‘What really struck me was the fact that, on a rough calculation, taking in all the different types and categories of ads, there must be well over thirty thousand sadomasochists in Italy. And that still doesn’t account for all those who reply to other people’s ads but don’t post their own.’
‘That’s a lot of people.’
‘I also took a look at some foreign sites. The figures are even higher in Germany, France, and Britain. Even the Swiss aren’t far behind.’
I tasted the Alligator that Rudy had mixed for me: seven parts Calvados, three of Drambuie, plenty of ice, and a slice of green apple, following the recipe invented by Danilo Argiolas, the guy who runs the Libarium bar in Cagliari. It hadn’t yet reached the ideal temperature. ‘Some put their trust in religion, others in shrinks . . .’
‘Yeah, yeah, and still others like their butts whipped,’ Rossini interrupted. ‘Just tell me, did you find out anything?’
‘No, I didn’t,’ Max replied. ‘But I found rather an interesting ad. Someone calling herself Sherazade is offering her services as an S and M model.’
‘Like Helena.’
‘Precisely.’
‘If she’s as beautiful as Helena was, the Master of Knots may well get interested.’
‘I’ve contacted our Sardinian friends and asked them to have a go at cracking the password.’
‘We’ve had a bit of a talk with Mirra.’
Max noticed Old Rossini’s satisfied grin. ‘I’m betting he got hurt.’
I showed him the stains on my shirt. ‘A fair bit. Still, it helped refresh his memory. We’ve finally got the name of the guy who makes the videos.’
Beniamino passed on what we’d learnt from the porn trafficker.
I broke open a packet of cigarettes. ‘We’re going to have to spend some time in Rome, so we’ll need a safe house and someone who’s really at home in Rome’s gangland.’
‘I met someone when I was in Rebibbia,’ Max said. ‘But I don’t know if we could trust him.’
‘I’ll take care of this,’ Rossini said. ‘I know the right man—one of the old guard. A guy who every now and then gives me an order for contraband goods.’
I retried my cocktail. It was perfect now. ‘There’s no point all three of us going. Max should stay here and carry on monitoring the ads and emails.’
My associates agreed; Beniamino and I would leave the next day. There was just enough time to grab a few hours’ sleep and pack a bag with clothes and a plentiful supply of cash.
Rossini snorted. ‘Damn it. I promised Sylvie I’d take her out on the boat for a couple of days. I’m going to have to find some way of earning her forgiveness.’
Again my thoughts turned to Virna. I was tempted to call her but thought better of it. Maybe when we got back from Rome.
Rossini’s contact in Rome turned out to be a man called Toni Marazza. They were about the same age and had first met in the high-security prison on the island of Pianosa. Marazza’s real speciality was armed robbery, but his advancing years and numerous convictions had forced him to switch to arms-dealing. It was he who kept Rome’s gangs supplied with the weaponry they needed, through Beniamino, who procured the machine guns from the former Yugoslav army. These weapons were particularly sought-after for the power of their bullets, which could pierce the armored plating of supposedly bullet-proof security vans.
We met Marazza at a posh restaurant in the central Prati district, and once they had performed the civilities customary between gangsters, Rossini explained to Marazza the purpose of our trip to Rome. Marazza appeared happy to help us out and, after a brief negotiation of financial terms, he took us to a small, independently accessible apartment, situated in a block not far from Piazza Barberini. Until fairly recently, the premises had been let to a pair of young, high-class prostitutes. Their clientele had included two very assiduous members of parliament, who liked to go there to relax a bit during the pauses in their onerous parliamentary schedules—Montecitorio, Italy’s Lower House, was a short walk away. Marazza had bought the place along with all its furnishings and hadn’t yet got round to removing the huge mirrors on the ceilings of the two bedrooms.
The apartment was going to cost us two million lire a day. Toni Marazza’s assistance in tracking down Jay Jacovone, on the other hand, was free of charge. Marazza and Rossini weren’t just of the same generation, they had lived by the same code of honor all their lives. The way Marazza saw it, the elimination of an S and M video producer was almost a moral imperative. We had a couple of hours’ rest, then Toni dropped by to pick us up. The hunt was on.
