Gang of Lovers

by Massimo Carlotto

  That was her first name: her surname was Colin. I learned that when I rang her doorbell the following day. The night at the Tip Top Bar had been challenging, both in terms of consuming alcohol and in terms of controlling my anger. A ridiculous number of contenders for her attention whom I’d gladly have gotten rid of by waving a sawn-off shotgun. The lovely bartender had invited me over for lunch, but there was nothing on the kitchen table but a paper sack with two ham sandwiches.

  “Wine or beer?” she asked.

  “Beer,” I answered, absentmindedly. All my attention had been drawn to a poster that showed Ninon, practically naked, feverishly clutching at some man.

  “I worked in porn until two years ago,” she explained. “And that big handsome hunk is my ex-husband. He’s no longer acting either, now he’s a producer in Slovakia.”

  “Will you give me a complete set of all your movies?” I asked, perfectly serious.

  “No,” she replied, and then she kissed me.

  Ninon was beautiful. I’d have stayed in her bed for the rest of my life but there was no room for me in her life. I was just a foreigner passing through, a good way to break up the monotony of a town where all the men were after her but none really wanted her. She accepted the situation because the Tip Top Bar had been in her family for as long as anyone could remember and she wouldn’t have abandoned it for any reason on earth.

  Two days later I was completely head over heels in love with her. When it dawned on me that my time was up, I walked into the bar and asked her to run away with me. Right then and there.

  Ninon lit two cigarettes and stuck one between my lips. “Please, don’t be ridiculous. Don’t leave me with such a depressing memory of you.”

  But I just kept making things worse. Luckily she got sick of it quickly and kept me from sinking all the way to rock bottom.

  “Beat it, handsome!” she hissed, cold as ice. I turned on my heel and headed straight for the door.

  As I walked past the table with the two retirees, I heard one comment to the other: “Another day, another asshole, eh, Louis?”

  He was right, and everything about what had happened kept on making me feel shitty. Ninon didn’t deserve to be treated like that. This was collateral damage in the war that would only come to an end, perhaps, with an inevitable execution.

  At the Vienne train station, we found Luc waiting for us with a small delivery van. The safe house was just another farmhouse way the hell out in the countryside. It hadn’t been lived in for years, and there was dust everywhere. Plus it was freezing. The heaters were going full blast, but the place wasn’t even going to begin to warm up until the next day.

  Max went to help Christine get the kitchen into working shape. I went in search of Beniamino to bring him up-to-date on our scouting trip in Lyon.

  The first thing I told him about was the little front garden. He asked me about a couple of details, but only to be polite; it was clear he had other things on his mind.

  “You’ve talked to Sylvie,” I guessed.

  “Right. I told her that we’ve been forced to give up on the idea of hitting Natalija Dini´c ’s business interests and she didn’t take that well at all. She insulted me. Every day that passes, she seems to have a crueler tongue.”­

  I pulled a small flask of Calvados out of my jacket pocket. I’d been carrying it around with me for the past two days and I had yet to taste a drop. I unscrewed the cap and handed it to my friend.

  He took a substantial gulp. “At this point, everything about this thing hurts. It’s just sick.”

  I agreed, and I sat there listening to his sad, weary thoughts. He despaired over the woman he loved, who could no longer find anything to care about in her life.

  “The only thing about me that she loves is the violence I can unleash on her enemies.”

  “They’re your enemies too. And ours.”

  “But Sylvie has forgotten that part.”

  We were interrupted by Luc, who came to announce that dinner was ready. A giant onion frittata that Max praised to the high heavens, though with pedantic asides on just how he would have cooked it differently. Christine paid him no mind. And neither did we. The next day Natalija had an appointment with her hairdresser and all we cared about was making sure we arranged for the best possible surveillance.

  “It’s important that all of us be there,” Beniamino hammered home. “We need to figure out whether or not the Garašanins intend to hold up their end of the deal.”

  “I’d be amazed if they didn’t,” I retorted. “We’re holding their Uncle Lazar hostage and they are completely determined to get their hands on all of Dini´c’s businesses.”

