Bandit Love

by Massimo Carlotto

  I nodded in agreement, and told him to go on.

  “Finding out what really happened with the burglary, which might seem to have nothing to do with this, is crucial. We have to look into everything so we can figure out what role the dead guy played. I did some research on the ring. It’s what’s known as a chevalier, a signet ring. The flat part on top is where you would normally have an engraved coat of arms.”

  “An aristocrat?”

  “I don’t think so, that cross thingie was pretty crude, and I couldn’t find anything like it in any of the heraldry sites I searched online,” he said. “It definitely doesn’t belong to any well known family.”

  “What else?”

  My partner held out a pair of empty hands. “That’s all I’ve got so far.”

  I looked over at the bottle of Roger Groult “Vénérable” Calvados and then over at the clock on the wall. It was 4:20 in the afternoon. I sighed. I still had a long time to wait before I could slurp down my first glass. For the past two years now I’d made a rule that I could only drink after dinner. It was the only way I could think of to avoid becoming an alcoholic. But every blessed day I did nothing but check the progress of the hands of the clock.

  Max caught my gaze and smiled. “How I understand you,” he said in a tone of complicity. “That’s why I’m so careful not to slip into the quagmire of dieting. I’d just spend the day counting the minutes, terrified of turning into an anorexic.”

  I pointed to the bottle of grappa. “Drink a shot to my health and stop spouting nonsense.”

  “For a friend, it’s the least I could do.”

  “Last night . . .” I started to tell him.

  “As you sat watching the usual fucking television shopping show . . .” he mocked me.

  “It relaxes me, you know that . . .”

  “And between a mattress and a set of new pots and pans . . .”

  “I remembered that the guy told us that before coming to see me he’d tried to do some looking around on his own, and he’d run into a cop who scalped him for a sizable wad of euros just to leave him alone.”

  “Yeah, I remember.”

  “So if that’s true, it means that when the guy first came to town he had no idea of who we were.”

  Max finally got it. “Which means that it was the cop who gave him your name.”

  “Exactly.”

  “That is, unless he just made that part up . . .”

  “Look, it’s a lead, and it’s worth looking into.”

  “I agree. Let’s wait for Rossini.”

  “He’s on his way. He called about half an hour ago.”

  Beniamino’s face was hollowed out, his eyes sunken with tension. He was impeccable as ever, shaven, sweet-smelling, and neatly dressed, but pain was carving an abyss deep inside him.

  We were friends, so I didn’t waste time. I told him what I thought: “The past few days on the Dalmatian coast haven’t done you a lot of good.”

  He shook his head. “I’m just holding it together,” he admitted. “And for the first time I’ve got ugly thoughts buzzing around in my brain.”

  I knew exactly what he meant. Find out the truth, take revenge, and put an end to it all. I didn’t say anything. All things considered, I saw his point. How the fuck do you go on living with something so grim and tragic in your gut? For an instant, I thought how lucky I was this hadn’t happened to me.

  “That’s right,” I exclaimed aloud. “Why didn’t it happen to me?”

  The two others glanced at me quizzically.

  “Why did they single out Beniamino? Why didn’t they take Virna?”

  “Maybe because she left you,” Max suggested.

  Rossini took off his camelhair overcoat. “No. It’s because they know that of the three of us I’m the one that does murders. So I was the one they wanted to punish first.”

  “That’s what I think,” I said. “But that means that someone around here has been giving them information. And I think it has to be the same cop that gave my name to the guy with the ring in the first place.”

  “What cop?” the smuggler asked. I explained my theory to him.

  “Then we have to try to find him,” he concluded.

  “We’re going to need some cash,” the fat man pointed out.

  Beniamino pointed to the suitcase he was carrying. “I smashed my piggybank,” he announced. “We can go.”