We were traipsing in and out of bars, restaurants, and clubs of every description until three in the morning. Toni Marazza shook hands, exchanged pleasantries, and asked for information. Nobody knew a thing. Jacovone clearly didn’t associate with Rome’s underworld. In the end, Marazza said we were going to have to look elsewhere. If Jacovone had links with the Miami Mafia, the cops were sure to be apprised of his arrival in Italy.
The following evening we rang the doorbell of an exclusive club just off Via Veneto. Marazza had warned us about the strict dress code, so I’d gone out and bought some new shoes, a dark-blue suit, and a tie. I felt ridiculous and the shoes pinched, but it was a classy joint. A piano player tinkled away distractedly, dishing out smiles to anyone who came within range. I recognized a lot of faces from television. The tables were laid out in such a way as to allow for discreet conversations, but the bar was lined with professional drinkers. When I asked for an Alligator and explained its composition to the barman, he acted scandalized and sought to dissuade me, recommending other Calvados-based cocktails. After some elegant verbal sparring, I was forced to give in and try his ‘Apple Cocktail’: Calvados, cider, gin and cognac. I downed it and ordered another one straight away—it really was good.
After a little while, the man Toni was looking for walked in. He was in the company of a woman half his age with a fine body and pretty face spoiled by a pair of ice-cold, calculating eyes. It seemed the man was a middle-ranking official at the Ministry of the Interior, with a career going nowhere and a high standard of living to maintain. Marazza, spruced up like he had to lead his daughter up the aisle, took charge of the introductions. The government man packed the girl off to powder her nose then listened to our request, whispered a figure, and agreed to meet us the following evening. I returned to the bar and knocked back my third Apple Cocktail.
I was woken up the next morning by Beniamino suggesting we went out to do some shopping. I told him to go to hell, turned over and went back to sleep. He returned mid-afternoon, laden with parcels, most of them containing presents for Sylvie. There was one for me too: a solid steel Ronson cigarette lighter, the original 1960s model.
‘This way you can stop using those crappy plastic things,’ he muttered when I thanked him.
That evening Marazza’s government contact arrived punctually. I followed him to the toilets and, once he’d counted the cash, he whispered an address and handed me a color photocopy of a photograph. We had found Jay Jacovone. I rang Max, who was still busy monitoring the emails of S and M sex slaves, but he hadn’t yet turned up anything new.
Jacovone’s cover turned out to be a firm that exported Italian wines to the US. Its headquarters were located in an office block in the Flaminio district, where Jacovone was also registered as resident. Wearing my new dark-blue suit, I took the lift up to the wine exporters’ offices, pretending I’d got off at the wrong floor. It was a smartly furnished place with large photographs of wine cellars and vineyards hanging on the walls. The company proprietor was not at his desk, but his secretary was very helpful, directing me to the office of the lawyer I had said I was looking for.
‘He must have some other place where he copies and stores the cassettes,’ Rossini said.
‘It’s not going to be easy to find. We’ll have to tail him.’
In Rome, if you have to tail somebody, the ideal way to do it is on a scooter. You can zip through the traffic and, in the midst of all the other scooters, bikes, and mopeds, you’re hard to spot. Marazza got us one with a powerful engine. When it came to choosing helmets, Beniamino made a great fuss: they had to be elegant but not eye-catching. When we finally headed for the door, the store assistant heaved a sigh of relief.
It proved hard to find a place from which we could keep an eye on comings and goings at Jacovone’s offices without drawing any attention to ourselves. It wasn’t a very long street and there weren’t any bars or stores. We noticed however that there was a first-floor apartment for sale almost exactly opposite. We told the janitor we were on our way up to the marriage agency on the third floor.
‘They’re Eastern European whores, every last one of them,’ he warned us. ‘They’ll only marry you for the residence permit.’
Old Rossini pulled from his pocket a leather wallet containing a set of picklocks, selected one, inserted it in the lock and opened the door without doing any visible damage. From the kitchen window we had a perfect view of the door we wanted to keep an eye on. After a couple of hours, Rossini pointed me out a parked car—a mustard-colored Fiat Punto. Inside sat a guy reading a newspaper.
