Kill the King Read online

  Pala stubbed out his cigarillo on the windowsill and sat back down.

  “One question each.”

  Colomba thought she’d misheard him. “Excuse me?”

  “I don’t know you and I don’t know whether I can trust you. You could get me in trouble with the association, or you could start trouble for Tommy. So, what I’m offering is one question each, take it or leave it. Or else threaten me with the handgun you have in your belt.”

  Colomba realized that the bottom of her sweatshirt had hiked up, uncovering the grip of her sidearm. She tugged it down. “I’m authorized to carry it.”

  “I certainly hope so. You start. What do you want to know?”

  “How long have you been seeing Tommy?”

  “Seven months.”

  “And before that?”

  Pala smiled. “My turn now. Do you think that Tommy’s innocent only because he was scared when you saw him, or do you have another reason?”

  “I don’t think it. Now it’s my turn.”

  “Hold on there. You didn’t answer my question.”

  Colomba glared at him. “You’re making up rules to suit your purposes … Let’s just say that I have some doubts. And let’s say that I’d like to resolve it. Now answer the previous question.”

  “The Melases didn’t live here. They moved here eight months ago from Greece. The mother didn’t have the resources to afford a specialist there, and so she entrusted him to the Greek public institutions. My turn now. What keeps you from turning away, from simply ignoring him? Your sense of duty?”

  “My sense of guilt. I’m not looking to collect any more than I already have,” said Colomba, falling silent a second after saying it. It wasn’t like her to confide in a stranger. “Would you have noticed if Tommy had been subjected to serious abuse, considering his condition?”

  “Do you mean sexual abuse?” Pala seemed alarmed. “Do you have any reason to think that’s happened?”

  “You didn’t answer my question.”

  “Because it’s a particularly thorny matter,” Pala said, after pausing to reflect briefly. “An autistic child’s reaction to abuse is frequently to accentuate their self-harming behaviors, such as banging their head against the wall or chewing on their fingers. But if the abuse had taken place before I first saw him, then I wouldn’t have noticed any changes. And speaking of abuse and trauma, who’s helping you to overcome yours?”

  “No one. I don’t have any traumas,” Colomba said hastily. “Did Tommy have any marks or scars?”

  “I’ve never seen him without a T-shirt. None on his arms. Now it’s my turn again. You deny that you’ve ever suffered a trauma. And yet, you show yours to the world.”

  “Is that a question?”

  “No, this is the question. How many days have you been wearing that Charlie Brown sweatshirt?”

  “What the fuck is that supposed to mean?”

  “Answer or stop playing.”

  “I don’t remember. That’s the truth, I swear it.”

  Pala put on a pair of glasses and paused to study her. “From the ring around the collar, I’d say it’s been a week. You’re not taking care of yourself, you’re not getting enough sleep, and you’re not washing up enough. I doubt that was your personal style, really, prior to the Venice terror attack.”

  Colomba planted both elbows solidly on Pala’s desk, her green eyes seething like twin emerald tornadoes. “Listen. Last night I ran out of propane, and I don’t usually see a lot of people. So, yeah, I’m a little dirty and down at the heels. But I’m trying to help Tommy, and if you don’t want to lend a hand, then frankly you can go fuck yourself.”

  Pala recoiled against the back of his chair. “And I doubt you were this touchy before.”

  “You’re wrong there, I’ve always hated having other people pick through my brains. Well?”

  “Ask whatever you want to know.” Pala sighed. “I’ll keep quiet about the rest.”

  “What sort of people were Tommy’s parents? And don’t answer in monosyllables.”

  “I didn’t see enough of the stepfather to be able to offer any kind of judgment. It was the mother who brought Tommy to see me or else received me when I made a house call. She seemed reasonably happy.”

  “Wow, some endorsement.”

  “I don’t know how much she really loved her husband and to what extent she was just bound to him by a sense of gratitude for having changed her quality of life. It was hard for her, living alone with her son.”

  “Why did they come here, of all places? Didn’t she want to get back to her home?”

