Max la Memoria walked into my apartment without knocking, wrapped in a garishly colored dressing gown.
He had a light-green file folder under one arm. “Nothing adds up in this narcotics heist,” he said flatly. “Even the amount and the types of narcotics keep changing.”
“What do you mean?”
“At first, they reported that forty-four kilos of narcotics was missing from the storeroom: thirty kilos of heroin, ten kilos of coke, and four kilos of amphetamines, ecstasy, and other assorted pills. But I found a written response from the deputy minister for internal affairs to a parliamentary inquiry in June 2004; there it says that forty-nine kilos of heroin were stolen, along with six kilos of coke and another couple of kilos of hash.”
“That’s a discrepancy of something like thirteen kilos. That’s a lot,” I commented, tossing a cigarette butt into the fireplace.
The fat man flopped onto the couch. “You want to know what I think?”
“I do,” I answered. “You haven’t come out of your study for the past two days.”
He ran his fingers through his unkempt hair. “The thieves wanted the heroin.”
“Someone hired them to do it. They had the contacts to move the product and they reached out and found someone willing to help them get inside.”
Max handed me a newspaper clipping. “I’m not convinced that this job was about selling drugs.”
I started skimming the article. The headline read: “Evidence Stolen, Acquittal in View?” I glanced at the date: July 3, 2004.
“They may be guilty, but there’s a good chance the defendants will go free anyway. That’s the unlikely outcome of the trial for the spectacular heist of narcotics from the Institute of Legal Medicine. There is a risk that the people who were peddling those narcotics will be acquitted and released . . . The district attorney’s office is willing to negotiate a plea bargain, but according to reports from well-informed sources, the lawyers of those charged are opting for an abbreviated trial. No appeals. All or nothing . . .”
“Usually the couriers are just mules, and they cut them loose if they get caught,” I answered, doubtfully. “I’ve never heard of a drug cartel putting together such a complicated plan to get a low-level transporter out of trouble.”
“Maybe they weren’t so ‘low-level,’ or maybe there’s something else going on here.”
“That may be. But I don’t see how any of this can help us identify the guy with the ring and find out what happened to Sylvie.”
When I said her name, I felt my stomach seize up, the way it always did in those days and weeks. The mystery shrouding her fate lured my mind toward territories infested with impossibly violent nightmares. A beautiful woman, a vendetta . . . there were all the ingredients, and I couldn’t keep from thinking ugly thoughts.
“You’re not listening,” the fat man admonished me.
“Sorry, I just can’t help thinking—”
Max held up a hand to silence me. “Let’s make a deal, Marco: let’s pretend this is just another case, or we’re not going to be able to hold it together. And we’ve got to stay on track, we can’t afford to lose it.”
I nodded in agreement, and told him to go on.
“Finding out what really happened with the burglary, which might seem to have nothing to do with this, is crucial. We have to look into everything so we can figure out what role the dead guy played. I did some research on the ring. It’s what’s known as a chevalier, a signet ring. The flat part on top is where you would normally have an engraved coat of arms.”
“An aristocrat?”
“I don’t think so, that cross thingie was pretty crude, and I couldn’t find anything like it in any of the heraldry sites I searched online,” he said. “It definitely doesn’t belong to any well known family.”
“What else?”
My partner held out a pair of empty hands. “That’s all I’ve got so far.”
I looked over at the bottle of Roger Groult “Vénérable” Calvados and then over at the clock on the wall. It was 4:20 in the afternoon. I sighed. I still had a long time to wait before I could slurp down my first glass. For the past two years now I’d made a rule that I could only drink after dinner. It was the only way I could think of to avoid becoming an alcoholic. But every blessed day I did nothing but check the progress of the hands of the clock.
Max caught my gaze and smiled. “How I understand you,” he said in a tone of complicity. “That’s why I’m so careful not to slip into the quagmire of dieting. I’d just spend the day counting the minutes, terrified of turning into an anorexic.”
I pointed to the bottle of grappa. “Drink a shot to my health and stop spouting nonsense.”
“For a friend, it’s the least I could do.”
“Last night . . .” I started to tell him.
“As you sat watching the usual fucking television shopping show . . .” he mocked me.
“It relaxes me, you know that . . .”
“And between a mattress and a set of new pots and pans . . .”
“I remembered that the guy told us that before coming to see me he’d tried to do some looking around on his own, and he’d run into a cop who scalped him for a sizable wad of euros just to leave him alone.”
“Yeah, I remember.”
“So if that’s true, it means that when the guy first came to town he had no idea of who we were.”
Max finally got it. “Which means that it was the cop who gave him your name.”
“Exactly.”
“That is, unless he just made that part up . . .”
“Look, it’s a lead, and it’s worth looking into.”
“I agree. Let’s wait for Rossini.”
“He’s on his way. He called about half an hour ago.”
Beniamino’s face was hollowed out, his eyes sunken with tension. He was impeccable as ever, shaven, sweet-smelling, and neatly dressed, but pain was carving an abyss deep inside him.
We were friends, so I didn’t waste time. I told him what I thought: “The past few days on the Dalmatian coast haven’t done you a lot of good.”
He shook his head. “I’m just holding it together,” he admitted. “And for the first time I’ve got ugly thoughts buzzing around in my brain.”
I knew exactly what he meant. Find out the truth, take revenge, and put an end to it all. I didn’t say anything. All things considered, I saw his point. How the fuck do you go on living with something so grim and tragic in your gut? For an instant, I thought how lucky I was this hadn’t happened to me.
“That’s right,” I exclaimed aloud. “Why didn’t it happen to me?”
The two others glanced at me quizzically.
“Why did they single out Beniamino? Why didn’t they take Virna?”
“Maybe because she left you,” Max suggested.
Rossini took off his camelhair overcoat. “No. It’s because they know that of the three of us I’m the one that does murders. So I was the one they wanted to punish first.”
“That’s what I think,” I said. “But that means that someone around here has been giving them information. And I think it has to be the same cop that gave my name to the guy with the ring in the first place.”
“What cop?” the smuggler asked. I explained my theory to him.
“Then we have to try to find him,” he concluded.
“We’re going to need some cash,” the fat man pointed out.
Beniamino pointed to the suitcase he was carrying. “I smashed my piggybank,” he announced. “We can go.”
We climbed aboard a large expensive French four-door, no longer in production. Rossini had held on to it because in the engine compartment there was a space that seemed to have been designed specially to conceal a pair of handguns. The guns were souvenirs of Beniamino’s recent trip to the former Yugoslavia: brand-new, never fired, and if the police got hold of them, the guns would tell them nothing.
We started making the rounds of police informers. We handed out crips wads of bills in exchange for reports on the policemen who paid them.
“Unusual request,” commented Raschio, a former heroin addict who worked the downtown piazzas, mingling with the spritz-sipping crowd to identify and report: not so much the dealers as the regular users. His specialty was screwing the little hipsters who sniffed smack: once they were caught in his web, in order to avoid further problems and to save their reputations and careers, they would in turn become informers. That was how the war on drugs worked.
His nickname, Raschio, was Italian for “rasp,” and it came from his voice, which resembled a metal file grinding down a piece of rebar. “Maybe my own cop might be interested to know about this,” he added in a sly tone of voice.
“We’re looking for one in particular to do a piece of business,” I explained in a conciliatory tone of voice. “When we do find him, if he hears that you’ve been causing trouble, he might just lose his temper.”
