Kill the King Read online

  Dante has spent his life studying ways of picking locks and getting out of chains, in the constant fear that the Father might return to get him. He can open a padlock with a bobby pin held between his teeth, he can get out of a straitjacket by dislocating his shoulders, he knows the exact right spot to hit a metal handcuff to break it open. Even easier with a plastic handcuff. His left hand, the bad hand, is a single twisted mass of scar tissue. His metacarpal bones never did solidify entirely and that makes his hand even more flexible and compressible. Dante manages to jerk it repeatedly so that it slithers through the plastic noose, though the edge lacerates his flesh as he does so. Gudetama whines and thrashes unhappily. Dante lays Gudetama down again. With his bad hand, he now frees his other hand, and using both hands together, he unfetters his ankles. Finally, he removes the mouth bit. It was fastened with a buckle on the back of his neck, and now that he sees it he realizes that it’s a bit of masochistic gear, the rubber ball that sex slaves put in their mouths to muffle their screams. He wonders how Colomba would have reacted if she’d seen him tricked out like that. Colomba, with that … straitlaced mind-set of hers. He misses Colomba, but he’s afraid to think of her, because it summons her up the way he saw her last, clutching at her belly as blood spilled out of it, her eyes wide open in shock and pain. He doesn’t know how much time has gone by (hours? days?), but he still hasn’t quite digested the fact that Colomba failed to protect him from his abductor, that she had been unable to vanquish the bad guys, the way Wonder Woman might have. With all the time that he’s spent with her as a … “consultant,” Dante has learned to trust Colomba, to rely on her implicitly. He always felt safe when she was around, he felt protected.

  Attracted.

  But remembering the past will do nothing to save him. Dante stretches his limbs as much as he can in that limited space, only a smidgen bigger than his body itself, with a foot or so of empty air above him, between his face and the air holes. He tries to push it, but the lid won’t budge; in fact, it doesn’t even creak.

  Like a stone tomb covering.

  That’s the wrong image and, sure enough, Gudetama promptly vanishes. Dante pounds with his hands and his forehead against the wood until he can no longer see a thing due to the blood dripping into his eyes. He loses consciousness and when he regains it, he can taste the vomit in his mouth. He has to get out of there before he goes stark raving mad.

  Dante massages his good hand to restore feeling, then runs it around the corners of the lid above his head. There are no hinges or movable parts that he can detect. The lid is screwed down from outside. Dante makes a deal with himself: if he can’t find a way of opening the crate, and soon, he’ll slit his wrists. The buckle to the mouth bit has a pointy tongue about an inch long, he’ll be able to use that. Strangely, the idea of killing himself cheers him up in his partial delirium: he won’t have to die like a rat in a trap, it will be quick and painless. But in the meantime he has other tasks to tend to. Dante feels around on the bottom of the crate, and suddenly he touches something strange. Circular cuts in the wood, about the diameter of an eraser on the end of a pencil. He presses down on one with his fingernail and pops out a tiny wooden lid. And underneath it …

  It can’t be, he must be dreaming again. And yet, his fingers, trained by his thousands of solitary experiments, can’t be mistaken.

  Inside the hole there’s a trick screw, the kind that magicians use for nut-and-bolt puzzles, or to close false bottoms. It seems perfectly ordinary, fastened with a normal nut on the outside, but there’s a hidden detail: the threaded shaft isn’t part of the head, it’s only screwed in. So the head can be unscrewed without touching the nut. Dante tries it and can feel it turning under his fingernails, he can hear the wood creak, and the gap between the bottom and walls of the crate grows wider. Dante undoes the screw entirely and then does the same thing with the three other screws concealed at each of the crate’s four corners. And now the bottom sags loose.

