Fourth hour.
I sleep.
The airplane’s in line for takeoff, awaiting authorization. Carla has placed her travel bag in the overhead compartment, with the helpful assistance of a stewardess. A few passengers give her knowing glances. Glances that contain the history of the world, but not the history of Carla. If they knew that story, they’d immediately dive back into the newspapers they’re holding in front of them. Other passengers are ignoring her, but they’re doing it ostentatiously. Perhaps they hope she’ll notice them for it. A few miles away, in a small isolated villa, a few men remain on guard until seals have been placed on doors and windows. The people who count are leaving, heading for meetings where they’ll have to report to people who count more than they do, people who in turn will have to report to the people who count most of all. The staircase goes straight up, and it appears to be endless, but the important thing is to be careful of that last step, because after that one you plunge downward into the void. A few miles away, an underworld criminal named Tano Casale is turning a Totocalcio lottery ticket over and over in his hands; he believes it’s a winning ticket and he’s wondering what to do. My suggestion has intrigued him, captured his imagination. The fact that I’m a wanted man has caused him a slight problem, but he’s decided to wait and see how things turn out. He’s coming to the conclusion that he can do it all by himself, that after all he doesn’t need anyone else. After all, he’s the king of the world as well as the boss of part of Milan.
Fifth hour.
I sleep.
By now the airplane is a dot in the distance, as seen from the ground. A trail of smoke at takeoff that will be the same as the trail of smoke on landing, only scattered into a different sky. Carla shivers slightly with cold, the aftermath of tension and fatigue. Her mind is blank and her body demands rest. She has decided to put off until her arrival all planning, all thoughts for the future, all hypothetical strategies. She’s tilted her seat back into the most comfortable position, she’s tucked a pillow under her head, and she’s covered herself with the thin blanket provided by the airline. The engines are buzzing in the tail and it’s easy to drift away. Many miles away, meetings are being held to determine the official version of events and what items to leave out, under cover of personal or state secrecy. A police detective named Stefano Milla is trying to decide whether it’s worth the risk to buy the Alfa Romeo Spider roadster he dreams of. He can imagine himself driving it, the wind in his hair. He can afford it, and he doesn’t feel the slightest remorse for the way he got the money. The only problem he has is explaining his sudden prosperity.
Sixth hour.
Carla is asleep.
I wake up.
My wristwatch tells me a time that means nothing. I think of turning on the television set but immediately dismiss the idea. I’d be looking at Corrado on Domenica In or Arbore’s band on L’altra domenica. There’s no television news at this hour on a Sunday. People want entertainment: some people decide not to know, others decide to forget. It’s a deeply human application of the commutative property. Whichever you choose, the sum remains unchanged. In any case, the only thing I could learn from any public news outlet is how fragmentary the reports are that I already know in complete detail.
I get up and go into the bathroom. I do the usual things, as if it were an ordinary rise-and-shine. I pee. I wash my face. I brush my teeth, and as I do, I think to myself that it’s been an awful long time since I’ve had anything to eat. Food is for the living, and I therefore have no right to it.
Chaos and chance. Now I remember.
I look at myself in the dim light that filters through the slats of the blinds. The mirror imparts an image that doesn’t belong to me. I myself don’t belong to me, because I wear a name that can no longer protect me and that can’t be fixed. It’s like an old shirt, and as such, it needs to be thrown away.
I step out of the bathroom and walk into the living room. The floor is cold and filthy under my bare feet. Hygiene is always the first thing to deteriorate when you’re wanted by the law and on the run. I saw the house where Daytona died. I saw the house where Lucio and the others died.
It must have been cleaner in Bonifaci’s villa.
But they’re all just as dead anyway.
I pick up the file from the chest of drawers and sit down on the couch, which welcomes me with the rustle and crinkle of the plastic slipcovers. On the cover of the file there’s a white label. Someone’s hand wrote a hasty script with a fountain pen and black ink: Daedalus and Icarus.
I think it over for a minute, but the phrase means nothing to me. I unhook the elastic fastener and open the cover. I fold out the three flaps. Inside I find a pile of photographs and a stack of papers. I extract them and leaf through, slowly at first and then frenetically. When I get to the end I go back to the beginning and pore through it more calmly. Those sheets of paper and those snapshots are a traveler’s guide to a subterranean world, a tunnel carved out yard after yard by a complete lack of scruples, guided in the proper direction by unbridled ambition. It’s enough to unhinge a person’s sanity just to pass through it once, because it’s hard to absorb the depths to which human abjectness can sink. There’s enough evidence in this folder for a magistrate to order a series of arrests, with handcuffs and preventive detention—that is, as long as the magistrate in question isn’t ordered to desist by his superiors.
I close the file and lean back on the couch.
The ceiling becomes a screen upon which my mind projects images. I see familiar faces, places, and colors again. There is a succession of streets, people, seaside settings, children’s games, grown-up love affairs, inadequate hiding places.
