“Holy shit!” shouted the deputy police chief.
“What is it?” asked Sebastiano.
“Plastic.”
Sebastiano and Italo exchanged a glance. Emilio was baffled. “Plastic?”
“Plastic explosives,” Italo corrected him.
Emilio’s eyes opened wide in fright.
“Let’s open another. Come on, Emilio.”
“At your orders!”
In the second crate they found automatic assault rifles. More plastic explosives. Then detonators. Still more plastic explosives. A disassembled shoulder-mounted rocket launcher. Ammunition.
Seated on the opened crates, the four men looked at one another in bewilderment. “Sebastia’, I’m starting to have some doubts,” said Rocco. “You don’t think that ‘Chant number 4’ stands for C-4, do you? Plastic explosive? Look how much of it there is!”
Sebastiano nodded. “Maybe so. What the hell was I thinking? I should never have trusted Ernst,” his friend replied.
“Let’s call the police!” Emilio suggested.
Rocco slapped him on the shoulder. “We are the police, Emilio.” Sebastiano and Italo exchanged a baffled glance. “All right,” the deputy police chief continued, “now why don’t you take your rotary tool and head on home. Get yourself some rest, because you’ve probably caught a chill. Thanks for all the help you’ve given us. Without you, we couldn’t have done a thing.” The retired postal worker smiled and nodded. “Ah, don’t mention it, it was nothing. In fact, I really enjoyed it, you know?”
“All right, go take care of Ginevra. Then we’ll catch up with you and decide what to do with the Sri Lankans.”
“All right. I’m heading back then. I’ll wait for you inside. It’s been a pleasure to help you. A real adventure, a real adventure . . .” And Emilio headed home with his saw and a light step.
“The thing to do here is call Interpol, if you ask me!” said Sebastiano. “No, seriously, do you realize what we have here? This is a military-grade arsenal!”
“Yes, we’re going to have to impound the truck. No two fucking ways about it,” Rocco said and flicked away the dead cigarette butt that he still had clamped between his lips.
“Chant number 4!” shouted Italo.
“What?” called Sebastiano and Rocco in unison.
Italo was squatting on the ground, peering at the side of a crate. “Right here—it says CHANT NUMBER 4!”
The two men went over. It was true. On one of the crates, someone had written CHANT NUMBER 4 with a marker. Sebastiano and Rocco looked at each other. Rocco grabbed an automatic rifle from the closest crate and, with two sharp cracks of the rifle butt, broke open the lock. They opened the crate. Inside were eight stone Buddha heads. Sebastiano grabbed one. He smashed it on the road. Among the fragments were three cellophane packets full of marijuana. The smiles returned to Rocco’s and Sebastiano’s lips. And to Italo’s as well. This was what they had come for.
“Come on!” shouted Sebastiano, picking up the packets they’d just found and three more of the Buddha heads. “Let’s get moving!” He trotted over to the van. “Good work, Ernst, bravo! It was true!” he kept shouting at the top of his lungs.
Italo and Rocco finished loading the sculptures. Then Sebastiano turned to look at his friend. “I’m going. No question, I’m leaving you in a sea of shit.”
“Don’t worry. In any case, you know my account number, right?”
“Three days tops and you’ll have your money.”
“Him too!” said Rocco, pointing at Italo.
“We can take care of him right here and now!” Sebastiano stuffed his hand into his pocket. He pulled out a wad of green one-hundred-euro banknotes. “Thirty-five hundred. Here, go ahead and count it.”
“I trust you,” said the officer as he pocketed the money.
Sebastiano slapped him on the back, got behind the wheel of the van, and put it into reverse. “Ciao, Italo. You’re a good kid. See you soon, Rocco!”
“See you round, my friend. Don’t forget about me. Stay in touch.”
“Say hi to the Ukrainian chick if you see her.”
“I’ll be sure to.”
The van vanished into the night, engine roaring as Sebastiano accelerated. Italo and the deputy police chief stood there watching until the taillights were swallowed up by the darkness.
