The dogs of Rome cab-1

by Conor Fitzgerald

  He put aside his anxiety and enjoyed a good night’s gaming, faction versus faction. He outfought and outplayed everyone, and a few players remarked on his phenomenal stamina and gameplay. The only bad moment came when one of his so-called companions disagreed with him about the value of an Arcanum of Focus.

  “You pull down way too much hate, you die overmuch, and your mana pool is the smallest,” Pernazzo warned him.

  “Dont knock js cuz u so stoopid u dont get it.”

  Pernazzo stayed calm, gave the kid some sound advice. “Smooth it out with stat gear and balance your pve. You need hp REAL bad as a +dmg lock whos thrown out most of their stm gear that +200 is total worth it. Evrybdy know +dmg tunnelvision instead than stats is unkorrect if u R planning high-end attx.”

  But the crackhead wouldn’t listen. Pernazzo almost logged out in his frustration. The policeman did not come that day.

  43

  MONDAY, AUGUST 30, 8:55 A.M.

  Just before nine o’clock on Monday morning, Pernazzo was sitting on the toilet playing white-water rafting on his cell phone when he received a text message from an unknown number.

  Change SIM call bk now.

  Pernazzo was so excited he forgot to flush.

  He went straight out to his local Vodafone center, and bought himself a new SIM card. He produced ID, showed it to the teenager in the red jacket behind the counter, then filled in the forms using an invented name and address. The youth didn’t even glance at what he had written, just gave him the SIM. Pernazzo put it in his phone and called the mystery number back.

  It was Massoni. Pernazzo felt a thrill that went from the back of his throat to his balls. A wanted man calling him. A RL cop-killer. But no sooner had the thrill run through him than it began to fade, and the disappointment that had been sitting at the base of his stomach rose up and flooded his mind. He was disappointed at the sheer inevitability of it. Who else was it going to be?

  Massoni began their conversation by unravelling a long string of obscenities. Eventually, Pernazzo began to pick out other words but he could not make sense of them. Massoni was talking about standing in the sun, dying of thirst and being eaten to death by insects.

  Finally, he made sense. “I need you here now, as quick as possible. But you need to make sure you’re not being followed. Go to where we held the last dog show. Go past the prefabricated huts and across a field to where there are dog cages. You can’t see them till the last moment. If anyone is following you, they’ll have to come across that field and you’ll see them. There is a white Renault Kangoo there, with the keys lodged under the back left wheel. You can get there by taxi, then take the Renault, come out here.”

  “Why should I do this for you?”

  Massoni paused, then said, in the calmest tone he had used yet, “There’s a lot of money in it. Alleva is doing bank transfers. I need someone who knows about computers. Besides, he sent me to get you.”

  “Get me?”

  “Bring you to Innocenzi, have you explain yourself.”

  “Who’s Innocenzi?”

  Massoni couldn’t fucking believe this and said so. Not only had Pernazzo killed the man Innocenzi’s daughter was sleeping with and sent shit flying in all directions, he didn’t even know he’d done it.

  When Pernazzo finally understood, he felt powered up. “So why didn’t you do as Alleva said and bring me to this Innocenzi person?”

  “Drive into Rome with every cop and Carabinieri looking out for me? I would never have made it as far as your house. It was a set up. Alleva must think I am really stupid. What he needs is to buy time so he can get away, and he was going to buy that time with me.”

  “You mean he’ll have told the police you were coming in?”

  “Sure.”

  “Wow. That’s so sneaky.”

  Massoni told Pernazzo how to reach the dog cages. It took him some time to explain it to his and Pernazzo’s satisfaction.

  Pernazzo went home, picked up his portable, two USB keys, and his Glock. He dropped them all into Clemente’s backpack, then called a taxi from his mobile as he came down the stairs onto the street, and the taxi picked him up just a few minutes later.

  Pernazzo told the driver to head down the Via della Magliana. The taxi driver, unlike the ones Pernazzo had seen in films, was not happy just to drive: he wanted to know the exact destination.