Then, suddenly, without warning, I start laughing.
I laugh for myself, for all these years spent with a suspicion that has now become a certainty. I laugh for that razor blade that condemned me to spend the rest of my life as nothing more than a spectator, while I in my utter stupidity believed that I had more than a few strings to pull. I laugh for Carla and for all the planes that, sadly, have to land sooner or later. I laugh for Barbara’s breasts and Cindy’s white flesh and for Laura, who fell in love and was betrayed. I laugh for Lucio and his soulless music and his pointless years of pretense. I laugh for Giorgio Fieschi, who could have spent the rest of his life listening to the roar of the crowd but instead died in the faint hiss of a gun with a silencer. I laugh for Daytona and his expensive watch and his comb-over that, even at death’s door, his hand was rising up to pat into place. I laugh for Tano Casale and his all-too-familiar voice. I laugh for men who took the job of defending others but when the time came found no one to defend them. I laugh for the ideals that deal death and the death of ideas. I laugh because only the stupid and the innocent lack an alibi. I laugh because chaos and chance aren’t governing the world, they’re destroying it.
I laugh and laugh and laugh.
I laugh so hard that my lungs start to ache because I can’t catch a breath. I laugh so hard that I’m afraid someone is going to pound on the wall to make me shut up in here. I laugh so hard that I find myself sprawled out on the couch with the plastic slipcover glued to my face, wet with tears.
When I’m done laughing, the tears are all that’s left.
Tears of liberation, grief, and farewell.
I recover and get to my feet. I know what to do now. The first thing I have to do is track down my lawyer, Ugo Biondi, as quickly as possible. I try his office, but just to cross it off my checklist. I know that it’s highly unlikely that I’ll catch him there on a Sunday, but I can’t overlook any possibility. His phone rings and rings without anyone answering. I was hoping he might be in the office to prepare for a case in court on Monday, but no such luck. Ugo’s no workaholic. The day that the Italian government decides to issue knighthoods for minimal effort, I’m pretty sure that he’ll be on the first year’s list of honorees.
I dial his home number, but with the same result. I imagine a phone ringing in an empty apartm
ent, the sound bouncing off the walls. Off the furniture and lamps and carpets and books on bookshelves.
There’s only one other place I could find him. I know that he has a vacation home on Lake Maggiore. Whoremonger that he is, he sometimes spends weekends there with his latest Lady Quack-Quack. Once or twice I sent one of my own girls there with him. Free of charge out of loving-kindness, and entered on the balance sheet as a PR expense.
I even think I remember the name of the town.
I dial the number for Information provided by the Italian phone company, SIP. I ask the operator for a phone number of a certain Ugo Biondi in Arona. My doubts about the name of the town are immediately swept away by a voice giving me the number requested.
Now I dial that number.
Every movement is clear and precise. Every sound is crystalline. My finger in the holes of the rotary dial, the sound of the rotor as it clicks back into place. Now I’m clearheaded and determined, as if I’d just snorted a line of coke.
The phone rings on the other end of the line. It rings for a long time, without anyone coming to pick up the receiver. The answering voice catches me by surprise, just as I’m about to hang up.
“Yes, hello?”
He’s a little out of breath, as if he’d run to pick up the phone in time.
“Ciao, Ugo, this is Bravo.”
Now he’s completely breathless. I’d have the same reaction, if I were him.
“Fuck. Where are you?”
“In a place.”
He doesn’t mince words.
“You’re up to your eyebrows in shit.”
“Not anymore. I’ve taken care of everything.”
“What do you mean, you’ve taken care of everything?”
“I’m innocent and I can prove it. I’m planning to turn myself in and I want you to be there as my legal counsel. I think this will get your name in the papers. It might be a fairly complicated case, but what is there in this life that’s simple?”
He takes a second to think it over. Another second to answer.
“I’m at the lake.”
I have to smile. My phone call must really have caught him off guard and flustered him for him to say such a ridiculous phrase.
“Umm, I know that. I called you there.”
“Jesus, of course, obviously. What I mean is, it’s going to take me some time to get back to Milan.”
“Take as long as you like. Nobody’s chasing you.”
There’s another short silence on the other end of the line. He’s probably wondering how on earth I manage to make jokes, given the situation I’m in. He doesn’t know that I’m about to experience one of the happiest moments of my life.
I take advantage of this opportunity to get practical.
“How long do you think it’ll take you, more or less?”
“Depends on traffic. An hour and fifteen minutes, maybe an hour and a half.”
“We’ll see you in an hour and a half in your law office.”
I hang up the phone without giving him a chance to answer. I’m pretty sure that even if he was in the middle of having sex, he’s going to leave his lady love sprawled on the bed halfway to paradise, jump into his trousers, and drive straight to Milan as fast as whatever car he owns can go.