  “I have no idea. She said that her husband was in love with this part of the world. In fact he was constantly out and about in the woods taking pictures of birds and plants.”

  “He didn’t have to make a living?”

  “No. He had an independent income. I thought it must have been an inheritance, but we never delved much deeper into the subject.”

  “If he was rich, he might have made some enemies. Or maybe his wife was having an affair.”

  “I didn’t see them socially, we never talked about anything of the sort.”

  “What kind of relationship did Melas himself have with Tommy?”

  Pala took a few more seconds to answer. “I don’t think he’d quite gotten used to him.”

  “Did he yell at the boy or anything like that?”

  “No, no. Absolutely not. But I never saw them interact in any affectionate manner, unlike with the mother.”

  Colomba stood up. “Thanks. If you could avoid telling the sergeant major that I came by to talk to you, I’d be grateful.”

  “Don’t worry, I’m keen to keep my license. But, Colomba … call me. If you need to talk to someone, I’m here. The important thing is that the next time you come, please leave your gun with my secretary. Weapons make me nervous.”

  “Why are you so eager to become my psychiatrist?”

  “Partly out of selfishness. One way or another, Tommy obliged me to take a look at you, and I’ve seen the array of horrors you’ve been exposed to. You’ve looked Evil in the face, close up and personal, Colomba. And that’s something that someone in my line of business is constantly striving to understand.”

  “All you want is to take a ride through the circus in my head.”

  “No. Aside from the fact that I want to understand, I’m really interested in helping you. Because you need a helping hand, Colomba. I know how much you’ve suffered in order to do your duty. You deserve a little peace.”

  Colomba was tempted to retort that he could take all his psycho-bullshit and stick it up his ass, but a knot in her throat kept her from speaking. Her chin was quivering, her lips were twitching downward. To her horror, she realized that she was about to burst into tears. No, not in front of him!

  “The worst thing you can do when you’re in pain is pretend that it doesn’t exist. It won’t go away, even if we pretend not to notice that it’s there,” Pala went on. “In fact, it never gets better.”

  Colomba raised her hand to her face. It, too, was trembling. “I’m not going to let you pull the wool over my eyes,” she panted. But then, why wasn’t she leaving?

  “Talk to Caterina and have her make an appointment for a day and time for us to meet again. It’s not your fault that you survived.”

  Colomba hurried away, struggling to keep from losing control.

  4

  Colomba returned home in another taxi that she caught after nearly an hour’s wait at the street corner. The cold calmed her down and little by little dried up the pool of tears waiting to burst from her eyes. That was a good thing, because when she got back to the farmhouse, she found her mother out front, stacking up grocery bags and cartons in front of the door. Colomba’s mother had only recently entered her early sixties, her hair was gray and her body was petite. “You never go anywhere, but the one time I come to see you, you’re not here,” she grumbled.

  “Next time, call ahead,” said Colomba, more
harshly than she’d meant to.

  “Do I need to make an appointment? Come on, give me a hand.” Her mother saw Colomba’s swollen lip. “What have you done to yourself?”

  “I slammed my head against the steering wheel.” Colomba pointed to the shape of the Panda stuck in the ditch.

  “I thought that looked like our car,” said her mother. “You need to call a tow truck.”

  “Thanks, I’ll do that.”

  Colomba grabbed a crate of apples and carried it into the kitchen, while her mother followed behind with the grocery bags. “It’s freezing in here.”

  “The boiler isn’t working.”

  Her mother opened the refrigerator and started pulling out the food that had gone bad, tossing it into one of the half-full black bags on the side of the sink. “Look at all this stuff …”

  “If you turn around and leave right away, you can avoid the bad weather,” said Colomba, who already couldn’t stand having her around. “They say it’s going to start snowing again.”

  “I thought you might want to come home with me.”

  “I’m home already.”

  “You never wanted to come up here when your papà was still alive, and now I can’t pry you loose from the place.”

  “And I didn’t used to like eating spinach but now I eat it all the time.” Colomba flexed her right arm. “Just look at these muscles.”

  “Would you cut it out?”

