“Buratti, you’re just the person I’ve been looking for,” he began, in a strong Venetian accent. “I’ve got a doubt that’s been nagging at me since this morning.”
I started to unwrap a pack of cigarettes, resigned to sitting through one of his goofy tirades.
“I woke up this morning thinking about how the ads for cryotherapy to eliminate hemorrhoids have completely vanished. Years ago the newspapers were packed with ads for clinics that promised to perform miracles by sliding a little piece of Siberia up your ass. I’ve pored over the local papers and I haven’t found a single line about it. What happened? Does no one suffer from this exceptionally irritating pathology these days? Or did they simply figure out that the method was worth fuck all, and now the Italian peninsula is teeming with poor bastards whose rear ends are as red as a baboon’s?”
The time had come to interrupt him. “And so you decided it would interesting to come and talk the issue over with yours truly.”
He smiled and accepted one of my smokes. “If not with you, then who? You’re the only person I know who’s soon going to be in need of a miracle cure to keep from going to prison, which is where, after all, you deserve to be.”
I pretended not to be alarmed. “I have to confess you’ve lost me there.”
“Just go on confessing, Buratti, because you need to explain to me just why you feel the need to go around with a bunch of other ex-cons asking questions about a certain armed robbery.”
I tried to guess. With Campagna, it was no good trying to deny something he already knew; someone had spilled the beans. Most likely it was the kidnapping scout from Treviso. “Toni Brugnera?”
He shook his head. “My informants are none of your business.”
An indirect confirmation. For that matter, Toni wasn’t built to face the harsh realities of prison, a place he’d carefully avoided up till this moment. In the end he’d be willing to rat out his own son-in-law. A gangster like Franko Didulica was a get-out-of-jail-free card.
I sucked down a couple mouthfuls of smoke while I tried to come up with a fairy tale credible enough to get this inspector off my back, but nothing came to mind.
“I know you’re working on something underhanded,” he said, touching the tip of his forefinger to the cell phone I had in my breast pocket. “Your landlines and cell phones are as silent as little fishes, which gave me a mischievous idea: cloned or encrypted phone numbers.”
The cop’s suspicions were certainly well-founded. We’d long ago learned to protect ourselves from wiretaps and we spent tons of money to make sure we were getting the best the black market in security devices had to offer us.
“I have a client,” I told him, choosing to venture onto the treacherous ground of half-truths.
“Who?”
“You know I can’t tell you that.”
“Seeing that you’re an ex-con with no P.I. license, you don’t have the right to investigate in the first place, not even into the theft of an apple from a fruit stand in the piazza.”
I blew out my cheeks. “Don’t start in with that old story.”
“It’s my duty to put you on notice: You’re committing crimes that will cost you dearly.”
I blew out my cheeks even more emphatically. “You’ve been trying for two years and you haven’t found a thing. Maybe we’re just luckier than you.”
He angrily flicked his cigarette butt between my feet. “I know the way you like to wrap up cases.”
“Then stay out of it.”
“I took a look at the case file. Back then I was on the drug enforcement squad,” he explained. “It’s one of those investigations that pisses you off, and I have a mountain of cases like that to digest, understand? If there’s so much as a sliver of a chance of finding the bastards responsible for that bloodbath, I want to be the first one to know about it.”
I offered him another cigarette. He turned it down with a brusque gesture.
“Well then, I’m the one who doesn’t want you underfoot,” I blurted out.
“What?”
“This is a case that can’t be solved while respecting your laws.”
“At the moment, those are the only laws in effect.”
“Listen, Campagna,” I began in a reasonable tone of voice. “You need to trust me. If we’re right about this thing, it would be covered up and forgotten at the speed of light if it ended up in your hands.”
“And what about in your hands?” he asked contemptuously.
“There’s at least a chance of the case being taken care of in a way that’s fair to the victims.”
He stared at me thoughtfully. “And what would you get out of it? None of the relatives has enough money to afford a crew of high-paid good-for-nothings like you guys.”
“The retainer was twenty cents,” I replied, ignoring the insult. Campagna always tended to provoke when he was feeling uncomfortable.
“Have you decided to go in for charity work?”
“You wouldn’t understand,” I replied. “But we’re on the right side of this one.”
“You realize that you have no right to even say this kind of stuff to me, and that I’m not allowed to stand here listening to it?”
“Then get out of here and leave me alone.”
“What I ought to do is bring you into headquarters and grill you good.”
I shrugged. “You’re the cop. Make up your mind what you want to do.”
I’d put him in a bind once again and he was furious. But I was sure he’d registered the honesty of my words. He slunk off with a classic cop line. “For now I’m going to have to file away this delightful encounter in a corner of my memory; anyway, I know where to find you.”
He turned on his heels and started to leave. Then he thought better of it. “If I get any more tips about your illegal investigation I’ll go straight to my bosses and I’ll repeat every word of our conversation.”
