Luc Autran and Christine Duriez. Husband and wife, and partners on the job. Their specialty was armed robberies. They lived in Marseilles, but they were careful not to pull any of their capers near home. They worked the French provinces and often worked outside the country. Belgium, Spain, and one job in Italy. An armored car in the Turin area. Rossini had come up with the plan.
Their two accomplices, a pair of Portuguese, had been arrested a few months later trying to make off with the take from a robbery at a small bank in Germany. Excellent in terms of execution but no good in terms of planning.
“What about the duo from Marseilles: are they good at planning?”
“They’ve never been caught. They know what they’re doing.”
“I thought you met this Luc in jail.”
“No, I met his uncle there.”
Grenoble, Thursday, December 21, 2006
I looked down on the Isère river from the cable car. The dark water flowed sluggishly. My back was to the mountain. In front of me, beyond the riverbank was the old Italian quarter, with signs for restaurants and pizzerias, with names that harked back to places that emigrants had left with cardboard suitcases and empty stomachs.
Max was sitting across from me, his eyes gazing at the mountain peak. Beniamino was talking quietly with Luc and Christine. The rescue team, in its entirety. Sitting in a circle, we filled up one of the little cable cars, a steel and plexiglas bubble that carried tourists from the city up to the Fort de la Bastille. Up there, you could enjoy a spectacular view of the entire valley.
We had arrived the night before from Italy, after taking great care to make sure no one was following us. Our final destination was Chambéry, about twenty miles away from Grenoble. There the duo from Marseilles had rented an apartment in an old building downtown for a month. The landlady was the widow of an armed robber. She led an apparently respectable life working as a server in a bakery, but she wasn’t above rounding out her salary by renting her place to old friends of her late husband. Two bedrooms, a bathroom, and a kitchen.
Luc had awakened us at eight on the dot with coffee and croissants. I opened my eyes and found myself face-to-face with a skinny guy with a handlebar mustache, decidedly out of fashion, but I felt sure that his look was a professional tool and that just before he pulled a job he always shaved that mustache. His face was creased with deep wrinkles even though he wasn’t much older than forty. Leather jacket, jeans, work boots. He could easily have been mistaken for a factory worker or a carpenter.
I shook hands with him but, since I didn’t know a word of French, I left it up to Max and Beniamino to keep the conversation going. A short while later, Christine appeared. She was wearing an extra-large cotton t-shirt that she had used as pajamas. She was about thirty-five, hair cropped short, a face with strong but pleasing features. She couldn’t have been any taller than 5’ 5”, skinny, and small-breasted, but clearly an habituée of some good gym. Dark, resolute eyes.
When she saw Rossini she threw her arms around him and kissed his bald forehead joyfully. Then she said something about Sylvie and the room fell into silence. She pulled out two unfiltered cigarettes, clamped them both between her lips and lit them, and then handed one to Beniamino. It was a gesture that indicated friendship and respect, not just a business relationship. If my friend had turned to them, it meant they were professionals who knew how to do their jobs, but it also meant that they had heart and a modicum of decency.
We had followed their car to Grenoble along a heavily traveled provincial highway. The Alps surrounding the city were lightly dusted with snow. Another year of high temperatures. If tourists wanted to ski for the Christmas holidays, they would have to settle for artificial snow this year.
That morning the sun still hadn’t emerged from behind the clouds and on the summit of Mont Rachais, where the fort had been built, a bone-chilling wind was blowing. We slipped into a café for a hot drink. Pretending to be tourists, we toured the museum and wandered around looking at the other structures. Only at the end did we climb onto the roof of the central fortification, known as the Belvédère Vauban. From here we had an excellent panoramic view. Luc handed us a powerful pair of binoculars and spoke for a few minutes about the mountains that towered on our right, telling stories about incidents from the French Resistance for the benefit of any nosy visitors. Then he turned to the city. Every so often Max would whisper a few words of translation in my ear.
