“You’re going to get us killed like this,” the bank robber from Marseille implored him. “We’ve got to get out of here fast.”
At last, Rossini snapped out of it. “Yes, let’s get out of here,” he muttered and strode off with a brisk step toward Luc, who was waiting for him with the motor running. Christine put on her helmet and roared off a second later. People started to pour out of the Académie de Billard, attracted by the sounds of gunshots.
I walked away, doing my best to keep from breaking into a run. Max had parked in a nearby side street. He peppered me with questions when he found out that it had been our friend Christine who shot and killed Dini´c. He couldn’t believe that Beniamino could collapse like that either.
I called Bojana. She attacked me with a string of insults.
“Do you want to know where to go get Uncle Lazar or shall we talk again after you’ve calmed down?”
“There was no need to put Ana’s life in danger,” she retorted furiously.
“We couldn’t trust you,” I said, cutting her off. I gave her the address of the farmhouse. “He’s locked in the basement.”
“I just hope you treated him well. My family might not be pleased,” the Serbian woman said in a threatening tone of voice.
“From this moment on, as far as all the members of the Garašanin family are concerned, we no longer exist,” I stated, enunciating my words very clearly. “Otherwise we’ll circulate the video that shows how Natalija Dini´c was betrayed by her bodyguards.”
Bojana said nothing. Then she hung up. I was sure we’d never see her again.
“You’ve gotten so good at spinning bullshit,” Max said, admiringly.
I broke the phone’s SIM card in half and tossed it out the car window. A gust of icy wind blew in.
“Let’s just hope this is all over,” I sighed.
The fat man said nothing. He handed me a flask of Calvados. An act of brotherly kindness. It was exactly what I needed.
There was no one at the safe house but the couple from Marseille.
“Beniamino decided to stay in Vienne,” Luc explained. “He said he needed some time alone.”
Christine finished rolling herself a cigarette. “I don’t like the fact that he’s driving around on a stolen motorcycle that was used in a murder. Natalija Dini´c was a big gun and all the cops in town are going to have their eyes peeled.”
“He ought to be here, safe, with us,” her husband chimed in.
“I’ll go find him,” I said.
I found him sitting on the steps of a small Roman temple in a city square. He was smoking a cigarette and drinking a beer. It was really too cold to brave the out-of-doors, but plenty of other patrons of the bar that had served Beniamino were sitting outside so they could enjoy a cigarette.
I joined him, though I couldn’t keep from expressing a note of disapproval.
“How the fuck are you sitting on this goddamned ice-cold piece of stone?”
“Your ass is resting on a piece of history. Try to show some respect.”
I nodded and looked around for the motorcycle.
“I hid it,” he reassured me. “They’ll find it come springtime.”
“Luc and Christine are worried. And so are we.”
“Did you think I’d gone nuts and forgotten the basic rules for a killer on the run?”
The bitterness of his tone couldn’t conceal the despair in his voice.
“What happened?”
He took a sip and handed me the glass. “Natalija was a creature straight from hell,” he explained. “She was happy to see me. She wasn’t afraid of my gun, much less the look of hatred in my eyes. She embraced me and whispered words of love in my ear. The same exact words that Sylvie used. Her voice was identical, even the way she caressed my back was the same. For a long moment I believed that she was my woman. I’m just lucky that Christine took care of wiping her off the face of the earth.”
“We’ve always been puppets dancing on Dini´c’s string.” I’d been wanting to talk about this for a while, and now was the time. “Maybe because she was a woman, maybe because she was a clone of Sylvie, but we’ve never been clear-eyed and determined in our fight against her.”
“What do you mean?”
“Twice now you’ve aimed a gun straight at her, and both times you failed to pull the trigger.”
“The first time it was Sylvie who asked me to kill only her husband.”
“And you knew perfectly well that killing her man at the altar as the two of them were swearing their undying love in the presence of a patriarch would inevitably lead to all this. We could have spared ourselves years of pointless suffering.”
He sighed. “You’re right. What do you want me to do? Say I’m sorry?”
I grabbed his arm and squeezed it hard. “Don’t even think of it. But now you get back to Sylvie and do your best to make things right.”
“First we’re going to have to make a withdrawal. We’re out of money, Marco.”
“Whose turn is it this time?”
“A jeweler in Avignon. The proprietor is a fence and a police informer.”
I snorted. “He deserves it but that doesn’t make it any less dangerous,” I said as I stood up. “I can’t take this cold anymore. And I’m hungry.”
“Who do you think has the run of the kitchen this time, Max or Christine?”
“I’d bet on the woman from Marseille.”
I would have won, too. With a clean apron and a pair of oven mitts she hardly seemed like the woman who just a few hours earlier had eliminated one of the unquestioned queens of the Serbian criminal underworld.
A pork roast and baked potatoes with sour cream. Rossini waited until the food and the red wine had to some extent alleviated the tension that had built up; then he thanked Christine. “I’ll always be grateful to you for what you did.”
