Rome Noir

by Chiara Stangalino

  Curreli sat down: I was wondering if you could help me. See, my daughter won’t talk to me, she wants to put a diamond stud in her nose … Well … you seem knowledgeable about these things.

  Deborah thrust her head back until you could hear the bones of her neck snap.

  —How can we help you kids if you won’t speak to us, huh? What, exactly, have we done to deserve so much hatred? What? Curreli implored with feeling. The face of his daughter Manuela had suddenly superimposed itself on that of Deborah seated before him.

  The girl looked at him with a mix of astonishment and affection. Dr. Vanni and Marchini could not believe their eyes when she reached out a hand to caress Curreli’s stubbly cheek.

  Then something extraordinarily clear appears in your eyes. What did you do? you ask. Just like that. As if you had realized that, in the tedious course of things, it is nevertheless impossible to get away with a slaughtered body scot-free. And I know what’s left. What’s left is to end it. Get dressed and go, I say. And you? you ask. Me, I’ll manage, I say. I’ll manage. I stand waiting to hear the door close behind you as you leave. I glance around me, looking for … looking for a plausible finale … and it all seems clear to me …

  With incredible lightness the girl rose from the chair, leaned toward the commissioner, and whispered a name, just a name.

  PART III

  PASTA, WINE & BULLETS

  CHRISTMAS EVES

  BY GIANRICO CAROFIGLIO

  Stazione Termini

  Translated by Ann Goldstein

  It was Christmas Eve, in the vast concourse of Stazione Termini. Marshal Bovio, his mood grim, his hands deep in the pockets of his big regulation overcoat, swam against the current of a desolate river of men and women. Small groups of pinched dark faces; lost gazes and a few laughs—too loud—to summon up cheer; the faces of vagrants, of old women bent over shopping carts, pushing their little piles of possessions. Unmindful—or unconscious—of everything around them. Normal faces, having ended up there by mistake, on Christmas Eve, in the cold of the station rather than the warmth of their own houses.

  The marshal leaned against the locked door of the information office, looked at his watch—7:30—and took out an MS from the crumpled, half-empty pack, lit it, and inhaled deeply.

  Many years earlier, he recalled, he had been on duty on Christmas Eve when a traveler was knifed to death, near the track where the last local for Nettuno departed.

  The whole night had been spent interrogating the derelicts who lived in the station because they had nowhere else to go.

  The murderer had been an illegal taxi driver, a slightly disfigured little man whose name the marshal couldn’t remember.

  The man’s face, however, he remembered clearly—a sick-looking face, the jaw shaken by a silent weeping, an animal sob after the last smack. The first gray light of Christmas Day was mixed with the yellow streetlights and the bitter odor of humanity, of fear of officialdom after a night of interrogation. Robbery and homicide for the disfigured taxi driver. Life in prison. Bovio had heard nothing more of him after the trial.

  He inhaled the last drag of his cigarette, smoked down to the filter, and let it fall to the ground.

  At home they must all be gathered by now for the big dinner—a southern family, traditions still strong—and for the exchange of gifts, after the flavors of Christmas, fragrance of homemade sweets, brilliant colors, and comforting warmth.

  The newspaper seller near the information booth was preparing to close. He chaotically piled up newspapers and magazines inside the kiosk with the unconscious speed of one who fears being excluded from something.

  An old woman with a cart approached the newsstand. A vagrant, with those dirty bags, those ragged sacks stuffed full of things. But there was something that set her apart—a strange dignity, perhaps—from the desperate, the destitute who wandered like melancholy phantoms through the station and around the idle trains. She wore a thick sweater and a man’s jacket; underneath was a long bright-colored skirt, cheerful; her hair was gathered under a carefully knotted kerchief. She began to attentively examine the magazines that the newspaper seller had not yet put away. She delicately leafed through one, as if she were looking for an article, or something.

  Then she turned to the proprietor. She had a thousand lire in her hand.

  “L’Unità,” she said.

  The newspaper seller looked up and hesitated a moment before answering.

  “L’Unità costs two thousand lire today. It’s Sunday, it has the supplement.” He seemed to be apologizing.

