A few days before Christmas, Luigi left us to go meet the guests we’d been waiting for. Unexpectedly, a very excited Bino left with him, slipping into my father’s old jeep. “I’ll see you at the party,” he said to Sasà through the open window, and then he and Luigi peeled away.
A dusting of snow appeared from the sky just before nightfall, the air grew magical. Luciano, Sasà, and I attended to the beasts and holed up in the comfortable little house. Our arrangement from years past endured. I stacked the hearth with firewood and made coffee for Luciano, who blissfully smoked a cigarette. Sasà sat near him and together they enjoyed the warmth of the fire.
I began to make dinner. The snow created a surreal silence. I felt alone. I turned to look at them, and only then did I realize something strange. It had been such a long time since they had spoken to each other directly. I understood that both of them wanted to clear the tension that was so contrary to their natures.
I moved the camp stoves outside, arranging everything under the glow of a gas lamp in a small shed recently built by Bino and my father. I let the sauce simmer as I took in the landscape. The snow fell lightly, small dollops of white began to adorn the pines, the placid goats let their newborns greedily suckle at their teats. They were beautiful beasts, nourished and cared for, they had a clean enclosure; their masters were throwbacks from another time and treated them like precious treasures.
For my father and Bino, the concept of time was relative; they accepted very few of the scientific findings that modernity offered and none of its morals. Though they’d endured a period of chaos, they’d overcome it. They lived on what the mountains gave them. My mother wore her braids gathered into a crown, as Bino’s wife had done all her life.
Our parents had imposed nothing on us as children, we’d chosen our destinies. After all we’d done, what I most wanted was a life like theirs, and if I’d had the strength to make that change, I know Luciano at least would have followed me. To hell with Milan.
But the world hadn’t frightened me enough yet. I shivered, boiled the pasta, and took overflowing plates back into the house. Inside, the storm had passed; they spoke quietly, and I only participated in the last part of their conversation, when they talked about Don Vincenzo Sparta.
Reading Don Vincenzo’s memoirs had been an indiscretion, one of the few Luciano had committed in his life. The old boss had poured the misdeeds of a lifetime into his notebooks. Beyond the local woes, he’d detailed an impressive series of offenses in which the Blood Brothers had played a role. Events similar to the one that had brought us to the French border of Germany. His memoirs included names, surnames, and accomplices. After reading them, Luciano understood the danger in knowing such secrets. He hadn’t read them out of a vain curiosity; rather he’d been looking for his father’s murderer, the one who had armed the late Totò the Blade.
And he’d found him.
Luciano pulled out two small strips of paper and handed them to me. I saw Don Vincenzo’s elegant, almost solemn handwriting. There were two short sentences.
Peppino Zacco reported to me on the death of the municipal messenger.
Peppino Zacco reported to me on the death of Sante Motta.
It meant that Zacco had been the one to request consent from the old man for those murders.
While Luciano and Sasà ate peacefully, having vented their anger, my food grew heavy in my mouth.
A suspicion arising from logical deductions is merely a narrative; revenge never leaves you completely satisfied when there is a doubt, however minimal, as to the author of your suffering.
Truth beyond the shadow of a doubt is what grants full vengeance.
The sky gifted us with more snow, and we had a white Christmas. A small parade of cars arrived: my brother and some of my sisters; Giulio, my brother’s inseparable friend; Anna, Santoro, and his wife, Chiara, who sweetly attended to him; Rino, the politician, and his wife; Luigi and Natalia.
Bino and my father lingered to greet their own special guest.
That unmistakable gait, that proud chest, that head held high, that man who so long ago had been a swine. It was Leonardo Brambilla and his family.
My thoughts, and those of many, went to Sante. It was an intense period, but like all good things, the holidays flew by, and we grew depressed when the time came for us to return to the North.
The
Beasts
in Their
Cage
No child of the forest was happy about leaving home; we all drove back north slowly, making frequent use of the rest stops. By now, everywhere I went, everyone asked the same thing: “Got any white?”
We’d started hearing the request a few months before; what had first been a lone voice here and there had become a choir.
People weren’t seeking out death anymore, or perhaps those who had really wanted to die had done it; now everyone was suddenly infected by the desire to live. And many of them wanted to live incessantly. Demand for the dark stuff diminished in just a few months, prices plummeted, and after a year we found ourselves distributing the last packages at seventeen million lire per kilo. It was the end of an era, and we found ourselves unemployed.
We kept up the good life, frequenting clubs and lounges, and eventually grew bored. The boys, disappointed, gradually stopped seeking us out and started to hound the South Americans. We had no plan for the future, but the demon inside of us was still hungry and drove us forward.
Luciano complained that his brain was rotting; he went back to university and forgot about us. We settled our accounts. Despite our crazy spending and high standard of living, our wealth from those years was still conspicuous.
Through Natalia and her connections, we were able to obtain thousands of bearer savings books at amounts of less than ten million lire each, and scattered them among numerous hiding places at our apartments. We had partnerships in companies and bars, we owned real-estate in every neighborhood. And we had fifty billion lire in cash.