Raschio thought about it for a minute and decided that he’d settle for a payment from us alone. He knew Rossini’s reputation, and even if Raschio was no smarter than the average informer, he did understand that it was to his advantage not to run the risk of pissing off the old smuggler.
“Guys, there’s a damned army of them,” the fat man said late that evening, with a tone of exasperation. “It’s a good thing we’re only working the narcotics informers.”
“ . . . and we’re limiting ourselves to the ones who were operating in 2004,” I pointed out.
“I’m sick of meeting pieces of shit and giving them money—my money,” Rossini threw in, angrily. “Let’s get a pizza and go to sleep. We’ll start again tomorrow.”
I still hadn’t had a drop of liquor. I was looking forward to the triple ration I would savor later on, stretched out on the sofa by the fireplace.
The next day, Old Rossini showed up a little before noon. “Let’s go have an aperitif with the stool pigeons.”
There were informers of every kind, sex, and nationality. The world of tipsters and stool pigeons is intricate and variegated. Every one of them has a different personal story, and in many cases it’s not extortion that’s driving them to betray their fellow man. For some of them, it’s like a calling. They’re good at it. Take the case of Morena Borromeo. She had tried working in a number of legal venues, but nothing worked out. She was very attractive, she knew how to dress, and she had started frequenting the best places in town. After a succession of failed relationships with the sons of wealthy businessmen, she started sniffing cocaine and turning the occasional discreet trick. Occasional, carefully considered, and well paid. Nonetheless, she found herself in trouble with the law. Luckily for her, a compassionate cop with nice manners pointed out an alternative, explaining that she knew lots of things, valuable information that could be worth cold hard cash on the right market.
And so she became a professional informant. She was good at her job—she had an uncanny gift for getting people to spill the beans. Especially men. It’s the oldest story in the world: men talk in bed. And lowlifes talk more than anyone else. Maybe not about themselves, but in order to look smart, they will tell other people’s secrets. And she was there, ready to accept, sort, and merchandise that information.
I knew her very well. She’d once dated a small-town industrialist who had made his fortune by manufacturing bicycle wheels. Then, when the market was ripe, he made his move and shifted his operation to Romania, because paying taxes to the corrupt national government in Rome and negotiating with the powerful Italian trade unions had become a pain in the neck. The fool thought he was sleeping with a lady. One day he confessed that he was sick and tired of the underage girl he’d been screwing in Timis¸oara. As Morena was slipping on her panties, she told him that she’d be needing an extra chunk of cash, or her conscience would drive her to report him to the police and tell everything to his wife.
The man turned to a lawyer, who hired me to do the negotiating. At first, I refused to have anything to do with it. It struck me as a classic case of sexual exploitation with side dishes of bullying and cash. But the industrialist insisted on having a meeting with me at any cost. He swore that he would leave the sixteen-year-old Romanian girl alone; in fact, he would give her a job and provide her family with assistance. The lawyer vouched for the man’s promise. I agreed to take the job; it was the only way I could see that the girl might come out of this with anything more than a kick in the ass. But making a deal with Morena proved to be somewhat more complicated. She played the part of the society lady, she made appointments to meet in expensive restaurants, and she named a stratospheric sum. I managed to wrestle her down to fifty thousand euros, to the enormous relief of the victim of her extortion.
Then I happened to run into her occasionally in the places people went for an aperitif. She greeted me jubilantly, as if we were old friends. I had always preserved a professional attitude with her, courteous and slightly distant, but deep down I kind of liked her. I liked her enough to wind up in bed with her. One night I shared my feelings with my friends, hoping they would give me a little encouragement. It was a mistake.
“How can you even think of it?” Max admonished me. “She’s the spitting image of the evil stepmother from Snow White.”
“There’s nothing our Marco likes better than a dangerous slut,” Beniamino said in an oracular tone. “Like that time in Sardinia that he went to bed with a psychopathic killer.”
“I remember her well. The notorious Gina Manes,” the fat man recalled.
“Let’s not delve into the past,” I protested.
“Fair enough. But you don’t know shit about women,” Old Rossini concluded tersely. We changed the subject.
But the day I saw her again, perched on a barstool, her legs crossed to good effect, dressed elegantly in a short-skirted but expensive suit, I regretted not having at least given it a shot with her. If I hadn’t been so upset over Sylvie’s kidnapping, I would have offered to buy her a drink.
Morena didn’t miss my appraising glance. “Are you here on business or pleasure?”
“Business.”
“But you wouldn’t mind taking a little time off from your business, would you?”
“Nothing doing.”
She grimaced like a naughty little girl making a face. “Liar.”
Morena wanted to keep playing games. The sight of my two friends, however, made it clear that the time had come to start negotiating.
“I have a lot of gifts to hand out at Christmas,” she announced. “I am very expensive this time of year.”
“Shut up and listen,” Rossini whispered.
“Oh my, your friend’s quite the gentleman,” she commented as she got down from her stool. She took my arm and pointed to a table off in a quiet corner. “I’m going to talk to you and no one else.”
I explained to her the kind of information we were looking for. Her cocaine-reddened nostrils flared, like a she-wolf who senses her prey.
“How much is in it for me?”
“Don’t work yourself into a frenzy,” I told her in a flat voice. “This is a small deal.”
She plunged her red-enameled fingernails into her glass and pulled out the orange slice. She sucked it reflectively to let me see how good she was. “I don’t believe you.”
“Well, that’s your mistake.”
“As far as the police are concerned, the investigation into the narcotics heist is a closed case,” she explained. “If this evening I called up my handsome policeman who pays me a monthly salary and told him that I can detail the names of those responsible, he wouldn’t even bother coming by.”
That was interesting. “Why not?”
She made the gesture of clapping a cover onto a pot. “I just told you: case closed.”
“Looks like you know plenty about it.”
She smiled. This time, she wasn’t seductive at all. “Maybe. But if I find out anything, I want ten thousand euros.”
“You just priced yourself out of the market,” I said as I got to my feet.
She grabbed me by the wrist. “My handsome policeman was involved in the investigation, but not officially, you understand?”
I understood perfectly, but it wasn’t in my interest to act too interested. “Like a lot of people in that period.”
She got up and brought her lips close to my ear. “But he likes two things,” she whispered. “Money, and the way I suck his cock.”
Her warm breath sent a shiver down my back. “The number of my cell phone is still the same,” I muttered as I walked off.
Late that afternoon, Old Rossini lost his patience with an asshole who had served a long prison sentence for kidnapping and was trying to rip us off. The guy must have forgotten that all three of us had been guests of the state, and that we knew every angle to the art of lying. We were in a pub, and the guy was sitting next to Beniamino. The smuggler did nothing more than to reach down his hand and grab the guy’s testicles, crushing them with a grip that had made him legendary in the underworld.
The asshole gasped, his mouth wide open in atrocious pain, unable to emit even the smallest sound, and keeled forward until his forehead rested on the table. “Fuck. You,” hissed Rossini.
“Let him be,” I said, worried that someone might notice what was happening. “Prison wasn’t good for him.”
“Why? Do you know someone that prison was good for?” Max retorted in an argumentative tone.
“It was just a way of saying his brain is fried.”
