At the End of a Dull Day

by Massimo Carlotto

  That’s when I found out that the boss was named Giuseppe Palamara, the young guy was Nilo Palamara, Giuseppe’s nephew. The beanpole was given short shrift: Bookkeeper Tortorelli.

  “These gentlemen have come to meet you because they need to move some fairly substantial sums of money through your restaurant for a while.”

  A flash of light filled my mind. “Money laundering. They want to turn La Nena into a washing machine.”

  “Well, my work here is done,” the Counselor announced, as he got to his feet. “Now the four of you will certainly have some details to work out that won’t require my presence.”

  None of the others moved a muscle. Everything was proceeding according to script. I waited until Brianese was at the door and then I caught up with him.

  “Why are you doing this to me?”

  “I’m teaching you what happens when you bite the hand that feeds you.”

  I was too shocked to think of anything to say. “If those guys get their foot in the door, I’ll never get them out of here. They’ll take La Nena away from me.”

  “That’ll never happen,” he replied. “As I’ve already told you, you’re sick and dangerous, a loose cannon in a system that has very different rules. They’ll keep you on a short leash but they’ll let you stay where you are.”

  He could read the rage and hatred in my eyes and a smile played on his lips. He put one hand on my shoulder. “Giorgio, you can’t imagine how happy I am right now.”

  He gripped the handle and opened the door. He hadn’t even closed it and he was already greeting someone else. I was just one more problem to him, and I’d been taken care of.

  “Come here, Pellegrini,” Giuseppe Palamara ordered, accentuating his Calabrian accent.

  I turned around and went back to my seat. I filled my glass and drank it off in a single gulp.

  “We’ve asked around about you, and we know all about your time in prison. We know you’re an informer, a real piece of shit, and that all you’re good for is punching some poor woman in the face who’s trying to earn a living,” Giuseppe said. “But we also know that you’re not so stupid that you can’t understand who we are and how far we’re willing to go.”

  I looked at the bottle on the table in front of me. It seemed to have been designed especially to smash into the faces of those bastards. But my hands lay flat on the table, and I heard my voice uttering the words of a slave.

  “I know how to stay in my place.”

  “Good. This is how it’s going to work,” the boss began explaining. “You can stay in charge of the restaurant, but from now on you’re on a salary, and the bookkeeper is going to take care of accounting.”

  “We’ll give you three thousand a month,” young Nilo specified.

  “Thirty-six thousand a year. It’s not bad and you don’t have much of a say in the matter.”

  He rang the tines of a fork against the crystal wine glass to catch my attention. “Understood, Pellegrini? Don’t do anything to bring the cops around. No more whores or any of that bullshit. You need to work all day and then go home.”

  “Understood, Pellegrini?” Giuseppe said again.

  “Understood,” I replied. “And I assure you that you’re really just doing me a favor. This place is just a money pit. I was using all the money I was earning on the girls to pay off the losses here.”

  Giuseppe Palamara snickered. “Now the bookkeeper will take care of straightening out the books. He’s a good accountant and a hard worker. Starting tomorrow morning he’s going to sit at that cash register and he’s not going to lift his ass out of that chair until the place closes at night.”

  “That’s fine. I’ll be able to focus on running this place the way it deserves.”

  “Good boy,” he mocked me. “Now bring us something to eat.”

  “You still haven’t told me how long you plan to use my restaurant.”

  The Palamaras exchanged an ironic glance. “As long as it takes,” Giuseppe answered.

  That is to say, forever. After a while they’d persuade me to sell the place, and then they’d probably kill me, as an unasked-for favor to the Counselor. I didn’t have any idea what his relationship might be with these Calabrians, but I doubted that he really understood who he was dealing with.

  “I’d like to sample the Istrian Malvasia,” said Bookkeeper Tortorelli, speaking up for the first time. Up until that moment he’d studied the wine list as if he didn’t care about the little lecture the Palamaras were delivering. “You think it would go well with a bowl of bigoli in salsa?”

