His name had been Vule Lez, and he was another Serbian gangster. As he died, he bled all over Natalija Dini´c’s wedding dress, in the Serbian Orthodox church of St. Sava, in Paris, before pews full of guests. An execution-style murder that had been strategically important in terms of the feud’s outcome. Dini´c’s first husband, on the other hand, had asked for it. I couldn’t even remember his real name anymore, only the name the Serbian intelligence agency had given him when he showed up in Padua. Pierre Allain. This guy wanted to force us to investigate the theft of a colossal quantity of drugs from the vaults of the Institute of Legal Medicine. We’d politely turned down the job, but he had insisted, had made life hard for us, forcing Rossini to shoot him. We’d buried his corpse under the one of the countless new highways being built across the northeastern Italian countryside and had considered the chapter closed until his widow decided to take revenge. In the worst way possible.
“Your boss should have taken it out on us,” I replied, “not on Rossini’s woman. She had Sylvie kidnapped, she tortured her, and then she sold her to a gang of Kosovar mafiosi. She suffered too much, and now she can’t forget.”
The woman touched her temple with a brusque gesture. “The truth is that she’s out of her mind. Both of them have gone crazy. Natalija lives only to look as much like Sylvie as possible. She’s had surgery three times now, and she keeps staring at pictures of her, trying to figure out new details to copy. Her plan is to eliminate Rossini’s woman, but only once she’s become her identical twin. And then she’ll take care of the rest of you. And what she has in mind must have been suggested by the Devil himself.”
I shook my head, horrified. “That’s not going to happen. We’re going to stop her first.”
Bojana smiled. Or rather, she bared her teeth. Tiny, sharp teeth. “Only if I help you,” she pointed out. “And in any case Natalija’s businesses cannot be part of any deal. My family has decided to purchase them.”
“That’s a white slave trade racket,” I reminded her. “We’ve already decided to put an end once and for all to the sexual-slavery ring you people have been running for years.”
She spread her arms wide. “You’re asking too much. My father and his brothers have decided to offer you my boss’s life in exchange for my uncle’s. But that’s it. I know them: if you insist on these ridiculous conditions they’ll sacrifice the hostage, even if he is a beloved member of the family, and they’ll establish an alliance with Natalija Dini´c in order to destroy you.”
Max and I exchanged a glance. We were in no condition to fight a war on two fronts and our strategy was crumbling before our eyes. We hadn’t taken into account the Garašanin family’s greed.
Bojana suddenly stiffened. I turned around and saw Beniamino coming toward us. He’d gotten tired of listening to the conversation through my cell phone.
“Fine. We’ll settle for the hide of Natalija Dini´c,” he told the woman, extending his hand.
She shook it vigorously. “That’s best for everyone. I tell you where to find her and you let my uncle go. He must be freezing, shut up in a car trunk.”
“The last thing in the world we’d want you to think is that we don’t trust you,” I said with a hint of irony. “Still, I think we’ll let your uncle go only after all this is over.”
Bojana Garašanin shrugged her shoulders. “Well, it was worth a try. And in any case, we’d have certainly kept our word.”
“Like hell you would!” snickered old man Rossini. “Now, where is Natalija?”
“In Lyon,” the Serbian woman replied, pulling a couple of folded sheets of paper out of her pocket. “I’ve written all the information you’ll need right here.”
“You’ve been her bodyguard for years and years now,” Beniamino pointed out.
“Twelve years, to be exact. At first, it was just me, and then Ana came to work for her too.”
“That’s exactly who I wanted to talk about. Should we consider her an enemy or is she up-to-date on our understanding?”
The woman took a step forward and poked him in the chest with an extended forefinger. “When it happens we’ll do nothing to interfere, but remember this: nothing happens to Ana, or I’ll cut your throat with my own hands.”
Rossini nodded. “I was just making sure. In cases like this, you always risk making mistakes that could make other people very unhappy.”
Bojana relaxed. “Follow the instructions and we won’t have any problems,” she added as she headed back to her car.
I stared at Rossini. “You just shook hands with her.”
“That’s right.”
“That means we’re willing to let the Garašanin gang take over our enemy’s businesses.”
The old bandit shrugged. “We can’t save the world, Marco. All we can do is try to put a dignified end to this matter.”
“What about Sylvie?”
“Once Natalija is dead, maybe she’ll start living again. Though I have my doubts, and the shrinks don’t seem especially optimistic.”
Max pulled out his cigarettes and we smoked in a silence charged with bitterness.
“If what Bojana says is true, it’ll feel like shooting my own woman,” Rossini commented.
“Are you ready for this?” I asked. “Otherwise we can ask Luc and Christine. I’m sure they’d be happy to oblige.”
I was referring to Luc Autran and Christine Duriez. A married couple, armed robbers from Marseille, who had joined our little army out of a longtime friendship with Rossini. Every so often they’d rob a bank or a jewelry store to help finance our expensive survival.
Beniamino was smoking with his eyes half-shut and his neck tucked deep in the lapels of his long camel-hair overcoat. He crushed out the butt with the heel of his shoe. “It’s up to me to do justice.”