I nodded. And the inspector finally blended into the crowd of pedestrians hurrying along the sidewalk, their heads tucked down between their shoulders.
Campagna wasn’t going to interfere, not unless he was absolutely forced to. I was sure of it, and I remained sure of it all morning, until I decided there was no need to tell my friends about my back-and-forth with the cop. It would only needlessly alarm them. Max hated the guy and Beniamino had never met him. I was the only one who could calmly judge the situation. And after all, we couldn’t afford to waste precious time while we waited to meet Kevin Fecchio.
* * *
Edoardo “Catfish” Fassio was right: The blues outlived everything. Fashions came and went but the devil’s music kept being played everywhere, and by great musicians. While waiting for some dramatic development in the investigation, I went to hear Fabrizio Poggi and his Chicken Mambo.
The evening was hot, the slightest movement brought rivulets of sweat, and beer oozed out of your pores along with it, but no one could resist the rhythm of The Blues Is Alright.
The lawn in front of the stage was teeming with cheerful, carefree people. I couldn’t relax, I was dancing to absorb energy so I’d be strong enough to confront monsters and phantoms and dangerous unknowns like Kevin Fecchio.
I bought the CD and at the end of the concert stood diligently in line to get it signed. It was entitled Spaghetti Juke Joint and it was dedicated to those Italian emigrants who were victims of a gigantic fraud and found themselves in the cotton fields outside of Greenville, Mississippi, at the end of the nineteenth century, sharing the terrible living conditions of the African Americans. Slavery had been abolished but the Ku Klux Klan made the laws, and exploitation and disease had hardly vanished.
According to Poggi, we Italians had been in the right place when the blues was “invented.” Legend tells of a club just off Tribbett Road, on the Dean Plantation, where on Saturday nights blacks and Italians gathered to play an
d dance, to heal the wounds to their hearts and minds. I was just like them, one hundred twenty years later.
I started chatting with Poggi, recalling a festival not far from Nice where I’d heard the sound of his harmonica for the first time.
Back then, I was with Ninon, a fantastic woman who happened to detest the blues. Cora didn’t like the blues either. Why didn’t any of my women love the music of my life?
Poggi replied that maybe the problem was me. I just wasn’t capable of conveying the right emotions.
The musician had a point, but it was a matter of will. I’d always been jealous of my relationship to the blues. There were guitar solos capable of shattering my mind and body, of taking me to unimaginable levels of pleasure. A secret that I’d carry with me to the grave.
* * *
Castelgomberto, in the province of Vicenza.
The doorbell rang a few minutes early. Beniamino jerked the door open, grabbed Fecchio by the lapel of his coat, and dragged him inside. It only took the man a few seconds to recover from his surprise but, when he tried to fight back, the pistol that Rossini pressed against his head convinced him to calm down.
The goldsmith found himself sitting on the same sofa that had accommodated the madam Cinzia Donato. He looked around and saw that there were three masked men. He didn’t seem to be afraid; instead, he seemed ready to deal with this kind of situation.
He swallowed a couple of times and then asked if Marika was all right.
I reassured him. “She went to see a girlfriend.”
“Then you paid her off and she sold me out,” he realized, disappointed. Then his tone changed. “If you’re going to shoot me, you might as well show me your face, Spezzafumo,” he snapped out in dialect. “And I know your names, too,” he added, pointing to the fat man and yours truly.
At that point, he sat there in silence, studying our reactions. Obviously, we remained impassive. He’d started to give us the confirmation we were looking for, and it would have been a pity to shut him up.
“That’s right. Your dear friend Gastone sang like a prize canary and I recorded every word,” he went on, arrogantly. “You want to kill me? Shoot me now and you’ll wind up spending the rest of your lives in prison with that slut Gigliola Pescarotto, the inconsolable widow.”
As he spoke he clenched his fists. He seemed ready to lunge at us. The voice, rendered hoarse by tension, seemed to emerge from the depths of a cavern.
“How did you know that you’d find gold and cash that night?” I asked.
“We’d been keeping an eye on the villa, waiting for you to organize another robbery,” he replied. “When I heard that three armed robbers had knocked over a workshop in the Treviso area, I talked to the owner and asked him to tell me the details. I knew immediately that it had been you guys, and we decided to hit the villa the next night, but we weren’t sure we’d find the swag. We just hoped we would.”
“What we don’t understand is why, once you realized that Oddo had been involved in the murder of your brother Maicol, you didn’t go to the police,” Max asked in a calm voice.
“Right. What turned you into a wild beast?” Rossini asked.
“The fact that my brother suffered like an animal when you shot him,” he retorted, raising his voice. “It took him more than two hours to die, and he was crying the whole time. ‘Kevin, help me, please,’ he kept saying, and I was right there, hands and feet tied up, but I couldn’t do a thing. Oddo was repaid in kind. ‘Mama, mama,’ that asshole kept crying.”
