‘No, no, ’ he said, shaking his head. ‘No, I cannot take you here. Impossible!’ He handed the paper back to her, pursing his lips and shaking his head. ‘It is a very, very bad area where that place is. No police will go. There are guns, drugs—’
His eyes widened as something occurred to him. He darted a glance from side to side, checking out their surroundings.
‘Come, we go to the bar, ’ he said, leading the way across the arrivals hall to a wide curve of white marble. He ordered cappuccino and brioche for both of them, and carried them to a small, breast-high marble table.
‘You don’t understand, ’ she said urgently, sipping the coffee, which was rich and loaded her up with energy. ‘There’s someone I have to talk to who lives there.’
He rolled his eyes.
‘Look, signorina. I may call you signorina, yes? Now in Italy they say, “All ladies must be called signora”, if not it is maleducato, not polite, because you say that maybe a lady is not married. I don’t understand, frankly, but that is what they say. But you, so young and pretty, it seems wrong to call you signora! You understand?’
‘Yes. Fine. You can call me anything you want.’ She took a bite of brioche, eggy and sweet. ‘But I have to go to this address and talk to the man whose name is on that paper.’
Mario’s distress was extreme: he tamped his brow with the flimsy paper napkin, even though the terminal was air-conditioned and cool.
‘Look, Signorina Evie, ’ he began, leaning across the table, lowering his voice. ‘George Goldman, he says to take very good care of you, and this I want to do. Do you need drugs? Is that it? I myself have nothing to do with this kind of thing, but maybe I could ask. I don’t want to, please understand me.’ He wrung his hands. ‘But if you need it – are you in, come si dice, a fall? Do you have pain?’
‘No! Of course not!’ she exclaimed, eyebrows rising to her hairline. Her surprise was so obvious that Mario relaxed immediately.
‘Good! Good! So why do you need to go to this terrible place?’
‘There’s someone there – this man, Giuseppe Scutellaro, but they call him Joe—’ she pointed to the name. ‘I need to talk to him. He’s told lies about – about a friend of mine, and she’ll go to prison if he doesn’t tell the truth. I need to convince him to say what really happened.’ She lowered her voice. ‘I’m supposed to pay him to tell the truth, ’ she explained. ‘Someone paid him to lie, and now if I pay him more—’
‘I see, I see, ’ Mario nodded quickly, appreciatively. Italy ran on bribes, Lola knew from Jean-Marc, whose family had textile factories here. It would be commonplace to give money to a witness; from Mario’s response, she could see the truth of that.
‘He’s holed up here.’ It was her turn to point to the address. ‘Keeping quiet till he has to go back to New York to testify.’
‘So we have to go here, ’ Mario said, with deep resignation. ‘This is very bad. One of the worst periferie – suburbs, you would say – in the city. And believe me, there are many bad suburbs here. This is a quartiere povera, una topaia. A very poor place. We say, where the mice live. Only there are no mice, because the cats eat them all.’ He finished his coffee and furrowed his brow, deep in thought; his cup was still in his hand, suspended in mid-air. ‘My son, he knows some people who have the nightclubs. We will take someone from the nightclubs with us. A buttafuori. Bouncer, I think you call it.’
Mario set down his cup and pushed it to one side. He steepled both his pudgy hands on the table, fixing her with a business-like stare.
‘Excuse me, signorina, but I must ask this now. To go to this place for me, perhaps to have my car broken or stolen, to take this risk and to find a buttafuori, to pay him, none of this will be cheap. You say you will pay this man, this Scutellaro, much money to tell the truth. So for my expenses too, there will be enough money?’
It was no time for bargaining. Lola’s life, effectively, was on the line. She met his stare full-on, nodding in a way that convinced him she was serious. In the Vuitton bag was a small fortune in traveller’s cheques, and she could certainly spare plenty to pay Mario Piciacchi to take her to this rathole in the worst suburb of Rome.
‘Whatever it takes, ’ she told him.
Four hours later, Mario picked her up from her hotel, a charming place in Trastevere, built around a small central garden in which a fountain played soft water from a statue of Neptune holding his trident, and deep pink roses were starting to bloom from the bushes planted on each side of the marble paths across the square courtyard. Mario was waiting in the courtyard, his face grim. But not as grim as that of the man standing a pace behind him and slightly to one side, his hands clasped across his chest.
