Kill the King

by Sandrone Dazieri

  “That’s not possible, the DNA—”

  “Caterina gave us a hand and took care of me while they did the exam. A minor exploit in sleight of hand. I set aside samples before disposing of the corpse.”

  “How did you know?” Dante asked, staring at him. “How did you know about her, how did you know she wanted to get rid of her son?”

  Tommy slapped Annibale on the back. “Go on, tell him.”

  “No …” he whimpered.

  Tommy pointed the knife at his left eye. “Come on.”

  “I’m sorry … I’m sorry … But I warned you to leave it alone …”

  “Come on, old man,” Tommy said again. His thin voice clashed with the threatening tone and his grown-up posture. Colomba wondered how she could have been so wrong about him. How she could have missed it. But Tommy had had a whole lifetime to learn how to pretend, how to dissimulate, a lifetime frozen in the physical appearance of an eternal overweight adolescent.

  “I didn’t know … I didn’t know what to do with the boy. With Dante. But there was a rumor going around …” He broke off and looked at Tommy. “Please.”

  “Beg all you like but keep talking. I have an airplane to catch.”

  “There was a rumor that … someone could take care of them.”

  Dante gripped the cane so tight that it creaked. “You gave your son to the Father?”

  Annibale, trembling, nodded.

  “But do you realize what you’ve done? Do you even realize?”

  “Now I do. Now …”

  “Now it’s too late!”

  Colomba tried to keep her cool. “And he wasn’t the only one.”

  “No. The Father offered this service when they cut his funding. There were plenty of people eager to get rid of their pain-in-the-ass children, kids who hadn’t learned to talk when they reached the age for it. Tommy’s mother had just been unlucky, because the German fucked things up. He was supposed to murder the husband and take the boy, but Tommy took off running and the German had to let him go. When I showed up, the mother was so happy. She thought we were going to conquer the world together.”

  “Jesus,” said Colomba. “And Maugeri, too, right?”

  “No, his wife. And he’d figured it out, oddly enough. He was always such an idiot. But then most people are idiots. Ninety-nine percent of the population. Then there are people like me and your friend. People who know how to think.”

  Colomba didn’t understand how on earth Dante had managed to lunge forward so quickly. One moment he seemed prostrate with grief at the revelation, and the next he had leaped to his feet and shot toward Tommy brandishing not one but two canes. Then she understood that one of the canes was nothing but the sheath for the other, which was actually a blade.

  Tommy was taken by surprise when Dante hit him on the arm holding the knife, but he quickly threw Dante to the ground like a broken reed, and then grabbed the blade out of his hand. It was a sort of sword, which had the knob of the walking stick as its grip.

  “This is nice, where did you find it?”

  “Fuck yourself,” said Dante as he tried to get to his feet. Tommy aimed Colomba’s pistol at him. “If you move, little Colomba, I’ll shoot him instantly.” Then he stepped on Dante’s left arm, putting his full weight on that foot, and ran the gloved bad hand through with the cane-sword, nailing it to the floor. Dante let out a piercing shout, and Tommy seemed to observe him with extreme interest. Colomba tried to react, but he wiggled his finger at her disapprovingly.

  “I can see you, Colombina. Don’t interrupt, I’m still talking to … let’s call him my brother.” He leaned over Dante, who was desperately clutching the wrist of his bad hand, trying to stem the hemorrhaging. “You know why I’m here, right?”

  “Look at yourself in the mirror,” Dante murmured, remembering the German’s words.

  Colomba understood, and it was another sudden whiplash. “You’re Valle’s son. You’re the real Dante.”

  Annibale wiped his nose on his sleeve. “Yes.”

  “You even took my name, kid.” He hauled off and kicked Dante in the face. Dante spat blood. “That’s something I can never retrieve, at this point. I’ve become Tommy Melas, and it’s as good an identity as another, until I’m done getting back what belongs to me. Then we’ll see.”