Luigi and Sasà traveled constantly in search of suppliers. Every now and then they would appear, fill a few bags with cash, and leave again. I stayed behind to manage our assets and relationships. I was practically alone, with Luciano intent on finishing his studies, though I would sometimes find a note from him lying around one the apartments we used. That’s how we communicated, by letter.
I took up residence in a two-bedroom apartment that we owned on via Eustachi. I hardly went out. In the mornings I’d do the shopping and I spent the evenings with Natalia. Every day I filled my bags with practically useless things at the Esselunga on viale Regina Giovanna. That’s where I met Giulia. We ran into each other almost every day with our carts.
We started by exchanging a few fleeting smiles, then moved on to saying hello, and then one morning we found ourselves having breakfast together at the Belle Aurore.
She was a biologist in a testing laboratory. At the time I was going by the name of Antonio De Pierro; I was a medical-scientific representative.
It didn’t take long for us to lose ourselves in each other. And my world was driven into crisis.
She was the first normal woman I’d allowed myself to know as a person. With her, I saw a Milan that had been unknown to me until then, a Milan of markets, museums, concerts, mom-and-pop pizzerias, simple people with real problems.
When she finished work, she would meet me at my apartment and we would stay together until the next day. On the weekends, we would travel to nearby attractions outside the city, always something new.
I let her introduce me to her parents, and I began to accept their dinner invitations, often staying to watch television. Sometimes I would fall asleep on their sofa, and Giulia would cover me with a fragrant quilt and wake me in the morning with her mother’s coffee.
What was I supposed to do, tell her the truth and hope she understood? Involve her in my life of deceit and violence?
; Instead, one evening, I said I would pick her up after work. A light rain was falling, the kind that silences Milan and transforms it into a human, understandable place, relieving the weight of the air. I arrived early and parked some distance from the door. I saw her walk out. She clutched her light gray raincoat tightly against her. She lifted the brim of her curious Panama hat to look down the road, anticipating my arrival. She was a happy woman. Every man’s dream. My dream.
I started the engine and disappeared from her life. The relationship was forcing me to reflect, something I couldn’t allow myself to do.
I escaped to save her. That was my excuse; my whole existence had been a pile of fucking excuses. Until then, I’d divided women into saints and whores, but she was not a doll to be placed on an altar or slammed against a mattress. She was a normal person, the world was full of them, even if it had felt safer for me to divide it into friends and enemies. And normal people are not figurines that you can arrange as you like. When I was a child, my father would sometimes lose his temper in response to that serious, worried look I often had on my face. “What have you got in that head of yours?” he’d cry. I didn’t have one shit inside my head, just a monster that devoured me. A bloody clot of evil. I should have run away from my father, from the others, then maybe I would have happily become a shepherd. Luciano would have ended up in a laboratory inventing something useful, maybe Sante would have stopped coming back to kill people, and Santoro would have grown fond of his uniform over time. I’d always invented a cause to fight for in order to keep others close to me. In fact, though, I was a prisoner of my fears, a vessel for the worst of a cultural network that was losing its significance. I was out of my mind, and perhaps no one even noticed. I’d tried to slay the monster inside me, but it was a big black bull with a shiny, silken coat, and a lead bullet hadn’t been enough to bring it down. Luciano had been right about one thing, which was that we, children of the forest, were part beast, only harmless when caged in our mountains.
I went to spend the night in the apartment on via Savona and found Santoro dozing in the bed, waiting for me. “Tonino found them,” he said.
For years, we’d been hunting two of the surviving assassins sent by Zacco to kill Sante. We couldn’t risk an outright war with Don Peppino; he was too powerful. After Vincenzo Sparta’s death, Don Peppino had taken his place, and we risked finding ourselves up against an entire army of Blood Brothers. Instead, we led a covert war, imitating the strategy of those saint-burners: officially we were friends with them and had no notion that Zacco had anything to do with Sante’s death.
We were aiming to weaken Zacco gradually. Every so often we would eliminate some of his most dangerous minions. If questioned, we swore we knew nothing about it. In that world of tragedies it was difficult to identify who was to blame; what an enormous burden, trying to figure out who, among so many enemies, most deserved a hit.
Death sentences were always issued with doubt.
Tonino had found the assassins in Genoa; they were getting weed from one of his men. We sent the marshal to study their movements, and after a week of tracking them he discovered where they lived. We woke them at dawn wearing Benemérita uniforms and driving a police car. They came with us peacefully in handcuffs, knowing the routine. They only started kicking when they noticed we were driving into the open countryside instead of into Marassi. They disappeared into nothingness, and Genoa was freed from their stench.
After that hit, Santoro quietly dedicated himself to his newborn little Sante. Luigi and Sasà reappeared to ask me to go in on a trucking company with them, with a few tractor trailers traveling to Spain on a weekly basis. Luciano also reappeared, in good spirits, and invited us all to dinner, announcing that there would be a special guest. The end of my relationship with Giulia had brought me back to my version of normalcy, with its unshakable certainties. My serious disposition allowed me to keep believing that I was a genius.