  Rossini finished chewing a mouthful of food. “Never trust a bunch of Serbian gangsters, especially if you’re not Serbian yourself,” he pronounced. “For all we know, at this very moment, they’re negotiating with Natalija because they’ve decided that an alliance would be more useful and don’t care if Lazar does wind up in an unmarked grave.”

  I nodded but Beniamino clearly didn’t think we were done with our discussion. “I don’t understand why you trust Bojana.”

  That wasn’t entirely true. Still, I’d taken the value of the hostage for granted. “I made a mistake,” I admitted easily.

  Rossini turned to the others. “Should we dig a little deeper?”

  Max grinned. “That won’t be necessary. The fact is that Marco’s been mooning after a certain hot bartender and his brains have turned to mush.”

  “Well, who is she?” Luc and Christine wanted to know. The fat man didn’t have to be asked twice. “She’s an ex-porn star.”

  “If she’s French, Luc is bound to know her work,” Christine broke in. “He’s a compulsive consumer of pornos.”

  “Not true. I like erotic movies. And what’s wrong with that?” her husband said, putting up a lame defense.

  “If you ask me, they’re boring,” added his spouse. “Right?”

  Beniamino, Max, and I voiced our agreement.

  “You’ve just handed me over to the enemy,” Luc said, giving us a look of reproof. “From now on, my life is going to be a living hell. I’m going to be put on a diet of heist flicks. That’s all Christine will watch.”

  We all broke out laughing and went on ribbing him for a good long while. But our friend Christine hadn’t missed the point that I still hadn’t revealed the name of my bartender.

  When I told them the name she went by professionally, Luc’s eyes widened in surprise. “Wow, she’s gorgeous.”

  “Yes. The most beautiful woman on earth,” I sighed.

  I caught the mocking, baffled glances my friends were exchanging and insisted that what I was telling them was nothing but the honest truth. “And I’ll never forget her.”

  “I can’t believe it,” Rossini blurted out in amazement. “You’ve gone all gooey again over some woman who doesn’t even want you.”

  “Who didn’t understand me,” I corrected him. “That’s a different matter.”

  “Spudorato bugiardo,” Christine scolded me in Italian, calling me a shameless liar as she refilled my glass.

  Alarm clock at six A.M. Coffee and dry biscuits. Then back into the train, packed in with commuters and students. It was raining, for a change. A fine, irritating drizzle. We bought umbrellas from a young man from Ghana who was slightly offended when we didn’t try to haggle over the price.

  “It’s not because you think I’m a starving beggar and you’re just trying to give me charity, is it?” he asked.

  “No,” Max replied. “We’re just in a hurry. No matter what, your price is too high.”

  “Your fault,” the young man shot back. “I would have been glad to knock the price on each item down fifty cents.”

  We spent the morning watching apartment building doors and doormen, streets and alleys, cars and public conveyances, fac
es, uniforms, restaurants, bars, and shops. As Max and I expected, Rossini chose the little garden courtyard in front of the building with the dentist’s office.

  “It’s like a cage. Once she sets foot in there, she won’t be able to get away,” he said in a flat voice. He jutted his chin to point out the escape route. “We’ll use a motorcycle. Luc’ll drive.”

  “And you’ll be on the opposite side of the street on another bike,” he added, to Christine this time. “You’ll be keeping an eye on the two bodyguards and any cops who happen along. If anyone pulls a gun, so do you.”

  We ate lunch separately. Max dragged me to rue de Brest, of course, where he methodically crammed himself full of food after studying the menu as if it were sacred scripture. He also ordered a number of dishes for me so that he could sample them himself. An extended tasting menu.

  We caught up with the others not far from the hairdresser’s an hour before Natalija’s appointment, to make sure that Bojana hadn’t invited us to a bloodbath. Everything looked quiet. We chose the glass window of a coffee shop as our vantage point. Natalija Dini´c’s car pulled up right on time. Bojana got out and opened the rear door and from the car emerged . . . Sylvie. From fifty yards away, the two women, the two great rivals, were identical. Rossini had turned to stone; he was white as a sheet.