  Dante pulls his legs up against his skeletal chest and pushes with both feet. The heavy crate rises above him. A gust of fresh air reaches his nostrils, scented with dust and grass. He slides out, reduced now to a quivering heap of aching muscles and tendons and nerves, and the sides and top of the crate fall back to the ground with a thump that echoes through the empty stillness. He loses control of himself for a few seconds, shouting and ripping the oversize diaper off his body. Rolling on the chilly cement floor. But it all passes quickly. He struggles back onto his feet, feeble but angry, ready to duke it out with anyone who might think of trying to lock him up again. Though he hates violence, he’s willing to use teeth and nails if necessary. Eager to do it, in fact, yearning to inflict violence. He sees the face of the man who called himself Leo Bonaccorso before his eyes again, dreams of beating that smile off his face. He dreams of locking him in a dark hole in the ground and giving him a taste of his own medicine. But only after asking him, once and for all, what the fuck he was thinking when he used an illusionist’s trick trunk to imprison Dante. Was that all he had at hand? Or was it some kind of a sadistic game?

  He reaches down and picks a length of electric cable off the floor, as thick as a banana and twice as long. He’s ready to hit his captor in the teeth with it, and he hopes it’ll hurt. But there’s no one there. He’s inside a rectangular warehouse, three hundred or so feet long on the longer side, with a roof held up by cement pillars. The light he had glimpsed is the light of the moon, which is refracted through the filthy glass of the skylight. The moon has almost set, while the sky is growing brighter. Everything around him is ramshackle and decrepit; a tree branch has shattered one of the windows and is now growing into the building; there are climbing vines and rotting dead leaves. He hears the cry of a bird of prey and the wind. Nothing else. No cars, no people, no electric generators, none of the sounds that we associate with civilization. And the smell, the smell isn’t the right one. Venice reeked of saltwater and fried foods, cigarettes and seaweed. This place smells of wild plants and animals and plastic, it smells of an old fire. And there’s no scent of human beings, except for his own odor.

  Dante thinks of The Day of the Triffids. Of Z Nation. Maybe the apocalypse has taken place while he was in the crate. Now that he’s able to think with something approaching his entire brain, he knows that it’s not solely to his own credit that he’s been able to keep from going completely gibbering insane. For his entire adult life he’s managed his moods and symptoms through drugs, and he can sense traces of something distinctly chemical circulating in his veins. An antipsychotic of some kind, most likely, a tranquilizer or something. He finds the spot where the moonlight is strongest and examines himself. His arms have swollen veins, and there are broken capillaries as well as bruises. Injections, IVs. They put him to sleep.

  For how long?

  He feels his beard, which is growing out, soft and patchy. That’s only a couple of days’ growth. But he can’t know whether or not someone shaved him while he was sleeping. Panic pulsates inside him. Dante forgets just how strange the situation is and runs desperately toward the flaking metal door of the warehouse. In the second that it takes before he touches it with his good hand, he envisions himself pushing on it in vain, and then slowly starving to death.

  Instead, the door swings open easily, pulling with it the branches of the climbing vines, and now Dante is standing at the center of a large cement courtyard. He’s in a military complex, reduced to ruins. Some of the buildings remind him of the high Soviet style of the Cold War. At the far end of the courtyard looms a building that he’s never seen in his life, but which he recognizes immediately. It’s practically identical to how he’s always imagined it, or dreamed it. That place has been called by many different names, but to its prisoners it’s only ever had one name.

  The Box.

  2

  The dumb luck that had been watching over Colomba’s driving finally ran out at the last curve on the dirt road before her house, and the Fiat Panda rammed nose down into a d
itch full of icy water. She slammed her face against the steering wheel and split her lip, which finally brought her back in touch with reality. She didn’t remember much of the crazy drive from the farmstay, but she could still feel the tingle of fear up and down her spinal cord.

  But fear of what?

  The Father was dead. Only eleven of his prisoners had survived, Dante among them, and Tommy wasn’t one of them.

  Are you absolutely sure of that?

  They still didn’t know all there was to know about the Father. They were very far from knowing everything. The Father had died without giving any testimony or leaving any documentation of all he had done, and his only known accomplice, the German, was serving three consecutive life sentences without once having opened his mouth to speak. What proof did they have that there were no other prisons they just hadn’t found yet, no other prisoners?