  “Personally, it strikes me as a stretch,” I replied in a professional tone of voice. “I’d actually recommend a pinot grigio del Collio.”

  He nodded. “Okay.”

  I walked out of the back room and stopped Piero, the senior waiter.

  “Go take the order from the table in the back room. You’re in charge of the restaurant. I have some things to do.”

  I headed home. I walked briskly, my long steps propelling me down the sidewalk. Martina wasn’t there. She was at the gym, attending her Zumba Fitness class. I stripped, putting my clothes away carefully. I dropped into the oxblood red armchair and sat there staring at the spinner bike for a long time—I couldn’t say how long. Then my woman got home, said not a word, took off her clothes, climbed onto the bike, and started pedaling. The whisking sound of the roller had a pharmaceutical effect on me, gradually calming all my rage and grief.

  The sun was setting when I emerged from the bedroom carrying Martina in my arms. I set her down in the bathtub, turned on the faucet, and planted a kiss on her forehead.

  “Thank you, my love. I’ll be home as soon as I can.”

  At the restaurant, there wasn’t a trace of the Mafiosi. I warned the staff that starting tomorrow there would be an accountant manning the cash register. Nobody blinked an eye. Nobody would have blinked an eye if I’d told them that La Nena was going to launder dirty money for the Calabrians. These were times when holding onto your job was the only thing that mattered. Everything else was a secondary detail.

  I spent the night with Nicoletta. I was implacable, pitiless, and I extracted all the information, down to the tiniest details, that she had gathered over time about the clients who patronized my whores in Brianese’s network. But it was a waste of time. I was unable to find anything useful that would improve my understanding of the links between the Counselor and the Palamaras.

  “Tell the girls to get ready.”

  “Are we getting rid of them?” Nicoletta asked hopefully.

  “Yes. But I’m going to keep the money,” I replied.

  She said nothing in reply. She had too much to make up for. And now that we had Mafiosi involved she was willing to do anything I told her, just to get out alive from the nightmare that had begun with Isabel’s death. She hadn’t figured out yet that I’d never let her go.

  The warehouse that served as the Maltese gangsters’ headquarters was even filthier than usual. The only thing that glittered in the place was the paint job on the body of my Phaeton.

  “Only three this time?” Petrus Zerafa, the boss of the gang, asked me as he massaged the Chinese girl’s ass. Lin was looking around in bewilderment. The other two girls were safe in the car. He’d only needed to take a quick look through the window to decide that they were more than acceptable. Lin had struck him as a little skinny and so he’d demanded that she get out so he could inspect the merchandise.

  “A Russian guy fell in love and bought one of them,” I replied. “It was true love. She wasn’t even the prettiest one, but he wouldn’t take no for an answer.”

  “That’s not the agreement we had,” he protested. “It’ll cost you 10 percent.”

  I expected it. “All right. But you have to throw a handgun with a silencer into the bargain.”

  He gave me a look. “You don’t seem
like the type. Are you having problems?”

  I did a De Niro imitation. “Do I strike you as someone who has problems?”

  He wasn’t a stupid guy. “You show up down one whore and then you ask me to give you a weapon. Maybe something happened and you have to take care of it.”

  “Do you want to stick your nose into my business or do you want to make a deal?”

  He nodded. “I can get you one right away but I don’t know how clean it is.”

  Which meant the gun had been fired and that the police could conceivably link it to a crime. Paradoxically that came in handy, even though it meant I was running the risk of going to jail for something I hadn’t even done.

  “That’s not a problem. All I want is a gun that works, with an extra clip and bullets.”

  “Lots and lots of ammunition for a guy who doesn’t want to kill anyone . . . ” he muttered ironically. He gestured to one of his thugs to take care of it and the guy vanished down a tunnel between the mountains of boxes.