The fat man wouldn’t drop the bone. “Beniamino has spent more time in prison than this jerk,” he insisted. “So what? Are you saying his brain is fried more than this asshole sitting next to us?”
The former kidnapper leaned toward the wall and vomited. We barely noticed.
“What’s wrong with you?” I asked. “You trying to start an argument?”
The fat man denied it. “The fact is that sometimes you just talk nonsense. Around this table, all told, is more than forty years of prison, and you start making jokes.”
Old Rossini stood up. “That’s enough,” he ordered. Then, to Max: “Ask the next shrink that you take to bed if she’ll be so kind as to help you get over your prison complex. You haven’t served enough time to justify these poses as if you were a lifer.”
The fat man was about to deliver a comeback when the waiter arrived. Eastern European accent. Ukrainian, maybe. He pointed at the guy bent over double on the bench and the remains of his lunch on the floor.
“Who’s going to clean that up?” he demanded, in disgust.
“The fact is that the beer you serve here is too cold,” I complained.
“And watered down,” Beniamino threw in.
As we walked past him, I slipped a twenty euro note into the breast pocket of his shirt. “Sorry about that.”
Every so often I got into a fight with Max. That happened less frequently with Beniamino and when it did, we got over it in ten minutes. Max la Memoria, in contrast, held a grudge longer than I did, and sometimes days and days would go by before one of the two of us would make a gesture of reconciliation.
This time, the situation was different, and I wasted no time. “From now on, I’ll try to avoid making references to prison.”
Max burst out laughing. “Christ, that was fast! You didn’t even give me time to sulk.”
When we got in the car, I peeked into the rearview mirror and saw the fat man looking out the window in a reverie. Beniamino’s words had hit hard, but he was right with a vengeance. Prison is a grim experience, and if you’ve ever been there, you have to deal with the aftermath sooner or later. Crying into your beer every chance you get does no good at all.
That night we drove the streets and roads, looking for old streetwalkers and transsexuals with reputations as informers. We only found one or two. The rest were retired now.
“Oh, the good old days are over,” lamented Angelica, a transsexual who couldn’t wear too short a miniskirt because of the equipment that dangled between her legs. “It’s all foreign merchandise these days.”
“Haven’t you had your operation yet?” asked Rossini.
“I wouldn’t dream of it. I’d lose all my clients,” she shot back decisively. “You little men want us active and passive at the same time.”
She was a straight dealer, and she made it very clear right away that there was nothing that she could do to help us. She’d settled her accounts with the cop that was blackmailing her, and now she made a living and was very careful to mind her own business. She refused the money I offered her for her trouble.
“It’s too cold to stay out here on the street and I’m hungry,” she said. “Why don’t you come get a bite with me?”
We invited her to get in the car and we went to get a plate of spaghetti at a little place just outside of the city.
We got back to La Cuccia just before closing time. Rossini dropped us off at the front door and headed back to Punta Sabbioni. I’d offered him a couch to sleep on at my place, but like every other evening he thanked me and refused, in case Sylvie reemerged from the darkness that had swallowed her up. He didn’t say it in so many words, but that was clearly what he was thinking.
When we walked into the bar the first thing I noticed was that Rudy Scanferla was behind the bar, intently drying glasses, alone, with a grim expression on his face. It didn’t take long to figure out why. There were two guys sitting at our usual table. I traded a quick glance with my partner.
“Cops,” he whispered.
Old timers. White hair, faces with all the marks left by years of night shifts and early wakeup calls. Days punctuated by coffee and cigarettes. One of the pair waved us over. He had an immaculately trimmed snow-white goatee.
He came straight to the point. “You’ve been asking a lot of people a lot of questions. Now we want to know why.”
“Did the top brass send you, or is this a personal initiative?” I asked.
“Buratti, don’t be an asshole, answer my partner’s question,” the other cop cut in.
“I don’t have anything to tell your partner.”
“You know how tough we can make life for you.”
I looked over at the fat man. Now it was his turn. “There’s a lawyer who thinks that . . .”
“Shut up!” I shouted.
“No, you shut up!” the cop with the goatee snapped at me.
“As I was saying,” Max went on, “there’s a lawyer who hired us because he has a client who claims that he knows who did the burglary at the Institute of Legal Medicine. But before he takes him into court, he wants to make sure he doesn’t wind up looking like an asshole.”
“And just who is this drug dealer?” the other cop asked.
Oh, the fat man was good . . . My partner trotted out the first and last name of a Turkish courier who’d been arrested a few months earlier with five kilos of heroin. The two cops eased up visibly.
“That’s crap,” the cop with the white goatee declared, stroking his whiskers with one hand.
He took a pause to light a cigarette and then resumed his attack. “But you guys are looking for one specific cop, aren’t you?”
“The Turk said that he’s the mole,” the fat man tossed out.
A smile of satisfaction glimmered briefly on the lips of both cops. Now they were sure that we were lost in the weeds. They got to their feet.
“Forget about this business,” the cop with the white goatee said threateningly. “And that’s not advice. It’s an order.”
They left the bar without closing the door behind them.
“They came in around halfway through the evening,” said Rudy, coming out from behind the bar to go shut the front door. “They just took seats at your table without ordering anything and sat there, glaring at the customers. In less than twenty minutes, the place was empty.”
“Don’t worry about it. They’re not coming back.”
“Well, who do you think they were?” I asked my partner. “Carabinieri, treasury, state police?”
“I really don’t know. I’ve never seen them before, and that’s already a piece of information.”
“Yeah, me neither. And I thought I knew every old-school cop around.”
For thirty-six hours nothing happened. Rossini called every so often to find out if there was news; his tone of voice clearly betrayed a mounting tension and distress.
I was listening to the nasal voice of Percy Mayfield singing You Don’t Exist No More when the ring tone of my cell phone cut through the notes of the blues.
“Ten grand—take it or leave it,” Morena blurted over the phone.
I snapped the phone shut in her face. We were certainly willing to spend any amount of money to find out something—anything—about what had happened to Sylvie, but I knew Morena far too well. If I didn’t hold up my end of the negotiating process in a respectable manner, she’d feel free to name any sum that came into her mind.
She called back ten minutes later. “I found the cop you’re looking for.”
“That makes you the seventh person just today,” I lied.
“But I’m the only one who has the right name.”
“At that price, no deal.”
“I told you I wasn’t cheap.”
“Call me back when you land on planet Earth.”
“Don’t hang up on me . . .”
“Why, do we have something else to talk about?”
“We could talk about whether we do or don’t over dinner.”
A restaurant for cokeheads. The cooking was barely passable, the interior was discreet, elegant, and decorated like a box of bonbons; the clientele was made up of ambitious social climbers, male and female, who’d probably all had a few lines before dinner. I knew the owner. He’d spent a few years in prison for dealing drugs. Then he’d decided to get smart; he’d started the restaurant so he could peddle drugs in blessed peace. No one busted his chops because he paid the right people on time. He didn’t even have to provide information; he just handed over three envelopes stuffed with cash to three different uniforms who came in to pick them up at regular intervals. Of course, among the customers were quite a few names that counted in Padua. As I walked in I noticed a couple of tables where more-or-less legal negotiations were being concluded, another three or four tables with illicit couples enjoying their dinners, and last of all, her, the queen of informers, looking at me with a smile.
“Have I ever told you how badly you dress?” she asked as I sat down at her table.
“More than once.”