  Colomba dabbed at her lip with the rag she used to clean the windows and abandoned the car to its fate. She trudged back into the house, battling the icy wind, treated her bruises and cuts, and drank a cup of tea that stung her lip.

  Tommy with his demented gaze continued to hover in her mind, until she finally forced herself to concentrate on more practical matters. Like the frost that was starting to build up on the windowpanes and the dank chill that was rising out of the sofa.

  Make a choice, either go get firewood or else you freeze to death.

  Despite the fact that the second option tempted her mightily, she finally opted for the first. She went out with a shovel to clean the snow off the woodpile, causing little avalanches directly onto her head, then she walked into the tool shed and pulled out an old ax held together with nails. She could see Tommy in her mind’s eye again, shivering in the shadows of the tool shed, his oversize silhouette pressed against the wall. She shut the door behind her, hoping that that ghost would stay outside, and started chopping. It was a slow and laborious operation, not only because of the dull blade, but also because after every other blow of the ax, Colomba stopped to listen. She felt anxious when she couldn’t hear any background noises, even though she also felt practically certain that she wasn’t going to see any new intruders, real or imaginary, at least for the rest of that day.

  Reasonably certain.

  The Father was dead and Colomba didn’t believe in zombies. Even if Tommy had been one of the old lunatic’s prisoners, that didn’t mean he hadn’t actually slaughtered his parents. In fact, that would have been a justification, considering what he’d been through. If that was what had really happened.

  Tommy might have seen that position depicted in some documentary, or he could have listened to the account of one of the survivors from the silos. At least a couple of them had been capable of speaking coherently and had been interviewed hundreds of times. Or else it was just a coincidence.

  And what are the odds that one of the Father’s victims, someone nobody’s ever heard of, would be living two miles away from your house? Far more likely that you’d be struck by lightning while winning a turn of the wheel at roulette.

  Tommy’s room really did seem like one of the Father’s cells, though. And then there were all those pictures of her.

  She filled the wheelbarrow with logs and emptied it in the kitchen, but lighting the fire in the fireplace proved even more demanding than chopping the wood. The flue drew little if at all, and the balled-up newspaper she used as kindling kept going out; in the end, Colomba ran out of patience and just poured a bottle of stain remover over the wood. The stench of petroleum filled the room, but the fire blazed up with a roar, and Colomba narrowly avoided losing both eyebrows. She took the card that she had stolen from Tommy out of her pocket and wedged it into the mirror of the medicine chest in the bathroom. A king, a rich man, a chief … She’d need to talk to Tommy again, try to figure it out.

  In her pocket, she even had the scrap of paper with the address of his psychiatrist. He didn’t live far away, in fact.

  Cursing herself and her stubborn mind, unwilling to relax and forget about things, Colomba picked up the phone and, discovering that the line had been restored, called for a taxi.

  3

  Dr. Pala had his office high in the hilly part of San Lorenzo, just a short stroll from the seventh-century Benedictine abbey. A black woman came to answer the door. She had an Afro and wore a cocktail dress. The dimly lit lobby had frescoed ceilings and was scented with patchouli. The woman smiled at Colomba, who stood in the doorway in her parka that reeked of wet dog. “Buongiorno, please come in. If you’ll remind me of your name, I’ll check your appointment for today.”

  “I don’t have an appointment. I just need to speak with the doctor. Ten minutes, at the most. My name is Caselli.”

  “I’m afraid he’s expecting a patient …”

  “This is about Tommaso Carabba. Tommy. Or maybe he’s registered under Melas, I’m not certain what surname you have him under.”

  The secretary sized Colomba up, eyeing her for a moment. “Melas … Can you tell me anything else?”

  “No.”