  Petrus kissed Lin’s neck and I understood that the time had come to get rid of the girls. I opened the car door. “Get out.”

  Dulce and Violeta held hands and sat motionless, pale, and frightened. I stuck my head into the car. “Do whatever they want and it won’t go too badly,” I advised in a fatherly tone of voice.

  Three guys emerged out of nowhere to take delivery of them while Lin remained wrapped in the boss’s arms. He’d made his selection.

  The guy that had gone to get the pistol came back. He handed me a flat cardboard box that had once held a clock radio. Inside I found a Beretta pistol, thirty years old but well maintained. The ammunition was new, and made by a trusted manufacturer. The silencer was handmade out of a bicycle pump. Zerafa invited me to test it out by shooting into a pile of old tires.

  I slipped in the clip and fired three shots in quick succession. The last shot was louder than the others. That meant the silencer filled up fast with smoke. If I had to use it, I’d need to take care to limit my volume of fire.

  It felt strange to hold a gun in my hand again after so many years. I’d been certain that guns were alien to me now, but instead my hands had performed the movements correctly and I’d felt the surge of power of my finger on the trigger.

  Dulce cried out and I heard the unmistakable sound of a slap. Lin broke free of the Maltese gangster’s embrace and threw her arms around my neck, begging me to take her back “home.” I pushed her off me with a single hard shove. Petrus burst into laughter and I reminded him that he still owed me money.

  He pulled a wad of 500-euro bills out of his jeans pocket and started counting them, after licking the thumb and index finger of his right hand.

  I had passed Brescia and I was about to leave Lombardy and enter the Veneto when my cell phone rang.

  “Should I be worried?” Tortorelli asked in a bored voice.

  “Not at all,” I replied with perfect calm. “I’m just shutting down my side business activities, like you asked me to do.”

  “When will you honor us again with your presence?”

  “Tomorrow afternoon, no later than that. In any case, the staff is perfectly capable of running La Nena.”

  “What would I drink with a plate of frayed dried horse meat with balsamic vinegar and shredded smoked ricotta?”

  “A Gewürtztraminer would be perfect. It might not be the most orthodox pairing, but you won’t be disappointed.”

  “I took the liberty of telling the cook to skip the bed of arugula. I hate that crap . . . ”

  “What did the cook do?”

  “What I told him. I made him think that it was an order from you.”

  “You stay away from my kitchen, Tortorelli.”

  “And you stop playing hide and seek, otherwise there’ll be big changes when you get back.”

  He hung up. Piece of shit. I turned on the radio and turned up the sound to vent my rage. The station was playing a song by Carla Bruni. I caught a line that went: “Someone told me that our lives aren’t worth much.”

  She seemed to be referring to my life. I reached out my hand and caressed the grip of my Beretta. Getting my hands on a weapon meant nothing more than the fact that I was ready to use it. I had no plan, and the ideas in my head were fuzzy at best. The one thing I did know was that unless I reacted I’d lose everything I owned and wind up buried in a shallow grave. Brianese had sold me to the ’Ndrangheta to punish me and keep me under control. He was afraid of me because I’d refused to play by his rules. I could always cut and run for it, abandoning La Nena, Martina, and the life that I’d worked so hard to build for myself, but that wasn’t something I was willing to do. I would have run away by now if it was just a fight between yours truly and the Palamaras. In that case I wouldn’t have had a whisper of a chance. But Brianese was in the middle of this fight and the only hunch that kept surfacing in the churning whirl of my thoughts, though I still couldn’t pin it down, was that there was still a slender margin for negotiation and I might be able to use it to get back what was once mine. I needed to find some form of leverage that would force Brianese to make a deal with me. After all, this was Italy, and by now even the Mafiosi are to some extent obliged to work within the system. In the Veneto, the local and international Mafias had moved in en masse, attracted by a quantity of wealth and an economic system that seemed to have been custom made for money laundering. No one had to be told how it worked: the way they used cutthroat loan sharking practices to take over companies, leaving the owners in place as their puppets while a guy like Tortorelli laundered dirty money and politicians like Brianese forged the right connections to invest that money in government contracts and real estate speculation.