  Colomba realized that Tommy was about to fire, and that she only had that brief, slender possibility. She was still hunched down, and she lunged at Tommy. Maybe she’d succeed in knocking him off balance, but Annibale lifted his leg, caught her in midair, and tripped her so she fell to the floor. “I’m sorry. He’s my son, you understand that?”

  “I think we’ll get along famously, you and I,” said Tommy.

  Then he pulled the trigger.

  Colomba felt her shoulder explode and saw the shadows return. She started crawling toward Dante, her Dante, leaving a trail of blood behind her like the slime of a snail. He seemed incredibly far away, and the distance only continued to grow. Tommy shot her again, and this time she tasted blood in her mouth. But it didn’t hurt, not anymore. She brushed her fingers over Dante’s side, and he turned his head to look at her, his eyes glazed over.

  “I’m sorry,” she said to him. Or maybe she only thought it. Tommy was getting ready to pull the trigger a third time when a cyclone with white hair turned the room upside down.

  13

  For Colomba, on the verge of unconsciousness, it was like witnessing a series of static images in a vacuum world. Tommy raising the handgun. Tommy pulling the trigger. The German lunging at him, wrapping both arms around him, yanking the weapon away from him. Tommy in turn wrapping the German in a bear hug and wrestling back. The German biting into his face and ripping away one entire cheek. Tommy opening his mouth to scream. The German pounding him with fists as massive and heavy as rocks. Tommy on his knees. The German with Colomba’s pistol in his hand, and a burst of flame emerging from the barrel. The back of Tommy’s head literally exploding. The German firing again. Valle, now without a face. The armchair tipping over backward, the German firing once again. Valle’s throat turning into a bloody crater.

  Darkness.

  14

  The German bent over Tommy and spat in his face. “You should have finished the treatment, kid.”

  He checked the magazine: he still had two bullets. More than sufficient. The German turned to fire the kill shot into Colomba’s head, but then he noticed that Dante was no longer lying on the floor. Dante was standing right in front of him, drenched in blood, his left arm dangling inert, his good hand firmly gripping the cane with the blade. Dante darted his arm forward as if brandishing a banderilla, and hit the German dead-center in the eye.

  “I did finish the treatment, asshole,” he said. Then he passed out.

  The German didn’t die until a couple of seconds later; he toppled forward and as he hit the floor, the Ham Brooks Classic sword punched out through the back of his head.

  When Lupo entered the apartment he found himself looking down on a horrendous spectacle, with blood everywhere, even dripping from the overhead lamp, and five ravaged corpses. Then he realized that two of the five corpses were still breathing.

  EPILOGUE

  The real Tommy had never been either fat or tall, and he was certainly not especially well liked. His corpse, discovered in Greece not far from the hotel where Teresa had worked, was malnourished and his body bore many marks of mistreatment. His mother had kept him locked in the house all that time, treating him as a burden she couldn’t seem to rid herself of. Annibale Valle’s son had solved that problem for her, by cutting the boy’s throat and burying him.

  Colomba would go on wondering for the many long months and years that followed whether she had never glimpsed Tommy’s real face simply because the ostensible boy was so skillful, or rather because she hadn’t wanted to see it, caught up as she was in her role of a paladin riding to battle against the dull, obtuse world. Probably, it had been a combination of the two.

  Multiple
investigations were still under way, but what it had been possible to determine up to that point (or at least what she had been able to learn) was that Tommy had escaped from the clutches of the Father immediately following his death, when the monster’s organization had collapsed. Thanks to the evidence found in the Factory, which Lupo had successfully managed to save from the shredders of the intelligence services—which earned him a swift kick in the ass and a transfer back to Portico from Di Marco—four more prisons had been discovered, scattered around Italy, and sadly dozens more corpses of teenagers who had been eliminated in a variety of ways. Traces of the Code had been found here and there, but just which of the prisoners had created it remains a mystery. In one of these prisons an open cell had been found, so rare a circumstance that it was one of the first to be gone over by the forensic squad: in it they had found the DNA of the real Dante, and the genetic analysts now all agree that it belonged to Tommy, and that Tommy/Dante had been able to escape from that cell immediately after the death of the Father, when Colomba had slaughtered his various accomplices. The prison had been concealed deep in the foundations of an apartment building, so buried in cement that Tommy, probably, felt certain that it wouldn’t be discovered anytime soon. Bart was working on it full-time.