  The secretary ushered her into the waiting room, a small parlor, dimly lit, with a small leather sofa and two etchings by De Chirico. After a couple of minutes, a hulking man in his early sixties emerged from his office; he had long white hair and two pairs of eyeglasses dangling around his neck. His sweater and trousers were both black, as were the flip-flops on his feet. His toenails were beautifully manicured. “Please come in, Signora Caselli,” he said.

  His office had colorful furniture made of plastic and rubber, nature posters, a wooden Pinocchio that stood a yard tall, and a blackboard with the conjugation of the verb “to be.” Colomba sat down in an armchair that seemed to be made of Lego blocks.

  “Is Tommy well?” Pala asked as he sat across from her in an orange armchair.

  “Yes, but I’m afraid I have to give you some bad news. His parents were murdered last night.”

  Pala was stunned. “Oh Lord. Who did it?”

  “The Carabinieri think it was Tommy. I’ve met him and I have my doubts.”

  “Are you a relative?”

  “I’m an ex-cop. Colomba Caselli, you can look me up on Google.”

  Pala slumped against the backrest of his chair. “There’s no need. Certainly, I wouldn’t have recognized you with your short hair, and above all, I didn’t expect to see you here today … but Tommy is an admirer of yours, Commissario Caselli.”

  “Deputy captain, actually. Ex.”

  “So you have no professional interest in Tommy.”

  “No. Strictly personal.”

  Pala shook his head. “Just give me five minutes. Let me make a couple of phone calls, you can stay here if you like.” He asked Caterina, the young woman at the reception desk, to cancel the next appointment, then he pulled a pack of vanilla-flavored cigarillos from the desk. “Care for one?”

  “No, thanks.”

  Pala opened the window and lit one. Outside was the building’s inner courtyard, similar to a convent’s cloister, and a chilly wind was blowing, but it didn’t seem to bother the doctor a bit.

  “How were they killed?” he asked, after a moment’s hesitation.

  “Hammered to death in their sleep.”

  Pala smoked in silence for a handful of seconds. “I know that this is a stupid question but … was it painful?”

  “They probably lost consciousness immediately, if they even ever woke up.”

  “If they were in their bedroom, then they obviously weren’t invading Tommy’s personal space …”

  “Exactly.”

  “Then I really don’t believe that it could have been him. He’s autistic, his bouts of rage don’t take place without a trigger. Certainly, it’s always possible they might have done something that Tommy could have interpreted as a threat, but I’d rule that out: his mother knew how to handle him. So it must have been someone else.”

  Lupo and his convictions about the murders wouldn’t hold up for long with a diagnosis of that sort, Colo
mba thought, but deep down, she, too, would have preferred to get the thought out of her mind. “Any idea of who else it might have been?” she asked.

  “Explain the reason for your personal interest, first.”

  “This morning Tommy ran all the way to my house. He was still covered with his parents’ blood.”

  Pala seemed perplexed. “So you live in Montenigro?”

  “No, in Mezzanotte, in the Valfornai.”

  “Tommy never goes out alone. Often his mother was unable to bring him here, and I’d have to go there. He suffers greatly from exposure to open spaces. He must have been terribly frightened to have covered all that distance.”

  “He was.”

  “I need to see him … Do you think they’d let me have a meeting with him?”

  “That depends on the magistrate and the expert appointed by the court. They’ll be expected to certify that Tommy is incapable of understanding and formulating intent.”

  “Tommy is perfectly capable of understanding and formulating intent. He just needs to be cared for.” He heaved a sigh of annoyance. “I shouldn’t be talking about a patient of mine with you.”

  “Clearly, I can’t force you to confide in me, Doctor. But I should warn you that soon, my place will be taken by a sergeant major who can’t wait to wrap up this investigation.”

  “You don’t seem to place a lot of trust in your colleagues.”

  “Ex-colleagues. If you want to protect Tommy, don’t answer their questions, and consult a lawyer. It will take a while before they’re able to issue any court orders, and new facts may emerge in the meantime.”

  “What sort of new facts?”

  Colomba shook her head. “I have no idea. Why don’t you just start by helping me.”