  “I’ll know it when I see it,” said Pernazzo, which was the truth. The taxi driver muttered something about time-wasters, but drove. When, on the city outskirts, Pernazzo told the driver to stop where there were no buildings, signposts, or intersections, the driver continued on for two hundred meters, until Pernazzo had had to raise his voice: “Stop right here!”

  Yeah, in the middle of nowhere, he told the disbelieving taxi driver.

  Yeah, he knew what he was doing. Yeah, yeah. He thought of pulling out his Glock and shooting the driver in the face. Instead, he didn’t tip, and the driver burnt rubber as he took off, cursing.

  Pernazzo now stood in an open field, phone in hand. Massoni was on the line.

  “There’s hornets everywhere here,” said Massoni. “Big black and yellow bastards. And I’m thirsty.”

  Pernazzo reached over and stripped a handful of bay leaves off a bush and crushed them. It was nearly lunchtime, and their fragrance reminded him he was hungry. He was sweating as he crossed the field. He could see a white vehicle in the distance. “You said the van was white?”

  “Yes. You there yet?” asked Massoni.

  “No. Not yet. So Alleva is trying to betray you,” said Pernazzo. “Told you he would. How far are you from the house?”

  “About half a kilometer.”

  “He can’t see you, can he?”

  “No, he thinks I’m on my way into Rome to you.”

  Pernazzo tried to picture the scene. “Alleva’s in the house now, with no transport?”

  “I’ve got the only car,” confirmed Massoni.

  “It said on the news you made a getaway on motorbike.”

  “We changed for a car. Dumped the bike.”

  “He’s got a phone, though?” asked Pernazzo.

  “He’s got lots of phones. This is one of them.”

  “You had better stop any vehicles. Taxis. That’s how he’ll get away.”

  “I worked that out for myself, thanks,” said Massoni.

  “Just out of interest, Massoni, why did you shoot that cop?”

  “I don’t want to talk like this on the phone.”

  “We’ve both changed our numbers.”

  “Even so. The cop didn’t look like a cop. He could have been someone Innocenzi sent.”

  “What? You thought he was one of Innocenzi’s soldiers or something?”

  “I didn’t think too hard. He looked like he wanted to stand in my way, so I removed him. Are you at the dog cages yet?”

  “Almost,” said Pernazzo. “Why would Innocenzi do something like that?”

  In front of Pernazzo lay a bright field, flat and manicured enough for a professional football match. It looked to him like England or Ireland or one of those perfect places with horses and church spires. At the far end of the field, Italian squalor reasserted itself in the form of crumbling outhouses made mostly out of corrugated sheets of aluminium that could be seen through a thin curtain of tall reeds and sedges. It was becoming hard to walk and talk in the heat without gasping. Pernazzo stopped on the edge of the perfect field.

  “I am out near Civitavecchia,” Massoni informed him. “Take the motorway all the way to the end, call when you come off it,” said Massoni. “Alleva has passports, money, accounts. A thing for printing or something. I saw the stuff. He pretends the two of us are going to get away to Argentina together, but there’s no photo of me in any of those passports.”

  “So you’ve parked out of sight from the house?”

  “Yeah, and I’m dying of the heat here.”

  Pernazzo said, “So get in the car and turn on the air-conditioning.”
<
br />   “Can’t. Can’t see the lane properly from inside the car and I need to be able to hear any cars coming.”

  Pernazzo hung up and entered the field. Halfway across, he suddenly felt he had entered an invisible gas chamber filled with the powerful and repelling stench of the dogs. He paused to get used to it, bent down a little to reset his senses.

  He reached the end of the field, which sloped down into a ditch containing a small canal that was supposed to carry the brackish waters away to the sea. But the canal had been dammed by the plastic and rubble thrown into it, and sat stagnant, feeding the vegetation that screened off the outhouses and the cages containing the dogs.

  The smell of the dogs had been growing stronger, but he had been accustoming himself to it. He scampered down the embankment, hopped over the ooze of water, and ran up the other side to peer out from behind a clump of sedge grass.

