooth on a crack in the hardwood parquet. This time, she was the one who screamed as the pain in her mouth surged down her nerves and inflamed her brain.

  “God,” she said, sitting up.

  “Not exactly,” said Tommy. “But everyone creates their own god, in their own image and semblance. I chose myself.”

  Colomba looked at him, unable to accept that the person standing in front of her really was the same boy she had protected. “This isn’t you,” she said, somewhat foolishly.

  “Skoptsy,” said Dante.

  Tommy shrugged. “Good boy, you took a tour of the Factory.”

  “So the Father really did kidnap you …” he said.

  “In 1979.”

  Once again, Colomba came close to being unable to breathe. “That’s not possible, you’d be Dante’s age.”

  “Eunuchs who are castrated as children develop differently,” said Dante, without taking his eyes off Annibale, who trembled as he wept. “They don’t get white hair, their whiskers don’t grow.”

  “Exactly,” said Tommy, sitting down on the armrest of his father’s armchair. Only then did Colomba notice that he was holding a kitchen knife pressed against the back of Annibale’s neck. “Testosterone has a number of contraindications. Castrati like yours truly have a good ten years’ extra life expectancy compared to the uncut. But there’s another thing that’s even better.” He touched his temple. “No distractions. Ah, yes, while we’re on the subject, Colombina, toss me your handgun. You couldn’t shoot me before I cut the old man’s throat.”

  “Please …” Dante whispered. “Papà, don’t worry,” he said.

  Tommy laughed. “Poor little thing.”

  Colomba tossed him her handgun and Tommy stuck it in his belt.

  “Tommy never existed, then?”

  “Of course he did, and he was a burden for his mother. She’d already tried to get rid of him, but it hadn’t turned out well. I took care of him, one less mental retard.”