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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously.
Copyright © 2017 by Edizioni e/o
First publication 2020 by Europa Editions
Translation by Will Schutt
Original Title: Blues per cuori fuorilegge e vecchie puttane
Translation copyright © 2020 by Europa Editions
All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.
Cover art and illustration by Emanuele Ragnisco
www.mekkanografici.com
Cover illustration taken from a photograph © ChristopherBernard/iStock
ISBN 9781609455705
Massimo Carlotto
BLUES
FOR OUTLAW HEARTS
AND OLD WHORES
Translated from the Italian
by Will Schutt
BLUES
FOR OUTLAW HEARTS
AND OLD WHORES
To Alvaro
ONE
The informant looked like an ex-cop. His uniform must have been padded with mothballs and buried in his closet for years, yet the crease in his pants and the neat part dividing his thinning blond hair gave the impression he’d never risen through the ranks. I had nothing else to go on, but instinct and experience provided me all I needed to know. He had a dark mole as thick as a nickel on his right cheek. His nerve wasn’t what it once was. Neither was the rest. When he talked money, his eyes lit up—brief flashes that betrayed his need to escape the tightfisted routine his pension demanded.
He said to call him Hermann, and from time to time he ran his left index finger over his lips, as if to check they were clean.
“You sure?” I asked, once more showing him the headshot of the man we were looking for.
He gave a firm nod. Convinced he was telling the truth, I handed him the envelope with 1,000 euros worth of Swiss francs. He didn’t ask what we would do with the information. The answer may have spoiled his desire to spend the cash. Bouts of conscience always have to be handled with care.
Even if he had, I’d have taken pains to avoid telling him the truth. I was prepared to tell him that we had extraordinary news for the mug, that he’d become a millionaire, that an uncle who had immigrated to Brazil had named him sole heir to his fortune.
Around the clubs and underbelly of Bern we’d spread word that we were looking for someone. The photo, ripped from a flashy magazine for affluent gourmands, showed a handsome, charming forty-five-year old with the disaffected and smug look of a winner, a look we wanted to extinguish for good.
As far as possible we’d been discreet. Bern is the city where you’re likeliest to turn heads for intending to commit murder. In the end, word had reached the ears of gentle Hermann, who, so it seemed, knew the right address.
He met us at a joint that was as old as its owner and would shutter the moment she was gone. The clientele wasn’t much younger. We liked the place because it was a throwback, the glasses tasted vaguely of Savon de Marseille, and every night, for a solid three hours, an Irish couple, Mairéad and Killian, played guitar and sang oldies. Folk, a little jazz, some blues. She had a boyish voice, like Bonnie Raitt. Her man, between notes, held off the ancient rage of the Northern counties. The love between them was the real reason we felt attached to the place. They’d been together for years and still knew how to laugh, kiss, hold each other’s gaze. We envied those lips that sought one another out. They weren’t young anymore, their faces bore the marks of a life spent gigging, but they were real. We hogged a whole table topped with glasses of Calvados, grappa, and vodka. We sat in silence and listened, toasting them with admiration and even shedding a few tears for that love that we ourselves had gone searching for, found on occasion, then lost forever, but which our outlaw hearts weren’t ready to relinquish.
Hermann, the informant, slipped me a piece of paper with the address. It was typewritten, the “s” key had been used up, and you could barely make out the letters. Our man lived in the fifth district, around Spitalacker Stadium.
“What else can you tell me, Hermann?”
“Cottage. Lives with a woman,” he said in halting English.
His words dispelled any lingering doubts. “When did you see them last?”
“Him the other day. Her before that.”
I held out my hand. Hermann, embarrassed, hesitated before taking it. His hand was as cold as the winter that had arrived all of a sudden. He ducked out, careful to avert his gaze. Useless precaution. No one would remember an insignificant little man in the domain of those two Irish lovers.
I went back to my seat—and my drink. “Maybe it really is Giorgio Pellegrini.”
Old Rossini shrugged. “Maybe. Let’s get this over with.”
I looked away. Max the Memory was checking the latest news on his tablet.
“We’ve been in Bern for over a month. If the informant’s mistaken, we go back to Italy. Otherwise the cops will come around asking a lot of uncomfortable questions.”
“I agree,” I said. “We’ll scope it out tomorrow morning.”
Whenever the old owner tired of having us underfoot, we’d retreat to a quiet spot near the train station where high-end escorts came to unwind between clients. Cappuccinos, smoothies, and long sessions in the bathroom to remove the stink of their last john. Unfortunately, the language barrier didn’t help improve relations, but we’d befriended a pair of thirty-something Spanish girls and a trans woman from Slovenia who spoke perfect Italian. She went by Katarina and joined our table willingly. Sometimes she’d sit there silently listening to us chatter away, and other times she’d interrupt for no other reason than to talk about hustling in Milan, her lovers, her neighbors. She kept us company for an hour that night, waiting for a high-paying john to call from the best hotel in the city. Now, for the first time, she insisted on buying us drinks. Normally we wouldn’t hear of it, but when it became clear she’d take offense, we accepted.