  We climbed aboard a large expensive French four-door, no longer in production. Rossini had held on to it because in the engine compartment there was a space that seemed to have been designed specially to conceal a pair of handguns. The guns were souvenirs of Beniamino’s recent trip to the former Yugoslavia: brand-new, never fired, and if the police got hold of them, the guns would tell them nothing.

  We started making the rounds of police informers. We handed out crips wads of bills in exchange for reports on the policemen who paid them.

  “Unusual request,” commented Raschio, a former heroin addict who worked the downtown piazzas, mingling with the spritz-sipping crowd to identify and report: not so much the dealers as the regular users. His specialty was screwing the little hipsters who sniffed smack: once they were caught in his web, in order to avoid further problems and to save their reputations and careers, they would in turn become informers. That was how the war on drugs worked.

  His nickname, Raschio, was Italian for “rasp,” and it came from his voice, which resembled a metal file grinding down a piece of rebar. “Maybe my own cop might be interested to know about this,” he added in a sly tone of voice.

  “We’re looking for one in particular to do a piece of business,” I explained in a conciliatory tone of voice. “When we do find him, if he hears that you’ve been causing trouble, he might just lose his temper.”

  Raschio thought about it for a minute and decided that he’d settle for a payment from us alone. He knew Rossini’s reputation, and even if Raschio was no smarter than the average informer, he did understand that it was to his advantage not to run the risk of pissing off the old smuggler.

  “Guys, there’s a damned army of them,” the fat man said late that evening, with a tone of exasperation. “It’s a good thing we’re only working the narcotics informers.”

  “ . . . and we’re limiting ourselves to the ones who were operating in 2004,” I pointed out.

  “I’m sick of meeting pieces of shit and giving them money—my money,” Rossini threw in, angrily. “Let’s get a pizza and go to sleep. We’ll start again tomorrow.”

  I still hadn’t had a drop of liquor. I was looking forward to the triple ration I would savor later on, stretched out on the sofa by the fireplace.

  The next day, Old Rossini showed up a little before noon. “Let’s go have an aperitif with the stool pigeons.”

  There were informers of every kind, sex, and nationality. The world of tipsters and stool pigeons is intricate and variegated. Every one of them has a different personal story, and in many cases it’s not extortion that’s driving them to betray their fellow man. For some of them, it’s like a calling. They’re good at it. Take the case of Morena Borromeo. She had tried working in a number of legal venues, but nothing worked out. She was very attractive, she knew how to dress, and she had started frequenting the best places in town. After a succession of failed relationships with the sons of wealthy businessmen, she started sniffing cocaine and turning the occasional discreet trick. Occasional, carefully considered, and well paid. Nonetheless, she found herself in trouble with the law. Luckily for her, a compassionate cop with nice manners pointed out an alternative, explaining that she knew lots of things, valuable information that could be worth cold hard cash on the right market.

  And so she became a professional informant. She was good at her job—she had an uncanny gift for getting people to spill the beans. Especially men. It’s the oldest story in the world: men talk in bed. And lowlifes talk more than anyone else. Maybe not about themselves, but in order to look smart, they will tell other people�
��s secrets. And she was there, ready to accept, sort, and merchandise that information.

  I knew her very well. She’d once dated a small-town industrialist who had made his fortune by manufacturing bicycle wheels. Then, when the market was ripe, he made his move and shifted his operation to Romania, because paying taxes to the corrupt national government in Rome and negotiating with the powerful Italian trade unions had become a pain in the neck. The fool thought he was sleeping with a lady. One day he confessed that he was sick and tired of the underage girl he’d been screwing in Timis¸oara. As Morena was slipping on her panties, she told him that she’d be needing an extra chunk of cash, or her conscience would drive her to report him to the police and tell everything to his wife.