Finally we moved over to the left side. Another fort, another mountain peak. They both had the same name: Saint-Eynard. On the slope of the mountain we could see the little town of Corenc, just under four thousand inhabitants scattered over different neighborhoods. A discreet village filled with handsome villas. In one of these villas, Sylvie was being held captive. Through the lenses of the binoculars, I could make out a large pre-war house, but we were too far away to make out any details.
“I can’t take you down to see it up close in daylight,” Christine explained. “I walked by the place at three different times of day, and there was always someone on the lookout at a window. I noticed they were checking out passing cars, too.”
“I got pretty close late at night,” Luc said. “The dogs guarding the other villas caught my scent and started barking, but nobody left the comfort of their beds to look out the window. In the villa’s front courtyard two large luxury automobiles were parked, the windows were shuttered. That’s all I saw.”
“For a whorehouse, there’s not a lot of visitors,” the woman commented.
“Well, it’s not exactly a whorehouse,” Max la Memoria started to explain, but his voice wavered out when realized that if he went on he’d only be adding to Rossini’s pain. But Old Rossini proved once again that he was a man of profound courage.
“There’s nobody but Sylvie in there,” he said softly. “And the only way that men can come in is if there are at least three of them. Three at a time, if you see what I mean.”
Christine gripped his arm and chewed out a long and elaborate curse.
“So basically we don’t know shit,” the smuggler went on. “And we have to rely on what that bastard Pavle Stojkovic told us.”
The Serbian gangster, once Beniamino had completed his two crossings, had finally revealed where Sylvie was being held prisoner; he had added that, according to their informant, the “house” would shut down for Christmas, and the belly dancer would be moved to another location.
“I’m going in as soon as it’s dark and I’m getting her out of there,” Old Rossini announced.
No one had any objections. Luc pointed to a road running around the outskirts of the city; it skirted a cemetery and then ran over a nearby bridge. “That’s how we get out of here. That’s how we come in and that’s how we leave.”
“You guys don’t have to come. You’ve already done too much.”
“No, if we come then we have you on the hook: you’ll have to organize another fat job in Italy to repay us,” Christine joked.
“And obviously Max and I are coming with you,” I said.
“You’ve never even held a gun in your life.”
“We could help without being armed.”
“We could drive, for example,” the fat man suggested.
“Maybe we could use them as a diversion,” Luc proposed. “They ring the doorbell and say they’re from a religious cult of some kind. We’ll be waiting in the garden, hidden right next to the front door.”
Rossini shook his head, skeptically. “That’d be far too unusual; it’d put them on alert. The only thing we can do is to jimmy open a door or window, get inside, and see what happens next.”
“It’s not much of a plan,” Christine pointed out.
“We have a few hours to improve on it. More important, how can we keep from making noise?”
“Three .22 caliber carbine rifles, with silencers and ten-shot clips. Brand new, in the original packaging, stolen just a couple of days ago from a gun shop in Vienne,” Luc answered. “Here in France they�
�re legal. They’re used for nighttime hunting. But if everything goes bad fast, we have three heavy sawed off shotguns.”
“What about the vehicles?”
“Two cars. They aren’t anything special, but we switched license plates with plates taken from identical models. They should do.”
At six o’clock that evening Beniamino, Luc, and Christine, armed and wearing camouflage, climbed silently over the wall into the garden from the back of the house. The dogs in the neighboring villas began barking as soon as they approached the house. Max and I, at the wheels of the two getaway cars, kept an eye on the windows of the houses along the street. No movement. The residents must have been accustomed to false alarms. It was probably enough for a dog or any other kind of animal to walk past to trigger a chorus of howls. It was hardly a crime-ridden neighborhood. In fact, it was a perfect neighborhood for someone to lay low if they were wanted by the law. Or a perfect neighborhood to hide a kidnap victim.
At 6:15 we parked in front of the villa. I got out first and peered through the gaps in the wrought-iron fence, the one across the driveway.