She stood up and planted a kiss on his forehead. “It was a real pleasure to murder that slut.”
Beniamino wrapped her in an affectionate embrace. “I’d still be standing there in a daze, with no idea what to do,” he confided without embarrassment.
Luc raised a glass. “Here’s to victory, and to the end of this war.”
Max followed suit. “Here’s to Sylvie, and here’s to all of us.”
The following morning our tiny army broke ranks. There was no longer any reason for it to exist. Beniamino and the couple from Marseille left for Avignon by train, Max went back to Italy, and I headed for Ninon.
I was almost certain that she’d give me the heave-ho but I needed to be with a woman, I needed to share a little affection with someone, share the routine of everyday life.
When I walked into the Tip Top Bar she was talking with a supplier and pretended not to notice me. The two regular customers greeted me with sympathetic smiles. I sat down and started leafing through a sports paper, waiting for the moment to approach the bar and receive the harsh treatment I certainly deserved.
At a certain point I realized that she was staring at me, her lips twisted into a sneer of contempt. I steeled myself and stood up.
“Ciao, Ninon.”
“What are you doing here?”
“I need a little advice,” I said, taking a stab in the dark. “It’s too cold out to go on drinking beer and anisette boilermakers. I’d like an alternative that’ll heat me up just right.”
“Am I supposed to find that bullshit you just served up somehow interesting?”
“I’m surprised. It struck me as a brilliant pickup line. Concise and amusing, in other words just perfect.”
“What do you want?”
“To stay with you,” I replied, serious now. “For a while. As long as you want. A minute or the rest of my life.”
“There’ve been two others in the meanwhile,” she informed me in a hard voice.
I shrugged. “I’ll manage to survive that piece of news,” I shot back playfully, even if I’d have preferred never to know.
“I like you but you’ve turned out to be a real disappointment.”
“I’ll behave.”
She stuck her hand in her bucket purse, rummaging around for her house keys. “I don’t want you here, upholstering my bar,” she clarified, before handing me the keys. “I’ll see you tonight.”
I left the bar feeling like a man who had just been healed by a miracle, and suddenly regained the use of his legs. She came in late that night, got comfortable next to me on the big sofa in front of the television set. We watched a couple of episodes of a show in which mankind does its best to survive a zombie apocalypse. She fell asleep with her head on my chest.
We started having sex again after a few days. We were in no hurry and neither of us was looking to prove anything. We were two people who’d decided to keep each other company for a while.
The one day the bar was closed, I squired her around town. A little shopping, a few museum exhibits, the movies, and an Indian restaurant or two: these were the things she loved. I tried to take her to a blues concert but she vetoed that idea firmly.
“You’d have to be a missionary or a Red Cross volunteer to want to listen to music born out of slavery. Sadder than hell.”
I disagreed and time was I would have argued the point with deranged fury; but just then, I found the way she said it absolutely irresistible.
Ninon liked novels. She had a friend with a bookstore, and she’d pick out books for Ninon and drop them off at the bar. She’d spend her mornings reading. After breakfast she went back to bed and hungrily devoured page after page.
I had plenty of time to myself and every once in a while I’d play a DVD from her career as a porn star. Men with overgrown cocks, women too horny to be true, and threadbare plots. Ninon was the most beautiful actress, and her husband the actor most generously endowed by Mother Nature.
It made a strange impression on me to watch her. It didn’t turn me on, but I didn’t dislike it either. One day she asked me a very specific question, taking it for granted that I’d watched her movies.
“I know your artistic opus by heart but I don’t recognize you, I don’t smell the scent of your skin. In short, I see the actress.”
“Does it bother you that I’ve worked in the porn industry?”
“Not a bit,” I replied, stung.
“Then stop keeping a safe distance between your dick and my ass.”
That’s just the way Ninon was.
One day Rossini came to see me. We met in a restaurant about ten kilometers outside of town.
“I’m leaving for Beirut,” he announced. “I’m going to see the one I love.”
“How is she?”
“The same,” he replied, pulling a fat manila envelope out of his inside jacket pocket. It was full of cash.
“That’s a lot of money,” I observed. “I don’t need that much.”
“Everyone always needs money,” he retorted. “And the job came off nicely. The kind of job that sets you up for a nice long time.”
“News about the Garašanins?”
“Bojana has been punished. The family called her back to Belgrade, but without her girlfriend Ana, who has apparently been sent to run a drug-dealing network in Hamburg.”
“Solid source?”
“Solid and certified. I’ve bought more than a few pieces off Vukašin Joksimovič.”
Joksimovič was a notorious Serbian arms dealer, an independent operator who supplied anyone who came along, without getting permission from the various mafia families. He had a sincere liking for old Rossini and would never give him bad intelligence.
“That was cruel of them. There was no need to mess with her emotional life,” I commented.