  Tommy might very well have been the Father’s longest-held prisoner, and he’d learned everything that he needed. His contacts with the world of contractors, which he’d used adroitly to have the Chourmo sunk and to take Dante prisoner, in turn; the lists of parents who had entrusted their differently abled sons to the Father in the hopes that he might heal them and in any case get them out from underfoot; the foreign bank accounts … Tommy had used all this to destroy what remained of the Father’s domain, and to build himself a considerable personal fortune. All that he lacked was a public identity, seeing that he couldn’t use the identity of Annibale Valle’s son, and the investigators felt certain that his plan had been to feign a miraculous “cure” from the symptoms of autism that he knew how to counterfeit so skillfully, after which he’d be able to live the way he thought he deserved.

  Like a king.

  During his three years of freedom, Tommy had hopscotched across Europe like a giant bloodsucking tick, draining of their assets many of those whose names appeared on his list, as well as manipulating an array of individuals into doing as he wished, without their ever quite realizing it. Collaborators and collaborationists from the Father’s and the German’s spheres of influence had been ravaged and murdered, while Melas, who had had the bad luck of being not only the sole heir to the man who laundered the Father’s money but also the parent of an unwanted child, had been very, very cooperative, because Tommy had a gift and a skill for terrorizing people and persuading them to follow him. And in the end, as always, Melas had been deleted from history. Colomba was starting to think that maybe Demetra wasn’t the black sheep of the family after all. They’d found her in a hotel in a state of profound narcosis, after Tommy had forced her to miss her plane by feigning a hysterical crisis and trashing the Alitalia lounge.

  While Colomba was recovering from her wounds at Celio military hospital, graduating from suspect and defendant to free citizen, she read all the volumes of Doc Savage: The Man of Bronze that she could get her hands on. Doc Savage was a hero of the American pulps in the thirties, a sort of gigantic genius, undefeated in hand-to-hand combat and in science. He had five assistants, and one of them, a lawyer named Theodore Marley Brooks, also known as Ham, went everywhere with a sword cane.

  “Do you know, I’m really enjoying myself?” said Colomba once she was capable of getting up on her feet and out into the garden, and Dante was finally able to come see her, after spending a month in hiding before his name could be cleared. As best she was able to understand, Santiago had rented Dante the roof of the apartment building where he lived. Dante had returned to his fine former fettle, with longish hair and a panama hat, and seemed to be a cosplay version of David Bowie. His bad hand was healed, though it was even more crooked and twisted than before, but as long as it stayed in its glove that wasn’t evident. As for his spirit, the various pieces were having a hard time holding together. Valle’s death had come as a blow. The man who had raised him had been willing and ready to sell him out to a murderer, only because that murderer was his true son. If Tommy had arrived in Cremona ahead of Dante and Colomba and was ready and waiting for them, it was for one reason only: Annibale had given him a heads-up after the phone call from Dante.

  “It’s as if I’ve had to review my entire past life, again,” he said to her, handing her a thermos full of what he claimed was the world’s finest Irish coffee: Irish whiskey, aged sixty years, and medium-roasted Kenya Konyu coffee. “That is, if I even have a past at all.”

  Colomba took just a small sip and felt her head start spinning instantly. “Well, one thing’s for sure. You’re not Dante Torre.”

  “My ass. I earned that name, I deserve it.” He took back the thermos and took another drink. “But I killed the only man who knew who I was.”

  “And who remains a mystery, even now that he’s dead.”

  “All self-respecting Dr. Frankensteins have a faithful Igor, but let’s just hope that something turns up …” He looked at his hands, one of which was sheathed in a well-made glove. “I never thought I’d be capable of such a thing. But we’re all probably capable when the time really comes.”