“What about Luigina, the poor housekeeper? How much did she scream?” old Rossini asked again. “She had nothing to do with it, but you still raped and tortured her.”
Fecchio shrugged his shoulders insolently. “She must have known something. And anyway, even if she wasn’t in on it, she was a casualty of war. Her fucking problem that she happened to be in that house. If his wife hadn’t gone out that night, there would have been three corpses.”
“Four, with the little girl,” I prodded him.
He waved his hands in the air. “No, not the girl. I’d have left her alone.”
Turns out even Kevin had a heart.
“There’s no war going on,” said Beniamino. “Your brother’s death has clouded your mind, or else you were born rotten and you just needed some excuse to indulge in the violence you’ve always liked so much.”
“If you ask me, he’s just a fucking sadist,” said the fat man, piling on. “All that gratuitous violence just proves that he’s messed up.”
The goldsmith’s reaction caught us off guard. “Then we’re the same,” he retorted, cold as ice. “Because letting a man die with a bullet in his gut is gratuitous violence. Only sickos live like parasites without working a day of their lives, robbing decent people.”
He stared at us with utter contempt before going on. “But before, I wasn’t like you. I’d never committed a crime. I was just a normal person: work, family, a friend or two. You were the ones who came into my place of business and threatened, and murdered, and took away everything my brother and I had sweated so hard to build.
“You don’t know what work is. You have no idea of the effort, the worries we small businessmen have as we try to survive this recession.
“You’re like ticks; you come and suck our blood and before you know it, you’ve also swept away our dreams, our hopes. You brought death into my family, and ruin. I’d lost everything; I went to get back what belonged to me.
“Not everything, of course. There are lots of things that can’t be fixed. My wife and children aren’t ever coming back to me, because I can never be the husband and father I once was.”
He paused. He patted his linen jacket, looking for his cigarettes, and muttered that he must have left them in the car. I wanted to smoke myself, but this wasn’t the right time.
“I did what I had to,” the goldsmith continued. “It was my right—seeing as the government protects criminals like you instead of the citizens, does nothing but suck us dry with taxes—to make sure murderers didn’t get off scot-free. And it was just as fair to save the company by taking back the gold.
“And do you guys think, after everything I’ve been through, that I ought to feel guilty because I kicked the shit out of Oddo’s housekeeper and then fired a bullet into her head?
“You don’t know it, but things have changed. People aren’t willing to take it anymore; if you dare show up to rob or steal, they want to have a chance to rub you out.
“I’ve been keeping an eye on you for some time now, and you’ve stopped knocking over workshops. But if you so much as try it, my friends and I will come riddle you with bullets fired by your own weapons, the weapons we took away from you and that we’re now keeping safe, waiting for the perfect opportunity.
“I wouldn’t want you to think that we’re even. You’ll pay, with your lives or with prison, when I decide the time is right. And the same goes for the widow.”
He stared at us, his manner defiant. Kevin Fecchio had gone well beyond the thresholds of reason and common sense. He’d started down a dead-end street. This wasn’t going to end well for anyone.
I pulled off my ski mask, and my friends immediately followed suit. “We don’t have anything to do with Oddo, his wife, or Spezzafumo’s gang,” I explained, pronouncing each word carefully. “We represent the interests of Sergio Cantarutti, twelve years old, the son of Luigina, the housekeeper. She deserves justice, too, and her son deserves to be fairly compensated. That’s the kind of argument you ought to be able to grasp.”
The goldsmith stared at us aghast. He was so relieved that we weren’t there to murder him that he allowed himself a joke. “So who are you supposed to be? The Avengers, only for the domestic help?”
“You need to think of some way to take care of this problem,” Beniamino put in. “First of all, you’re going to be responsible for the future of you
ng Sergio, and then you’re going to have to think long and hard about the most challenging and complicated aspect of all this: How to pay for that crime.”
“What is that supposed to mean?”
“You haven’t figured that out already?”
Incredulous, he burst out laughing. “Perhaps you failed to catch the meaning of everything I’ve been saying.”
Max showed him a tiny tape recorder. “If we missed a few words, we can always play them back.”
Kevin pulled his lips back, baring his teeth like a ferocious dog. “Do you think you can blackmail me with a recording? I can always say that you extorted it from me, and people will believe me because I’m Kevin Fecchio. And anyway, try to get it into your heads that I’m not afraid to die or wind up in prison because, whatever else happens, the people who hurt me will be punished. And the same goes for you.”
“Do your accomplices see things the same way?” I asked. “Are you sure that Sante and Vasco are ready and willing to sacrifice themselves?”
The goldsmith leapt to his feet and started blindly throwing kicks and punches. Rossini hit him in the pit of the stomach with the barrel of his pistol, and the man found himself suddenly seated, gasping.
“Those are my two closest friends. They don’t know anything about any of this,” he hissed as soon as he recovered his breath. “Leave them alone.”
For All the Gold in the World Page 7
