“I can’t see when I’m going to make up for the activities I missed this morning,” she said, as soon as she saw me. “There’s no way to fit them into the coming days.”
Her girlfriend was stroking her hand. “Don’t worry about it. I’ll take care of it. Here, have something to drink.”
I stared at Gemma. Her hair was a mess, she didn’t have a speck of makeup on. “What’s going on?” I asked.
“Giorgio sent us on vacation,” she replied. “For a week.”
“A vacation means cancelling the activities,” Martina pointed out. “The problem is the ones from this morning.”
I couldn’t believe my ears. “So Giorgio has decided that you needed a little time off, and you jump to obey.”
“Giorgio decides everything,” Gemma replied, exaggeratedly resolute. “And we’re fine with it.”
“Are you really sure of that?” I asked.
“I always have been.”
I took a sip of spritz and changed the subject. “On the phone you said you had a message from Pellegrini.”
“He’ll see you tonight at La Nena, after closing time.”
“A tempting invitation,” I commented ironically.
“Will you go?”
“I don’t know,” I replied. “And either way, I’m certainly not going to tell you.”
She nodded, then she turned to her friend. “Go do some shopping, Martina,” she said, pulling a wad of cash out of the pocket of her rumpled skirt suit.
The other woman didn’t have to be told twice and leapt to her feet. “I was just starting to get tired of your complicated conversation,” she muttered. “It’s all because of your diet. Too many toxins in your liver tend to undermine your ability to think clearly.”
Gemma waited for Martina to be out of earshot before asking a question that caught me off guard. “Who’s going to win?”
“We are,” I replied confidently. “The era of handsome Giorgio is coming to an end. A matter of days, if not hours.”
She bit her lip. “Until this morning I was positive, absolutely positive that it was the other way round,” she explained. “Then I saw a hint of uncertainty in his eyes. That had never happened before.”
I shrugged. “I have no idea what he’s planning but I can guarantee that his fate is sealed.”
“What about us?”
“Are you serious?” I hissed, aghast. “This is your chance to finally free yourselves of your ‘lord and master’ and start a new life. You should leap at the chance.”
“You don’t understand . . .”
“No. You’re the one who doesn’t understand,” I interrupted her. “Martina is slipping dangerously into mental illness and you’re willingly hurling yourself into an abyss. I don’t know anything about you and your past but one thing is certain. Your ‘King of Hearts,’ Giorgio Pellegrini, isn’t the treatment, he’s the disease, the virus that’s devouring you.”
Her eyes welled up with tears. “Will he die?”
I decided to tell her the truth. That woman had a right to know in spite of her indestructible loyalty to that sack of garbage. “Probably. I hope so with every ounce of strength in my body. He’s hurt too many people.”
“You don’t seem strong enough to beat him,” she objected. “Maybe you’re overestimating yourself.”
“My friend will take care of him.”
“Who? The fat man in the hospital?”
“No. Someone else.”
“You sure have a lot of friends.”
“You don’t,” I retorted, cruelly. “You’ve been forced to serve as a lady’s companion to a loony just to keep loneliness at bay.”
“And to be Giorgio’s whore,” she added, carefully enunciating her words. “You have no idea how good I am at keeping him happy.”
There was a strain of despair in her voice that left me speechless. Gemma stood up and walked away wearily. I wished her good luck.
“He actually wants a meeting with us in his restaurant?” Beniamino asked in surprise a couple of hours later. He had come back from Punta Sabbioni with a duffel bag full of weapons and ammunition. A sawed off pump-action shotgun, and a couple of handguns with silencers that he was now cleaning and oiling.
“That’s right,” I replied, giving the arsenal a worried glance. I’d never much liked weapons and I’d never been willing to pick one up. Not even to learn how to shoot. There was a very simple reason: I’d never have been able to carry the weight of a dead man on my conscience. I’d always been clear on this point and I left it up to Rossini to manage violence in all its various declensions, because he—unlike me—believed it was a necessity, when justice demanded it.
Max, too, was careful to steer clear of weapons, but that was for different reasons, to do more with his physical condition. He was too much of a butterfingers to be sure that a gun in his hand wasn’t a one-way ticket to suicide, or at best to shooting himself in the foot.
“All right then,” the old bandit cut the conversation short as he peered down the barrel of a gun.
It wasn’t all right with me. “I don’t see why we should walk voluntarily into a trap. I don’t believe he’s inviting us there to offer us a nightcap.”
“We can’t refuse the invitation,” Rossini shot back. “I went into Pellegrini’s place and challenged him. Now he’s calling us back to clarify his position. At the first hint of a threat I’ll kill him and anyone else who tries to put anything over on us.”
I heaved an exasperated sigh. “Do you think that Pellegrini doesn’t know that you’re going to show up armed?”
“I’m sure he’s anticipated every move.”
“In that case, why go?”
“Because we’re the ones who started down this path and now we need to stick with it until we reach the end,” he snorted, annoyed. “All this chatter is messing up my concentration and these guns need my full and undivided attention.”
“Otherwise they might take offense,” I joked as I lit a cigarette.