  While he had been hiding out from the arrest warrant in his name, Dante had studied the sheets of paper that Colomba had gathered at the Factory. They came from a place called Villa Blu, which in spite of the Disney-sounding name had been a sort of concentration camp for children run by a psychiatrist nicknamed Dr. Electrode, on account of his uninhibited use of electric shocks, especially as applied to the testicles of misbehaving young boys. Villa Blu was shuttered in the wake of the passage of Italy’s Basaglia Law in 1978, and the Father had been happy to offer his services to the families who would have preferred a son they could show off in society. Cesare’s parents were indicted and faced trial, and they were soon to be joined by a great many other parents.

  The woman who lived across the landing from Romero had been indicted, too, once she emerged from her coma. She’d never seen Leo, of course: she’d lied in exchange for money to buy herself a lifelike silicone newborn doll: the one that Colomba had mistaken for a real baby. She’d never had a child at all, she’d only pretended to have one, and she was so deeply attached to that doll that she’d gone back into the flames to rescue it … whereupon it had melted onto her flesh.

  “It’s incredible the way Tommy managed to pull the wool over everybody’s eyes,” said Colomba. “Even when I was in Milan, and I was convinced I was talking to Leo, it was really him on the phone the whole time.”

  “I’m really good at imitating voices, too, you know. Have you ever heard my Mickey Mouse imitation?” He smiled bitterly. “He made a fool of me, too, CC. I was looking for the gray-haired grand old man of private war-making, not just a bad copy of myself. But you, in any case, have an excuse. Your maternal instinct. Your biological clock, ticking away.”

  “Idiot. It was just that he really seemed like a teenager. None of the health care professionals ever noticed a thing.”

  “He had a first-class prosthetic device and no one ever did any serious, in-depth exams, knowing where to look. And when the supervisor at ETC started to make insistent noises about doing some, he had her killed. In any case, I sent a good bottle of whiskey to Lupo. He more than deserved it. He was the only one who never trusted Tommy.”

  “And I always treated him like a creep, along with everybody else who wanted to bring charges against Tommy.”

  “Tommy was good, really, really good at it. Hidden in plain sight just like Leo, but physically much more powerful and capable. And then there was the sulfur on his shoes, the crowning touch, his masterstroke. He was sure you’d figure it out.” It was Tommy who’d planned the Melases’ move to Portico, precisely so he could get close to Col
omba and bring her into it. And when he was confined at the group home, he hadn’t had any difficulty getting out at night to take care of his various errands.

  Martina had probably recognized him, the night she was murdered.

  “Luca writes me often,” Colomba said. “He says that he made the right decision, to trust me and to reveal the Code to me. Now Cesare practically lives with him.”

  “Maybe Maugeri is less of an asshole than we thought,” said Dante.

  “Compared with the others, he’s practically a saint. And Luca is growing up very well, he’s using his disease as an instrument, not as a limitation: a feature, not a bug.” Colomba gave Dante a play jab: he’d slipped into a reverie, staring into the empty air. “What’s up with you?”

  He took another sip, a way of stalling for time. “I’ve got an idea about why they were so interested in kids on the autism spectrum,” he said. He handed her a newspaper clipping about how there was a far greater concentration of adults with Asperger’s in Silicon Valley tech companies than the national average.

  “Are they good at making software?” Colomba asked.

  “No doubt about it, but I think the real issue is something else,” he said, leaning on his cane. He didn’t need it and there was no longer a blade inside, but he was convinced it looked good on him. “Evolution.”

  “Evolution?”

  “Do you know why there are so many people with high blood pressure? Because people with high blood pressure tended to wake up more easily, not like you: you sleep like a diesel engine. And if someone tried to kill them in their sleep, they’d react. Now, though, high blood pressure is no good to anyone, or practically none. Many scientists, however, think that the autistic are the people of the future, better suited to move through a world buried in an avalanche of information, because they’re capable of finding the right details without getting distracted.”