“You really look like an illegal immigrant, from one of the eastern bloc countries . . .”
“Once you told me that I dressed like an African.”
“You were wearing a purple silk shirt, darling . . .”
She was dressed to turn heads, and heads were turning. I looked at her with frank appreciation, laying on a series of open expressions of lust that made her laugh with gusto.
“If I reached out under the table I bet I’d find something very hard to the touch,” she said mischievously.
“A well-bred lady like yourself would never do anything of the sort.”
Another laugh. The waitress came over with the menus. She was a mulatta. Almost certainly Cuban. She was cute and curvaceous, as required by the style of the restaurant. When we ordered, Morena demanded that the proprietor choose the wine. And of course an expensive bottle was brought to the table, the usual wine “constructed” by some fashionable enologist or other, with a pointlessly high proof.
After a while I got bored with staring at her tits, placed on generous display by her plunging neckline. “Well?”
“I know the name of the cop who sold your name to the guy who was looking for information about the burglary.”
The time had come to find out whether Morena was telling the truth. “There’s just one thing I don’t understand,” I said in a thoughtful tone of voice. “If the cops wanted to whitewash the case in a hurry, why suggest the name of the one private investigator who might be able to find something out?”
“Maybe because he knew that you don’t get mixed up with drugs and his real objective was to get you in trouble.”
I looked up sharply from my food. She really did know who it was. I cocked my head to one side. “Ten thousand, take it or leave it,” she reiterated in a sugary sweet little voice.
“I’ll take it.”
She raised her glass. “Let’s drink to our agreement.”
“Tell me the name.”
“Did you bring the money with you?”
I slapped my chest with my right hand, over my heart. “It’s right here.”
“We’ll do this my way,” she announced. “We’re going to finish dinner, then you take me home and, far from spying eyes, we’ll make the trade.”
“Don’t you trust me?”
“That’s not it. It’s that I like having you by the balls.” When she saw the irritated expression on my face, she added: “Oh come on, let me have my fun for once.”
As always, when you’re in a burning hurry, the service was painfully slow. Morena got up twice to go snort a line of coke in a closet positioned strategically between the doors of the men’s and women’s toilets. The proprietor’s wife took care of setting up the lines and providing disposable short plastic straws, though some customers brought their own straws, made of silver. The luxuries indulged in by people the police can’t touch.
I finally succeeded in paying the check and dragging my informer out of the restaurant. She shrieked in horror at the sight of my Skoda Felicia.
“Why don’t you buy a new car?” she wailed.
“Because I like this one,” I replied brusquely. “If you prefer, I can call you a cab.”
Morena lived in the center of town, in a big apartment building that might have been nice in the Sixties, but was now a horror to behold. She pulled a remote out of her purse and buzzed open the door to the underground garage. “No one will bother us down there.”
I stopped my car in front of the private parking garage marked ‘7’. Morena unzipped my down parka, slipped a hand into the inside breast pocket of my blazer, and felt the envelope full of cash. After caressing my chest, she reached out, seized my chin, and kissed me.
“I’m in kind of a hurry to get that name,” I said politely.
She started unfastening the belt on my trousers. “You really never listen. This time we’re doing it my way.”
I gave in. And it wasn’t very difficult. “This isn’t the most comfortable place,” was my sole objection.
She opened the door of the car and got out, rummaging through her purse for the keys to the garage. A few seconds later, we were embracing in the dark. When she turned around and placed both hands on the wall and spread her legs wide, I hiked up her skirt and ran both my hands over her firm smooth ass. Then I lowered her panties to her ankles.
“Hurry up, Alligator,” she urged. “I’m giving you a special price: just five hundred euros.”
I stopped cold and she burst out laughing. “I’m joking, darling.” She reached around, seized my cock, and guided it inside her. “Go slow,” she said. “I want to enjoy this.”
Beniamino and Max were waiting impatiently in my apartment. I’d called them the minute I left Morena’s garage, after swearing to myself that I would never breathe a word about fucking her.
“De Angelis,” I hissed the minute I set foot in the living room. “Arnaldo De Angelis.”
“Wasn’t he the cop that was implicated in that perjury case?” asked the fat man, true to his moniker. “When was it, 1998?”
“No, 1999,” I corrected him.
De Angelis was a police detective who had decided to accuse an ex-convict of assaulting him in a deserted parking structure, fabricating the details out of whole cloth. Two shoves and a back-handed smack across the face that would have placed the defendant at a suspicious time and location, allowing the detective to shoehorn him into a much more serious set of charges: receiving and fencing stolen goods. This charming little set-piece was worth five solid years in terms of prison time. And since the detective needed a witness to prop up his fabrication, he asked a fellow cop to swear a false affidavit. I had been hired by the ex-convict’s defense team, and I had little trouble discovering that the other cop had been out grocery shopping in a supermarket with his wife and kids.
I wanted to defuse things amicably, so I waited for De Angelis at his usual bar and showed him a photograph of his friend pushing a shopping cart down the frozen foods aisle, taken from the security camera feed, with a nice time stamp in the corner. The detective dropped charges, the defense lawyer got his client acquitted on the stolen merchandise rap. But evidently De Angelis still had it in for me, and he’d been patiently waiting for the first opportunity to pay me back: it took five full years for that opportunity to roll around. Patience and determination. Those are typical qualities of old school cops. He had retired about a year ago, Morena told me. She gave me his current address, too.
It was an expensive apartment building in a park-like setting just outside of town. Ten minutes by bike from the center of Padua. But the retired detective liked to walk. Actually he liked to run. The following morning, despite the biting chill in the air, we saw him emerge at eight sharp and trot away down the tree-lined lanes of his elegant neighborhood, dressed in a designer track suit. Precisely half an hour of aerobic exercise later, he made a quick stop at the newsstand and stepped into the café. We decided that I’d confront him, alone, as he stepped out of the café.
I materialized at his elbow. He recognized me immediately but continued walking. “Expensive neighborhood, top-floor apartment, doorman building,” I greeted him in a cheerful voice. “Life is good on a detective’s retirement plan.”
He looked younger. He was fit and still a pretty good-looking man. He was tall with a handsome face and a full head of dark brown hair. Maybe some of that dark brown hair color was chemically enhanced, but at least he’d had the good taste not to dye it the strange Doberman pattern that so many Italian politicians seemed to be favoring lately.
He looked around cautiously. “What do you want, Buratti?”
“One evening, a couple of years ago, you extorted cash from a guy, a foreigner, who was asking around about the theft of narcotics from the Institute of Legal Medicine.”
He lengthened his stride. “Leave me alone.”
I hurried past him and wheeled around to block his path. “And you gave him my name,” I went on. “He came to my bar and when I told him that I wouldn’t work for him, he started acting tough, because that’s what you told him to do, right?”
He threw up his hands. “I wanted to have a little fun with you. So?” he snapped. “You made me look like an asshole that time, and I just thought I’d return the favor. So I sent you that jerk. And now, two years later, you come busting my chops about it?”
“I just want to know who that guy is.”
“I don’t know who he is.”
“Wrong. You’d never have pulled those moves with a total stranger.”
He tried acting menacing. “I can still cause you a world of trouble.”
“Yeah, so can I,” I shot back. “Or else, in two minutes, you can be rid of me forever.”
He puffed his cheeks in annoyance. “You have no idea how much I dislike you, Buratti.”
