“Don’t tell me you’ve got all our money in that suitcase.”
“I haven’t had time to go to the bank yet.” He looked around, and then pointed at the bed. “That’s the only one, isn’t it?”
“There’s a couch.”
“We couldn’t find anything better?”
“We’re going to have to make do.”
He grunted in disappointment. As he was taking off his coat and pants, I brought him up to speed on the latest developments. Then he grabbed a blanket, lay down on the couch, and fell asleep.
Once again, I felt a surge of envy. All he had to do was lay his head on a pillow and he dropped into a deep sleep. I always had to watch hours of television shopping shows to knock myself out. I thought to myself that sooner or later I was going to have to seriously consider breaking myself of the habit.
I made a cup of coffee and smoked a couple of cigarettes. Then I left the apartment and walked toward the center of Padua. I windowshopped and killed time until the bars, the piazzas, and the surrounding streets began to fill up with people. That was when I started looking for Morena Borromeo.
I finally found her in Piazza delle Erbe, smoking with a couple of her girlfriends, warming themselves by a freestanding patio heater. They were all three dressed identically, made up identically, and their hairdos were identical as well. The police informer was older than the other two, who couldn’t have been over thirty.
When I walked up to them, all three turned to me with the same professional escort smile, telegraphing that they were free for the evening. But when Morena recognized me, her face changed expression. She seemed genuinely pleased to see me. She got rid of her friends with a brusque goodbye and gave me a hug.
“I haven’t seen you around for a while.”
“I had a lot of vacation time I needed to use up.”
“I haven’t thanked you yet for putting that bastard in his place.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“Fine, fine, message received,” she whispered. “I see you’ve finally started dressing like a little gentleman.”
“A drink and dinner?”
“Sure, and after-dinner if you want. But the meter’s already running.”
“So you finally decided to get a boss.”
She sipped her spritz. “It’s an agency, not a pimp. They only take a percentage of my time keeping company in public. The money for the tricks I get to keep.”
I observed her carefully. She still looked great, though another couple of years of cocaine had left their mark. She began playing her part. I let her work without interrupting. I needed time to figure out if she was still in the informant business.
We moved to another bar, and stayed there until she got hungry.
“Now let me take you to a brand new place: cozy, unusual, and . . . expensive.”
“As long as it’s not one of your cokehead restaurants. I don’t want to eat in a place where dealers are selling drugs from table to table.”
“Relax. The place looks fake, it’s such an elite crowd. But the food is incredibly good.”
The place looked like an old downtown osteria, only with fine crystal, designer silverware, and five-star food presentation. The dishes all had the kinds of names that evoke spectacular crescendos of flavors, the names that food journalists seem to swoon over. In reality, though, the meal was just a grab-bag of flavors that, given the money we were paying, we couldn’t afford not to enjoy.
But there was another reason that you couldn’t have persuaded me to go back to that restaurant. Everyone was talking in low, hushed voices; no one laughed out loud; the waiters came and went as silently as ghosts. It was a restaurant frequented by well-mannered corpses.
“You still dating your handsome policeman?”
“Last year his wife left him, so now he fucks me on a regular basis. Every Sunday. He shows up with a gift-wrapped tray of pastries, after taking his children to Mass, and he goes at it till late at night.”
“So you’re his girlfriend now?”
“Well, in a way. He treats me a little better, he tells me things. Typical male: he can’t wrap his head around the fact that his wife finally dumped him.”
“And you’re happy with how things are going?”
“I can’t complain.”
“How much do you take home at the end of the month?”
“Three thousand euros, after taxes, but I don’t usually talk about that with my customers.”
“Maybe it would be worth talking about with me.”
She smiled. “I was just starting to wonder when you’d get around to telling me the real reason for this nostalgic get-together.”
“Do you think you could get your cop to do a little work for me?”
She ran a breadstick over her lips before taking a tiny bite. “Are you looking to cut me out?”
“No. I’ll need you to keep an eye on him and warn me if he’s planning to fuck me.”
“What’s in it for me?”
“A year’s income.”
“What about my bonuses?”
“Forty thousand euros. Not a euro more.”
“And how much is he going to get?”
“More than you get, of course, but it’s a separate deal.”
She stared at me. “Maybe you’re not offering me enough money.”
“Don’t be greedy. He’s not the only crooked cop in town.”
“Okay. I’ll talk to him.”
I seized her hand. I wanted to make sure that she realized how serious I was. “In this movie, traitors die.”
“Are you trying to scare me?”
“I’m trying to make you understand something.”
“Does this have anything to do with that old drug heist?”
“No,” I lied.
“Do you remember that my handsome policeman was monitoring the phone calls of cops in another jurisdiction who were suspected of being responsible for the heist?”
“Vaguely.”
“It was them, all right, but all the tapes with the recordings of the wiretaps were mysteriously demagnetized, and the investigation was archived.”
These are things that happen when the intelligence services are involved, I thought to myself, but all I said to her was: “See what happens when you rely on technology?”