‘I noticed it when we got here,’ he said. ‘It hasn’t budged a centimeter.’
‘You think Jacovone’s under surveillance?’
‘Who else?’
‘By the cops?’
‘Maybe. Anyway, let’s keep an eye on them. I don’t want to get mixed up in any police investigation.’
Jacovone came out of the building on the dot of one-thirty and climbed into a white Jaguar. We rushed down into the street, grabbed the scooter, and got behind him. But we weren’t alone; the Fiat was also on his tail. It overtook us and moved in to hug Jacovone’s bumpers. It certainly wasn’t a professional operation; the Fiat driver kept jerking his car around, clearly afraid he might get separated from his prey. Jacovone was heading out towards Fiumicino. We thought he might be going to the airport, but then he turned off into the car park of a fish restaurant on the seafront. The Punto pulled up a little further down the road.
We went into the restaurant, where Jacovone was sitting talking to a couple of old gentlemen. Spread out on the table before them was a brochure from a wine producer, indicating that it was a straightforward business lunch. We made our way over to a free table not too close to Jacovone, from which we could observe him without being noticed. He was around fiftyish, slim, medium height, with dark eyes and hair. You could tell he was American by the way he dressed—he looked like an extra from an American Mafia movie; yellow short-sleeved shirt, trousers, white moccasins, and black silk socks. He wore a gold chain round his neck and a ring set with an emerald on the little finger of his left hand. He came on like a Mafia boss, waving his arms around like Marlon Brando in The Godfather.
I glanced at Rossini, who was playing with the bracelets he wore on his left wrist. His scalps. He’d happily add Jacovone’s to his collection.
We ordered an antipasto and a plate of spaghetti each. By the time Jacovone ordered coffee, we were already paying our bill. We got back on our scooter and hid behind an ice cream kiosk, not wanting to be seen by the character in the Fiat.
‘It’s cost us trouble and money to track down Jacovone,’ Old Rossini hissed, ‘and that dickhead is going to foul it all up for us.’
‘So what do we do?’
‘We’re going to have to give up following our little mafioso here and concentrate on the other guy. We need to find out what he wants.’
After a while, Jay Jacovone left the restaurant and drove back to his office, with the Fiat Punto and Rossini and me on the scooter following in his wake. However, rather than stopping outside Jacovone’s office, the Fiat drove on to a dirt-cheap hotel close to Stazione Termini.
All it took was 50,000 lire to get the guy on the desk to supply us with his customer’s details, his room number, and to forget he’d ever laid eyes on us. The name was Flavio Guarnero, thirty-six years old and living in Turin, where he had been born. Rossini knocked gently on the door of room eleven.
‘Who’s there?’ a voice enquired.
‘The guy from reception,’ Rossini replied.
As soon as Guarnero caught sight of us he attempted to shut the door again, but Rossini shouldered his way in, knocking the guy to the floor. Guarnero jumped back up and made a grab for the bedside cabinet. Beniamino seized him by the throat and wrenched his arm behind his back, immobilizing him.
‘Who are you?’ Guarnero asked menacingly. He wasn’t scaring anybody. He was plump, with thinning, light-brown hair and pale-blue eyes. I opened the drawer of the bedside cabinet, took out a handgun by its barrel and held it up for my associate to see.
‘Nine-millimeter Beretta,’ Rossini commented. ‘Police-issue.’
I noticed his wallet. ‘Right. He’s a cop,’ I said, taking out his ID. ‘Superintendent Flavio Guarnero. Turin City Police.’
He didn’t look like a street cop. His physique and clumsiness suggested something sedentary.
‘What office do you work in?’
‘Immigration control.’
Rossini let go of him. I handed the gun to my associate, and he checked it was loaded before pointing it at Guarnero.
‘Sit,’ he ordered.
‘Are you Jacovone’s men?’ Guarnero asked, massaging his arm.
‘No,’ I replied. ‘We’re film critics and we take the view that the films that bastard makes stink.’