“I only see a Mercedes.”
“They’ve been in there for a long time.”
A couple of minutes later the little pedestrian gate leading to the walk swung open. For a brief instant Christine appeared, dressed in dark clothing and with a ski mask over her face. She gestured to us to enter through the gate.
“Sylvie is locked in a room on the second floor. The door is armor-plated, and we can’t find the key. You go on in; I’ll keep a lookout down here.”
Max translated for me as we slipped our ski masks over our heads.
The furnishings were expensive, modern, recently purchased, and in the crassest of taste. We stepped over a dead man in the middle of the hallway that led to the stairs, and I understood there was nobody left to question.
We reached Beniamino and Luc as they were struggling to pry the door frame away from the wall. We could clearly hear Sylvie’s muffled cries as she called out her bandit lover’s name over and over.
“Find the fucking key,” the smuggler shouted, pointing to a door.
We walked into a study of sorts; inside were two more men, shot dead. The first guy was stretched out face-down on a thick white carpet, with a puddle of blood slowly spreading from under his corpse. The other dead guy was slouched in an office chair, behind an impressive desk. There were three or four bulletholes in his chest.
I pointed to him and told my partner: “I know this guy.”
“That’s Fatjon Bytyçi. This villa belongs to the Kosovar mafia.”
I stepped closer to the corpse of the son of the godfather of Pe´c and started emptying his pockets. Nothing useful. I noticed that he had a heavy gold chain around his neck that I hadn’t seen in the photograph in the newspaper. I slipped the chain off his neck and found a key at the end of it. Short, flat, shaped like a butterfly.
“Got it!” I exclaimed and ran out of the room.
Rossini grabbed it out of my hand and fitted it into the lock. The door swung open and before our eyes emerged a ghost of the woman we’d known.
He made a move to seize her in a crushing embrace but he stopped, bewildered, suddenly fearful that he’d shatter that profoundly fragile figure. She realized why he’d stopped and, covering her face, burst into tears.
Beniamino set his rifle down. “My love,” he murmured as he gently gathered her in his arms.
“We need to get out of here,” Luc blurted out.
He was right. I looked around. The fat man wasn’t there. He was still in the study, rummaging through the desk drawers.
“Forget about that. We have to get out of here.”
“Why was Sylvie being held prisoner by Fatjon Bytyçi? Doesn’t that strike you as an unlikely coincidence?”
“Maybe so. I’ll give that a little thought sometime when I’m not in danger of spending the rest of my life in a French prison.”
Two cars, two teams. I was driving the one with Beniamino and Sylvie—barefoot and wrapped in a blanket. The married couple from Marseilles were with Max.
“I’m happy to see you again,” I told her. “You have no idea.”
She reached out a hand and touched my hair. Beniamino whispered to his love constantly until we got back to our parked cars. Christine slipped into our car to give Sylvie a kiss, then she joined her husband in their car. They would take care of disposing of the rifles by tossing them into the icy waters of the Isère, then staight home.
Sylvie was in no condition to drive all the way back to Punta Sabbioni. She needed time to recover. They’d stay as long as necessary in the house in Chambéry. Rossini gathered her into his arms and carried her into the apartment as if she were a little girl. He laid her gently on the bed in the bigger of the two bedrooms.
Max and I came in to say hello and goodbye to her, but she turned her back to us, her face to the wall. It was understandable.
“Tell her that we love her.”
“When the time is right,” Beniamino answered, a bit distractedly. He was at once happy and broken. He hadn’t expected to find her so ravaged. Neither had we. But in retrospect, it was predictable enough.
“There’s something you need to know,” the fat man started to tell him. “The dead man in the study, the one in the office chair, is Fatjon Bytyçi.”
“So?”
“It was to get him and the men of his clan out of prison that they arranged the narcotics heist from the Institute of Legal Medicine.”
“OK, and that means what to me?”
“It means that none of this adds up. We have to figure out what kind of spider’s web we’ve wandered into . . .”