  “Do you need to use the bathroom before you leave? Do you want a glass of water? A benediction?”

  Her mother shut the refrigerator door. “All right,” she said with a tremulous voice. “I do my best to be a good mother, but what can I do if you don’t want me to help?”

  “Nothing. I’m a grown-up woman, I have a credit card and a handgun. I can take care of myself.”

  Her mother took a piece of toilet paper and dried her eyes. “And are you going to stay here until Dante turns up?”

  “So what if I am?” Colomba snapped.

  “You’ve been here for a year! Doing nothing!”

  “What of it?”

  “What of it? He’s dead! Everyone knows that he’s dead!”

  “That’s enough!” Colomba shouted. “Get out of here!”

  Her mother sat rigidly at the table and Colomba felt embarrassed at having lost her temper with the last person left on earth who truly cared about her.

  She put the rest of the groceries into the refrigerator, ignoring her mother’s litany of complaints, which went on for another half hour until she finally headed back to Rome. Finally alone, Colomba started the fire back up by spraying a bottle of acetone nail polish remover onto the firewood. A sickly green flame burst like a shattered Molotov cocktail, but this time she jumped back in time and avoided the scorching blast of heat.

  You’ve been here for a year, doing nothing.

  She waited until the fan blades started kicking out jets of warm air, then she washed up in a basin in the ground-floor bathroom with water from the teakettle. The bathroom looked like it came straight out of some depressing sixties-era motel, and a large rococo-style mirror boasted pride of place. Colomba was forced to look at her reflection in it. She’d gained a few pounds since she’d been in the hospital, but she still looked drastically underweight. The scars from her operation stood out in an angry pink above her sunken belly, and her breasts had lost a cup size. She brushed them with her hand, and then hastily yanked her arm away, because the sensation reminded her of the last person to have squeezed them with his hands. But by now, the memory had been triggered, and Colomba imagined Leo behind her, his face exactly as she had seen it in the mirror on the train heading to Venice, when they’d locked themselves in the bathroom before indulging in what might easily have been the last reckless act of idiocy in their lives.

  She still felt dirty.

  A year doing nothing.

  Colomba begged to differ. She’d actually done a lot of things: she’d whined and complained and self-pitied the whole year long, like a genuine professional. And she’d built herself a gray world where nothing ever happened, where she never had to talk to anyone or go anywhere. A muffled world that made everything more tolerable.

  Or at least it had before that morning. Before the arrival of Tommy with his tragedy, and with all this strangeness. Tommy, who with all the places there were in the world had chosen to burst into her comfortable gray cocoon, and seemed determined not to leave.

  Wrapped in a quilt, she chomped down a couple of slices of stale zwieback toast, gazing sightlessly at the jumbled mess that filled the room. There was junk everywhere, dirty and clean clothing, books and boxes of food. The stairs leading up to the second floor were covered with spiderwebs and littered with dead insects. She hadn’t made her bed in what felt like centuries. She didn’t even always make it to bed before falling asleep, and sometimes she spent the night there on the sofa. One night she’d even slept on the bathroom floor, and she honestly couldn’t say why. Now, though, she understood that sleep wouldn’t come for hours yet. She rummaged through the kitchen drawers until she found an old lined elementary school notebook with a flowered pattern on the cover. She recognized her father’s handwriting, and inside were lists of seeds to buy at the town market for the vegetable garden. Who knows if he’d ever managed to plant them, or whether that was the spring that the heart attack had felled him.

  Colomba turned to a blank page and started writing her first police report in a long, long time.