Twenty minutes later we drove through the front gate of a farm that a real estate agent couldn’t manage to sell but had been willing to rent to us for far more than the market price, no questions asked. In the large kitchen, embers still glowed in the fireplace, and the temperature was quite cozy. Max assembled a snack from bread, salami, and cheese.
“Lyon is the capital of fine French cuisine,” he said as he fooled around with a corkscrew. “I know a couple of bouchons in rue de Brest that are worth a visit.”
“I don’t think we’ll be there long enough,” Beniamino retorted. “And more importantly, it’s not like the three of us can be seen at a restaurant together.”
The fat man was unfazed. “That just means I’ll go alone. And then I’ll tell you all about the flavors and smells.”
“Stop spouting bullshit and give us the information that Bojana handed over.”
He pointed to the down jacket hanging from the coatrack. “It’s in the right-hand pocket. And stop insulting my perfectly legitimate desire to expand my culinary and enological horizons,” he objected, gesturing with the salami. “If it weren’t for me, there wouldn’t be even the slightest trace of poetry in your diet.”
“Among your many fine qualities,” Rossini broke in, poker-faced, “the one I value most highly is your incredibly thick skin.”
I ran my eyes over the sheets of paper before interrupting my friends’ banter by reading aloud. It was a list of dates and times, all of Natalija Dini´c ’s appointments over the next two weeks, laid out in a faintly childish handwriting. Gym, dentist, hairdresser, beautician.
Max picked up his iPad and started looking up the addresses on the map of Lyon. “They’re all downtown. Narrow streets, lots of traffic, police everywhere.”
“As long as it’s inside, any building will do. The main thing is to pick the right building for what we want to do,” Rossini said as he stood up. He cocked his pistol. “I’m going downstairs to get the ‘uncle.’ He still needs to eat and he must be curious about how our meeting went with his little niece.”
A few minutes later
, our prisoner was seated at our table, sipping a glass of red wine. His name was Lazar Garašanin, he was close to sixty years old, and he’d distinguished himself in the civil war that had dismembered Yugoslavia by eliminating a respectable number of Croatian civilians. He considered himself a soldier, an officer, and he put on the airs and demeanor of one. But in reality he was nothing but a butcher.
He and two other “veterans” had kidnapped Sylvie and handed her over to Dini´c. For money. Then he’d been hired again to eliminate us in Paris, but he’d made the unforgivable error of underestimating old man Rossini’s experience and instincts. He’d watched his accomplices die, and then he’d surrendered. Beniamino had held the muzzle of his pistol jammed against his forehead for several long minutes.
“Unfortunately we need you alive,” he’d finally whispered in disappointment as he lowered the pistol. Lazar had fallen to his knees, sobbing like a baby.
That same evening we’d sent a message to his niece and the negotiations had gotten underway.
“We met with Bojana,” I informed him.
“In that case, I’ll be going home soon,” he snickered nervously, stroking the gray stubble on his chin.
“That depends on how things turn out,” Rossini retorted menacingly. “In this kind of situation, it’s never a good idea to count your chickens before they hatch.”
The uncle turned pale and concentrated on the butter he was spreading on his baguette. “If you had just let my niece take care of things, we’d be done by now,” he grumbled unhappily. “A few drops of poison, a silk noose around her neck. Quick and clean.”
“We don’t hire hit men,” Beniamino interrupted.
“That’s an offensive term in any language,” the offended Serbian protested, shoring up his own self-respect.
“We’re leaving tomorrow,” I announced, changing the subject. “We’re going to leave you locked up in the cellar, with plenty of food and water, and when the time comes we’ll tell Bojana to come set you free.”
“But that way I don’t have any guarantee that you’ll keep your side of the bargain.”
“Don’t tell me you’re afraid, ‘commandant’?” I asked with a smile.
The Serbian pointed at Rossini furtively. “Yes, I am—of him.”
Lazar really was a poor idiot. He was afraid of Beniamino’s vengeance because his criminal culture couldn’t conceive of the notion of respect. Respect for one’s word, for prisoners, for women and children.
The old bandit took him by the arm. “It’s time for you to go beddy-bye, Lazar Garašanin. You’re no longer welcome here.”
The trip to Lyon took more than five hours. In a brasserie on the outskirts of town we met Luc and Christine. They both looked different than the last time I’d seen them. Evidently they’d made a withdrawal since then, and changing your look was essential in the world of armed robbery.
Luc had shaved his mustache, and Christine had dyed her hair a faded red. Both of them wore coveralls that bore the logo of a janitorial company.
“We found a safe house in Vienne,” Luc informed us. “The lady that rented to us is the widow of a straight-up guy I met in prison.”
“It’s more than thirty kilometers outside of town,” his wife added. “But these days the city isn’t safe. The cops are hunting for a couple of fugitives and they’re checking everybody and everything.”
Rossini shrugged. “We’ll be fast and discreet. Like always.”
Max and I boarded a bus and headed for the center of town, where we planned to scope out the places Natalija Dini´c was a regular. It was nice to stroll through the streets of that beautiful city, both ancient and prosperous, but our minds were on other things. On the one hand, we were relieved at the thought that this whole thing might soon be over once and for all. On the other, we were filled with a kind of dread completely divorced from rational thought. Even though we knew it was the right thing to do and that there were no feasible alternatives, planning a murder that required a betrayal to work just didn’t fit with the lives we’d led up till then.
