The waiter came over immediately and, of course, gave no sign of having ever met me. The Kosovar ordered a beer.
I asked for a cappuccino and a croissant. Arben wanted to begin negotiations immediately, but I told him it was better to wait for our orders to arrive, so that we wouldn’t be interrupted. The real reason, though, was that the miniature microphone and recording device that would spell his downfall was hidden in the cardboard napkin dispenser, and I needed it to be brought to the table, on a tray, along with our orders, and placed in the middle of the table before anyone said a word.
The ex-convict played a perfect attentive waiter, and Arben, relaxed at last, swallowed a gulp of beer before asking me to explain the details of the deal.
“As I told you, we have nothing to do with the murder of Fatjon Bytyçi. To prove that, we can hand over to you the mastermind and we can give you the names of two of the actual killers. If you agree to persuade your people not to take revenge on us, we’ll give you ten kilos of gold jewelry.”
“You know too much about Fatjon’s murder. It’s hard to believe you had nothing to do with it.”
I finished chewing my mouthful of croissant. Unhurriedly, savoring it. I wanted him to believe that I wasn’t afraid of him. I wanted him to think I was stupid, not that I was tough.
“We’ve had two years to investigate, and we found out who did it. What we couldn’t figure out was who fingered us for it.”
He shrugged. “It was Agim, the younger brother. He came back to Pe´c with Fatjon’s body, and told everyone that his older brother had been killed in a car crash. But inside the family, they knew that Fatjon had been killed over a woman. He’d stolen her from an Italian, and the Italian tracked him down, with the help of two friends, and he finally managed to find him somewhere in France. He made him pay for it in blood.”
I sat up and listened carefully. This version had some interesting modifications. “How was he killed?”
“You really don’t know?”
“I don’t have the slightest idea.”
“He was in a car, going home after a night out. They ambushed him in the open countryside. They killed Fatjon as well as his bodyguards.”
“I don’t understand why this Agim wouldn’t have told the truth.”
“Fatjon was a widower, but he was about to remarry. He was going to marry the daughter of the capo of another family.”
So the true story of the gang bang parlor of Corenc had been concealed from everyone, even the members of the mafia family. Fatjon’s father, the boss, and Agim wanted to make sure that nobody knew that the man who had been next in line to inferit the mafia empire of Pe´c, and who was about to establish an alliance with another mafia clan by marriage, was a depraved son of a bitch.
“So now Agim is going to marry the girl, right?”
“That’s right. And together, the two clans will be much more powerful, but that’s none of your business. Here’s what I want to know: if I do agree to cooperate, how would the deal work?”
“It’d be very simple. We arrange a meeting, we hand over to you the mastermind, the names of the killers, and the gold. Just half the gold, of course. You’ll get the rest when you prove to us that we no longer have a problem.”
“So you and your friends are going to bring me the mastermind, giftwrapped with a bow on?”
“That’s right, as a goodwill gesture. You can do what you want with him. Ship him home to Agim Bytyçi as a wedding present, or shoot him in the head.”
He snickered. “You guys sure want to save your own skins.”
“We know that you have a code of honor, and no one escapes it.”
Pride broadened his smile. “Yeah, but I want all the gold. Otherwise you guys’ll try to cheat me, say that we never had a deal.”
Good old Arben, I thought. He’d already decided to kill us, so he knew he’d never see the second half of the gold unless he persuaded us to hand it all over immediately.
“Out of the question.”
He stared at me, uncertain whether to try to argue or just settle for what he’d been offered.
I shook my head. “Don’t push me on this. For that matter, I’m coming back to Padua to live, so there’s no reason for me to try to trick you.”
He had to let it go. Maybe he was mulling over the idea of postponing our executions so that he could lay his hands on all the loot.
“And I guess you wouldn’t consider telling me the name of the mastermind.”
“If I tell you, you’ll just go get him on your own.”
“This time I name the place.”
“Fair enough. But it has to be in this part of town.”
“No problem.” He drained off the last of his beer and added: “Next time you beat up one of my men, make sure he’s not a Kosovar.”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“Your friend broke a piece-of-shit Moroccan’s jaw. That’s not serious, but if you ever do anything of the sort to one of our people, get ready for a world of pain.”
“That’s pretty rough talk for two guys about to do business together.”
“It’s better to be clear from the beginning.”
“That’s fine. Let’s just be clear that anyone who tails us does so at the risk of personal injury.”
He gave me a hard glare. I could see in his eyes just how much pleasure he would take in murdering me. “Okay. Each of us has said what we needed to.”
I let him leave first. A couple of minute later I stood up and left the bar, heading in the opposite direction. Max followed in my footsteps. As he strolled past the little table where I’d been sitting, he snagged the napkin-holder and came after me.
“The recording is clear as a bell,” he said later, as we drove off together.
“It’ll be a pleasure to screw that guy,” I snapped. “He was sitting there talking to me, and the whole time he was thinking about how he could kill me. It was like being locked in a glass case with a rattlesnake.”
“Now let’s get ready for our second move.”
“How many moves do you expect in this match?”
“Three. If it all works according to plan.”