  In front of him, fifty meters away, sat a row of about thirty iron cages, deep brown with rust. Every other cage contained a dog, or at least no two dogs were placed in adjacent cages. The long row was protected from the sun by an asbestos roof supported at either end by concrete walls and intermittently propped up by metal pylons. It looked like the gable end of an old factory or warehouse.

  Pernazzo could not see from the shade of the sedges into the shade of the cages, but the dogs seemed mostly to be prostrate. To his left, the orange carcass of a stripped-down bus was subsiding into the earth. Someone had boarded up two of the windows with plywood, and the next one was curtained off with a dark tartan blanket that swayed gently. It looked as if a tramp had made it his home. Outhouses constructed of wood, plastic sheets, and corrugated iron were collapsing into each other on the right.

  Glancing on both sides of him, he emerged from the hedge and started making his way across the abandoned lot toward the dogs in the cages. A rolling growl indicated that his approach was being watched.

  The guttural sounds from the cages began to rise in pitch and spread among the dogs. One of them was on the verge of barking. He felt his Glock, still attached to his belt, still in danger of slipping. When all this was over, he would get himself a nice holster.

  Suddenly a Tosa Inu rose majestically in its cage and, overcoming the exhaustion of hunger and heat, roared its disapproval of the furtive figure approaching. It was the command the other dogs had been waiting for. At once, they all began to bark and snarl, though an American bulldog decided to howl and yelp instead. Pernazzo froze. He could smell the breath of the dogs, and they smelled his fear, which he was now converting rapidly into aggression. It felt like the very earth was shaking. He could feel it vibrate, up to his thigh.

  Shocked by the sudden uproar from the dogs, it took him a few seconds to realize the vibrating and singing was coming from his phone. He yanked it out. The sun was too bright to read the screen. He pressed a finger into his ear to drown out the dogs.

  Massoni was shouting. “You in the van yet? I’ve turned back a taxi. I’m standing dying in a field in the sun. If you don’t do it, I’ll just go back, kill Alleva myself. I’ll kill him twice.”

  “Wait, Massoni. We can do better. You’ll see. Stop the taxis. Taxis are good. Much better than accomplices. Pay them if you want. They like being paid when there’s a no-show. Don’t make them go to the police or anything. Pretend you’re the one who called. Car broke down but is OK now. If you kill him now, you won’t get his money or anything else he has on the computer. If I was him, I’d have hotels, plane tickets, houses abroad-everything lined up and ready, saved in virtual space.”

  “Hurry. I’m going insane here. Insects.” Massoni hung up.

  Pernazzo found a good strong stick, held it in his left hand and walked by each cage banging on it and roaring at the animals. He got the best reaction from a Doberman pinscher.

  He held the pistol in his right hand just in case a lock was faulty. The animals had worked themselves into a fury, except for a black-and-white mongrel, with a lot of German shepherd genes that just stood there, baring its thin and sharpened teeth. He tried to goad it by poking the stick between the bars. It didn’t react.

  “Are you the underdog I was supposed to bet on?” Pernazzo asked the beast. He walked back toward the cages. Some of the dogs were already getting used to his presence and had stopped barking in the hope of food.

  Tucked into what looked like a field latrine several meters from the cages were three refrigerators powered by an external generator exuding diesel. A new aluminium covering and generous use of masking tape protected the wiring and the generator from the elements.

  He opened the first one and stared in fascination at the heaving pink mass of horsemeat packed into plastic bags squeezed into every corner. The sweet smell of the meat, fat, and blood was so strong that he thought for a moment the refrigerator must have broken down, but then he realized that if it had, he’d have known the difference. The second refrigerator contained more of the same, though the meat in this was whiter, less pungent, and wrapped in paper. The third contained strings of meat on bones and three bottles of Peroni beer with twist-off caps.

  Lying next to the refrigerator was a long white pole with a twisted bit of cable coming out of one end and a hoop at the other. He pulled on the cable and watched the hoop at the other end tighten.