  The old woman withdrew the money hand with the banknote but remained in front of the newsstand. She was still there, unmoving, when Bovio’s large hand reached out of his dark overcoat and placed a thousand lire in hers.

  She looked up slowly, up to the marshal’s face. “What a kind person.” Her voice was thin but firm. “I hope that you may be granted everything you wish for.”

  Then she turned, passed the two thousand lire to the newspaper seller, took her paper with the supplement, and moved along with her cart.

  He stood looking at her. He was slightly ashamed of that blessing, so disproportionate with respect to his own instinctive gesture, which now seemed to him petty. He watched her move into the distance, into a remote corner of the immense concourse.

  He took ten thousand lire from his wallet, clutched it in his hand, and slipped the hand in his pocket. He would catch up with the old woman, give her that money, and then hurry away, before anyone could see him.

  So he began walking, feeling strangely embarrassed.

  The old woman, meanwhile, had taken out a small broom and had begun to sweep her corner. All around, against the walls, under a scaffolding in front of the billboards that displayed the timetables, the homeless were preparing for Christmas.

  Some were already asleep, rolled up in newspaper sheets, sheltered in cardboard huts, having closed their eyes knowing nothing of tomorrow. Others, awake, scanned the void or tended to themselves like tired old cats. One had his pants rolled up; his calves were covered with scabs that he picked at conscientiously, one by one, concentrating, his eyes, like a stray dog’s, red with some awful disease.

  Now the marshal was just a few meters from the old woman. She had her back to him and continued to sweep. Serene, with the air of one who is placidly seeing to her own domestic affairs. Bovio was about to call out to her, when he felt a pang of nostalgia and the blurred memory of some distant Christmas. Corridors, lights, and lost rooms. Voices of excited children, yearnings from the vortex of the past.

  Absurdly, he realized that it was not his memory.

  Just as absurdly, he thought that he must return it to the old woman.

  He took a few more steps, almost staggering, with a buzzing in his head and the hand in his pocket contracted around the ten thousand lire.

  “Marshal.”

  The voice of the young police officer was like a rock smashing a window. The marshal turned suddenly, with a guilty expression, it seemed to him. He quickly pulled his hand out of his pocket as if hiding evidence; he began walking away in a hurry.

  “What is it?” The voice sounded too high, and fake.

  He didn’t turn back.

  BERET

  BY CARLO LUCARELLI

  Vicolo del Bologna

  Translated by Kathrine Jason

  There’s a radio’s playing. It’s coming from one of the upstairs apartments, and it’s got to be turned way up because we can hear it clearly, low but clearly. So much the better. It helps drown out the noise we’re making.

  Moretti gives me a look and nods, as if he’s read my mind. This has been happening more and more often recently. He looks at me, nods his head, and says what I was going to say. Either we’ve become telepathic or he can read my face like a book.

  “Hurry up, move it!” Moretti says, and Agello pushes the key further into the keyhole. It makes a loud, metallic squeak, but it’s muffled by the music. The click of the lock is
even louder, but now it’s a question of moments, split seconds.

  Moretti raises the pistol, holding it near his face, the back of his hand against the wool fabric of the beret covering his forehead. He gives the door a kick, straight-on, with the sole of his shoe, and it opens. In split seconds, one split second, we’re all inside, me with the MP5 raised, selector set to rapid fire. Albertino, ready with the twelve-caliber SPAS, Moretti aiming the Beretta with two hands, thumb on thumb, and Agello, with another Beretta and his arm raised to hurl a grenade, the pin already out.

  But hurl it where? The apartment is just this, this room behind the door—table, chairs, kitchenette, a fake brick archway from which a transparent curtain hangs, and beyond it a bed. The apartments in Trastevere are usually tiny, but this is extreme.

  A split second. Being the closest, I take a step, brush the curtain aside with my arm, turn the barrel of the gun, but I can see right away that there’s nobody here.

  No, actually, there is somebody: There’s a sound like a sigh behind a small door in the wall, next to the kitchenette. It’s barely louder than a murmur and it’s muffled in the music that floats down the stairwell to where we stand.