‘This is Leo, ’ Mario said. ‘He will come with us.’
She nodded at Leo, and received a short nod in response. About five feet ten, with a long, bony shaved skull, his nose, in true Roman fashion, was long and hooked and looked as if its arch had been broken a couple of times. The hands clasped over his chest were equally bony, the knuckles swollen and knobbed. Leo had been in plenty of fights. She just hoped he’d won most of them.
‘Right, so now we go!’ Mario announced. ‘I will be positive, ’ he added rather bleakly. ‘It is important to be positive.’
They piled into a small, battered Fiat, which sagged noticeably under Mario and Leo’s weight. Mario was driving.
‘This is my mother’s car, ’ Mario informed her. ‘She had had it for fifteen years, she will not change it. Of course, mine is much better. A Mercedes. For the clients I drive. But we do not take it to this quartiere. No, no, no. The animals who live there, they have never seen anything so beautiful as my Mercedes. They will destroy it at once.’ He translated this for Leo, who nodded agreement.
Negotiating out of the centre of Rome, with its endless roadworks and architectural digs slowing traffic down to a crawl, took a while; but by the time they were on a main road leading out of town they could have been in any poor Italian city. Endless apartment blocks made from slabs of crumbling concrete, sad little strings of washing pegged across the shabby balconies. Advertising hoardings, tattered at the corners, as if no one had bothered to change them in years. It was hard to believe that, just a short while before, they had been in Rome itself, the Eternal City, with its exquisite marble buildings, its narrow, enchanting streets, its moneyed, stylish occupants. They had rounded the Colosseum on their way out and she had gasped, its high colonnades so beautiful that even Leo had nodded in approval of Lola’s reaction to one of the wonders of the world.
And now the landscape was going from bad to worse. The graffiti on the stone was becoming thicker and more frequent, the apartment blocks in a worse and worse state of decay. Kids lounged on corners, staring at every car that passed in challenge, or piled onto battered bicycles, one riding, one standing behind with his hands on the rider’s shoulders, one sitting behind him, legs out wide, maybe even a fourth perching on the front mudguard. Refuse of all kinds littered the streets. And everywhere, there were the cats. Skinny, feral cats, slipping along crumbling walls, darting across the streets, rummaging through overflowing bins down dark alleyways.
Finally, the car braked with a squeal, backed up, shot right down a narrow street, and halted with a groan of its entire engine.
‘We are here, ’ Mario announced unhappily.
They climbed out and surveyed the territory. On either side of them rose the concrete apartment blocks they had seen from the main road, ten storeys high, built in the 1970s and aging very badly. Dark water stains marked almost every join of the concrete, which was visibly crumbling and filthy; bird shit and graffiti were struggling for dominance, and it was hard to tell which was winning. It was a hot late-spring day, which only made the smells even stronger. Big steel dumpsters of rubbish were overflowing everywhere, reeking, and a cat fight was in progress in a bin behind them – high, unearthly screams and hisses.
But the worst smell was of drains. The lower note was the musty, un
healthy odour of damp, but above that, richer and more powerful, was the stink of faeces and urine. It was as if this entire area had been built on an open sewer. Lola did her best not to gag.
Mario was locking the car, squaring his shoulders as if about to go into battle. Leo was looking around him, and in turn they were being surveyed by many pairs of eyes. Men leaning on the stone walkways that ran around each storey of the apartment blocks. Kids, scruffing around the pavement, kicking battered old balls, seemingly aimless, but their dark eyes sharp and alert. A group of young men, smoking unfiltered Camels, clustered around the dented steel entrance door to the apartment block where Joe Scutellaro lived, their hard stares directed straight at Mario, Leo and herself.
They were all males, she noticed. Even the kids. It was more than a little unnerving.
Leo gestured to Mario and her to remain by the car. Smoothing down his jacket, he walked past the kids, along the short cement path, and straight up to the young men who were guarding the entrance door.
‘What’s he saying to them?’ she asked.