“That whore ruined our lives and yet an inexplicable sense of remorse will color our experience of her death,” said the fat man, between slurps of beer.
“It’s a burden we’re going to have to share with Beniamino. He’s the one who’s going to be pulling the trigger.”
We had slipped into a bar on rue de la Martinière, where Natalija’s dentist had his office, almost right across the street from the Académie de Billard. You had to walk through a small front garden to get into the building. Though we hadn’t yet checked the other addresses, we both knew that this was where it was going to happen. It was a sort of no-man’s land surrounded by hedges, with a couple of trees that seemed to have been planted with an ambush in mind.
As always, the real problem would be our escape route, but we could leave that detail to the old bandit and the couple from Marseille.
We boarded a taxi and headed to the station. The train was packed with exhausted commuters; some talked on their cell phones, while the rest listened resignedly to bits and pieces of other people’s lives.
“I feel like having a smoke and a drink,” I confided to Max. “And to think I only quit half an hour ago.”
“I hear you. And I’m hungry, too. We just need to fill in the holes in our lives.”
I snickered. “You’ve dated too many shrinks. They’ve left their mark on you.”
“Only the Lacanians. Two Lacanian psychoanalysts, to tell the truth, are plenty.”
“If you ask me, you’ll fall for a third the first chance you get.”
“You can bet on it. Before long I’ll climb a tree and start shouting: I want a woman! Like the crazy uncle in Fellini’s Amarcord.”
“Life during gang wars.” I’d meant it as a cynical wisecrack but it came out sounding gloomier than I’d intended.
“I think you ought to give the idea of a girlfriend who’s a shrink some thought,” the fat man observed. “If you go on like this, every woman you meet will give you the heave-ho the way that cute bartender in La Trinité did.”
“You’re a pal.” In the past few weeks I’d been doing my best to forget about the latest pathetic attempt I’d made at picking up a woman I liked. It was the end of July, a rainy day that was anything but warm. I’d stopped to fill up my tank and the sign across the street had caught my eye: Tip Top Bar.
I decided that a quick shot of something wouldn’t hurt and the next thing I knew I was standing in a bar that was practically deserted except for a couple of retirees, regular customers, each nursing a pastis he meant to make last until evening, and a female bartender who was giving me a level look: arms crossed and a cigarette dangling from her lip.
Forty years old, a cascade of dark curls, a pretty face, made up as if she was waiting her turn to walk the runway for an exclusive Parisian designer. Tits and neckline that you couldn’t miss.
“With someone like you behind the bar, this place ought to be packed with horny men,” I said after ordering a beer and an anisette.
“They show up after sunset,” she replied. “That’s when I’m at my best.”
“Then maybe I’ll wait around for the show to start.”
I took the little shot glass of liqueur and dropped it into the mug of beer. By the time it hit bottom, the anisette was nicely mixed in with the beer. “Just perfect as a thirst-quencher,” I explained.
She paid no attention to me. She’d already filed me away as just another customer. I started staring at her insistently. She got annoyed almost immediately.
“Something wrong?” she huffed.
“I want to strike up a conversation but I can’t figure out the best gambit to attract your attention. I don’t want to get my first move wrong.”
“Oh, you’re a slick one with the girls, aren’t you,” she said in a mocking tone of voice, before
walking over to the radio to change the station.
I took advantage of the opportunity to get up on my tiptoes so I could catch a good look at her butt and her legs. I caught her wry glance as she watched me in the mirror behind the bar. “Everything meet with your approval?” she asked.
“Yes,” I sighed.
She tuned the radio to a station that was playing Coeur de Chewing Gum. Brigitte sang:
Si j’avais le coeur dur comme de la pierre
j’embrassarais tous le garçons de la terre
mais moi j’ai le coeur comme du chewing gum
tu me goûtes e je te colle . . .
“Is your heart all gummy too?” I asked her.
The woman gestured for me to pay attention to the lyrics.
Irrésistiblement amoureuse c’est emmerdant
Irrésistiblement emmerdeuse c’est amusant.
“So now do you get it?” she asked.
“Yep, you’re having some fun at my expense.”
“That’s exactly right.”
“And I deserve it, don’t I?”
“Your question about my heart was strictly for beginners.”
Just then I felt my cell phone buzz in my shirt pocket. It was Beniamino. He was calling to find out whether I’d crossed the border and when he should expect me in Nice. Staring the bartender right in the eye, I told him that I wasn’t far away, but that I would most likely get there a couple of days late because I’d just met the most beautiful woman on earth. My friend asked no questions, it was enough for him to know that I was well and on my way. She, on the other hand, burst out laughing.
“You understand Italian,” I said, stunned.
“Enough. Like everyone here, we’re just a stone’s throw from the border.”
“And I made you laugh.”
“Am I really the most beautiful woman on earth?”
“Absolutely no doubt about it.”
She stuck out her hand. “The name’s Ninon.”
Gang of Lovers Page 2