“If Bojana wasn’t the daughter of one of the bosses, she’d be six feet under by now. Ana’s going to have to pay the price for the two of them, and I’d be willing to bet that a few months from now she’ll be behind bars, serving time for trafficking in narcotics.”
“They can go fuck themselves,” I said, cutting the discussion short and moving on to more agreeable topics.
“Did I already tell you that her name is Ninon?”
“The porn star? Yes.”
“She used to be,” I clarified for no real reason. “In any case, for once I’m happy. I take care of unimportant details so that I can live comfortably with her. And I’m satisfied with that. The gang war drained me, and I’m having a hard time getting back into gear.”
“Will it last?”
I shook my head. “No. It’s just an interlude.”
“Or else it’s a limbo . . .”
“Whatever it is, it works for me.”
Time flowed over our lives and we didn’t even notice. I lived at Ninon’s place for more than two years and it was actually Beniamino who finally dragged me away. Looking back after all this time I can admit that I was happy with that woman. She’d figured out that our castle was bound to crumble the minute she started asking questions, and in fact she was careful not to ask them. As for me, I’d taken great care not to oppress her with what she referred to as “the usual bullshit I get from men.”
We’d spend hours at a time in silence, but every time we happened to catch each other’s eyes, we would smile. Tender, vulnerable, but real. Back then, the money from Rossini allowed me to do nothing at all. I’d started getting back into the blues with a certain focus. I read articles and books, I bought records, I went out to hear French and American musicians passing through. And I had the good luck of hearing at the last minute about a concert by the great singer and harmonica player Fabrizio Poggi who was performing with his band Chicken Mambo. His version of I’m On the Road Again warmed my heart. But it didn’t always go that way. Sometimes I’d come home upset. The blues can be cruel; without you even noticing, the blues will dig a hole inside you, will slap you in the face with memories, or push you into a pit of nostalgia.
But as always, the blues fed my sense of equilibrium.
My relationship with alcohol had changed, too. I drank less than I used to. A glass always seemed to last longer. Ninon was good for me, she seemed to limit the excesses that I required to tolerate life.
The phone call came late one spring afternoon. I’d followed the twists and turns of a mountain road all the way up to a tiny village where a group of ex-hippies lived. With the passing of the years, they’d come to appreciate the importance of organic farming and started producing first-class wines and cheeses.
I was spreading a blue-veined goat cheese onto half a baguette when my cell phone started buzzing in my shirt pocket.
“You need to come to Beirut,” said Rossini, sad and worried. I knew that tone of voice, and this was no time to ask questions.
“All right.”
“You’ll get a call from Max, he’s organizing your trip.”
Two minutes later, the fat man called. “What’s happening?” I asked.
“No idea. Beniamino didn’t tell me. We’ll find out when we get to Lebanon.”
I wasn’t at all happy to hear from my friends that day and in that way. I had no desire to leave my Ninon, and I knew that if I wanted to keep from lying to her, I’d have to stick her with a line something like: “I have to leave, I can’t tell you why, and I don’t know if and when I’ll ever come back.”
When I did it, she looked at the duffel bag that now contained all my worldly possessions and pointed to the door. “Good luck,” was all she said before closing the bedroom door behind her.
I slipped out of her life with a feeling of death in my heart. As I was driving straight to the airport, I did my best to justify my actions, telling myself that in the world I came from, when a friend calls you, nothing else really counts for much.
I landed at Charles de Gaulle airport, where Max was waiting for me. I found him at the duty-free shop as he was loading up on foie gras and French chocolates.
I gave him a hug. “I hadn’t heard there was a famine in Lebanon.”
“Always best to stock up, just in case,” he retorted, showing me a bottle of Calvados.
We waited for our flight to be called in a nondescript bar disguised as a brasserie. The staff hated travelers passing through and treated them with a brazen and relentless rudeness.
Max was in the mood for a fight but I managed to calm him down. “In all this time, neither one of us felt the urge to reach out to the other. Are we still friends?” I asked.
“What a bullshit question,” he replied, pretending to be offended. “The truth is that you’ve been so clingy over the past few years that a little distance was necessary, therapeutic even.”
“I almost never thought about you and I never missed you at all.”
The fat man gave me a level stare with his pale blue eyes. “As far as that goes, I haven’t exactly been wallowing in nostalgia either,” he shot back, changing his tone of voice. “You want to play truth or dare? I’m happy to. That fucking gang war ruined our lives and we needed time and distance from everything that might remind us of what we’d been through. Even our dearest friends.”
As he spoke, I sized him up attentively. He was tan, and even if he hadn’t lost so much as an ounce, he was still looking pretty fit.
“What have you been doing all this time, Max?” I asked, my curiosity aroused.
“Are you already tired of playing the game?”
“Yes, just answer my question.”
“I worked in an alpine hut in the mountains.”
“So that’s why you look like Friar Tuck from Robin Hood,” I joked. “Didn’t Beniamino set you up with some of the take from the robbery?”
Gang of Lovers Page 4