  A split second. Moretti kicks the door and the lock in the small door rips away from the jamb. Moretti and Albertino and I step in, weapons raised, and Moretti yells, “Police, stop!” hollering so loudly that the music from upstairs suddenly stops.

  The girl sitting on the toilet clearly has no intention of moving. In fact, if not for her lips, which are trembling, she could be dead. She’s sitting paralyzed, a roll of toilet paper in her hand and her underpants at her ankles, eyes fixed on us, in our black body suits and ski masks, crammed together in a bathroom of a few square feet, shower and all.

  Moretti raises his fist and we all lower our weapons.

  “Shit,” he mutters.

  There’s a radio playing. It’s from an apartment across the hall, at the end of the landing. I know that because the last time the girl brought me food, I asked her and she told me it was coming from over there. She says she listened at the door and heard it. MTV, she said. It’s on practically all day, and it reaches all the way to my apartment, through two closed doors, not loud enough to be annoying but loud enough that I can hear it, as if the TV is on low in another room.

  I’ve gotten used to it. That must be why I realized the second it stopped. Or maybe because first I heard a door slam, and then that shout I couldn’t understand. Rude assholes, I thought, but then the music stopped and that made me suspicious. So I got up from bed, grabbed the 356 from the bedside table, and went to the door.

  “He’s not here,” Moretti yells down the stairwell, and moments later everyone comes up: agents in uniform, top brass, the chief of the mobile squad, and even the judge. They rush up the stairs to the landing. “Stay back, please. Police!” shouts an official as doors open. Nobody comes out, except one woman in a bathrobe and slippers on an upstairs landing who won’t back off from the railing, so we have to send an agent up.

  “Bad tip,” says Moretti to the judge. “Marcos isn’t here and the girl’s got nothing to do with it, she’s shoots video for television. She went back into the bathroom, but I’ll bet she raises hell when she comes out.”

  “Vicolo del Bologna,” the judge says. “Number 5B. The informant was sure.”

  “The informant was wrong. This is number 5 and Marcos isn’t here.”

  “What if he only got the side of the building wrong?”

  I hear them knocking at the door. Police, open up! And they don’t rush right in. They’re cautious. They’re right to be.

  We go in with our weapons ready, shoo away the people on the landing, take a quick look around, then the agents follow and we move on to other apartments. We begin on the third-floor landing. A huge dog leaps out from one apartment and Agello nearly shoots him. Next door there’s a journalist who wants to come along, and we have to shut him inside. Outside, the vicolo is blockaded and nobody can pass.

  On the lam you can spend your dough well or badly. I spent it badly. I’m not saying on chicks and champagne—even though this one does bring food and she’d be willing. But at least I should have planned on having somewhere to run. That, yes. A skylight, the possibility of jumping down to another street. Here there’s no way out, just a clothesline suspended across a closed courtyard.

  So I’m thinking there are only three possibilities. I surrender, open the door, slide the gun down the stairs, say, I’m alone and unarmed. Or I don’t surrender, grab the grenades on the dresser, throw them down the stairs, and then make a run for it with the submachine gun I keep next to the bed, and either I make it or I’m fucked. Or else, I stand ready with the pistol, the door open a crack, and decide what to do when the first mug appears.

  The door of that last apartment is slightly open. Maybe they left it like that by accident and nobody’s home, or maybe some cooperative citizen opened it and is waiting for us to arrive. I’m the nearest to it—clutching my MP5 like a pistol, my hand ready to give the door a shove—in my black combat fatigues and waterproof boots that keep sticking to the tile floor. Then, suddenly, something that hasn’t happened to me in a long time happens. I can’t stand the beret, and the wool ski mask is itching the hell out of my sweaty skin. My wet breath is slimy on my lips and I feel like I’m going to barf. It’s broiling today, though I’m used to the heat. Still, this time I can’t seem to go on. So I pull off the beret with one hand, then let out a sigh of relief, but fuck, the TV’s off now. I reach out again with the ski mask clenched between my fingers and push the door open.

  I’m thinking I already have three life sentences. I’m thinking I’ll be better off if they kill me. I’m thinking: Now these asshole Rambos have me really fucked.