We drove to Treviso where we hooked up with Old Rossini, who had been staked out, maintaining an uninterrupted surveillance of Pavle Stojkovic since the night before. His eyes were red-rimmed and a scratchy white stubble covered his face. The car reeked of cigarettes and exhaustion. Max got in and sat in the passenger seat, next to Beniamino; I got in back.
“We can forget about trying to bust in on him in his nice country villa. The two enforcers live with him, he has guard dogs and a security system,” he explained, pointing to an unsightly suburban apartment building. “You see the two plate-glass windows on the ground floor? That’s the office of Balkan Market, and it’s connected to the cellar warehouse by an internal staircase.”
“His bodyguards?”
“They’re with him every minute of the day.”
“Anyone else?”
“A secretary. I thought I saw her go in this morning. When I called to check, a woman’s voice answered.”
“There must be someone in the warehouse.”
“No. This morning I saw a couple of delivery vans arrive and leave, and Bozidar opened and closed the gates.”
“What kind of car?”
“A black Mercedes, as usual It’s parked in an underground garage. No way of getting to it.”
“It doesn’t look good to me,” I said. “Maybe we should call Luc and Christine or the two Germans.”
“No!” Beniamino hissed.
“If you want to get in there without getting badly hurt, you’re going to need people who know how to handle a weapon. You can’t do it by yourself.”
“Oh, yes I can.”
I leaned forward and said to Old Rossini: “You wouldn’t by any chance be thinking of a convenient shootout where, after the smoke clears, all the bad guys are left lying on the ground, their chests riddled with bullets?”
He smacked the steering wheel angrily, his bracelets jangling. “Sometimes you can be a real asshole.”
“Maybe so, but you know how these things can be. You knock on the door with the best intentions, but the other guy refuses to cooperate, he thinks he can get away with it, he tries to pull a slick move, and in the end, you have no choice but to start shooting.”
He lit another in a seemingly endless series of cigarettes. “That won’t happen.”
I tapped the fat man on the shoulder. “What do you think?”
“Beniamino knows what he’s doing. And the less we know about it, the better.”
The Serbian gangster’s bodyguards were veterans of a long and bloody civil war. They were also young and fast. But I would never have dreamed of bringing up any of those points. Rossini was still a legend, even at age sixty. Or sixty-two . . . He’d always been kind of vague about exactly how old he was, like an aging actress.
“I bow to the wishes of the majority,” I said, playfully, to cut the tension. “Now what do we do?”
“We sit here, bored out of our skulls, waiting to figure out when the time is ripe to go pay a visit on our old friend Pavle.”
“You don’t think that three men sitting in a parked car might be a little obvious?”
Rossini rapped his knuckles on the window. “Smoked glass. You can’t see a fucking thing from outside.”
After a while it started raining.
“There’s been more rain this year than I can remember,” I muttered.
Rossini and the fat man exchanged a glance and burst out laughing.
“What? What did I say?”
“You really went senile living in Lugano. Now you’re starting to comment on the weather, like an old guy on a park bench. This is Beniamino, and I’m Max. We’re not old guys sitting on a park bench next to you.”
They had a point. They were my only real friends. But I was still uncomfortable about what the fat man had said to me the day before. I felt weird, as if I’d lost my way in a network of streets that I knew like the back of my hand.
“Yesterday I spent three hours sitting in a bar run by a Chinese family watching people get on and off of buses.”
“Now that’s the Marco I know,” the old smuggler broke in, as he continued to snicker. “You’re the only guy I know who could waste so much time on such futile bullshit.”
“Futile? Now I can offer you the benefit of my pearls of wisdom about life.”
“I’d bet money we’re going to hear all about it.”
“You’d be grateful to me as long as you live.”
At 12:45 on the dot, the three Serbians and the secretary came out of the building. Pavle Stojkovic walked ahead, accompanied by a woman aged somewhere between 35 and 40. She was tall, she had long black hair, and she was dressed in a somewhat ostentatious style. Bozidar and Vladan followed a few yards behind them. They walked about 150 feet and stepped into a bar that served quick lunches.
“Secretary and lover,” Rossini decided.
“Did they arrive together?” I asked.
“No. The woman arrived shortly after him.”
“We should do what we can to keep her out of this.”
“That may not be possible.”
“One more fucking problem,” I muttered. I was sick of sitting in a parked car with the windows rolled up.
Max craned his neck to look back at me. “Don’t nag, Marco. You know we wouldn’t hurt a hair on her head.”
Forty-five minutes later, they went back into the offices of the Balkan Market. Same formation.
Between 2 and 5 o’clock, two more delivery vans pulled up, completely unmarked. Each stayed less than twenty minutes.
Half an hour later, the Mercedes revved up the ramp from the cellar parking area and pulled up to the front door. By the light of a streetlamp, we saw that only the bodyguards were in the car. Pavle and his secretary came out an hour later. She took care of locking the door and turning on the security system. Then the woman got into an expensive sports car. The Serb waved goodbye with a smile.
I looked at my watch. “Six thirty on the dot.”