“That’s exactly right. Especially the .45s. If you don’t treat them like ladies, they’ll pay you back just when you need them most.”
“Cut it out, Beniamino. You seem a little crazy when you talk like that.”
“Well then, let me work in peace while I enjoy this moment of lunacy,” he snickered.
He shot me a wink. It was his way of telling me I could rely on him.
The last customers straggled out of La Nena a little after midnight. They walked past us complaining about the prices and surprised at the proprietor’s arrogance. Pellegrini was on edge, and he was taking it out on his customers. Maybe he wasn’t so sure that his plan was going to work.
We decided to go in when the staff was still there, trusting that that would be one more line of defense against an ambush. Handsome Giorgio didn’t so much as blink. He loudly thanked us for coming in and invited us to follow him into a small dining room where a waiter brought a bottle of champagne and three flutes. He filled one glass and drained it in a single gulp.
“You’d never have agreed to drink with me, so I spared you the awkwardness,” he justified his rudeness. “And after all, this fine French bubbly only helps to set the right, old-fashioned tone. The two self-respecting criminals who drop by to settle accounts with the bad guy du jour. What do you two call each other when you’re alone? Pepé? Jojo?”
I exchanged a glance with Beniamino. This asshole was trying to rile us up, but we’d come just to hear what he had to say, so we sat in silence.
He stuck his forefinger right at me. “You scared Gemma. You told her my time was running out.”
“The simple truth, then,” Rossini broke in, pulling out a pistol and laying it on the table in accordance with time-honored ritual. “Your filthy career is coming to an end.”
Pellegrini pretended to shudder. “Why, what a terrible frig
ht! I almost had a heart attack.”
Something wasn’t right. He clearly had an ace up his sleeve.
“What are you going to do, shoot me here, you pathetic old retired crook?” handsome Giorgio mocked him, laughing in his face.
“No, though I’ll admit I’m strongly tempted,” Rossini replied calmly. “But the time will come, and when it does it will be a pleasure.”
“You’re just a couple of losers,” he went on insulting us. “You’re nobodies, coming in here to try to meddle in my business.”
“You’re through, Pellegrini,” I blurted. “End the charade and tell us about Guido Di Lello. How did he die?”
I was sure he’d try to deny everything, but instead he had no trouble admitting his involvement. “It’s the Swiss woman who’s paying you, right?”
“Yes.”
“Does she just want the truth or does she want to make sure that whoever took her lover away pays the price?”
“That’s none of your business,” I replied.
The proprietor of La Nena was enjoying himself. He seemed annoyed, offended perhaps, but not scared in the slightest.
“I understand: she didn’t hire you to avenge the memory of that idiot professor of hers,” he said. “In that case, turn me over to the cops. Now.”
“We have no intention of involving the police,” Beniamino said evenly.
Pellegrini feigned surprise. “Oh, no? And yet for some reason you’re thick as thieves with Padua police HQ, since the news of the clandestine background checks on Buratti and Max the Memory carried out by that cuckolded idiot Federico Togno leaked from the offices of the Mobile Squad.”
He was referring to Inspector Campagna but there was no point in pursuing that line of conversation. Useless and dangerous to provide him with any information.
“You’ve no doubt noticed that I just described Togno as a cuckolded idiot,” Giorgio went on. “And I didn’t choose the term at random, since you took his wife away from him.”
“She gave us plenty of useful information,” Rossini said. “The details that we needed to fill in the big picture.”
Pellegrini threw out both arms. “I admit my misjudgment. I underestimated the potential downside of a second-rate whore.”
He suddenly grabbed his cell phone and slammed it down on the table. “Call your trusted cops or else walk out that door and never show your faces around here again.”
I sighed. “We’ve delved into your past,” I started telling him. “We know that you’ve been in the service of powerful men like Sante Brianese and that you’ve always been ready and willing to sell out whoever you had to in order to keep from paying for your crimes.
“You’re challenging us to call the law on you because, no doubt, you’re in a position to negotiate and you’d be able to get away scot-free this time too.
“But we’ve made up our minds to stop you, to shut down your illegal activities, and put an end to the harm you’ve been doing. Once and for all. I confess that we’d like to know the truth about what became of Guido Di Lello to satisfy the needs of our client, but if we can’t do it, we’ll be able to live with ourselves. The complete absence of room for bargaining means that we can’t force you to talk.”
Pellegrini rolled his eyes. “Are the two of you really going to keep to this cut-rate script from a movie from the fifties? Brush off the mothballs and look around you with fresh eyes because, and I say this in total honesty, you’re so pathetic that, in the end, you make me feel a little tenderly toward you. If you want, I’d be glad to hire you, so you can entertain our guests with your ridiculous Jean Gabin routine.”
“I’m getting tired of your insults,” old Rossini said menacingly.
“Do you care to make a bet that you’re going to have to go on taking them for a good long time?”
I knew my friend far too well not to know he was starting to reach the end of his rope and that the next insult would be washed off with blood. I stood up.
“Let’s go,” I said to Beniamino. “The visit ends here, as do the good manners.”