She had a thing for Beniamino. That much was clear. Just as it was clear that she didn’t like him for a john. That was her life: screwing strangers and meeting men with whom she could dream of having something better. Katarina stroked his thin whiskers—a source of pride for the Old Gangster—and strutted off.
I’d been expecting a sad and anonymous cottage. The kind you don’t bother noticing, the best kind for hiding out. Instead it was painted a bright, if elegant, color. The small garden was looked after and the hedges along the fence were planted with millimetric precision. But the white gravel drive, which led to the entrance and wrapped around the unit, lay buried in leaves that had gone to rot in the cold and rain. Hermann said he hadn’t seen the woman in a few days. She must have been the one looking after the place. Unless Giorgio Pellegrini was taking care of it. But he wasn’t the type to push a broom, and even if he were, he wouldn’t have risked being seen in the neighborhood.
“It’s deserted,” huffed Beniamino, starting up the car. “Let’s come back for a look when it’s dark. We might have more luck.”
“Maybe he’s just left for a few days,” added Max.
“Or else he smelled a rat,” I interjected, “and he’s fucked us over again.”
Old Rossini engaged the gear of the subcompact with Swiss plates that had been procured for us by our landlord, an Italian who’d done a couple jobs with Beniamino twenty years back. The apartment cost as much as a suit
e in a luxury hotel, but it was comfortable and safe. No one would ever find us there.
We drove to a nearby neighborhood and everyone went his own way. I drank a beer and slipped inside a record shop. The owner was an old rocker with shifty eyes and a face that bespoke a steady diet of hard drugs.
“What’re you looking for?” he asked in German.
“Women blues singers,” I said in English, “are all I listen to right now.”
He pointed to a rack, but I didn’t budge. “I’m looking for something new, but I don’t like combing through CDs. I’m open to suggestions.”
He smiled. Without a second thought, he fished one out and handed it to me. “No way you know this one. Finnish blues.”
I scanned the cover. Ina Forsman. A redhead, tattoos on her arms. “I’ll take it if you let me have a listen.”
“Be my guest,” he shrugged, passing me a pair of battered headphones.
The guy was right. Ina had the perfect voice for songs like “Bubbly Kisses.” For a while now all I’d been relishing, heart and ears, were women singers. Maybe because that was the only kind of blues that could make my desire to fall in love bearable. I thought about some of my past relationships. Just to remind myself that I hadn’t always been so lonely. At a certain point I yanked off the headphones. The rocker looked at me, concerned.
I waved my hand to ensure him everything was fine, but I offered no explanation. It wasn’t as if I could tell him that affairs of the heart must be swept aside when you’re about to kill a man. That I wouldn’t pull the trigger myself didn’t matter. I’d be there and I’d feel relieved to watch Pellegrini die with my own eyes.
The last time we’d been face to face with Handsome Giorgio was in a basement, Rossini pointing a pistol at him. He bartered for his life in exchange for something more important to us, and we kept our end of the bargain. At least the Old Gangster did. I’d begged him to pull the trigger, to rid humanity of that snake, but my friend didn’t listen. We’d given our word.
And yet I continued to believe that for once we could renege on our principles. I had come to terms with that. But Beniamino hadn’t.
A few minutes before 7 P.M. Old Rossini forced open the wrought iron fence. We preferred dinnertime to late night, convinced that the neighbors would be snug in their homes, distracted by the hum of the TV and the noise in the kitchen.
The door’s deadbolt was no match for Beniamino’s picklocks. He entered first, pistol raised. Inside, it was dark and quiet. There was nobody there. Our man least of all. A framed diploma in the hall informed us that the owner was Lotte Schlegel. My tiny electric flashlight shone on a photograph of a young woman with short black hair and a pleasant smile. How had she ended up in Pellegrini’s claws, I wondered.
It was Max who noticed another photo tacked to the door of the antique solid oak closet in the bedroom. Giorgio Pellegrini smiled down at us, his arms crossed. It was the same photo we’d been handing out. Somehow he’d gotten hold of a copy, realized that sooner or later we’d find him, and split.
Max also noticed that the closet was sealed with packing tape. But it was Beniamino who took out a jackknife and cut the tape with the sharp tip.
The faint stench indicated there was a body inside. It was the owner of the house, naked, wrapped in several layers of nylon. The rope with which she’d been strangled was still wound tight around her neck. Her smile from the photograph had been replaced with a horrible grimace. We were no experts, but she must have been dead for days.
Max shuddered, his eyes fixed on the plastic cocoon shrouding the body of the latest woman to pay a high price for having met Handsome Giorgio.
Beniamino put his hand on Max’s shoulder and guided him gently toward the exit.
“What now?” I whispered, disheartened, back in the car.
“Call the cops,” snapped Rossini. “We’ve exhausted all other options.”
I sighed.