Mario shrugged, and she saw Leo was pointing at her. They stared at her appreciatively; one of them whistled, another laughed. Leo’s dour expression almost cracked into a smile. He put his finger next to his head, swivelling it. They all laughed. A young man at the centre of the group said something. From the way the others fell aside, deferring to him, as soon as he spoke, he was clearly the leader. They were all wearing jeans, much tighter than their American gangland equivalents would be caught dead in, light denim, with bright, equally tight T-shirts. ‘PRISON CAMP SEX’, read the slogan on one. ‘69 4-EVER’, read another. ‘ROCK, ROLL, REV’, a third. Near-meaningless texts, printed probably in China and sold here cheaply at local markets for a few euros, bought by people who barely understood the words but liked the Americana they thought they represented.
Leo turned back to the two waiting by the Fiat and beckoned. They were in.
‘Santo Dio, proteggimi, ’ Mario muttered, crossing himself.
Lola was used to men staring at her, but this was something else entirely. She could almost believe that Leo had sold her to the young men, the way they were looking at her. In her jeans and three-quarter-length sleeve T-shirt, a sweater knotted at her waist, she was pretty well covered, but she might as well have been wearing a string bikini and four-inch perspex stack heels. They leered at her, laughing in her face, saying things that were clearly meant to taunt her but which, mercifully, she couldn’t understand. One of the young men flung open the steel door with a mocking smile, and she passed through to a stream of whistles and catcalls, Leo and Mario following. Inside it was dark, dank and stunk like a cattery. Mario winced in horror. There was a lift ahead of them, but they didn’t take it; Leo indicated a set of concrete stairs instead.
That ascent of the stairs she would always remember as one of the worst experiences of her life. The vials on the floor that their feet crunched over, the pools of piss and vomit in the corners, the stench everywhere, the dried bloodstains, the streaks of human excrement, like children’s finger painting, on the concrete walls. It seemed an interminable walk. None of them spoke: all of them were too busy breathing through their mouths, to avoid, as much as possible, smelling the odours surrounding them. By the time they reached the sixth floor, Mario was moaning audibly.
Number 45 was halfway down the walkway. Its front door had been painted a jaunty turquoise once, but was so peeled and sun-faded now that only a few bright chips remained to indicate its original colour. Leo approached it, but Lola tapped his arm, shaking her head, and stepped forward instead.
Heart in her mouth, she knocked on the door.
To her surprise, it was opened almost immediately. But the young man who stood there had clearly been expecting someone else. His eyes bugged out when he saw her small figure and Leo, standing behind her. She could see the cogs in his brain whirling as he worked out why her face was familiar to him, and who she was.
And then he started to shut the door in her face.
Leo was very fast. He had one hand past her and pressed flat against the closing door before she even realised what he was doing. And he was strong, too, because he held the door at that exact angle very easily, even as Joe Scutellaro pushed, with his whole slight weight, against him, trying to get it shut.
‘Look, I just want to talk to you, ’ Lola said urgently. ‘Please can I come in?’
Joe Scutellaro closed his eyes momentarily.
‘Just you, ’ he said finally. ‘Not your animal.’ He added something rude in Italian, directed at Leo, who didn’t react.
‘We must check it inside, ’ Mario said anxiously. ‘To see there is no one else, who could hurt her.’
Joe let out a bitter laugh.
‘Sure, knock yourself out, ’ he said, throwing the door open wide as Leo took his hand away. ‘You can practically check it out from here.’
Lola went inside. It was so sparse, so pitiful, that her heart would have broken for him if she hadn’t known how much money of Carin Fitzgerald’s he must be sitting on. A front room with an old stove and small, whirring refrigerator, two wooden chairs and a chipped Formica-topped table; a blue-and-white checked piece of cloth hung over a row of wooden shelves with a few scanty provisions on them. Beyond was another small room, with a mattress on the floor, an orange plastic crate turned upside down to serve as a bedside table, and some clothes on hangers suspended from nails on the walls. The bathroom was a sink, toilet and open shower all in one narrow cubicle, so that in winter, without the sun to dry off the tiles, the whole room would be perpetually damp. The grouting was already rotten, lying in dark grey worms over the tiles.
