Bandit Love

by Massimo Carlotto

  “Are you the one who needs a lawyer?” he asked.

  “No.”

  “Then why on earth are you dressed in that get-up?”

  “I’m trying to avoid certain people.”

  “Word’s going around that . . .”

  “That what?”

  “That you and your partner were forced to sell La Cuccia and leave town because you sold out one of your customers to the police.”

  I snickered. “Idle gossip. You believed it?”

  “Of course not. I know you better than that. And if you had decided to become a police informer, you would have done it at the time of your choosing.”

  Ubaldo returned to take our orders. He objected politely but firmly when I ordered a seafood appetizer followed by a veal steak, very rare.

  I gave in. “You decide, then.”

  “Of course I’ll decide. And I’ll choose the wine as well.”

  Bonotto laughed heartily but discreetly, and then ran his hand over his snow-white mustache. “Now, what seems to be the problem?”

  “The Kosovar Mafiosi of the Pe´c clan that are operating in Northeast Italy employ only one law firm.”

  “I’m aware. They work with Antonio Criconia, a colleague here in Padua. He’s in the middle of a fairly intricate court case right now.”

  “It’s just more of the usual, coke smuggling on behalf of the spoiled young hipsters and wealthy professionals of this town,” I pointed out. “A case that emerges from a lengthy and meticulous investigation . . .”

  “So get to the point.”

  “I want access to the transcripts of the wiretaps and eavesdropping tapes.”

  He grasped what I wanted instantly. “So you can find out what they’re saying about you and your partner.”

  “Precisely.”

  He slipped his fork into the plateful of tagliatelle and spun a mouthful of pasta. “And you’d like me to ask my colleague for this favor?”

  “We’re willing to pay whatever it takes.”

  “I’m pretty sure that, when he took on these clients, my colleague had no clear idea of the collateral effects—first and foremost, the fear—involved in becoming a full-time defender on behalf of a certain kind of client.”

  “He’s not the first lawyer to make this kind of mistake.”

  “Agreed. But my point is this: I doubt that money is enough of an incentive. He has a wife and children.”

  “We aren’t interested in getting him in trouble. We just want to find out what they know about us.”

  “I can make all kinds of promises, but that’s not going to reassure him.”

  “But he’s known you for years.”

  “True, but we stopped working together a while ago. He knows perfectly well that I disagreed with his professional choices.”

  “So you’re telling me that you won’t even try to talk to him?”

  “That’s right. It would be pointless.”

  Plan A had failed. Now I had to try Plan B, and I wasn’t looking forward to it. I waited for the waitress to take our plates.

  “We have to get our hands on those transcripts.”

  He heaved a deep sigh. “Please, Marco . . . .”

  “Look, I don’t like this either. It’s unpleasant, but this is how matters stand: either he helps us out, or we’re going to have to make Avvocato Criconia understand that he has more reason to be afraid of us than of the Kosovars.”

  “Unpleasant? It’s despicable. Do you realize what you’re asking me to do?”

  I nodded. “We have no alternative.”

  He got to his feet. “Forgive me if I leave you to your meal. I’m not hungry anymore.”

  At that point I lost my temper. “If you had any idea what’s behind this request, you’d drop this pose of moral superiority.”

  “I have some sense of professional ethics; you’re asking me to deliver a Mafioso extortion message.”

  “I could write you a pizzinu if you like,” I badgered him.

  He told me to go to hell and left the restaurant. I finished my meal alone, fobbing off the curious waitress with the story that my friend had been urgently summoned back to his law office.

  “Before they invented cell phones, people could finish their meals in peace and quiet,” she observed.

  Without my asking, Ubaldo sent a glass of vintage Calvados over to my table. It was his understated way of letting me know that he’d recognized me. I felt the warm burn of the apple brandy as it moved down my throat and into my belly.

  Max la Memoria remained safely ensconced at Fratta Polesine: at the speed that the fat man drove, it was 90 minutes away from Padua, though it took three hours at the speed that ordinary mortals drive. I was waiting for him under the shelter of the porticoes of Piazza dell’Insurrezione, taking care not to wind up in the viewfinder of one of the 120 new videocameras with swiveling lenses and remote zoom that were conveying a live feed of every neighborhood in Padua to the gleaming new command center of the city police.

  As usual, a cold wet rain was drumming down. My old leather flight jacket would have kept me warmer than the elegant and expensive overcoat I was wearing that day. A little later a small mob of upright citizens on the hunt for lowlifes came along. They were escorted by a pair of private security gaurds to protect them from the kids from the social centers who used to kick their asses whenever they ran into them. They saw me from a distance and headed straight for me. As they drew closer, they noticed the color of my skin and my expensive clothing. They changed course and headed on down the porticoes. As they went by, the man who must have been their leader greeted me in a low voice and gave me a look, hoping to receive a white Italian citizen’s gratitude for their protection. I pretended to be intent on my cell phone. They were the last thing I needed.

  Every corner of Padua was being patrolled by patrols and “megapatrols,” as the newspapers had come to dub them, and there were uniforms of every description.