  5

  While Colomba was transcribing her conversation with Pala, working from memory, two hundred miles away, the chief of the Rome Mobile Squad, Marco Santini, was holding his nose to avoid the stench that filled the long hallway on the sixth floor of police headquarters on Via San Vitale. The foul odor was the result of the stopped-up toilets, and the reason the toilets were stopped up was that the hallway had become a dumping ground for all the immigrants arrested by the counterterrorism squad. Nearly all of them were Arabs, with a few Africans. There were those who shouted in their native languages, others who wept as they were being hauled away. It was a scene that played out identically every time a new operation was undertaken. As he limped along on his aching leg, Santini tried to remember the name of their last operation. Petal by Petal? No, some other fucked-up name: Flower by Flower. To give the idea of precision and painstaking care, but only concealing that they were really just dragging a trawl-net through the city’s immigrant population. At the door to his office, Santini found Corporal Massimo Alberti. He was a broad-shouldered young man in his late twenties with fair hair and a sprinkling of freckles scattered over a face that just now was grimmer than usual. Once again, Santini missed the cheerful young recruit Alberti had been until recently. But it’ll age you quickly when you see too many of your fellow officers slaughtered like farm animals.

  “So what’s going on?” he asked. “More roundups? Flower by Flower II: Revenge of the Horticulturalists?”

  Alberti shook his head.

  “If it’s bad news, save it. I’ve just spent three hours of my life with the unions, what I need is a reward.”

  Santini was in the corner office that had been occupied by all the chiefs of the Mobile Squad who had gone before him. The last in that line of chiefs had left him a legacy, his collection of Paulo Coelho novels, crammed in among the law books and file binders. Santini pushed the novels aside, pulled out the bottle of vodka hidden behind them, and poured himself a shot, then carried the glass back to his desk, where he took a seat, lifting his wounded leg onto the stool that he’d brought in from home. “Well? Give me the grim news.”

  Alberti made a sad face. “Dante Torre,” he said.

  “Have they found him?”

  “No, but they found the boat that Bonaccorso used to take him away from Venice, the Chourmo. It’s lying at the bottom of the sea, under six hundred and fifty feet of water.”

  6

  Right after the terror attack at the Palasport della Misericordia, an electrical bla
ckout had knocked out the security cameras at a yacht club in the city, and before power could be restored a sixty-five-foot sailboat had headed out to sea. The Chourmo was her name. According to their reconstruction of events, Leo Bonaccorso had moved away from the scene of the explosion with Dante slung over his shoulder, mixing in with the hundreds of people fleeing the blast in a state of panic. The Chourmo had immediately deactivated her transponder, and considering the fuel in her tanks and the power of her engines, she could easily have docked almost anywhere in the Middle East. Bonaccorso must have been long gone by the time Santini had arrived at the scene. Santini had reached Venice at two the following morning, and he’d lingered on the bridge, the Ponte della Misericordia, watching as the dead were tended to.

  There had been forty-nine corpses, covered by the sheets and contained in the body bags of, respectively, the Protezione Civile and the city morgue. Many of those corpses lacked a limb, or had badly ravaged facial features, or else clothing that was ripped to shreds. Half of them were Carabinieri and policemen, the rest were guests and executives of the philanthropic association Care of the World, which was throwing a benefit party at the Palasport della Misericordia, a small sports arena. The large external metal staircase leading up to the second floor had partly broken loose from its moorings in the outside brick wall, and it was creaking and swaying dangerously as the army helicopters set down.

  At ten o’clock the night before, Santini had still been sprawled on the sofa at his home, drunk out of his skull. He’d just returned from a government plane trip with all the high muckety-mucks of the Ministry of the Interior as well as the chief of police and his entourage, all of them pretending not to even notice his existence, the one and only advantage of being in a state of utter disgrace. Once he reached the scene of the slaughter, and after donning the requisite crime-scene shoe covers, he’d stepped into the area lit up by the floodlights, an expanse scattered with jackets, coats, shoes, purses, necklaces, and bracelets that had either been abandoned during the stampede or torn off their owners by the blast. The crater from the explosion was ten feet across and was a smoky black. That was where one of the terrorists had blown himself up, while the others were shooting and stabbing people left and right. Two of the other terrorists had been killed by gunfire, and a third had broken his back by falling on a boat moored at the side of the canal. Then Santini had entered the Palasport itself. The SIS were inside, surveying the crime scene, stepping carefully around overturned furniture and crushed finger food. There was a stench of wine and fruit that was reminiscent of vomit, and the main source of light was the sickly greenish glow of the emergency lights that had turned on in the aftermath of the explosion.