  So I raise the barrel of the 356, and when the door opens, some guy’s big red face appears right there in the viewfinder. His eyes are bugging in surprise, his mouth’s hanging open, and a clump of sweaty hair is sticking straight up on one side of his head; it looks like he couldn’t even brush it back down if he wanted.

  Split seconds. Three. One, to mentally superimpose the mug shot onto that face: It is Marcos. Two, to realize I’m a goner. Three, to take the first shot. But then there’s no need because he raises his arm, aiming the pistol at the ceiling, and keeps it like that until I grab it. Then the other guys rush in.

  He keeps on staring at my head, even when we pull his hands behind his back to cuff him. He seems to be laughing. I put a hand up to my head and feel a stiff shank of hair that the beret pressed up at a weird angle. It sometimes looks like that in the morning if I’ve slept funny on the pillow. When I was little, my brother and I called it the arrow. I push it down with my hand but it springs back up.

  “Hey, cop,” Marcos says as I grab him by the arm to escort him out. “That hair of yours there, it looks like it needs a cut.”

  And he laughs, the jerk.

  REMEMBER ME WITH KINDNESS

  BY MAXIM JAKUBOWSKI

  Calcata

  His budget flight landed in Fiumicino. It was a hot, humid summer day.

  Even though he held a CEE passport, the uniformed border officer at immigration control looked up and actually asked him whether he was visiting Rome for business or pleasure. As inquisitive as an American airport official.

  “Sentimental reasons,” he answered, and was then allowed through with no further comment.

  Maybe the border guard had been bored or something, as he had never been asked any such question on the occasion of his previous, numerous visits.

  He had only hand luggage so went straight through into the main terminal’s arrivals hall and made a beeline for the car rental desks. He had no need for anything fast or fancy in the way of transport, but he still had to convince the rental clerk that he actually prefered a car with a manual gear shift rather than an automatic. Habits die hard. After filling in the forms and signing on all the dotted lines, he was handed the keys to a dark blue Fiat and given the
directions to the parking lot where it was kept.

  He walked out into the midday sun and looked around. On his last time here, she’d been waiting, with her usual both wanton and joyfully innocent smile, wearing a white skirt and carrying a huge canvas bag embroidered with sunflowers, an accessory she’d bought six months earlier in Barcelona and which made her look like a schoolgirl rather than a full-grown woman.

  He settled into the driver’s seat, keeping the door open for a few minutes to allow the heat to escape from the car’s interior before the air-conditioning kicked in, while his feet found the measure of the pedals, getting himself accustomed again to driving a car on the opposite side of the road and having the steering wheel on the left-hand side. It always took a little acclimation, however many times he had to rent cars abroad.

  And finally, he drove off toward the city. Considering it was the main road connecting Rome to one of its major airports, there was something old-fashioned and narrow about this street which made him think of all the legions of Caesar and past emperors and despots who’d in all likelihood marched down these avenues upon returning from or departing for battle many years before. No modern highway this, more of a cobblestone alley in places, with twin ramparts of trees on either side and occasional low stone walls pouring with ivy, possibly erected long before even Mussolini.

  It was as if the twenty-first century hadn’t yet broken here, despite the gleaming modern cars racing up and down the road, all splendidly oblivious to any speed limit. He was in no real hurry and, irritated by his leisurely pace, some of the other drivers honked at him repeatedly.

  He’d found a room on the Internet in a small residential hotel close to Piazza Vittorio Emanuele II. It was a quiet side street and easy to park, even though he wasn’t sure if the parking space he had chosen was illegal or not. At any rate, he couldn’t be bothered about parking tickets and was confident the Fiat wouldn’t be towed away since it wasn’t blocking anyone, and many other local vehicles were lined up on the same side of the street. The hotel was situated on the fourth floor of a massive apartment building and suited him fine: a clean, spacious, if somewhat Spartan place, just a reception desk manned by a young student busy revising her journalism and publishing exams, she informed him, and a small breakfast salon at the other end of the corridor from his room. He didn’t require anything more. There were bars all across the city, and anyway he didn’t drink. Never had. More taste than principle, even if he found that it led to some people gossiping behind his back back in London, and he was often suspected of being an ex-alcoholic. Print the legend, he thought; it’s miles more glamorous than the truth.