For his dinner, Luciano had chosen the Botte on via Ripamonti. Tonino, Santoro, the marshal, Rino, Natalia and I had already taken our seats when Luciano arrived. I couldn’t believe my eyes when he walked in with Stefano Bennaco, the jocular fugitive who had sought refuge in my father’s mountain hideout so many years ago before escaping to Basque Country. Rino told us everything. They’d been working on it for a long time, engaging legal luminaries, renowned experts, offering them bulging envelopes. Eventually they’d gotten Stefano’s sentence repealed. After many long years in hiding, his life imprisonment sentence for a kidnapping gone wrong was no longer hanging over his head.
Stefano celebrated with us, and we took him and the family he had formed in Spain on a weeklong tour of Milan. Then he left for Calabria to introduce his mother to the grandchildren she’d never met. Luciano was like that; what he got in his head to do he did without being asked. He worked slowly but always hit the mark. We’d spent happy days with Stefano when he was a “shadow” hiding in our fold. He had never forgotten our hospitality. He had always sent gifts from Spain to us or to my father. Now, Luciano had happily repaid him for his loyalty and affection.
Eventually, the travels of Luigi and Sasà and all the money they spent bore fruit, and they returned with definitive proposals. Luciano, Santoro, the marshal, Tonino—now a permanent member of the group—and I gathered at Natalia’s villa. She let us have the place to ourselves and went out on the town with her distinguished husband.
Sasà had learned all about cocaine and proved it. Cocaine had been around for years, for all of time, one might argue. Almost everyone kept it at an arm’s length because it was a restricted market, it cost too much and few could afford it. Everyone thought it was Colombian, but it was mainly produced in Bolivia, on the border with Brazil. Colombians were the major traffickers, and sold ninety percent of the product in North America. That was the biggest market in the world; cocaine was mass-consumed there, for a very simple reason: the only currency the South Americans would accept was the dollar. They demanded $35,000 a package and transported it by land. Hundreds of millions of people were able to spend fifty dollars for a gram, almost pure. Each shipment amounted to several tons of product. But an Italian buyer first had to change lire for dollars, and spend seventy million lire to get $35,000. You had to import it yourself, because the big traffickers wouldn’t bother for transports of less than three or four tons, and the little traffickers couldn’t handle it. So after you bought it, you also had to move it, which meant at least a thousand dollars a package to load it, a thousand to ship it by cargo, another thousand to unload it, and a thousand for ground transport. In order to make a decent profit, you had to sell it at around ninety million lire per package on a first-hand delivery; retail came to one hundred and twenty million. In Western Europe, few could afford to traffic on those terms, and it was no surprise that cocaine was a rich man’s drug. The supposed “white” that was floating around was almost always a synthetic drug prepared in some Dutch laboratory or, as Santoro explained, since he often saw the test results for narcotics seized by the Carabinieri, a mix of cutting substances: lidocaine, boric acid, plus ether for an anesthetic effect and amphetamines to act as a stimulant. In that mixture, coca alkaloid was present at less than ten percent, sometimes even less than five. That was the only way to bring the price down to around fifty thousand lire per gram, which the masses could afford, at least on occasion.
Sasà said that all of his contacts with the Colombians had failed, that they didn’t consider the European market to be desirable at the moment. But with Luigi he’d been able to get further. In Bolivia the growing was done in broad daylight, and it wasn’t hard to find suppliers. The crop was sometimes so abundant that the leaves were left to rot on the ground. They could buy it for five hundred dollars a pound, and they’d already connected with wholesalers. The local relationships had been secured, as had ground transport to the Brazilian ports, and transport by sea to Spain. We would take care of the last leg to Italy with our trucks, w
hich were already shuttling toward Barcelona.
All we were missing were a couple of everyday chemicals and the products needed for refinement. Natalia procured the materials and personnel, whom we brought to Spain. Luigi and Sasà went with them. To set the entire mechanism into motion required economic savvy, knowledge of means, people, places, and guarantors, which at that moment only we possessed.
Of course, Sasà and Luigi took all the credit. Luciano, who had a passion for politics at that time, said this scheme would destroy us, and he disappeared again.
We created a market in Milan and kept a firm grip on it for years. Once the prices went down, we got the attention of the Colombians, who monopolized sales in Northern Europe. Italy was the richest European market, especially Milan. We managed to produce a finished product at a cost of about twenty million lire. Then we flipped it to the Calabrians at twenty-eight or thirty million per package.
We were back on our path. Everyone was seeking us out again and I can’t deny that we loved it. Even Luciano couldn’t resist it, and to everyone’s joy he returned to oversee the accounting. We had stepped into the nineties, and the new decade was proving itself to be richer and happier than the one before it. The new criminal procedure code had made its debut, bringing with it amnesty and pardons; from now on, trials would be conducted the American way, on equal grounds between the prosecution and defense. There was a widespread sense that the state had assumed a strategy of tolerance, and even heavy sentences were mitigated by a general application of the Gozzini law, which governed the lives of prisoners.
Black Souls Page 12