  With the ostensible goal of freeing the city’s neighborhoods of pushers and whores, in reality the vigilante patrols were so many campaign promises being kept, as well as placeholders, doing advance groundwork for the witch-hunt that was in the offing. As soon as the security bill now making its way through Italian parliament was approved, hunting season would be open and the vigilantes would be off.

  And the biggest supporters of that law were, of course, Mafiosi of every nationality. They would finally be able to rid the cities of their annoying competitors, unaffiliated small-time crooks, the annoying freelance criminals who wound up in the newspapers on a daily basis, threatening to upset their profitable and discreet arrangements.

  In the meantime, the law-abiding citizens of Northeast Italy continued to entrust their elderly relatives to illegal-immigrant nurses and caregivers; their houses were still being cleaned and their meals were being cooked by undocumented housekeepers. Workshops, factories, construction yards, new highways, and shipyards were all staffed by illegal immigrants who had made their way across Italy’s porous borders locked up in 40-foot containers or aboard rusty and terrifyingly dangerous old freighters. An underpaid, easily extorted labor force that could simply be expelled from the country if they caused trouble or made demands—without even having to invoke the usual excuses of a slowing economy or rocketing inflation. And those same upright citizens continued exploiting for their sexual gratification Nigerian prostitutes and Brazilian transexuals, young women and underage boys from every country in the old East European bloc.

  Simple arithmetic told you that more than a few people had to be preaching one thing and practicing quite another, on the one hand braying about clean streets and law and order, and on the other hand shamelessly exploiting the illegals.

  In Northeast Italy, for that matter, unprincipled cynics were in charge. More than before. More than ever before. The owners of little factories and businessmen with luxury cars, elegant villas, and millions invested overseas who had never paid a lira or a euro in taxes in their lives. Waste d
isposal tycoons who exported thousands of tons of toxic plastic to China, plastic that was then recycled into brand-new toys for children around the world. And there were pillars of the community in the same sector who obliged women who had immigrated illegally from third-world countries to sort through garbage bare-handed.

  To say nothing of call centers where dozens of Italian women worked only to be paid under the counter, waiting months at a time for their wages, and never uttering a word of complaint because, with unemployed husbands and children to feed, a job—however crappy—was still a job.

  To say nothing of the entrepreneurs who ran websites listing young escorts, and who were always eager to buy the houses where the women entertained their clients, because real estate is always the best investment, even during a recession.

  To say nothing of politicians and public officials who kept taking the same bribes they’d always taken, but now they camouflaged them with consulting fees and agreements and, in the rare occasions when they were caught, they hastened to state that it had been a “single episode of weakness” . . . But the truth was quite different: illegal machinations were the order of the day in every sector of hard-working Northeast Italy, and it had become a fertile terrain for organized crime of every kind to take root. The mafias of the world had sunk their teeth into the Northeast, and nothing would stop them from eating to their heart’s delight. Money laundering had become the meeting ground between unprincipled cynics and Mafiosi. Only politicians, and with them the local press and television, continued to pretend not to notice that this was the part of Italy that had the highest concentration of organized crime. And they weren’t pretending for their political futures alone, because if there is one thing that the mafias of the world understood long ago, it’s that the only way to do real business is to be on good terms with everyone—absolutely everyone.

  And the respectable citizens and voters were all happy to bray for the heads of the illegal immigrants because everything else, the really bad stuff, all things considered, was going splendidly. The mafia money made the wheels spin round, business was booming, and there was a positive synergy with legal businesses of all kinds. Even more effective than the nocturnal patrols of those gentlemen wearing phosphorescent bibs were the police cars stationed outside the clinics that offered medical care “even” to illegal immigrants. It had become common practice in many different cities and towns in the province of Padua, and fear had begun to spread among the poor, the sick, and the vulnerable.

  Max appeared at my side. “And here I am.”

  “You’re late,” I scolded him as we walked across the piazza.

  “Twelve minutes late. When it’s raining I tend to lower my maximum velocity.”

  “It’s dangerous to drive 35 mph on a superhighway. There’s a good chance that a Greek or Bulgarian truck driver who’s been powering cross-country for ten hours without a rest might rear-end you.”

  “Are you in a bad mood?”

  “I’m worried that the past two years in Switzerland haven’t been good for me. I can’t wrap my head around the idea that this fucking Northeast Italy I’ve always lived in is becoming unlivable.”

  “So you’re looking around and you don’t like what you see, eh?”

  “It’s worse. I think, I analyze, and I find everything morally intolerable.”

  “Yup, it’s a mess. You need to purge your system and come back and live with us cynical assholes.”

  “That won’t be easy.”

  “One week of drinking spritz in the piazza cafés and you’ll see how easy it is.”

  We’d arrived at the street entrance of the office building that housed Avvocato Criconia’s law firm. “Can you imagine me showing up for an aperitif dressed like this?”

  “For once you’d be dressed like everyone else; you could finally extend your circle of acquaintances. The next step is Facebook, but I’ll explain that to you some other time.”