“My cop told me that his higher-ups never really intended to take those other cops to court.”
“Then why spy on them?”
“I asked him the same thing, but I didn’t understand the answer: ‘Reselling it wasn’t part of the agreement, it was an excess of zeal and a lack of communication’.”
Then, as if nothing had happened, she resumed her performance, acting the part of the woman that you absolutely have to take to bed. After a while, she realized how ridiculous it was and began making fun of herself. We both burst into laughter, attracting the attention of the living dead who were dining at the other tables around us.
“Tonight, it’s on the house.”
“I’m not sure I’m up for it.”
“Come have a glass of something at my house and let’s see what happens.”
Later, in her apartment, while Morena was preparing a line of coke for herself, I started snooping around in her collection of CDs, just to avoid standing there like an idiot staring at her. I was surprised to discover an Alberta Adams CD, Born with the Blues. It must have just wound up there by chance.
Edoardo “Catfish” Fassio had introduced me to Alberta. I was immediately enchanted by her voice: the voice of an attractively jazzed-up 77-year-old woman with an incredible charge of vitality.
After starting her career in Detroit nightclubs at the end of the Thirties, and after going through a number of unsuccessful marriages, she had decided to go back into the recording studio not once but four different times when others her age were griping about their arthritis.
I slipped the CD into the player and chose my favorite song, Searchin’. I closed my eyes. It didn
’t take Alberta long to convince me that making love that night might not be a bad idea at all. I took off my jacket and began loosening my tie.
It was just before lunch when I got back to my apartment. My host wasn’t an early riser, and no one left her bed before eleven, just in time to head out for the first aperitif of the day.
“I’m in a hurry to meet your handsome policeman,” I reminded her as I planted a kiss on her cheek.
“You get your money ready, and you’ll meet him tonight.”
Max was cooking; he looked questioningly at me. Beniamino, instead, came over to me and took a deep, stage sniff.
He turned to the fat man. “I hereby announce that he screwed Snow White’s evil stepmother.”
“Yikes,” Max commented as he stirred the risotto.
They began to rib me mercilessly. I got sick of it after awhile.
“Most likely I’m going to meet with the cop this evening.”
Rossini’s face became serious. “That’s good news.”
Max la Memoria went on with the ribbing. “Excellent. That means we’ll overlook your strange perversions and we’ll allow you to share our humble meal.”
The handsome policeman had a name and a surname: Attilio Carini. He picked me up in front of the train station a little after one in the morning and gestured for me to remain silent. He drove up onto an overpass, sped through an entire section of town, and turned onto the ramp that led onto the ring highway around town.
He was somewhere between forty-five and fifty years old, physically fit, with an alert face set off by a perfectly bald head. He dressed unostentatiously—no designer clothes, no expensive watches. He drove at moderate speed, and the unnecessary miles he drove had a very clear purpose behind them: he wanted to give me the time to consider carefully just what kind of cop he was so that our conversation could get off on the right foot. I gradually came to the conclusion that he was not corrupt in the classical sense of that word, because he wasn’t allied with the bad guys. If he ever took money, he would do so only once he was certain that to do so would harm neither an ongoing investigation nor any of his fellow policemen. He wasn’t the kind of bad cop who acts recklessly just to service a vice or to keep a mistress.
I found myself obliged to come up with a very different strategy from the one I’d agreed on earlier that day with my friends.
He stopped the car in a highway pullout and gestured for me to get out. He frisked me carefully for microphones or recording devices.
“Now it’s my turn,” I said once he’d finished searching me.
“You must be kidding me!” he snarled.
“If you won’t let me check, it means you’re wearing a wire.”
He shrugged and raised his arms. I did just as meticulous a search as he had, and then I demanded that we leave both our cell phones in the warmth of the car and step about fifty feet away from the vehicle. I’d heard about a guy who was screwed for having had a conversation a little too close to a car bumper.
“All right, let’s get to the point,” he said as he lit a cigarette.
“Do you know who I am?”
“What kind of an amateur do you take me for?”
“Well, I just wanted to make sure that I don’t need to introduce myself.”
“No, there’s no need of that. So what do you want from me?”
“I want to fuck a Serbian gang that operates in Northeast Italy. The local boss is called Pavle Stojkovic and he’s working with a woman, possibly German, called Greta Gardner.”
“In my line of work the verb ‘fuck’ can have a lot of different meanings.”
“True. As far I’m concerned, we’re not talking about physically eliminating anyone. I just want to dismantle the organization.”
“So what do you want from me?”
“Useful information.”
“You should be the one giving information to me. I’d be sure to pass it on to my colleagues with proper jurisdiction.”
“Let’s not waste time kidding each other. There’s 100,000 euros in it for you and, if you’re interested, a bonus: you get to catch them with their hands in the honey pot.”
“Honey that I’ll bet you’ll be supplying.”
“Oh yes. Plenty of shiny, sticky honey . . . Some might even stick to the fingers of whoever finds it.”