Now I cross my fingers and hope for another stroke of luck. I rummage around in drawers and cabinets until I find a phone book. I lean on the table and look up Stefano Milla’s name in the directory. He could be on duty, which is very likely, considering that all hell has broken loose, but I’d prefer to put off a phone call to police headquarters until it’s my last resort.
He picks up on the sixth ring and answers in a sleepy voice. He probably worked the night shift and I just woke him up. I need hardly add that I couldn’t care less.
“Hello.”
“Hello, Stefano. This is Bravo.”
Silence. I know that he can’t believe his ears. Then I hear the rustle of sheets, the sound of someone suddenly sitting bolt upright in bed.
“Hello?”
“I said, this is Bravo.”
“Unfortunately, I understood you the first time. I just wanted to make sure.”
I breathe my most ceremonious voice into the mouthpiece.
“How is everything?”
“You piece of shit. Do you have any idea how many people are out on the street, trying to find you?”
Nobody recognizes a piece of shit like another piece of shit. I have to hand it to him.
“I know that. Don’t worry, they’ll be able to relax soon enough. I’m planning to turn myself in. But first I need your help.”
“Have you lost your mind? I’ve already run enough risks for you.”
“I’m going to give you two alternatives. The first is, you do what I ask, you get a bundle of money, and you even make a good impression on your superior officers.”
“What’s the second?”
“Be an asshole and show up with your bullyboys at the address I’m going to give you. Do that, and I can guarantee you that we’ll make the trip back to police central together, both of us in handcuffs. I don’t know if that’s clear enough for you.”
His voice changes. Suddenly he’s turned into a good cop. Maybe now he’s not even being a cop.
“Bravo, you can’t do this to me. I’ve always been a good friend to you.”
“You’re nobody’s friend, Stefano. I’m pretty sure that there are days when you can’t even stand yourself. All the same…”
I leave the phrase hanging. Just long enough to dangle him over the hot coals. The coals begin to roast him and he prods me.
“All the same?”
I repeat the words I said to my lawyer just a few minutes ago.
“I’m innocent, Stefano. And I can prove it. I have documents that are so explosive they’ll leave a hole as deep as the craters on the moon.”
“How the hell did you get into this mess in the first place?”
“I really had no say in the matter. But I do have a say in how I get out of it. If you give me a hand, I’ll make sure you’re one of the people who get full credit. And, just to reinforce the concept, a fat bundle of cash.”
The last few words seem to calm him down.
He wouldn’t feel so calm if he knew the names of the people I just read in that file. If he knew what’s about to happen to Tano Casale.
“What do I have to do?”
“Wait at home. I’ll call you later and tell you where you need to go.”
“How much later?”
“Fifty million lire later. Does that work as an approximate time?”
Once again, I hang up without giving him a chance to reply. I’m positive that he’ll do what I tell him to, now and later. In the first place because he’s shitting his pants with fear, and in the second place because he’s never seen, much less laid his hands on, fifty million lire in his life. He wouldn’t know how to write the number out, even if he were copying it directly.
Now all I have to do is wait.
I’m relaxed, now that time is no longer barreling straight at me like an oncoming collision. In my mind there’s still a plane in the sky, carrying a sleeping woman, and with every minute that passes it gets farther and farther away. Now it’s time to think about the plane that will carry me away. Where? I’ll make that decision at the last minute, too.
I go into the bathroom, and there I find the copy of La Settimana Enigmistica that I had left sitting on the towel cabinet. The issue that unveiled Lucio’s masquerade and allowed me to unmask him. I pick it up and go back to the living room. I sit down at the table and leaf through it, in search of a cryptic clue. I find one on the Page of the Sphinx.
Accommodation that’s barred for flappers (8)
I smile. I like the imagery, and considering my current residence, it’s even somewhat topical. It’s one word, eight letters long. I light a cigarette. The coffee cups are still sitting on the table. One of them still has the taste of Carla’s lips on the rim. The other
one is full of coffee that’s cold now, the coffee I never drank.
I work on the cryptic clue. It takes me a while to work it out, but I come up with the solution.
Birdcage.
It wasn’t really that hard after all. Every puzzle shows its weak point, once you solve it. Sometimes it’s enough to read a little-known fact in a weekly puzzler; sometimes it’s enough to find a hidden pistol, if you know where to look for it. Sometimes all you have to do is open a stiff cardboard file. Unfortunately, there are many things and many people that you lose along the way, and you can never get them back.
I extinguish my cigarette in my coffee again. The sizzling hiss is drowned out by the sound of a key turning in the lock.
I swivel to look at the door.
The latch clicks open and the door swings toward me. In the rectangular frame two figures appear, a canvas suitcase on the floor beside them. A woman with a cloth jacket stares at me in astonishment and fear. At her side stands a pale little boy with dark hair, about five years old. Their appearance and their clothing indicate that they’ve just arrived here after a long journey and are trying to make up their minds whether the place they’ve arrived is worse than the place they left.
A Pimp's Notes Page 29