Rossini grabbed his pistol and put it away in his shoulder holster without ever taking his eyes off handsome Giorgio, who caught me off guard once again by inviting us to stay a while longer.
“We’re still not finished here,” he explained. “The reason I asked for this meeting, aside from the priceless pleasure of your lovely company, is to come to an agreement that both parties find reasonable and satisfactory.”
“You don’t have anything to trade that’s valuable enough to save your skin,” I shot back sarcastically.
Pellegrini shook his head in disappointment. “Only a dilettante would talk like that,” he chided me. “You still have a lot to learn from yours truly.”
“We’re listening,” Rossini snapped brusquely.
“I’ll make sure you catch the gang down to every last man. Federico Togno together with the two guys who ran the kidnapping and killed the professor and buried his body, and shot your overweight buddy too. But you in exchange forget you ever even heard of yours truly.”
We showed no interest and Beniamino laid out the way we saw things. “You’re the boss, the brains, the mastermind. The first name on the list, get it? Or do I have to tell you the story of the serpent’s head?”
“We’ll round up the others later,” I added. “Togno will pop out of the woodwork eventually, and when he does he’ll turn over his accomplices.”
“Your reasoning is impeccable,” Giorgio complimented me, “but I’m certain that you will be willing to accept my offer because right now the gang is up and running. There’s a hostage in their hands, still alive right now, but tomorrow who can say . . . and given the fact that your hearts overflow with charitable sentiments, I know that, in order to save that hostage’s life, you’re going to meet me halfway.”
Bastard son of a bitch. He’d made an end run around us. The choice was a simple one because we had no alternatives. The life of the hostage made our desire to bring Pellegrini to justice a secondary concern. I was sincerely impressed with his perverse brilliance as well as the ruthless way he had brought us to this point. He knew from the very beginning that we’d have to accept his terms.
I was pretty sure that Beniamino felt the same way I did and I was surprised when he said: “The truth is, you only need to put in an anonymous phone call to the cops and you could arrange for the hostage to be rescued. But then unfortunately your accomplices would give them your name and you’d wind up in prison.”
“And sadly ready and willing to talk about your own involvement,” Pellegrini hastened to point out.
“So you want us to save the hostage by killing Togno and those other two,” Rossini went on.
“They’re guilty of terrible crimes, and according to your chivalrous code, they deserve to die.”
“And in exchange you want to be left in peace.”
“For the rest of my life.”
I objected. “No, you can’t get away with it like this,” I hissed furiously. “If the hostage returns home, if you tell us the truth about what became of the professor, you can save your skin. But then you’re going to have to go far away and abandon restaurant, house, wife, and girlfriend.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” he replied defiantly. “You’re forgetting about the kidnap victim, a poor old woman who’s in her early sixties.”
“We’ll be sorry not to be able to help her, but that’ll just mean that the day I kill you will be all the sweeter,” Rossini bluffed, shifting his chair.
Beniamino was already turning the door handle when handsome Giorgio said: “Fine. We’ll do it your way.”
The Centra brothers’ house and old workshop were immersed in shadows. No outside lights, shutters fastened tight. Beniamino carefully scrutinized the whole layout, asking Pellegrini the same questions about the floor plan and the location
of his men over and over again. Handsome Giorgio, comfortably seated in the back, replied mechanically and without contradicting himself. Meanwhile, I was mulling over every single word we’d exchanged back at the restaurant, trying to figure out all the tricks he’d used to screw us. At a certain point I had the right intuition.
“When was the woman kidnapped?”
“A few days ago,” he replied evasively. He’d already sniffed out what I had in mind.
“You miserable piece of shit,” I blurted, turning to Rossini. “He ordered his henchmen to kidnap the woman just so he’d have a bargaining chip. He’d sensed we were on his trail and he prepared an escape hatch.”
“If I wasn’t handcuffed I’d clap my hands in appreciation of your wisdom; if you’d like I can still let out little shouts of jubilation: yay, yay,” said Pellegrini, amusing himself once again.
Beniamino shrugged. “It doesn’t change a thing. The hostage’s life is more important this vicious little troll’s. We’ll settle up with him some other time.”
“In that case, you’d better hurry,” Pellegrini challenged him, “because once you reach retirement age it’s tough to aim accurately. Your hands start shaking and your eyesight is never the same. A few more years and you’ll be needing a nurse.”
Rossini didn’t react. Handsome Giorgio was having fun with us, certain that he could loll about in safety. We’d hold up our end of the bargain and no one would harm a hair on his head, but what the bastard didn’t know or wasn’t counting on was that the next time he crossed paths with my friend, he’d be a dead man. His life would be cut short by a shower of lead. That’s why the old bandit was putting up with his insults and not reacting. There was definitely going to be a sequel to this story.
“In five minutes, we’re going in,” Rossini announced.
“Just enough time for you to tell us what happened to Guido Di Lello,” I said.
“Happy to,” he retorted cheerfully. “In part because I believe that the professor’s story will help you understand that the Swiss woman really didn’t deserve so much attention after all.”
Gang of Lovers Page 18