  The man turned to a lawyer, who hired me to do the negotiating. At first, I refused to have anything to do with it. It struck me as a classic case of sexual exploitation with side dishes of bullying and cash. But the industrialist insisted on having a meeting with me at any cost. He swore that he would leave the sixteen-year-old Romanian girl alone; in fact, he would give her a job and provide her family with assistance. The lawyer vouched for the man’s promise. I agreed to take the job; it was the only way I could see that the girl might come out of this with anything more than a kick in the ass. But making a deal with Morena proved to be somewhat more complicated. She played the part of the society lady, she made appointments to meet in expensive restaurants, and she named a stratospheric sum. I managed to wrestle her down to fifty thousand euros, to the enormous relief of the victim of her extortion.

  Then I happened to run into her occasionally in the places people went for an aperitif. She greeted me jubilantly, as if we were old friends. I had always preserved a professional attitude with her, courteous and slightly distant, but deep down I kind of liked her. I liked her enough to wind up in bed with her. One night I shared my feelings with my friends, hoping they would give me a little encouragement. It was a mistake.

  “How can you even think of it?” Max admonished me. “She’s the spitting image of the evil stepmother from Snow White.”

  “There’s nothing our Marco likes better than a dangerous slut,” Beniamino said in an oracular tone. “Like that time in Sardinia that he went to bed with a psychopathic killer.”

  “I remember her well. The notorious Gina Manes,” the fat man recalled.

  “Let’s not delve into the past,” I protested.

  “Fair enough. But you don’t know shit about women,” Old Rossini concluded tersely. We changed the subject.

  But the day I saw her again, perched on a barstool, her legs crossed to good effect, dressed elegantly in a short-skirted but expensive suit, I regretted not having at least given it a shot with her. If I hadn’t been so upset over Sylvie’s kidnapping, I would have offered to buy her a drink.

  Morena didn’t miss my appraising glance. “Are you here on business or pleasure?”

  “Business.”

  “But you wouldn’t mind taking a little time off from your business, would you?”

  “Nothing doing.”

  She grimaced like a naughty little girl making a face. “Liar.”

  Morena wanted to keep playing games. The sight of my two friends, however, made it clear that the time had come to start negotiating.

  “I have a lot of gifts to hand out at Christmas,” she announced. “I am very expensive this time of year.”

  “Shut up and listen,” Rossini whispered.

  “Oh my, your friend’s quite the gentleman,” she commented as she got down from her stool. She took my arm and pointed to a table off in a quiet corner. “I’m going to talk to you and no one else.”

  I explained to her the kind of information we were looking for. Her cocaine-reddened nostrils flared, like a she-wolf who senses her prey.

  “How much is in it for me?”

  “Don’t work yourself into a frenzy,” I told her in a flat voice. “This is a small deal.”

  She plunged her red-enameled fingernails into her glass and pulled out the orange slice. She sucked it reflectively to let me see how good she was. “I don’t believe you.”

  “Well, that’s your mistake.”

  “As far as the police are concerned, the investigation into the narcotics heist is a closed case,” she explained. “If this evening I called up my handsome policeman who pays me a monthly salary and told him that I can detail the names of those responsible, he wouldn’t even bother coming by.”

  That was interesting. “Why not?”

  She made the gesture of clapping a cover onto a pot. “I just told you: case closed.”

  “Looks like you know plenty about it.”

  She smiled. This time, she wasn’t seductive at all. “Maybe. But if I find out anything, I want ten thousand euros.”

  “You just priced yourself out of the market,” I said as I got to my feet.

  She grabbed me by the wrist. “My handsome policeman was involved in the investigation, but not officially, you understand?”

  I understood perfectly, but it wasn’t in my interest to act too interested. “Like a lot of people in that period.”

  She got up and brought her lips close to my ear. “But he likes two things,” she whispered. “Money, and the way I suck his cock.”

  Her warm breath sent a shiver down my back. “The number of my cell phone is still the same,” I muttered as I walked off.