Old Rossini seized him by the arms. “Listen. Right now I care about Sylvie, nothing else. I don’t give a crap who died in that office.”
“Well, the Kosovar mafia may feel differently.”
Tears filled his eyes. “In that room is the woman I love. She needs me right now. And you’re coming at me with this bullshit?”
Max turned a bewildered gaze in my direction.
“You’re right. Get in touch as soon as you can,” I said, as I hustled my partner toward the door.
Lugano, Saturday, December 27, 2008
I’m running out of money,” Rossini sighed.
“That’s a problem,” Max commented. “How’s Sylvie?” The old bandit took a long pause while he tried to find the right words. “She hasn’t danced again. That’s not all. She doesn’t move, she doesn’t live the way she once did. She’s lost her spirit.”
His lips were curled in a bitter sneer, his eyes no longer laughed the way they once had: the most unmistakable signs of defeat. And defeat wasn’t something that Old Rossini was used to.
He hadn’t found a way to bring Sylvie back, to heal her, but he’d never give up. He would stay by her side even if meant enduring a living hell. It was his way of loving. Bandit love.
I turned to look out the window at the lake. Since I’d come to live in this apartment in Lugano it’d become second nature to me. It helped me think.
Beniamino had just arrived a few hours earlier from Beirut, where he and Sylvie had taken shelter under the protection of a powerful Druse family. He’d smuggled contraband liquor and cigarettes with the Druses during the civil war in Lebanon.
It had been two years and six days since we rescued Sylvie. We’d been obliged to vanish from our old haunts. The old smuggler had sold the villa and the speedboat, Max and I had found a buyer for the entire farmhouse, with the upstairs apartments and La Cuccia: we needed cash to flee the revenge of the Kosovars, Greta Gardner, and anyone else who might be interested in getting us out of the way. Twenty-four months after the raid on the villa in Corenc, we still hadn’t managed to figure out with any certainty exactly what had happened in that intricate story.
Given the presence of the corpse of Fatjon Bytyçi, we understood that if we waited around we’d be killed one by one. We fled. The only way to dodge the bu
llets of those organized criminals was to split up and cut all ties with our old lives. It would have been much more complicated to escape the police, in the age of high-tech security.
Max la Memoria hadn’t wandered all that far from Padua. He’d taken shelter in Fratta Polesine, a small town filled with old villas and socialist and radical traditions. He’d continued to update his files and had established a friendship with a young architect, his family, and his friends. Together, they’d decided to try to refine a wine known as the Incrocio Cagnoni. They were chasing their dream of distilling the first brandy in the area.
I’d crossed the Swiss border and stopped at Lugano. I had a hunch that it was the right place to wait for events to evolve. There, time moves at a different pace.
And it turned out I’d been right. “Where nothing ever happens,” I wrote in an email to Max, “the weeks and months flow over you without leaving a mark. If fate or distraction decided that I would spend the rest of my days here, I don’t think I could bring myself to regret it.”
I wasn’t bored, either. Long walks, bars, concerts, theaters, movies, lots of newspapers, and the occasional book. I lived like a ghost, or like a tourist who’d enjoyed himself so much that he’d never gone back to his everyday life. Even if there had never been anything everyday about my life; at the most, an appearance of the everyday tied up with the fact that I helped to run La Cuccia, but only when I wasn’t on a case.
I’d never been a “regular” citizen, and I’d never wanted to become one. When I was young and I sang blues in clubs, it didn’t take me long to figure out that my whiteboy voice wasn’t going to be good enough to build a genuine career. So I’d have to figure out something if I wanted to get old without too much suffering.
But prison had tossed my plans in the air. When I got out, an obsession with the truth turned me into an unlicensed private investigator. I’d earned a reputation among the lawyers who hired me as something of a crusader; but I was just doing my best to survive the cruel trick fate had played on me without having to pretend I was moving on and forgetting the past.
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