“Well, you’re not the love of my life either.”
“He’s Swiss,” the retired detective began. “He’s a lone operator, but one report said that he was an informer for the Serbian police.”
Another spy. “What do the Serbs have to do with the stolen narcotics?”
“You’ve got me there. I have no idea,” he muttered as he resumed walking toward his apartment building.
“And you never felt curious enough to try to find out?”
“No. Even if I had, I could never have tracked him down. We don’t have very good relations with those people, you know.”
The Serbs, the meanest, toughest survivors of the former Yugoslavia. All the others were sugar candies in comparison. “What’s his name?” I practically shouted. “What was he called?”
De Angelis couldn’t remember, but he suggested that I go rummage through the old registers of a certain hotel.
“Look for a couple.”
“He wasn’t alone?”
“No. There was a woman with him. A nice piece of ass.”
We waited till that night. Hotel desk clerks on the night shift tend to be much more tractable, and the empty lobbies help to lead them into temptation. They were painful hours. My friends made me repeat my conversation with the retired detective over and over again, dissecting it word by word. The involvement of the Belgrade police promised nothing good. It just made the whole story look more tangled than before.
At two in the morning I rang the hotel’s front door intercom. A thirty-five-year-old Maghrebi buzzed me in. He wasn’t very happy that I’d roused him at that hour.
“We don’t have any vacancies,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
“I’m not looking for a room,” I explained. “I’d like to talk to you.”
He nodded resignedly. “Everyone wants to talk to me, and it’s always at two in the morning,” he complained. “Carabinieri want information about certain guests, whores want to bring customers into their room without registering names, drug dealers want me to take bags up to rooms . . . What do you want?”
“I want to check an old register.”
“How much you willing to pay?”
I pulled out a 200 euro note.
He sighed. “I make 700 euros a month.”
“Then this will come in handy.”
“No question about it,” he said as he took the banknote from my fingers. “Come in, follow me.”
Half an hour later I left the hotel, turning to shake hands with the desk clerk at the door. I shivered as I walked out into the chilly air of that November night. I lit a cigarette and glared into the headlights of Beniamino’s car; he had pulled away from the sidewalk and was moving slowly forward.
“His name was Pierre Allain, the woman was Greta Gardner,” I announced as I handed Max the xeroxes of the two passports.
“Names that smell fake a mile away,” the fat man snapped. “How the fuck can someone be named Greta Gardner?”
My partner’s instincts were sound as usual. The passports were fakes. Another blind alley. Wasted money, precious time gone forever, and Sylvie further and further away. After another forty-eight hours of trying to find any clue or lead, we were forced to give up in despair. It had been exactly twenty-one days since she’d been kidnapped.
“Now what do I do?” Rossini wondered aloud. “Do I go home and tell myself, ‘Tomorrow’s another day,’ or some such bullshit?”
Max and I stood there wordlessly. Just then, there was nothing anyone could have said. Beniamino left without saying goodbye. The fat man stood up and poured himself a healthy dollop of grappa.
“Alcohol. That’s what we need right now.”
I grabbed the bottle of Calvados by the neck, even though it was too early for me to start drinking. I tossed back the first glass at a gulp. I was in a hurry to get stunned.
After my third glass of Calvados I collapsed onto the sofa and pointed the remote control at the stereo. I pushed play and pumped the volume to maximum. The voice of Jimmy Witherspoon exploded from the speakers, with the first lines of Money’s Gettin’ Cheaper.
Well, I can’t afford to live,
I guess I’ll have to try
Undertaker’s got a union,
and it costs too much to die.
The night of the thirtieth day since the kidnapping, my cell phone rang and rang. I opened my eyes and the situation slowly swam into focus. I was stretched out on the sofa, the television was still on, and a soft-porn actress from the Seventies was singing the praises of the remarkable powers of an amulet that could be yours . . . I picked up the cell phone and looked at the caller ID. It was a number I had in my phone book. I sat bolt upright when I read the name.
“Sylvie!” I shouted with relief.
It was a woman’s voice, but I’d never heard it before. Cold as a mountain stream. Strong German accent. Too strong to be real. “You still have to complete a task for which you have already been paid.”
“Greta Gardner,” I guessed.
“That’s right. Then I don’t need to go into detail.”
“Tell me about Sylvie.”
“There’s an envelope in your mailbox downstairs,” she announced, and hung up.
I galloped down the stairs. A medium-sized manila envelope, hand delivered. Inside was a photograph of a dancer in full regalia. The face was made up, there was a professional smile on her face, but the eyes that gazed into the lens when the picture was taken told a story of imprisonment, anger, and grief. I looked at the time and date, in red at bottom left. Sylvie was alive.
I galloped back up the stairs. I pounded on Max’s door and phoned Beniamino. He answered on the second ring. It was just another sleepless night for him.
“Get over here,” I panted. “Now.”
The fat man came in. He looked at the picture. “I’m going to go make some coffee,” he said, his voice quavering, and shut himself into the kitchen to weep in peace. I had too much alcohol and adrenalin in my system to do the same thing. I pulled open the drawer that had the photocopy of the passport of Greta Gardner in it. The retired detective De Angelis had described her as a nice piece of ass. If he was telling the truth, the photo didn’t do her justice. She looked like a wan and harmless little blonde.
Until that moment I had been sure that the so-called Pierre Allain had just brought her along as camouflage. Instead, it turned out, she wore the pants in that couple. It was obvious the moment I heard her voice. It really is true: I don’t understand a fucking thing about women.
Old Rossini kissed the photograph, then he wrapped his arms around both of us and stood silently, hugging us in his powerful grip. He ran his hand over his tear-streaked face. “My Sylvie.”
Coffee. Then a solid hour of pounding his fist on the table, and a continuous refrain of: “Fuck, she’s alive, fuck fuck fuck!”
And then: “We have to rescue her, yeah, we have to track down the bastards that stole the narcotics and then we need to make a deal. We’re going to have to be careful though. Obviously that bitch has a plan in mind, she wants revenge . . .”
Once the emotional tempest of the news that Sylvie was alive had died down, we gradually managed to bring the situation into focus. Sylvie was being held prisoner by the accomplice—and perhaps the lover—of the late guy with the ring, and it was clear that the blonde with the German accent wasn’t a bit happy about her boyfriend’s premature death. She had certainly concocted some intricate and diabolical plan for a vendetta.
She’d arranged for Sylvie to be kidnapped, and then she’d let us stumble around in the dark for a month, maintaining complete radio silence. Then she gets in touch with a single specific request: find out who pulled the narcotics heist at the Institute of Legal Medicine. It had been more than two years. Why was it still so important? Whatever the story was, we had no choice. We had to take the assignment.
Even if she hadn’t said so explicitly, clearly Sylvie’s fate was bound up with that investigation. Of course, we weren’t so naïve that we thought it would all culminate in a trade. In her plans, Rossini’s woman would remain alive until we’d solved the case. Then Sylvie would be killed. Along with the three of us, I’d have to guess.
I picked up the photograph and looked at it again for what seemed like the thousandth time. She could have sent us any picture she wanted of Sylvie. Instead, she’d forced her to put on a costume and makeup and dance. That woman was clearly refined and twisted, and damned attentive to details.