“So what you’re saying is that you want the police to take them out of circulation for you?”
“It’s the deal of a lifetime: you get money and a career boost.”
“That might be something I’m interested in.”
“Except?”
“Except I have to be sure that this whole operation isn’t just one gang getting another gang out of the way.”
“They fucked with the wrong woman, and someone’s pissed. That’s all.”
“Are you asking me to believe that?”
“I’ve never been more serious in my life.”
He offered me a cigarette. “Speaking of women. You’d be giving the 100,000 euros to Morena.”
“Right. So no one can link the money to you.”
“That’s not the only reason. That money’s for her.”
“So why are you telling me about it?”
“Morena is going to turn over a new leaf. No more coke, no more cocks.”
“Does she know about it?”
“Not yet. But now you do. So keep your hands out of her panties.”
We got back in the car and said as little during the ride back as we had on the ride out. So the handsome policeman was sick of the loneliness of divorce and had decided to make an honest woman of Morena. It wasn’t a bad idea. She was on the verge of becoming too old for her business. Another couple of years, and she’d have to cut her rates drastically. When it comes to turning tricks, you can’t beat youth.
He dropped me off at the station, where my friends were waiting for me in a Japanese-made car with unusual lines. The car was black, with tinted windows. I got in back and made a disgruntled noise. “This is nice and inconspicuous.”
If one day I was able to go back to my old life, the first thing I’d do was get my old Skoda Felicia, currently in the loving care of Paolo Valentini.
“He saw it, and there was no way to stop him,” the fat man told me. “He wouldn’t even bargain on the price; he pretended to believe that it really has just 1,200 miles on the odometer.”
Beniamino stroked the steering wheel lovingly. “It’s sort of like a scale model of a mid-century American car.”
“You mean the cars that drove around Chicago full of gangsters with a tommy gun in their lap?”
“Well, the cars from the movies of my childhood. Masterpieces: A Touch of Evil or Asphalt Jungle. The first one taught me how to deal with cops; the second taught me how not to split up the take from a robbery.”
“Don’t you want to know how it went with the cop?”
“It went fine,” said Old Rossini. “Otherwise you’d never have busted my chops about the car.”
I looked out the window and realized we weren’t heading for Scanferla’s apartment. When it dawned on me that we were in my old neighborhood I asked where we were going.
“We have a decent place to stay now,” Max replied. “You can call Rudy and tell him he can go back to his rathole.”
A cluster of gleaming new apartment buildings stood where there was once only countryside and I rode bicycles with small armies of boys my age.
The apartment was big and fully furnished. Each of us would have his own room.
“Nice place,” I commented.
“They’re going to rent it out as a pied-à-terre for visiting managers of a multinational corporation. It’s costing us about what a villa on the Costa Smeralda costs in August.”
Beniamino patted his wheeled suitcase packed with cash. “Don’t quibble about money, boys. At my age, I need comfort and cleanliness.”
The fat man was hungry, and he suggested having a plate of pasta. I sat in the kitchen to keep him company whil
e he busied himself at the stove. Rossini withdrew into his bedroom to make an international phone call to Sylvie. He came back with a worried look on his face.
“I don’t feel comfortable being so far away from her,” he explained, nervously fingering the bracelets that dangled from his wrist. “If I’m not there, she doesn’t like to go out, and spending all her time indoors isn’t good for her.”
“But there’s always someone with her to protect her, right?”
“Two trusted bodyguards stay with her everywhere she goes. It’s a pretty big slice of the family budget.”
“How does she spend her days, now that she’s given up dancing?”
“Mornings she works at a rape crisis center. Once a week she sees a shrink, then I take her shopping and in the evenings we go to the best nightclubs in the city. The real problem is the night. In the old days, she lived for the night. Now it’s become a nightmare that never ends.”
Max served out platefuls of pasta and asked me to open a bottle of wine. The old old smuggler seemed to be lost in a reverie. He ate a couple of forkfuls of pasta before continuing. “For the first time in my life, I’m sure that payback isn’t going to change a thing. Killing the person that decided to take her to that gang bang parlor isn’t going to help Sylvie at all.”
“You just have to hope for the best. Time helps.”
He waved one hand in the air resignedly. “No, she’ll never be happy the way she was. She’s not my dancer anymore. Those bastards killed her in Corenc. And that’s why I’m going to kill them. It’s vengeance for a woman who no longer exists.”
Wednesday, March 4, 2009
Things had changed in the police stations of Italy. A policeman couldn’t surf the criminal databases for information without leaving a trace anymore. Carini must necessarily have asked a superior officer for authorization to delve into information on the Serbs. As I clutched the thin file tight, I wondered if he’d mentioned my name. He’d probably just used the usual excuse of an informant, but by then it didn’t really matter anymore. Each of us would play the game according to his own rules and neither would be sticklers about regulations. In the game we were playing, what mattered was to know when to stop, to avoid getting hurt needlessly.
Bandit Love Page 11