  Late that afternoon, Old Rossini lost his patience with an asshole who had served a long prison sentence for kidnapping and was trying to rip us off. The guy must have forgotten that all three of us had been guests of the state, and that we knew every angle to the art of lying. We were in a pub, and the guy was sitting next to Beniamino. The smuggler did nothing more than to reach down his hand and grab the guy’s testicles, crushing them with a grip that had made him legendary in the underworld.

  The asshole gasped, his mouth wide open in atrocious pain, unable to emit even the smallest sound, and keeled forward until his forehead rested on the table. “Fuck. You,” hissed Rossini.

  “Let him be,” I said, worried that someone might notice what was happening. “Prison wasn’t good for him.”

  “Why? Do you know someone that prison was good for?” Max retorted in an argumentative tone.

  “It was just a way of saying his brain is fried.”

  The fat man wouldn’t drop the bone. “Beniamino has spent more time in prison than this jerk,” he insisted. “So what? Are you saying his brain is fried more than this asshole sitting next to us?”

  The former kidnapper leaned toward the wall and vomited. We barely noticed.

  “What’s wrong with you?” I asked. “You trying to start an argument?”

  The fat man denied it. “The fact is that sometimes you just talk nonsense. Around this table, all told, is more than forty years of prison, and you start making jokes.”

  Old Rossini stood up. “That’s enough,” he ordered. Then, to Max: “Ask the next shrink that you take to bed if she’ll be so kind as to help you get over your prison complex. You haven’t served enough time to justify these poses as if you were a lifer.”

  The fat man was about to deliver a comeback when the waiter arrived. Eastern European accent. Ukrainian, maybe. He pointed at the guy bent over double on the bench and the remains of his lunch on the floor.

  “Who’s going to clean that up?” he demanded, in disgust.

  “The fact is that the beer you serve here is too cold,” I complained.

  “And watered down,” Beniamino threw in.

  As we walked past him, I slipped a twenty euro note into the breast pocket of his shirt. “Sorry about that.”

  Every so often I got into a fight with Max. That happened less frequently with Beniamino and when it did, we got over it in ten minutes. Max la Memoria, in contrast, held a grudge longer than I did, and sometimes days and days would go by before one of the two of us would make a gesture of reconciliation.

  This time, the situation was different, a
nd I wasted no time. “From now on, I’ll try to avoid making references to prison.”

  Max burst out laughing. “Christ, that was fast! You didn’t even give me time to sulk.”

  When we got in the car, I peeked into the rearview mirror and saw the fat man looking out the window in a reverie. Beniamino’s words had hit hard, but he was right with a vengeance. Prison is a grim experience, and if you’ve ever been there, you have to deal with the aftermath sooner or later. Crying into your beer every chance you get does no good at all.

  That night we drove the streets and roads, looking for old streetwalkers and transsexuals with reputations as informers. We only found one or two. The rest were retired now.

  “Oh, the good old days are over,” lamented Angelica, a transsexual who couldn’t wear too short a miniskirt because of the equipment that dangled between her legs. “It’s all foreign merchandise these days.”

  “Haven’t you had your operation yet?” asked Rossini.

  “I wouldn’t dream of it. I’d lose all my clients,” she shot back decisively. “You little men want us active and passive at the same time.”

  She was a straight dealer, and she made it very clear right away that there was nothing that she could do to help us. She’d settled her accounts with the cop that was blackmailing her, and now she made a living and was very careful to mind her own business. She refused the money I offered her for her trouble.

  “It’s too cold to stay out here on the street and I’m hungry,” she said. “Why don’t you come get a bite with me?”

  We invited her to get in the car and we went to get a plate of spaghetti at a little place just outside of the city.

  We got back to La Cuccia just before closing time. Rossini dropped us off at the front door and headed back to Punta Sabbioni. I’d offered him a couch to sleep on at my place, but like every other evening he thanked me and refused, in case Sylvie reemerged from the darkness that had swallowed her up. He didn’t say it in so many words, but that was clearly what he was thinking.