“Greta Gardner has resources, money, and definitely an organization behind her,” I said, thinking aloud. “When she realized that the guy with the ring was dead, she returned to base and calmly and coldly designed a plan to screw us.”
“Yeah, we came to that conclusion an hour ago, Marco. That’s what we’ve been talking about,” replied Max with some concern.
“So the problem is that she has too big an advantage on us. If we play the game by her rules, we’re bound to lose.”
“Then what do you want to do?” asked Rossini.
“We have to play it our way.”
“Which would be?”
“We have to split up,” I replied. “I’ll look for the guys who pulled the heist and you look for Sylvie. And Greta. Sylvie alive, and Greta dead. There’s no other way out for us.”
“Easier said than done,” the fat man objected. “Our whole army is seated around this table.”
“We have the photographs. We need to keep searching until we find somebody who’s met them.”
“Belgrade,” Beniamino suggested.
“Excellent idea,” I agreed. “You know plenty of people in the smuggling business. If they were informers at the time, then maybe there’s a crooked cop out there who might remember them.”
Max poured himself a cup of cold coffee, added sugar, and stirred for a long time, in a reverie. “It’s a reasonable plan. But can you hold things down on your own?”
“I think so, though I doubt I’ll find anything out. If you want to know the truth, I’m pretty sure that Greta doesn’t give a shit about the heist. She just wants to watch us run for awhile, like gerbils on a treadmill.”
The old smuggler turned and looked at Max. “I’m going home to pack and pick up some more money, and then I’ll be back to pick you up.”
Morena shook her head when she saw me. She said something to the tall elegant gentleman she was flirting with and came over to where I was standing.
“I hope you haven’t gotten any funny ideas,” she said under her breath. “That sex was strictly to celebrate the transaction.”
“What if I’m ready to pay the 500 euros?”
She tossed her head toward the man she’d been talking with when I came in. “He’ll pay that, but with fringe benefits. Plus, I like him better. At least I have something to talk about with him.”
“I don’t doubt it. Anyway, I’m here on business.”
“The well known incident we’ve already discussed?”
“Right.”
“Forget it. I’m not interested in reopening that can of worms.”
“Just hear me out. You’ll make twice as much money.”
“He’s going to take me to a resort in Tuscany for the weekend where you can’t get in no matter how much money you have. He can get me in there. You can get me in trouble.”
“Just put me in touch with your handsome policeman.”
“I wouldn’t dream of it.”
She spun on her stiletto heels and marched back to her tall dark companion. I ordered a spritz and watched the little slut doing what she did. Actually, her new beau hardly looked like a dope. Quite the contrary. He knew exactly who he was dealing with. And he wasn’t a loser who just couldn’t find anything better for the weekend than a high-priced whore. “He’s another guy who likes dangerous sluts,” I thought, as I remembered Rossini’s words.
But maybe, all things considered, it wasn’t so true. Certainly, on the one hand, I was incapable of resisting the wiles of that kind of woman, even though I knew it would get me in to trouble every time; on the other hand my ideal woman was very different: Virna.
But Virna had left me, and I hadn’t lifted a finger to keep her from leaving. I popped a handful of salted peanuts into my mouth.
I was dying to see her again, but I was afraid that she’d reject me with one of those little sermons of hers in which every word is a knife to the heart. No, I wouldn’t try to find her. I was too fragile in that period to take any further humiliations.
Morena and her date put on their overcoats and headed for the door. As he strode past me, he gave me a mocking little grin that I pretended not to notice.
The next day I woke up early so I could intercept De Angelis on his morning run. There was no one else I could think of, and the idea of a weekend of total inactivity while my friends were tracking down contacts in Belgrade struck me as intolerable.
I waited for the retired detective at his bar. He gave me a grim look. Those days, it seemed like nobody was happy to see me. I greeted him in a loud voice, including rank and full name.
He came toward me with both fists balled up and shoulders thrust forward. “Let me just make a quick phone call to a couple of friends who still have badges, and we’ll see if you still feel like bothering me.”
He hadn’t lost his taste for threatening people, so I decided to remind him that not only is extorting money from foreigners staying in local hotels not considered friendly, it’s not strictly legal.
He snickered. “I’m retired, and nobody gives a crap about that old story.”
“Well, fair enough, but you have the money socked away somewhere, and I’m pretty sure I could find an investigating magistrate who doesn’t owe you any debts of gratitude.”
I must have pushed the right buttons. “What do you want?” he asked.
“I just want to talk about old times.”
“I don’t know shit about that narcotics heist.”
“I’m happy to hear about rumors.”
He pointed to the cashier. “Let me pay my check. I’ll wait for you outside.”
No one really seemed to understand why, back in 2004, that mountain of narcotics had accumulated in the basement storerooms of the Department of Toxicology: bad management or an intentional tactic to facilitate a single big heist? The only thing that was clear was that someone with good information had taken advantage of the opportunity to haul it all away.
That much I already knew, however. What I didn’t know was that in police circles the rumor was circulating that not even a single gram of the more than fifty kilos of narcotics had ever circulated in Italy. In the narcotics division, they were pretty sure that the drugs had been transported outside of the country long before anyone realized they were gone.
I told him about the two cops who paid a call on me at La Cuccia.
The former detective thought it sounded odd. He doubted they were officers from any of the normal departments. He thought it was an operation managed from the highest levels, using people from far away.
“Now get out of here. Let me enjoy my retirement in peace.”
While I was driving back home, I got a call from Max. No news. They were buying drinks for half of Belgrade to get an in with the police.
Saturday evening at La Cuccia. A decent jazz quartet was playing, but I was ignoring it. A young woman asked me about Max.
She was cute but she sure wasn’t friendly. It must have been the one that the fat man was going to invite for dinner the night before Sylvie was kidnapped. I made up a tale of woe about Max’s aunt and how he had to go take care of her.
She wasn’t buying it. She gave me a wry little grin.
“Has he heard the telephone was invented?”
“It’s not much of a story, is it?” I admitted.
“It wasn’t much when it was new; it’s threadbare to say the least.”
“There are no other women involved,” I explained. “If I were you, I’d give him a second chance.”
“Just tell him to stop wasting time. I’m overwhelmed by my suitors.”
She couldn’t manage to keep a straight face, and burst into laughter in a very attractive way.
“I’m Marco, pleased to meet you,” I said, extending my hand.
“Teresa.”
I bought her a drink and we talked until it was almost closing time.
On Sunday I got up and went out to buy my newspapers; I took a long stroll downtown. It was crowded with shoppers. Christmas wasn’t far away now. I stopped off in Piazza Duomo for an aperitif.
I bought a paper cone of hot roasted chestnuts and then headed back home to go back to sleep.
The fat man woke me up in the middle of the afternoon. “We may have something,” he said excitedly. “We’ll be back tomorrow.”
“Can you tell me anything more?”
“We have an invitation to dinner.”
The following Wednesday we were all together, sitting around a table in a renowned restaurant in Mira, not far from Venice. There were six of us. Us three, a leading figure in Serbian organized crime, and his two bodyguards. The Serbian was named Pavle Stojkovic, and he was in charge of Northeast Italy for one of the few criminal organizations that had not been absorbed by the Belgrade mafia. Like many Eastern European gangsters, he had been an official in the state security apparatus until the Communist regime collapsed. Then he’d made the leap to the opposite side of the moat.