  Pernazzo drank a beer, which tasted a bit oily. He tossed the bottles at an abandoned caravan, aiming at the windows and missing. He thought he saw something moving beneath. A rat, probably. A large one, from the shadow it cast.

  He grabbed a handful of meat, and went directly to the mongrel’s cage and threw it at the bars. About a third went in; the rest wrapped itself on the bars and fell outside. The dog took what had arrived, and ate it calmly. Other dogs growled and some barked, but there was a lot more whining this time. He risked putting his hand near the cage and picking up the dropped bits, which he inserted between the bars. The dog soon ate those. Pernazzo tossed him more and more meat, which the animal ate with equanimity.

  Then he fetched the long pole with the wire noose and held it in front of him, unsure what to do. A small pulley system allowed the front bars of the cage to slide up, like a portcullis. Pernazzo reckoned the mongrel was small enough, and risked opening the trapdoor a third of the way. The animal meekly poked its head out, and Pernazzo slipped the steel cord over its neck, then pulled the lever on the pole. He dragged the animal sideways across the gravel, keeping a good distance with the pole, and then opened the trapdoor of a cage containing the Tosa Inu. His courage and skill now increased, he performed the same operation with the Doberman, feeding it, holding it down with the control pole and maneuvering it into the same cage, so that all three dogs were enclosed in a space so tight that it reminded him of a cartoon. The underdog whimpered and tried to squeeze its way out between the bars. The other two tried to stand up, but they did not have sufficient space. They crouched, legs bent outward, and bared their teeth at each other. He waited five minutes, hoping to see the two larger dogs go for each other or turn on the underdog, but the animals seemed determined only to growl. Pernazzo resolved to come back after three days to see what the result was.

  A zinc sluice-trough ran lengthways through all the cages. It entered through a narrow aperture on one side of the cage and out the other side to the next, and so on down to the end. The trough sloped slightly so that the water flowed down as far as the last cage. It was done so that the dog nearest the tap got first go at the water. The water flowed just fast enough for some water to reach all the way down to the last animal. Pernazzo turned the tap off.

  He made several trips back and forth to the refrigerator, gathering the gobbets and hunks of meat, which he placed outside the dogs’ cages, just out of their reach.

  44

  Pernazzo past the turn-off to Santa Severa when his phone started playing the Black-Eyed Peas.

  “Where are you?” demanded Massoni.

  “On the way. Past Santa Severa. Fifteen minutes tops.”

  “I’ve turned
back three taxis. The same guy came twice, can you believe it? Says Alleva raised a real stink on the phone.”

  Pernazzo turned on RAI Radio 2. Francesco de Gregori and Fiorella Mannoia were singing “L’Uccisione di Babbo Natale.” He listened all the way through, but didn’t get it. Two DJs came on and cracked a series of jokes at each other and howled with laughter. He phoned Massoni. “Right. I’m near Civitavecchia, now what?”

  “Wait till the divided highway runs out-have you got any water with you?”

  “No. The road runs out. I can picture that. I know where you’re talking about.”

  Massoni said, “I’ve just been thinking about Ferrarelle, waterfalls, icy streams, melt water, Sprite.”

  “Directions, Massoni.”

  “Clock exactly five-point-three kilometers, turn off to the right. Go thirty meters. You see a green gate to an abandoned house on your left, you’re on the right road. If not, go back to the main road, take the next turn to the right… Dust… Another fucking taxi!”

  Pernazzo hung up. He was less than ten minutes away. He found the road as Massoni had instructed, and didn’t need to look for the gate, because as he turned into it, a taxi pulled out. He drove four kilometers over a red dust track.

  Suddenly a large powdered figure emerged as if from nowhere and stood in the road in front of him. Pernazzo stopped and Massoni rapped on the driver’s window with hairy knuckles.

  “You sure you’ve no water? Some Sprite maybe? A beer would be good,” said Massoni when Pernazzo rolled down the window.

  “No. Let’s move. You’ll get water when we get back to the house. How far?”