She came out into the front room after thirty seconds.
‘There’s no one here, ’ she said to Leo, who nodded, understanding that much English, and closed the door.
She was alone with Joe Scutellaro. Slowly, Lola crossed the room to the table and sat down on the further chair, indicating that he should take the other one. His big dark eyes never leaving her face, he sat down too.
‘How did you find me?’ he asked.
‘I can’t tell you that.’
‘Carin would never had told you. Nor anyone who works for her, ’ he said. ‘They’re all too well-paid. And too scared.’
He was very handsome; with his tight dark curls, liquid dark eyes and full red lips he might have walked straight out of a Caravaggio painting, where he would have been depicted as a faun, or a young Bacchus, holding a full bunch of grapes to his mouth. His eyelashes were ridiculously long and thick, his jawline smooth as silk.
‘Whatever she gave you, I can top it, ’ Lola said, her dark eyes boring into his. ‘Name your price.’
‘I can’t! You must be crazy! She’s gone so far with this thing. Making me hide out here. “Bury yourself alive, ” were her exact words, if I remember right. “Somewhere shitty. They’ll look for you in the nice places, not the shitty ones.”’ He gestured around him. ‘This is my cousin’s place. Nice, isn’t it? A real palace. I gave him a bunch of euros and told him to fuck off for three weeks. You can bet he was glad to go.’
She cleared her throat.
‘Well then, ’ she said tentatively, ‘doesn’t that tell you something? I mean, you’re making all this money from her – she must have paid you tons – and still, this is where you’ve ended up till she needs you again? Somewhere as shitty as this? She doesn’t care about you at all! She’s just using you!’
‘I know she’s using me, ’ he said impatiently. ‘It’s all about the money, OK? For her and for me.’ He looked around him once again. ‘You can see the kind of thing I come from. I mean, not as bad as this. Nothing’s as bad as this, it’s one of the worst fucking places in Italy. Unless you’re down in Naples, living on a rubbish heap.’ He spat over his shoulder. ‘But yeah, we come from nothing. I needed to set myself up, you understand? It wasn’t’ – he wouldn’t meet her eyes – ‘it wasn’t anything personal.’
&nb
sp; He fumbled in his pocket, pulling out a pack of Marlboro Lights.
‘I’ve got to give you points, ’ he said, still not meeting her eyes. ‘Managing to track me down here. Jesus, just getting into this place. It’s like Fort Knox. The dealers don’t let anyone in they don’t know. Heroin, ’ he said, answering her unspoken question. ‘Straight up from Africa. Roba. My cousin shoots up every Friday night, just for shits and giggles. Works all week and spends the weekend in a coma. I tell you, if I’d grown up here I’d be a junkie myself.’
He tapped out a cigarette, stuck it in his mouth, and then offered her the packet.
‘Thanks, ’ she said, taking one.
He lit hers and then his.
‘Look, there’s nothing I can do for you, ’ he said, blowing out a cloud of smoke. ‘Nothing. I’m all bought and paid for. Sorry, but that’s just how it is.’
‘Like I said, anything she gave you, I can give you more, ’ Lola insisted. She hadn’t come this far to give up now. ‘She’s got money, but I have the Van der Veers behind me, and they’re much more powerful than Carin.’
From the way he looked up at her, she knew she’d found a chink in his armour.
‘The Van der Veers have interests all over the world, ’ she insisted. ‘You could be set up wherever you want, with whatever you want. Right here in Italy, if you like. You know about their textile factories. You could have an interest in them. I mean, you need a lot of money to be set up for life nowadays. A lot. I doubt Carin’s promised you that much. But I will.’
‘How do I know you’re good for it?’ he asked, staring at her. ‘This could all be a lot of hot air. I mean, Carin’s got her hands on her fortune already. You’ve got nothing for now.’
She fished in a pocket of her bag, extracting an envelope. ‘Fifty thousand euros, in cash, for starters. Yours to keep, just for listening to me.’
‘You’re kidding!’ he exclaimed, his eyes widening.
He snatched at the envelope with such instant, immediate greed that she felt her heart pounding with excitement as she reached into another compartment of the bag and pulled out a stack of papers and a fountain pen.
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