He was a cultivated gentleman, about fifty-five, affable and polite, conservatively dressed, and he had agreed to meet with us as a result of the intervention of a smuggler of considerable repute who had worked on many occasions with Beniamino. While waiting for the antipasto, he talked about classical music, letting us know he was a passionate opera fan. To intimate that he had gathered information about us, he wandered into the field of jazz and blues, and asked me to tell him about a number of musicians who had performed at La Cuccia.
“I attended a Maurizio Camardi concert in Belgrade,” he said. “I went with my daughter.”
He waited until he had scooped up his first forkful of risotto before he declared that he was ready to listen to our request. Max opened his leather briefcase and pulled out a file folder with the xeroxes of the passports of the supposed Pierre Allain and Greta Gardner, as well as photographs and information about Sylvie. Max handed the file to the bodyguard who sat next to Pavle Stojkovic, who in turn handed the papers to his boss. Gangsters like nothing so much as a healthy respect for hierarchies.
“The man is dead. We understand that he was an informant for the Serbian police,” I explained. “The woman kidnapped Rossini’s girlfriend. As ransom, she’s demanding information on who was responsible for the theft of narcotics that took place at the Institute of Legal Medicine in Padua in 2004.”
“What are you asking from the ‘interests’ I represent?”
“As much help as you can afford us.”
He wanted to make sure that he had understood exactly what we were asking. “By which you mean?”
“Information. Anything you can give us to help ensure a positive outcome to this incident.”
“To help us rescue my woman,” Rossini spelled it out as clearly as he could.
“That’s a big favor. You’d have to return the favor . . . with interest, as you Italians like to say.”
“We are ready.”
Stojkovic nodded. He looked Beniamino in the eye. “You have a very nice speedboat,” he complimented him.
“The police don’t have a single patrol boat that can outrun it.”
“One crossing, with merchandise, for information about the theft,” he proposed. “Two crossings for anything we can tell you about La Gardner or your lady within one week.”
“Agreed. What kind of merchandise would I be transporting?”
“That’s not a question I’m willing to answer. Any problem with that?”
The old smuggler shook his head, and the Serbian gangster smiled with satisfaction. “We aren’t very well equipped for deep-sea transport. Perhaps in the future it might prove profitable for you to work with us.”
Rossini stalled. “One thing at a time.”
The bodyguard filled Pavle Stojkovic’s glass with an excellent Friulian sauvignon. As the Serbian sipped it with evident approval, he began his story.
A substantial share of the heroin that had vanished so mysteriously from the Department of Toxicology belonged to the Kosovar mafia. Two-thirds of the heroin that was sold in Europe came from Afghanistan, was transported through Kosovo, where the opium was refined, and then forwarded on to the various European countries. Since 1997, the Kosovars had dominated the heroin market in Switzerland, Austria, Belgium, Germany, Hungary, Norway, the Czech Republic, and Sweden. In Italy, the Kosovars still had two rival groups: the Turks and the Serbians, but they struggled with considerable logistical disadvantages and a complete lack of “cooperation” from the intelligence services, which instead closed not one but both eyes when it came to the Kosovars.
“You mean that the heist was organized by the Italian intelligence services?”
“That’s right.”
“But why?”
“Kosovo is marching triumphantly toward a declaration of independence. But the KLA is not just an army of freedom fighters, it’s also the armed branch of the Kosovar mafia, and its soldiers are the very structure of the criminal organization.”
“That’s the Serbian point of view,” I objected, interrupting him.
He set his fork and knife down on his plate, interlaced the fingers of both hands, and rested his chin on them. “I am personally convinced that Kosovo belongs to my people, but we’re talking business here: information in exchange for a specific service, and I am doing what I promised to do. I’m not engaging in an exchange of opinions in a bar, you understand that, don’t you, Signore Buratti?”
“I understand perfectly, and I beg your pardon.”
Another sip of wine, and he proceeded to explain the backstage maneuverings that led up to the heist, while his grilled fish grew cold. The objective of the Kosovar mafia was to found a narcostate in the heart of Europe. For this to succeed, it was necessary that to the eyes of international public opinion the whole struggle should appear to be nothing more than a struggle for liberation from the rule of Belgrade waged by the Albanian majority. The Colombian mafia had already made agreements to use the territory as a point of arrival for its flow of cocaine; the Kosovars would arrange to distribute that cocaine through its own channels. And the United States would turn a blind eye in exchange for a number of substantial favors, including the construction of the largest and most expensive military base since the Vietnam War, Camp Bondsteel, subcontracted by the Pentagon to the usual beneficiary Halliburton, with the blessing of the former CEO, Dick Cheney. The camp is located strategically close to the trans-Balkan oil pipeline, which in the future is expected to bring oil from the Caspian Sea to the Adriatic, and it housed seven thousand men in more than three hundred buildings scattered over an area of a thousand acres.
Stojkovic continued to rattle off statistics and names, but he still hadn’t told us anything significant or interesting about the heist. He came to the point after explaining the real estate interests at stake in the expulsion of the Serbian minority from Kosovo.
“One thing you should know is that the structure of the Kosovar mafia is very similar to that of the Calabrian ’ndrangheta. There isn’t a commission at the top. The organization is structured horizontally, by biological families. That’s why there are no turncoats or informers. You can’t rat out your father and your brothers. But the families are often at war with one another. In 2004 the Padua prison was filling up with members of one of the three major clans that controlled the KLA. Among those convicts was Fatjon Bytyçi, the oldest son of a boss in Pe´c, who had been arrested with his girlfriend after a rival family informed on him to the police. To avoid a general gang war that would have created an international incident and undermined their larger objectives, the families called for a summit meeting to reach an agreement, and on that occasion the Italian intelligence services were asked to find a way of getting the Kosovars out of jail fast.”
“Evidence Stolen, Acquittal in View?”—Max la Memoria sang out, reciting the headline that had appeared in a paper at the time.
“More or less. Some of them plea bargained for lighter sentences . . .”
“But not the son of the boss and his girlfriend, who were sent back to Kosovo.”
“Exactly.”
“And what happened to the narcotics stolen in Italy?”
He shrugged. “The intelligence services can always use that stuff.”
Nothing more was said for the rest of the meal. Stojkovic skipped dessert, apologized for not having the time to drink a cup of coffee with us, and left the restaurant followed by his two goons.
“What the fuck is Greta Gardner going to do with this information?” the fat man said angrily. “I mean, it might have been useful immediately after the heist, but now?”
I revolved my coffee cup in its saucer absent-mindedly. “I told you before: she doesn’t want the information; she just wants to make us do her bidding, like puppets on a string.”
Then I turned to Beniamino. “You know they’re going to fill your speedboat with heroin, right?”
“I’ll do whatever it takes to bring Sylvie home.”
There are cases where life gives you no options, where you’re forced to betray your own principles. That’s what had just happened to Old Rossini. I never expected to witness such a thing.
He touched my arm. “Are there problems, Marco?”
“Lots of problems, too many problems,” I answered. “But whatever you do, I’ll always be your friend.”
Forty-eight hours later, one of Stojkovic’s men showed up at Beniamino’s house. The speedboat needed to depart in just one hour’s time. The weather conditions weren’t ideal for an open-sea voyage, but the merchandise had to arriva in Croatia the following morning, so that it could be forwarded on immediately.