  No, it was clear to me that if I wanted to get the Calabrians off my ass I’d have to get the lawyer and member of parliament who’d been the best man at my wedding into the middle of things and use him as leverage. He thought he was above the fray. He’d made his calculations and thought I was done for. And maybe I was, maybe I was deluding myself with my elaborate plans. But Brianese didn’t know how much I’d figured out about his relationship with Ylenia and the role that woman played in his web of dealings.

  Ylenia. I rolled the name around in my mouth, bouncing it off tongue and teeth. This could be the launching point for my counteroffensive. It could also be a way of clawing back the two million euros that Brianese owed me.

  There was a time in my life when I’d been a member of a terrorist group in Italy and later a guerrilla organization in Central America. Before we carried out an operation of any kind we patiently gathered all the information that could be useful and we took the time to plan out the logistics, the escape routes, the emergency plan B. I was going to do the same thing now. The first thing I needed was someone to help me. I could count on Nicoletta but she wasn’t enough. The time had come to meet with Mikhail again.

  “In two hundred kilometers I’m going to have to stop for gas,” I said over the cell phone.

  “Do you want to see a picture of my pretty cousin?”

  “No.”

  “Then I’m not sure how interested I am in seeing you.”

  “Come on, don’t be lazy. I’ll treat you to a cup of coffee and we can talk a little about Soviet literature.”

  “Couldn’t you have parked in the shadows?” the Russian complained.

  I pointed to a closed-circuit camera mounted on a pole. “They’ve added a new one.”

  He puffed out his cheeks in annoyance. “All right, what do you need this time? Am I going to have to dig another grave in the countryside?”

  “I’m in trouble, Mikhail.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that but I hope it doesn’t involve me in any way.”

  I pulled the cash from the sale of my three girls out of my pocket and laid the money down next to the stick shift. He peeled off a five hundred euro note and slipped it into
his shirt pocket.

  “For the trouble of coming out here.”

  “I need somebody to shadow an ’Ndrangheta bookkeeper like they were glued to him and report all conceivable information back to me,” I said, the words tumbling out of my mouth all at once.

  “Are you planning to rip off the Calabrian Mafia?”

  I shrugged. “That might be an idea, but right now all I want is the information. They’re using La Nena to launder dirty money and I want to get them out of there.”

  “You’re crazy,” he snickered, reaching out for the door handle.

  “I’m not done. I’m also looking for someone with nothing to lose, ready for anything, smart, on the ball, pitiless. You know, a desperate fugitive on the run.”

  “A renegade.”

  “That’s right.”

  “And we kill him when the job is done.”

  “Exactly. And his money would go to you.”

  “How much are we talking about?”

  “Twenty thousand to tail the bookkeeper. Fifty thousand for the renegade.”

  I monitored his reaction. The money was clearly not enough. “If it all goes according to plan, I ought be able to lay my hands on another 250,000 euros,” I lied, thinking about the money that Brianese owed me.

  “I don’t believe you but theorizing about it’s as a good a way as any to kill some time,” he said as he lit a cigarette.

  “I don’t let people smoke in this car.” The words slipped out of my mouth.

  “Wait: you’re thinking about robbing the ’Ndrangheta and killing somebody who’s supposed to trust you blindly, but you bust my balls about smoking in your luxury automobile?”

  I gestured for him to forget about it and go on. “I can take care of following the guy myself,” he said. “And maybe I have a vague idea of who your renegade could be . . . and figuring things on the fly, I don’t see how I can do it for less than 200,000 euros.”

  “You’re exorbitant.”

  “I’ve never heard the word in my life. Anyway, I may very well be ‘exorbitant,’ but you’re up to your neck in shit.”