Calling Inspector Giulio Campagna was never a good idea. But who was I to complain? I was the one who’d gone looking for him in a pinch. Campagna was as strange as the Hawaiian shirts he sported. He had his own theories about policing and justice. His regularly brusque, irritating tone could try the patience of a saint, but back when we’d written the final chapter in Pellegrini’s criminal activity in Padua, he’d stood up for us.
Convinced that snake was nothing more than a bad memory, we’d gone back to our lives. I’d hooked up with a blues band on tour: I traveled, listened to good music, drank, and picked up a new woman every night. Breezing through life is my way of catching my breath. Then one late afternoon I got a phone call. It was Pellegrini. I should have hung up but couldn’t resist finding out what he wanted. Maybe because I was on my third or fourth beer.
Pellegrini is a man of a thousand surprises, and on that occasion he didn’t disappoint: he wanted to hire us to investigate the murders of his wife and mistress. Martina and Gemma. I knew them well. After their master had fled, they’d taken over management of La Nena, the restaurant Giorgio had opened and made famous.
After arguing back and forth, I declined the job, but he laughed me off: “I know you, Buratti, I’ve seen how you operate. You’re obsessed with the truth. You won’t turn this down.”
His tone was too cocky. You can’t trust a mug like him, even when he’s telling the truth. His every move is carefully calculated. I finished my beer and went out in search of an Internet café.
From what I could glean the two women had been tortured and strangled in the restaurant cellar. The night’s earnings had been found in Gemma’s purse, and no one doubted that Pellegrini had been the real target.
Evidently, the two victims didn’t know where he was hiding out, and their executioners ran out of patience.
That night I slept soundly, even though I couldn’t put my finger on the reason for his phone call. A few hours later, I had my answer when Inspector Campagna and a few officers routed me from bed, the way cops always do, and brought me back to Padua.
At the station I made the acquaintance of Dottoressa Angela Marino. With her looks, I’d never have pegged her for a snake. I only got it when she made me listen to the conversation that I’d had the day before with Pellegrini.
There wasn’t a single incriminating word, but to avoid getting life the bastard had cut a deal with this cop. It wasn’t the first time. In the past he’d sold out accomplices and funneled information to cops, but now he was working a different angle for some kind of sting operation.
And we were part of the deal. If we didn’t join her team, we’d wind up in jail on some trumped-up charge or other. We were hardened criminals, after all; only a long sentence was fit punishment for us.
Dottoressa Marino was persuasive. She threw Max’s medical records in my face. “In his condition, he won’t last more than four or five years in jail.”
I hung my head. Which is to say, I pretended to give in.
My friends and I examined every possible angle, but the best solution was to uproot the problem by eliminating Giorgio Pellegrini, who had gotten us mixed up in that business just to get even. We disappeared from the scene and went after him, but he had evaded us three times. Now we were flirting with ideas and alternatives. And there was no question we needed more time. Even if we still didn’t know the details, it was clear this operation was too dirty to let witnesses walk—or live. Dottoressa Marino never had the slightest intention of keeping her word. We could run or hide out in some quiet spot on the Dalmatian Coast or Lebanon, where Rossini had friends he could count on. But that, we decided, would be our emergency option. The whole business was a sick joke, an injustice we couldn’t stomach. If that cop in league with Pellegrini was planning on playing us for suckers, she was sorely mistaken.
We weren’t about to barter away our dignity. Not for the world. “We’ll go for broke,” said the Old Gangster. In seventies-era gang-speak that m
eant risking it all: freedom, life.
“Call him,” insisted Rossini.
I fished in the pocket of my old flight jacket for my phone.
Two days later it was sunup, and I was sitting down at a little café on the outskirts of Padua, on the ground floor of a gray building bristled with antennas. At that hour, they served frozen pastries, weak coffee, dry milk that was reconstituted as soon as it crossed the Austrian border. The upshot was that it was a discreet place to meet people I’d otherwise never be caught dead with. The owner was an Albanian woman who had mastered the art of minding her own business. She’d arrived at the port of Brindisi with the first wave of boat people in ’91, had busted her ass doing jobs that Italians no longer wanted to do, and had tucked away enough money to buy the place. The clientele was largely composed of retirees and homemakers, all tranquil types.
I ordered a pear juice and glanced disinterestedly at the day’s news. Some priests had gotten embroiled in a sex scandal, and the story had made national TV. Parishioners, porn, sex toys, and a “boss” charged with promoting prostitution. The press was trying to paint a morally grim picture of the affair, but the city was having a laugh. Jokes and rumors abounded, in part because the religious leaders were known and beloved for their pastoral care, and a fuck here or there never hurt anybody. It was nothing new under the Veneto sky. I once knew an old priest who described celibacy as a punishment he’d chosen. He was made of finer stuff, called bread “bread” and wine “wine,” and believed it was his mission to prevent old convicts from returning to jail. When he died, I took it hard.
Inspector Giulio Campagna arrived ten minutes late. He had on a hooded parka with mangy fur lining that looked like the genuine article. He sensed my interest.
“Brush wolf,” he said, pointing at it with his glove.
Blues for Outlaw Hearts and Old Whores Page 1