“Okay. Now what about the Sri Lankans?”
Rocco pointed to the truck, with its lights still on. “Do you know how to drive this thing?”
“I even know how to drive a semi-trailer. Why?”
“It’s a ninety-minute drive from here to Turin.” Rocco looked at his watch. “It’s one forty A.M. right now. Say we load up, you take off, and you’re in Turin by three thirty. You drop off the Sri Lankans, and by five thirty you’re back here.”
“And then?”
“And then at six A.M. I’ll call headquarters. And then all hell breaks loose. Does it strike you as a good idea?”
“Give me that thermos full of espresso, otherwise I’ll be asleep by the time I reach Verrès.”
Rocco handed Italo the thermos, then walked toward the truck’s cab. He sat down behind the wheel. Fastened to the windshield, in plain view, was the GPS. Rocco smiled and shouted to Italo: “The address in Turin is right here. You’re in luck, my friend. You won’t even have to leave the highway. It’s at a service area. Happy?”
“For thirty-five hundred euros, I’ll take this truck all the way to Catania!”
Rocco climbed out of the back. “By the way. Give me five hundred euros. I’ll repay you tomorrow.”
“What for?”
“We parked eighty-seven Sri Lankans in his house. Don’t you think we ought to give him a little something for his troubles?”
Italo nodded and pulled out the wad of cash.
“All right, I’m going to get those poor wretches. You stay here. Stand guard—pistol in hand. Those two piece-of-shit truck drivers could show up again. This load is too important. Keep your eyes open, take it from me.”
The sky was starting to lighten. Sitting on a wooden crate with a semiautomatic AK-47 in his lap and what seemed like the thousandth cigarette in his mouth, Rocco Schiavone was waiting. He was thinking about Ginevra and Emilio, who had accepted everything that had happened without a word. They’d even objected when he offered them the five hundred euros, but in the end Rocco had won out. They promised not to say anything about the Sri Lankans, and in fact they supported the deputy police chief’s decision not to report their presence to the authorities. Forgetting the minor detail that in this case, the authorities were none other than Rocco Schiavone himself.
The cars that went by slowed down to stare at that strange pile of wooden crates abandoned on the roadside and the man dressed in a flower-pattern down jacket sitting with an assault rifle in his lap, like an old Apache lying in ambush. It was five in the morning on a freezing-cold Sunday, and the temperature was like that of the freezer aisle at a supermarket. If it hadn’t been for the coffees, the grappas, the prosciutto, and the chocolate that Ginevra had brought him continuously until four in the morning, along with the flower-pattern down jacket, Rocco would have wound up like an amateur mountain climber recklessly challenging Everest. His nose was red, and he could no longer feel his ears. Otherwise, aside from the pain in his knees, he was doing fine. He’d followed Emilio’s advice and had kept his legs inside the straw-filled plastic-explosives case.
Finally he saw in the distance the truck’s headlights approaching. Italo was back half an hour early. The deputy police chief stood up, flicked the cigarette far away from the crates, folded up the down jacket, and walked over to the road. The truck slowed to a halt, screeching like a locomotive, then the brakes ground down and it finally rolled to a stop next to the deputy police chief. Italo’s face, tired but smiling, appeared at the window. “All taken care of, boss. I’m going to park this thing!”
Rocco smiled. “Go ahead, Italo, go ahead!” Then he grabbed his cell
phone, thrilled at the idea of yanking the chief of police, the judge, journalists, and everyone else out of bed.
SUNDAY
The whole thing had a national impact. The police chief was beside himself with pleasure and kept holding press conferences one after another, even though it was a Sunday. The magistrate hailed the intelligence and enterprise of a deputy police chief and an obscure officer with a brilliant future ahead of him, and unbridled speculation began on whom that arsenal might have been intended for. Italo and Rocco had agreed on a story, and they stuck to it. A tip from an informant on the border who was friends with the deputy police chief, the escape of the two truck drivers, and the chance discovery of the explosives.