“These people are methodical,” said Max. “Everything to the minute, every blessed day they do the same things at the same time. We could sit here for a year watching them: nothing would change.”
“The delivery vans,” Beniamino mumbled. “Three of them this morning, two more this afternoon. We’ll use one of them to get in.”
The next morning we followed the first van when it pulled out from the underground ramp at the Balkan Market. It pulled onto the highway and didn’t get off until the first exit for Verona. It led us to an ordinary-looking industrial shed way out in the countryside.
“I have to say I’d love to know what kind of ‘Balkan merchandise’ Pavle Stojkovic’s company sells.”
Rossini shrugged. “I don’t have the slightest idea. You can’t even tell who delivers and who picks up the merchandise.”
“If it’s illegal, it means that our friend has more than one guardian angel. What cop wouldn’t want to know a little more about an import-export firm called Balkan Market?”
“Maybe the police have a surveillance camera on the place, like they do on Arben Alshabani’s bar.”
Rossini snapped his fingers. “I hadn’t thought of that. Maybe we should be a little more careful.”
We were basically going to just lower our heads and charge in: we didn’t have a real plan, we didn’t even have a vague idea of what we might be running into.
We went back to Treviso after lunch. Max insisted on getting off the highway near Vicenza, where he knew a good little trattoria.
That afternoon no vans pulled up to the Balkan Market. Otherwise, everything went exactly like the day before.
“Let’s try following them,” I suggested when I saw Pavle getting into the Mercedes.
Rossini wasn’t convinced. “If they spot us, it’ll fuck everything up.”
“Maybe they’re going to do some grocery shopping.”
“Oh, can you just see someone like Stojkovic pushing a shopping cart in a supermarket?”
“He has to eat.”
“His housekeeper takes care of it,” Beniamino snapped. “We need to focus on the delivery vans.”
It took us four days to figure out that the van that showed up at the warehouse most frequently was a light-blue Renault.
The van would drive down the ramp and stop in front of the door, under the vigilant lens of a videocamera. After a couple of minutes, one of the goons would open the door and let the van drive in. The driver was a young man with long hair and a series of tiny earrings piercing his right ear. He lived with his wife and two children not far from Montebelluna and he drove all over the Veneto region making deliveries. He didn’t look like a gangster; he probably had nothing to do with any criminal activity. All the same, we were going to have bust into his life rather roughly.
It happened the day that we decided to go ahead and settle some scores with that bastard Pavle Stojkovic.
Monday, March 23, 2009
Even though it had turned spring two days ago, it was still bitterly cold. It was seven thirty in the morning, and there was nothing to suggest that winter was coming to an end. The guy back-and-forthed his delivery van to drive out of his front yard. He turned down a country lane and, a few hundred yards further along, came upon our car pulled carelessly to the side, so that it partly blocked the thoroughfare. Max, Beniamino, and I were leaning over, intently studying the left rear wheel.
The guy stopped the van about thirty feet short of the car, and leaned his head out the window. “Need help?”
Rossini walked toward the van and brought a handgun up, level with his chin. “This is going to be a special day for you.”
The driver didn’t look particularly frightened. “The van’s empty and I have 150 euros in my wallet.”
“Your name is Fabio, right?” the old smuggler asked him in a fatherly tone of voice.
“Well, Fabio, we need your van. Later, we’ll let you know where you can go pick it up.”
“I need it for my job.”
“We’ll pay for your time.”
“You’re not going to kidnap me and keep me tied up somewhere, are you?”
Beniamino smiled reassuringly. “No, you’re going to go back home and wait for our phone call, safe and sound with your wife and children.”
The young man turned white. All we’d had to do was mention his family to strike terror into his heart. I wasn’t proud of it, but we couldn’t afford to have him report the van as stolen. That’s exactly the kind of crime that gets the cops interested.
Max recited his phone number by heart. “That’s right, isn’t it?”
Fabio gulped. “I’ll do whatever you want, but . . .”
“You just behave yourself, and nothing will go wrong,” I reassured him. Then I pointed toward his house. “Go back to bed, pull the covers over your head, and stay warm. You have a headache and a fever today.”
He walked off unsteadily, and then started running. We were behaving like a bunch of amateurs, but that might have been lost on Fabio. He might just have fallen for our bluff.
Beniamino climbed into the driver’s seat, and then stepped out of the van waving a clipboard with a beer-bottle-shaped clip; on it was the list of the day’s stops.
“Balkan Market, 9:30 a.m.”
The fat man got in the car with Old Rossini. I got in the Renault delivery van and followed them. At a stoplight, I glanced at myself in the rearview mirror. I was dressed in a jacket and tie and was cleanshaven. This was starting to become a habit. I looked like the owner of a small manufacturing company substituting for an employee who was out sick. No one would have noticed anything odd. That was just Northeast Italy.
When we got to Treviso my friends parked the car and climbed into the back of the van, where they hid with the tool bag. When it was time for Fabio’s stop I drove up the ramp that led to the warehouse. I lowered the sun visor and pretended to blow my nose, but Bozidar was satisfied once he recognized the van.
Bandit Love Page 14