  He turned to look at us. “Her hair,” he stammered in a hoarse voice. “Sylvie has been wearing hers like that for a little over a month. How could she know that? And the coat? It’s a Marras from last year, I gave it to her at the beginning of March, and Sylvie can’t have worn it more than two or three times.”

  “Someone has been spying on her,” I whispered, my stomach churning at the implications of that fact.

  Natalija was still a few steps ahead of us. She knew that Sylvie was in Beirut, and if she knew about her style preferences and the recent changes to her apperance, that meant that Natalija was close enough to kill her whenever she chose. Or, worse, kidnap her again.

  “I never suspected a thing,” Rossini admitted, in horror. “I thought I’d put my wife somewhere safe, but I couldn’t have been more wrong.”

  Just then Ana, the Serbian gangster’s second bodyguard, got out of the car and leaned on the door. Bojana went over to her and together they started scanning the street circumspectly. It only took them a few seconds to spot us. Bojana Garašanin started in our direction and strolled past the window with a quizzical look on her face. Rossini shook his head to reassure her that nothing would happen that day.

  The moment had come to vacate the premises, but Beniamino was still glued to his seat.

  “I want to get a good look at her. I want to understand how close the resemblance is.”

  And so we waited, surrounded by faux cappuccinos and slices of too-sweet cake. The two bodyguards couldn’t figure out what we were still doing there. They talked intently the whole time, wrapped in ankle-length down coats loose enough to effortlessly conceal the weapons they wore on their belts.

  Bojana took out her cell phone and a second later mine started ringing.

  “Should I be worried?” she asked.

  “No,” I replied. “The resemblance is stunning and we’re just trying to come to terms with this insanity.”

  “Understood. Have you made up your minds about when you’re going to act? The clock is ticking and she might sniff out the danger.”

  “Soon. Very soon,” I replied. I didn’t hang up right away. I couldn’t miss this opportunity to ask a very specific question. “Does your boss know where Sylvie is hiding?”

  “It seems to me I was pretty clear when I told you that she studies her photographs continuously. They come by email a couple of times a month. And the two Druze guarding her are just a couple of old jerks,” she explained, and then hung up.

  To see Natalija Dini´c again was even more stunning.

  She emerged from the doorway walking just as Sylvie did; her face bore the same fierce expression as the Franco-Algerian dancer’s so often had when I’d admired it, thousands of times in the past. Only she was the wrong person. Unlike Rossini’s woman, she was rotten inside. Pitiless, cruel, and perverse. Dangerous.

  At the sight of our stunned reactions, Christine Duriez reacted sternly. “Wipe those stupid expressions off your faces,” she hissed. “It’s nothing but a crude replica.”

  A few hours later, at the end of a silent dinner, I informed the others that Bojana had calmly admitted that someone had been spying on Sylvie in Beirut.

  “She’s always been able to rely on powerful connections,” said Beniamino. “But the thing I don’t get is how the Garašanins are going to justify her death and take over her businesses. Bojana is one of them, everyone will think it’s strange that she failed to lift a finger to protect her boss.”

  Suddenly I glimpsed the whole matter from a completely different point of view. Beniamino had been right when he’d scolded me for the trust I’d placed in Bojana. “She and Ana are going to open fire the second after you kill Dini´c.”

  “Probably. They’re going to use the fact that we consider them our accomplices to shoot me when I least expect it. Her willingness to cooperate just helps to create an atmosphere of trust, to get me to lower my guard.”

  “We’re forgetting about Lazar,” Max broke in.

  “No, we’re not,” I retorted. “Their objective is to eliminate the threat that Beniamino constitutes. They’ll pretend to offer the two of us safety in exchange for their uncle.”

  “It was the way they acted today that put me back on my guard,” Rossini explained. “They stood there the whole time leaning against the car in the bitter cold, instead of taking advantage of those comfortable leather seats. Ready to open fire.”