The room was hot, dirty and reeked of sweat. I ransacked the wardrobe, and at the bottom of a suitcase I found a document holder containing photocopies of surveillance reports on Jay Jacovone. One of them, marked FBI, confirmed that Jacovone belonged to the Miami Mafia. He’d been involved in the cocaine business until he had gone against ‘family’ orders and whacked one of the bosses of their Colombian competition. He’d then been sent into exile in Italy to look after the wine business. Trafficking in S and M videos was his idea, and he supplied these to illegal American and Canadian markets. The FBI were requesting that their Italian colleagues not to hamper Jacovone’s activities, as he’d recently become one of their most valued collaborators. The information he was supplying would enable them to dismantle the entire Miami drug cartel.
‘Our friend Flavio here is running an unauthorized investigation,’ I said. ‘Cops don’t normally keep confidential files in hotel cupboards.’
‘What’s your interest in Jacovone?’ Rossini asked.
‘Fuck yourselves,’ Guarnero yelled.
Rossini hit him on the head with the barrel of the Beretta. Not too hard, just hard enough to make him correct his manners. ‘Either you tell us the whole story or we’ll truss you up like a turkey and phone your colleagues here in Rome. Imagine how many questions they’ll be wanting to ask when they find this dossier on Jacovone lying on the bed here on open display.’
The threat proved effective. ‘It’s a personal matter.’
‘Let me guess. You were one of his favorite actors and he didn’t pay you,’ I said, needling him.
He bowed his head. ‘It’s my sister,’ he whispered.
Marisa Guarnero, thirty years old, had posted an ad on an S and M website, offering her services as a slave. She had agreed to meet a master, who had taken her to a hotel. The third time they met, he turned up with the blackmail video. Marisa taught Italian at a middle school, was unmarried, and had a boyfriend working in Switzerland. She also had a brother in the police who was married with two children, a father who worked in a factory, and a mother who was a nurse. She had surrendered to the blackmail and had ‘acted’ in several videos. Then, when the blackmailers’ demands had become too pressing, she had gone for a walk in a Turin park, sat on a bench, gulped down some rat poison, and waited to die. Her brother, spurred on by his police
man’s intuition, had decided to investigate. He couldn’t understand why Marisa had killed herself without leaving any trace of an explanation. During his training it had been impressed upon him that suicides without suicide notes were always suspicious. Flicking through his sister’s address book, he had come across a nickname: sorrisoblu. He had switched on her computer and gone online. When asked, ‘Have you forgotten your password?’ he clicked on ‘Yes.’ Then, once he’d typed in his sister’s date of birth and address, the computer had given him the clue he needed. ‘What is my cat’s name?’
Guarnero had tapped in the name ‘Arturo’ and was appalled to discover that his sister had been leading a double life as a sexual deviant. Good thing she had topped herself—the family name and his career were safe. To make quite sure the secret was buried along with Marisa, Flavio had carefully sifted through his sister’s computer files. Under ‘My documents,’ he had discovered a sort of diary in which his sister related how she had been blackmailed gave an account of everything she had suffered at the hands of a gang led by the Master of Knots. Flavio realized he’d been overly hasty in condemning her; the only thing Marisa deserved was to be avenged. Logging on to the interior-ministry computer system, Flavio had searched for traces of the blackmailers but found nothing. He had then followed the porn-trafficking lead and eventually identified Jay Jacovone. Guarnero waited for his summer holidays, drove his wife and kids down to his in-laws in Calabria, and then headed back up to Rome.
‘What were you planning to do?’ I asked.
‘Identify the gang.’
‘And how were you going to do that?’ Rossini asked. ‘By tailing Jacovone in your mustard-colored Fiat Punto?’
‘What else do you know about Jacovone?’ I enquired.
‘Just what’s contained in that report,’ Guarnero replied. Rossini removed the magazine and chucked the gun on the bed. ‘Go back to your wife and kids and stay out of this mess,’ Rossini advised him in a fatherly tone of voice. ‘Focus on reaching retirement age without getting yourself killed.’
The Master of Knots Page 9
