Gang of Lovers

by Massimo Carlotto

  “Oh no? Your brigadier wound up right in the middle of a nice raid because you sent him to the wrong hotel.”

  “How could I have known that was going to happen?” the idiot stammered.

  “You’re paid to know things like that.”

  “Okay, so I made a mistake,” he said, fumbling for the right words. “But I don’t see why you’re so angry about it. After all, nothing serious has happened, the whole thing is going to be covered up, no one wants to get Brigadier Stanzani in trouble.”

  “Then you tell me why those two assholes found out about your investigation from the police.”

  “I have no idea, but I already told you: there’s not going to be any investigation.”

  “Maybe not, but those two aren’t going to stop buzzing around you.”

  “Around me?” he asked in surprise. “Let them. I don’t have anything to hide.”

  I grabbed him by the chin and forced him to look at me. “You don’t have the kind of job that could explain your lifestyle, you commit illegal acts, and you’ve committed a murder,” I reminded him. “You need to get the fuck out from underfoot.”

  “And how?”

  I let go of him. “I’m thinking that over right now. When the time comes, I’ll tell you what to do.”

  Federico Togno, red-faced, mumbled out a farewell and hurried away. After a quick look around, I went over and took a seat at the table where Martina and Gemma were finishing their meal. My wife was looking enviously at the pudding her friend was sampling with gusto. She would have liked to order one for herself, but no waiter in the place would have dreamed of bringing her the dessert. I’d been very specific on that point, since I decided day by day exactly what my wife would be having at each meal.

  “What appointments does Martina have this afternoon?” I asked Gemma.

  “Pilates at 4:30 and a massage at 6.”

  “Go pick her up at 4:15,” I demanded.

  Gemma nodded grimly. That meant she’d be forced to wander around town until then, since I clearly wanted her to stay out of the house.

  My spouse, who had understood perfectly exactly what I had in mind, objected under her breath that she had just finished eating, but faced with my complete disinterest, she gave up insisting.

  I locked arms with her and we strolled home. The whole way, she wouldn’t stop talking. She knew that right then she was allowed to talk all she liked and she took advantage of the opportunity to tell me all about the problems her mother was experiencing as she faced widowhood. I listened to all those trite phrases hoping that fate and old age would soon put an end to my mother-in-law’s suffering.

  Once we got home, Martina hurried into the bedroom, while I headed into a room that was furnished with only a beautiful armchair upholstered in oxblood-red leather and a spinning bike. I got comfortable and a few seconds later my wife came in, dressed only in a pair of gleaming white panties and climbed onto the bike, awaiting my command: “Spinning, baby, spinning.”

  She started pedaling and before long she’d found the correct rhythm. I closed my eyes and, lulled by the noise of well-oiled gears, I was finally able to focus on my plans. Buratti, Max the Memory, Togno. I could see their faces clearly, I could hear their voices, and I moved them around like pawns, placing them in a given situation so I could test the results and predict any collateral damage.

  The lucidity of those moments was priceless, and it allowed me to see that the whole operation had somehow been compromised and that Plan B would have to be developed much further.

  I snapped my fingers and she picked up the pace. I planned my moves, I arranged them carefully. I was ready.

  And I was satisfied. I opened my eyes and looked at my spouse. Sweat was streaming down her body, her hair was matted to her head. Complete physical collapse was imminent.

  I helped her off the bike and laid her down on the wall-to-wall carpeting. I ripped off her panties and yanked open her legs.

  Martina welcomed me gratefully.

  CHAPTER NINE

  I gulped down a pizza with a couple of beers, well aware that digesting that mess would be no walk in the park. But I didn’t feel like sitting alone in a restaurant and that had seemed like the quickest solution. On my way back from the bathroom I spotted a rumpled copy of Il Mattino and between bites I leafed through the newspaper’s entertainment pages. That was how I found out that soon, in a local club, my old friend Maurizio Camardi, a renowned saxophonist as well as a connoisseur of beautiful women, would be performing with Marco “Ponka” Ponchiroli, a first-rate pianist I’d gone to hear many times before.

  The pizzeria didn’t stock Calvados so I settled for a grappa. I was worried about Max, who was rummaging around in a part of his past that, despite his efforts, he seemed incapable of letting go. The fat man had an unhappy relationship with the man he had once been. On the one hand, he tried desperately to translate those experiences into something positive in the present; on the other, he struggled to stave off the excesses and the filth that had muddied his dreams and those of many others.

  It was the right night to drink more than usual but I decided to stay within the bounds of a sobriety only slightly distorted by alcohol. A formula of my own invention that corresponded to a precise number of small glasses. The fact was that, for a while now, whenever I got drunk I started thinking about Ninon and crying. I missed her and when I imagined her in another man’s arms I couldn’t hold back my tears.

  I let my eyes range over the women sitting at the tables. I felt so alone and the yearning to love and be loved in return was so violent that I couldn’t arrive at any sort of objective selection. The time had come to ask for the check.

  I had to wait twenty minutes or so before I could say goodbye to Maurizio. He was busy giving advice to the umpteenth young man who just couldn’t seem to win some girl’s heart.