  The lawyer was a man of average height, skinny, with a face that made you think of a turtle wearing a toupee. He might have been a little older than sixty. He opened the door for us, but he carefully avoided greeting us. We’d hurt his feelings by threatening him, but we overlooked his wounded emotions. We followed him into the library, where there were ten or so thick files waiting for us on a conference table.

  “I’ll be in my office. Let me know when you’ve finished.”

  The transcriptions of the wiretaps and other electronic monitoring involved an investigation into a coke ring that was servicing a number of socialites who frequented certain exclusive clubs and other facilities in the center of Padua and in the hillside homes up on the Colli Euganei. The Carabinieri were able to blackmail one of their informants into placing hidden microphones all over the place; now they knew that it was the Kosovars who were dealing the Colombian coke.

  Max snickered with satisfaction as he read through the list of names. “Lookee lookee, all the respectable citizens.”

  We weren’t interested in the converstions of the highly placed coke addicts; we wanted to see what the Kosovars had to say. We started reading through their conversations, in translation, and found only one reference to us. In a conversation caught by a hidden mike, a certain Lenez, newly arrived from Pe´c, asked an accomplice named Arben Alshabani (who was an ambitious second-tier capo according to a Carabinieri report) if there was any news concerning the friends of the “bellydancer’s man.” Arben told him that they had left town and no one knew where they had gone, adding that it was annoying to have to go after people without knowing the reason why; it’s the kind of situation in which you make mistakes that can prove dangerous, even fatal.

  Lenez had gently reminded him that he wasn’t important enough to have to know everything. Arben had shot back that maybe he would be too busy to have time to look for those guys, and Lenez had brusquely snapped an expression that the translator had rendered: “Do whatever the fuck you think best.”

  Then they’d started on a new topic: the internal feuding in the family. Both Lenez and Arben were second cousins of the late Fatjon Bytyçi. According to Lenez, the patriarch and boss of the Pe´c clan was saddened at the death of his oldest son, but not distraught. He had always preferred Fatjon’s younger brother Agim, who was much smarter, more capable, and who had leadership qualities, as he had shown in the years when he commanded a KLA unit.

  “Why do Mafiosi always seem to have one useless son?”

  The fat man gave me a baffled glance. “You’ve lost me there.”

  “Take The Godfather. Fredo, Don Vito Corleone’s second-born son, is a pervert and is turning into an informer. Michael has to have him killed. Or A.J. Soprano, Tony Soprano’s only son: he’s an ineffectual mess, and he even tries to kill himself.”

  “So are you just running off at the mouth, or should I try to make sense of this?”

  “Don’t try too hard, I can help you. It seems obvious to me that the Bytyçi clan doesn’t want people to figure out how that sicko Fatjon really died.”

  “And so?”

  “So up till now, before I read these transcriptions, I thought that we were in much worse trouble than we seem to be. I figured that the old boss got up every morning and asked whether we had been killed yet. Instead, it looks like we’re far from a top priority for him, seeing that he hasn’t given Arben a kick in the ass, even though Arben’s clearly uninterested in tracking us down.”

  “You can rest assured though that if we ever fall into their hands they’ll slice us up into catfood, just to make it clear to everyone that you can’t touch a Bytyçi.”

  “Maybe so. But it strikes me that we have an opportunity to take advantage of how embarrassed they are about Fatjon’s perversions.”

  “Okay, but let’s start by finding out the official version of his murder. There’s nothing about that here. This Arben is very careful not to spell things out. It’s probably no accident that, even though the police are sure that he’s an important clan underboss, they still haven’t been
able to issue a warrant for his arrest.”

  Max la Memoria copied down names and took notes in his notebook with his clear and minute handwriting. I killed time looking out the window and smoking.

  When we told the lawyer that we were done, he didn’t even bother to look up from the file he was reading.

  It pissed me off. “Have they already asked you to smuggle a cell phone into prison?”

  He looked up and glared at me contemptuously.

  “When they do, remember, you won’t be able to say no.”

  The fat man tugged at my sleeve. “Forget about him, what do you care?”

  “Arrogant shit.”

  “Nowadays, every successful lawyer is arrogant. They have to be. He’ll be disbarred otherwise.”

  “What the fuck are you talking about?”

  “What the fuck are you talking about? You’re starting to sound like one of these little altarboy opposition politicos.”

  “You really think so?” I asked, deeply concerned.

  “You need to drink more and you need to get more pussy. Hurry, it’s not too late.”

  The discovery that killing me was not a top priority for the Kosovar mafia made me feel confident enough to lower my security restrictions. I went to the Anfora for an aperitif. Before walking in the door, I took off my sunglasses and my tie. I was immediately hailed by Alberto and a number of the regulars; there was a blizzard of wisecracks about my prolonged absence, and they quickly brought me up to date with all the news about our old friends. I stayed for dinner and then went back to Scanferla’s grim little apartment, intending to catch a quick nap until it was time for the evening spritz.

  But in the middle of the afternoon the doorbell woke me up. A short ring, followed by a pause, and then two more rings. Rossini was back. He was dragging a wheeled suitcase that looked like it was very heavy.