“Certainly, that container, so big and completely empty . . . it’s just strange,” the police chief said, and the judge echoed that sentiment. And Rocco had spread his arms wide and smiled. “Evidently, someone unloaded some of the cargo before the border, or who knows what else.”
Not a word about the Sri Lankans, and those men and women faded back into indistinct shadows in the everyday lives of Italian citizens.
“Did you know that inside the driver’s cab we even found a baggie of marijuana?” Chief of Police Corsi went on.
Rocco had smiled and shrugged helplessly once again. “What can you do about them? Those people are godless heathens.”
“Yeah. Driving a behemoth like that while they were high as Jimi Hendrix. It’s pure insanity.”
“You know who Jimi Hendrix is?”
The police chief fell silent for a moment. “Caro Dottor Schiavone, when you were still in fifth grade, yours truly was dancing to the notes of ‘Hey Joe,’ ‘Little Wing,’ and ‘Killing Floor’ outside the architecture building.”
“I can’t believe it! You were a sixties radical?”
“I was nineteen years old and I was in love.”
“Did you battle the police in the streets with the rest of them?”
“No. I turned and ran. Now I think that the two of us have more important things to do, don’t you agree?”
The rest of that Sunday Rocco just spent sleeping. And he missed Roma–Udinese. But it wasn’t such a big loss. The Rome team took a heavy beating.
MONDAY
Rocco didn’t like hospitals, and he especially didn’t like morgues. But Alberto Fumagalli worked in one, and Rocco knew that if you want things done right and fast, the best thing is to have them done by someone who’s very busy. When the door to the morgue swung open and Alberto emerged with his usual apron spotted with rust-brown stains—or maybe it wasn’t rust after all—Rocco got to his feet and walked toward him.
“I just got a phone call from the lab. The tests on the blood from the piece of tissue you brought in are ready.”
“This afternoon is Leone’s funeral.”
“Yes, I know. I sent all the autopsy results to Magistrate Baldi. I worked all weekend. On the internal organs and so on and so forth.”
“Did you figure out anything fundamental?”
“Yes. Leone Miccichè was in excellent health.”
“Nothing else?”
“I’d bet my left testicle—in fact I’d bet them both—that Leone died between seven and nine that night.”
Rocco stopped in the middle of the hallway. “Do you know what that means?”
“Yes. Practically speaking, Amedeo Gunelli killed him unintentionally. When he ran that Sherman tank of a snowcat over him, odds are that Leone was still alive. Half-frozen, buried under eight inches of snow, but still alive. Bad luck, eh?”
“You think so?”
They continued walking and left the hallway from the morgue to catch the elevator. “You look tired,” said Alberto. “I heard you pulled off quite a coup last night.”
“Yes. We impounded some firearms.”
“That was a nice piece of luck, eh?”
“It’s just a matter of having the right information.”
Alberto looked at him with a blank gaze, the look he usually put on when he wanted to make sure no one could make a fool of him. “Who was in that container?”
Rocco scratched his head. “Eighty-seven Sri Lankan immigrants.”
“Where did you take them?”
“To Turin. They had a contact there who had jobs for them.”
Alberto Fumagalli nodded a couple of times. The elevator doors opened, and they walked out. “You’re quite an asshole, Rocco.”
“I know.”
“Would you have done the same thing if they were Romanians?”
“First of all, I don’t bring race into this. There’s no such thing as race. And after all, Romanians are members of the European Community, so they hardly have to be smuggled across the border. They can enter freely.”
“Touché!”
“Fuck off.”
“I love you, Rocco.”
“Enough with the faggoty talk, Alberto.”
“No, I really mean it.”
“If you knew me better, you wouldn’t say such a thing.”
“Now you’re the one who’s starting to talk like a cocksucker.”
“How much farther is it to the lab?”
“Not far. Why?”
“Because carrying on a conversation with you is exhausting, and it puts me into a state of emotional apprehension.”
“Rocco, you don’t have the capacity for emotional apprehension.” Then Alberto opened the lab door.