  “You ought to teach a course in seduction. It would be the most popular class in town,” I said as we hugged.

  “You aren’t the first person to suggest this radical new direction, but I think I’ll just stick to music.”

  Then he asked me if was back in Padua for good. I told him that I didn’t know yet. “There comes a time when it’s really hard to pick where to live.”

  “The secret is to never stop traveling,” he said, pointing to his sax. “This guy takes me everywhere, which makes coming home a pleasure.”

  Jazz. I let the good music fill my ears. Every so often I’d check my cell phone, waiting in vain for a message or call from Max.

  Around midnight I went back to the two lovers’ apartment. It was quiet and it smelled good. I turned on the lights in every room so I could take a good look at the place in bright light, then I undressed and flopped down onto the sofa, ready to binge watch some television.

  Those days I obsessively watched absurd programs that told the story of the financial meltdown in the United States. Pawnshops in cities that were economically fucked like Detroit, with endless lines of African-Americans trying to sell anything they could lay their hands on for a few bucks. Houses and mansions were sold off in foreclosure auctions, the dueling buyers attacking each other like sharks, and eventually becoming reality TV characters. Long lines of self-storage units whose padlocks were lopped off with metal shears. The buyers had five minutes to take a look from outside, then they squared off, bids escalating at fifty dollars a pop, vying to purchase objects that had been part of the lives of other people, people who had one day found themselves unable to pay their storage rental fees.

  It was impossible not to marvel at the sheer tawdriness of the content, yet something drove me to keep watching. Especially the shows set in the pawnshop world. Women trying to raise bail money to get their men out of jail, forced to reconcile themselves to the fact that they wouldn’t be able to do so because their jewelry, television sets, computers, and fur coats were valued at a pittance.<
br />
  Every so often someone would come in who was just trying to pay for his medication, but that I couldn’t stand to watch, so I’d change the channel.

  There was a period when I’d kill time until sleep came by pigging out on TV shopping shows. Now the television landscape offered something better: a voyeuristic tour of poverty in the great land of America. The message was always the same: “Go fuck yourselves. It’s up to you to pay the costs of the great recession.”

  The next morning, for no particular reason, I decided to grow out my mustache. It just seemed like a good idea and I looked forward to the day with a mild surge of enthusiasm. I got in my car and headed for La Nena, where I planned to have breakfast, both to mark my territory and to annoy Pellegrini and Togno. When I got there, I found neither. I leafed through a newspaper and sated my hunger with a cappuccino and a pastry, which the menu informed me would cost an arm and a leg. As always, the place was packed with people chatting, laughing, making deals. Five bejeweled ladies were seated near me, intently attacking a tray of tramezzino sandwiches and a bottle of pinot grigio. After exhausting the unusual September weather as a subject, they moved on to parish priests. To my surprise they favored a changing of the guard, the advent of a younger generation. They were sick and tired of old priests with backward ideas about separation and divorce and as I listened it became clear that each of them could boast of one or more controversial cases in their own families.

  But at a certain point the youngest supplied the boundaries delimiting this group’s concept of change. “Just so long as some fresh-faced young priest straight out of the seminary doesn’t come along and decide to welcome a herd of Roma into the parish church or else organize a used clothing drive for convicts,” she said, to a chorus of approval. “I mean, already nobody seems to know what this new pope has in mind.”

  I would gladly have continued following this debate, but just then the proprietor made his entrance. Pellegrini noticed me almost instantly, and came over to my table flaunting an exaggerated smile, far too big given the degree of our acquaintance.

  “I’m so happy you’ve come in to sample our breakfasts. Every ingredient is carefully selected,” he said in a jovial voice.

  “I certainly hope so, considering the prices you charge,” I thought to myself, returning his smile.

  “Your friend decided not to come?”

  “No, not today.”

  He moved closer and lowered his voice. “The fact that you’ve come back means that yesterday’s unfortunate incident has already been forgotten, right?”

  “Certainly,” I replied, doing my best to be convincing.

  I couldn’t pull it off. Pellegrini made that clear to me by shooting me an icy glance.

  He turned on his heel and headed straight for the table where the ladies were dining, cheerfully scattering compliments on their outfits, handbags, hairstyles, and makeup, provoking ecstatic reactions. The man had a way about him. He was a true professional when it came to coddling customers. While I was paying the check, an attractive woman of about thirty-five, drinking an espresso at the counter, started staring at me and smiling in a manner that was extremely discreet but also unmistakable. I smiled back just long enough to figure out she was a housewife who was hooking on weekday mornings, when she was free from family obligations. I waved goodbye and headed out the door to my Škoda, which waited faithfully in the parking lot.

  But I’d gone less than fifty yards when I ran into Gemma, who was walking wearily and with a bored expression.

  “Breakfast at La Nena, I’ll bet,” she said without bothering to say hello.

  “That’s right. And you’re going in for breakfast now?”

  She checked the time on her cell phone. “Yes, well, actually I’m killing time until Martina’s done with her zumba class.”

  “You two are inseparable,” I said, not thinking.