  “So what are we going to do?” Luc asked.

  Rossini stood up and got a bowl full of walnuts and a bottle of wine from the sideboard. “We’ll change the plan,” he replied.

  “We can’t kill Bojana,” I hastened to remind him. “That would mean declaring war on the Garašanin family.”

  “And we can’t afford that,” Rossini added. “If we can’t think of a way to screw them all, we’ll have to think about just setting Lazar free and escaping to the far side of the planet with Sylvie.”

  “South America,” suggested Christine.

  “Australia,” Luc proposed as an alternative.

  Max and I looked at each other, appalled, and immediately started racking our brains for an idea.

  An execution in the middle of a large city like Lyon was a damned serious matter. The police exercised minute and extensive control over the city, and the all but certain firefight with the two Serbian women further complicated things. If we wanted to have a decent chance of coming out of this alive and free, we’d need the time to do thorough advance work. Instead, we’d only had one night to patch together a plan, a single violent blow based on the desperate awareness that Natalija was stronger than us and that we absolutely had to kill her that same day.

  After Luc, Christine, and Beniamino roared away aboard a pair of high-powered motorbikes that they’d stolen from the chop shop where they’d been stored until just moments before, I started running down the long list of unknowns that could undermine the outcome of the operation. Most of them seemed to have something to do with me.

  “You drive,” I told Max, tossing him the car keys. “The way I feel right now, I might hit someone.”

  The fat man gave me a sour look.

  “Don’t worry, when the time comes I’ll be perfectly calm and everything will go off without a hitch,” I retorted irritably.

  When I reached my position, old Rossini was just entering the little garden. He was wearing a long raincoat over his motorcycle jacket and he’d perched a flat cap white as snow on his head. Details that any eyewitnesses would remember accurately, forgetting the other details that might actually have helped to identify him.
Immediately afterward he vanished, tucked away into a providential recess in the apartment building’s façade. Another ten minutes and darkness would fall. Exactly when we expected our target to show up.

  In that kind of situation, time runs exasperatingly slow. I felt like I was about to lose my mind, and I couldn’t seem to sit still. Luc and Christine, on the other hand, were ostentatiously relaxed. No one would ever have guessed that they were both armed and ready to shoot at a moment’s notice.

  At last the car pulled up. Just as she had the day before, Bojana got out and opened the rear door. At that exact moment, I pulled out my cell phone and called her, praying that her phone would be on and that the gods of mobile telephony would look down kindly upon me.

  She answered on the second ring, just as she was helping Natalija out of the car. “A sniper has Ana in his sights,” I lied, hoping I sounded convincing. “She’s a dead woman if you try to screw us. It’s in your interest to get out of here fast.”

  The Serbian bodyguard snapped her phone shut. Her eyes scoured the street trying to spot me. I raised one hand to make it easier for her.

  Bojana walked her boss to the gate leading into the little garden and then went back to the car. A few seconds later, Ana started the engine back up and took off, tires screeching.

  Dini´c whipped around. She realized that she’d just been betrayed and accelerated her pace, hoping to find safety inside. But Rossini blocked her way, leveling a pistol fitted with a silencer straight at her chest.

  Natalija smiled and threw her arms wide. “My love,” she exclaimed and hugged him tight, whispering tender words. The same words that Sylvie would have used, a mixture of Arabic and French.

  The old bandit collapsed under the weight of the Serbian woman’s umpteenth brilliant ploy. Not only was she identical to his wife, but she knew all the secrets of their relationship. He couldn’t bring himself to pull the trigger. He couldn’t even break free of that embrace.

  It was Christine who finally put an end to the impasse. She raced across the street and, when she reached them, she placed the muzzle of the big-bore revolver against the woman’s temple and fired. Natalija Dini´c dropped to the ground. Beniamino went on staring at her, misty-eyed. His face was spattered with her blood. Christine grabbed him by the arm and forced him to start walking. But the old bandit moved slowly, awkwardly.