The technician handed the deputy police chief a sheet of paper. “The blood on the tissue that you gave us belongs to Group O negative 4.4.”
“Why, that’s the same blood group that we found on the bandanna that was stuffed in Leone’s mouth!” Alberto exclaimed.
“Fuck,” Rocco Schiavone murmured between clenched teeth.
“Is it bad news?” asked the medical examiner.
“It is for Omar Borghetti. The blood on the tissue is his. I took it off him with a slightly unorthodox method. See you around, Alberto. Grazie!”
“Then we’ve nailed him! I love you,” he shrieked after him, then the medical examiner broke into solemn laughter while the lab door closed behind Rocco.
Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” alerted Rocco to the fact that his phone was ringing. He picked up without glancing at the display. “Schiavone here, who is it?”
“Italo speaking, Dottore. Forgive the intrusion.”
Italo was addressing him formally, which meant that he was sitting next to someone else at police headquarters.
“What is it, Italo?”
“You need to come in to the office. Inspector Rispoli showed me something that I think you’ll be very interested in.”
“Can you give me some idea?”
“No. Because it’s a sealed envelope. And I have a feeling that you ought to read it.”
The letterhead stationery read, LAB 2000—LABORATORY FOR CLINICAL ANALYSES. The envelope was addressed to Leone Miccichè.
“The postmaster brought it straight here just a couple of hours ago. I took the liberty,” said Inspector Rispoli.
“You did the right thing.”
Rocco opened the envelope. They were charts with medical tests. Spermiogram, scrotal ultrasound, TSH test, semen culture. Rocco tried to read it and understand some of it. “Azoospermia. What’s that?”
“What does it say, Dottore?”
“No idea. It looks like these are medical tests that Leone had done . . . let’s see when”—he turned over the sheet, and the date stood out—“not even fifteen days ago.”
“What kind of tests?”
“Well, just guessing, but I’d say fertility tests.”
Rocco handed the sheets of paper to Italo. “Here, call Fumagalli. Get him to tell you what this stuff is. And have him call me on the cell phone—I’m going to see the judge.”
He got up from the chair and slapped Inspector Rispoli on the back. “Good work, Caterina. If you ask me, this is something very important!”
Caterina blushed.
“Do you wa
nt an arrest warrant?” Magistrate Baldi asked Deputy Police Chief Rocco Schiavone.
“Not yet. You see, there’s still something that doesn’t add up. The blood on the red bandanna found stuffed down the corpse’s throat belongs to Omar Borghetti with a ninety-five percent probability, which ought to pin the murder on him, but still . . .”
The judge leaned toward the deputy police chief. “But still what?”
“You see, as I explained to you yesterday, Leone Miccichè smoked a cigarette up there in the middle of the shortcut. He took off his gloves, probably to light the cigarette. We never found the cigarette butt. Still, traces of tobacco were found on the scene of the crime.”
“What does that matter?”
“Omar Borghetti doesn’t smoke.”
“So, who cares? That just means that the tobacco came from Leone’s cigarette, no?”
“No. Leone smoked Marlboro Lights. Always did. The tobacco is a different kind.”
The judge sprawled back in his chair, emitting a loud sigh. “So that means that whoever was with him does smoke, and doesn’t smoke Marlboros?”
“Right. And I’ve come to the conclusion that the killer offered Leone a cigarette. And that he smoked it. First because, otherwise, we’d have found traces of Marlboros along with the traces of this other type of tobacco. Second because his wife told us that he’d smoked the last of his cigarettes. Okay, I’m a smoker, so I know that when I have three left in the pack, I say that I’m out of cigarettes and I go out to buy more, but still the pack found on the corpse was empty. The odds are very good that he didn’t have any.”
“But the cigarette butt? Why wasn’t that found? The filter, something . . . ?”
“Because the son of a bitch who murdered him collected them all. They’re evidence, no?”
The judge started toying with his pen. He chewed on it a little while looking Rocco in the eye. “But you have an idea, don’t you?”
Black Run Page 18