  She decided to have some fun with me. “We live together, in fact,” she explained, staring at me. “Her, me, and Giorgio.”

  My curiosity piqued, I accepted the challenge. “A ménage à trois?”

  “There’s nothing wrong with that, don’t you agree?”

  “Nothing at all.” I decided that she wanted to chat and that maybe she could give me some information about Togno, since she and Pellegrini’s wife spent so much time in the restaurant.

  “Can I treat you to an espresso, Gemma?” I asked, using her given name for the first time.

  “Gladly,” she replied, without a second’s hesitation. “It’s been quite a while since another man invited me to spend a little time with him.”

  “You’re living in a relationship that’s become too exclusive.”

  She broke into a forced laugh that clearly revealed the mask this melancholy woman hid behind, devastated as she was by a complicated existence she didn’t seem at all proud of.

  She linked arms with me and walked me to a very unpretentious café overlooking a piazza crowded with stalls.

  She ordered a glass of red wine and a couple of meatballs. She’d get along famously with Max. I settled for a glass of prosecco.

  “I’d recognized him, you know?” she said suddenly.

  “Who?”

  “The man in the picture you showed to me and Martina. Professor Di Lello.”

  “Had you seen him at La Nena?”

  “Plus on TV, and in the papers. I’m a girl who likes to keep up with the news, you know?”

  “But you didn’t say anything the other night.”

  “At La Nena discretion is the first rule, and the second, and the third.”

  “Giorgio said that he didn’t remember him.”

  “Neither did Martina,” she replied in an ambiguous tone of voice. Then she ordered seconds on wine and meatballs. She didn’t kid around in the morning either.

  I wanted to ask her about Togno but there was something unsettling about that woman that kept me from dismissing her entirely.

  “You don’t take care of yourself the way your girlfriend does,” I said frankly, pointing to her plate and glass.

  She snickered. “I’m the lady’s companion. I can’t be perfect, quite the opposite. My defects have to be as evident as possible, to please my lord and his lady.”

  I stared at her, trying to gauge if she was serious. She smiled and tapped me sharply on the hand. “I’m only kidding.”

  “Do you know Federico Togno?” I asked. “He’s always hanging around at La Nena.”

  She didn’t answer. “Why are you and that fat friend of yours looking for the professor?”

  I took the time I needed to construct an adequate answer, certain that every word I said would be reported back to Pellegrini.

  “There’s a person who’s suffering and can’t seem to put her heart at rest, and she’s asked us to help her.”

  “His sweetheart?”

  I avoided the question. “The tragedy of being forced to live without news of a person you love is a terrible thing, and in time it becomes intolerable. There’s nothing that can alleviate that suffering. Nothing.”

  Gemma grabbed her glass. “Not even this?” she asked, trying to quiet the anxiety I’d provoked in her.

  I wasn’t trying to be cruel, but I kept after her. I was precise and detailed, feeling sure I’d be able to break through her armor of self-destructive cynicism. Toward the end, I asked her once more about Togno.

  She didn’t answer this time either. She preferred to slip into ambiguity, her favorite territory.

  “Giorgio is a king of hearts,” she said. “What kind of king are you?”

  “Maybe I don’t want to be a king at all,” I replied at random.

  She shook her head in disappointment and started to get up. I took her hand.

  “Can I give you my cell phone number?”

  “What for?” she asked warily.


  “Maybe you’ll feel like calling me sometime.”

  “All you want from me is answers,” she retorted bitterly. “There’s nothing else you’re interested in.”

  It was the right time to lie to her. Gemma was ready to believe anything as long as I made her think I was attracted to her.

  Instead I remained silent. That woman was strange and unhappy, she deserved respect. In my world there was no such thing as a lady’s companion.

  She picked up her cell phone and entered my number, then left the café with her head down. She stopped to dry her eyes and light a cigarette. I followed her to a building in the center of town that housed the gym where Martina went to stay in shape. When Martina emerged, Gemma greeted her with a smile and told her something that made her laugh. They walked together, stopping to look at shop windows, then they went into La Nena.

  Max called toward evening. “I’m coming back on the last train. Make sure there’s something for me to eat.”

  I was the least suitable person imaginable to entrust with the task of satisfying a fat man with culinary pretentions. I hurried out to the finest deli in the neighborhood where I was advised by a woman whose only fault lay in her portions, which tended to be overlarge.

  After a quick sprint over to the wine shop I headed home and killed time drinking spritzes and watching TV. While channel surfing I happened upon a show about medical cases that featured the story of a sixteen-year-old boy who weighed 675 pounds. His mother, scarred by the death of her first child, stuffed her second-born like a French goose, until he eventually turned into a statue made of lard, partially reclining under a canopy. To save his life, with the financial assistance of the television network, they finally rushed him to the hospital in a fire engine and there he became, for all intents and purposes, a body to be snipped at, weighed, and displayed whenever the opportunity arose. His mother kept bringing him “a little something” to snack on, but since she was a cast member, no one dared to shoo her away much less banish her.

  I changed the channel when it became evident that that kid had no chance of ever leading a normal life again. The TV crew had showed up too late.