While Rossini was battling the waves, Greta Gardner turned Sylvie’s cell phone back on and called me.
“Have you completed the job?”
“Yes.”
“Good, then you’ve taken care of your first debt.”
“Then let Sylvie go.”
“She’s how you take care of your second debt,” she told me. “There’s no price on that one.”
“Why should you kill her? Take it out on us.”
“That’s what I’m doing. You’re going to have to live your lives in the knowledge that she will dance for many men, that she will satisfy the pleasures of many men, for years to come. Then she’ll die.”
“Can’t we come to some sort of understanding?”
Greta Gardner laughed heartily. “In your letterbox you’ll find another envelope. This is the last one.”
“You don’t want to know what we found out?”
“I already have all the answers. It was just a matter of principle.”
She hung up, but this time I didn’t rush downstairs. I walked down one step at a time. I felt as confused as a boxer nearing the end of his career. Greta’s words had cut my legs out from under me. In the photograph this time, Sylvie was nude. So were the two men with her.
“Beniamino can never see this,” I told Max a few minutes later.
“He has the right to know.”
“In all likelihood, this is going to be the last picture we’ll ever have of Sylvie. You want him to remember her like this?”
The fat man said nothing. I tore up the photograph.
“That was a fucked up thing to do, Marco,” he scolded me. Then he added: “But I’m glad you did it.”
“Alcohol?”
“No, thanks. I’m too depressed to drink.”
“You think the Serbs will find anything?”
“I hope they will. It’s in their own interest. They can use Beniamino and his speedboat.”
Old Rossini called me mid-morning the next day to say that the bora wind out of the north was kicking up whitecaps as tall as houses, and that he would ride it out in a little bay in his speedboat, until the weather improved.
I was secretly pleased. I needed some time to recover. Beniamino knew me all too well. I didn’t want to arouse his suspicions. He would have pushed to find out what had happened and sooner or later I’d tell him.
The cell phone rang again. This time it was Morena. I didn’t want to talk to her; I didn’t answer. I gave in the fourth time she called.
“What do you want?”
“I want to buy you a drink.”
“You weren’t very nice to me last time I saw you.”
“You want an apology? Or would you rather I told you something that might interest you?”
“About that old case?”
“Right.”
“I’m not interested in it anymore.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“That’s how it is, though. And besides, weren’t you the one who said you didn’t want to hear about it anymore?”
“I had a stroke of luck.”
“Good for you, though I doubt you’ll find any buyers.”
She finally realized I meant it. I was about to hang up when she said: “Look, let’s try it this way. I tell you what I found out, and if you’re interested, you’ll open your wallet.”
“And I decide how much.”
“I rely implicitly on your honesty and the goodness of your heart,” she deadpanned.
Nice work, Morena. She’d roped me in for a second round. All my resolutions never to see her again had vanished into thin air the minute the phone rang.
It was raining, the traffic was even worse than usual, and finding a place to park in Padua had become an increasingly challenging proposition. I arrived late. The aperitif hour was over, the little café tables were already set for quick lunches. Frozen pasta dishes, heated up in a microwave, and fanciful “mega-salads.” Morena was sitting with her back turned. Since she was a regular customer, she was allowed to go on nursing her spritz. I sat down across from her, and the first thing I noticed was the pair of oversized sunglasses. I delicately lifted them from the bridge of her nose. The bruise under her right eye was turning yellow, a sign that it was on the mend. I did some mental calculations.
“This was the guy who took you to that nonexistent resort in Tuscany, wasn’t it?”
“One of his two friends. And the spa was a fucking mini-villa. I was the only one having no fun.”
“Big disappointment, I’m sure.”
“Pitfalls of the profession,” she said, with a catch in her voice. “That’s what my handsome policeman told me.”
“And he’s not going to lift a finger to help you.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it.”
I sighed. “You want me to tell you what I think?”
“I know, I know: the years pass, and the older I get the more men are going to take advantage of me.”
I thought of Sylvie and what she was going through: I suddenly lost my desire to teach anyone a lesson.
I ordered a couple of sandwiches and a glass of red and thought: At least Morena is free to choose.
“I always wanted to be in business for myself, but I think the time may have come to sign up with one of these luxury escort services.” She sighed: “I missed my chance when I couldn’t manage to marry ‘the right guy.’ By now, I’d be coddled, well cared for, and revered.”
I changed the subject. “So, what’s the news?”
“It was a gang of policemen who stole the narcotics.”
“Crap.”
“No, it’s the truth. They work in Friuli and they had an accomplice on the inside. My handsome policeman is one of a team that’s tapping their phones.”
“And he told you this?”
“Yes.”
So you’d come tell me, I thought to myself. But if he was trying to get me off the case, why would he invent a story that involved crooked cops?
“They kept the stuff hidden until six months ago, and now they’re handing over a kilo a week to a gang they have dealing it for them.”
“My wallet stays in my pocket. I’m not interested.”
“Fuck you,” she grumbled disappointedly.
“Give me the name of that guy and his cell phone number.”
“What, have you become the avenger of mistreated hookers?”
“Yes, but I’m not doing it for you,” I thought. This is for Sylvie. I couldn’t get that damned photograph out of my head. “You going to give them to me or not?”
She slipped her hand into her purse and pulled out a business card. “I don’t need it anymore.”
Rocco Ponzano was barely 5’ 7” but he was a born hitter. When he was fourteen, to keep him away from bad company in the alleys of Genoa, his father locked him up in a boxing gym.
He came out four years later, but the same friends were waiting for him; they’d been wondering what had become of him, and they showed him the way to prison, where I met him. Now he was free and he lived in Padua. He worked for a cooperative that provided counseling and aid to ex-convicts.
He’d gone straight, but he couldn’t refuse to do this favor for me. He owed me.
The shitbag who’d gotten his jollies by punching Morena in the eye lived in a villa in the center of Este, a lovely town in the Venetian provinces, with his wife and daughter. That same evening, when he got out of his 50,000 euro automobile and turned to go into his house, he found himself looking at Rocco. Rocco didn’t say a word; he just fired off a series of violent and very accurate punches, focusing on the nose and eyebrows.
A few hours later, when I was sure that he’d been released from the emergency room, I called him from a public phone booth. I gave him a little lecture on the idea behind good manners. He swore to me on his daughter’s head that he understood the lesson.
Then I lost control. “What the fuck is the matter with you all?” I screamed into the phone. “Don’t you know how to have normal sex anymore? Do you always have to be violent fucking bullies?”
I smoked a couple of cigarettes in my car with the windows rolled up, and then I drove to La Cuccia, where I found Max; he had spent the whole day in his apartment. He showed me the photograph of Fatjon Bytyçi that was taken the day he was arrested.
“He looks more like a dirt farmer than the heir to a mafia empire. Look at how the fuck he’s dressed.”
He wasn’t wrong. “These Kosovars are still a little rustic. They’ll find their style when Hollywood discovers them.”
“You watch too much television.”
“You can never watch enough. What else have you found on him?”
“Nothing.”
“I saw Morena.” I told him what she’d said about the gang of policemen.
He waved one hand in the air with a gesture of annoyance. “Bullshit. Even if it was true, it wouldn’t help us find Sylvie.”
Pavle Stojkovic kept his word; on the seventh day he summoned us to a meeting. This time, it was in an elegant pastry shop in Vicenza. He asked Rossini how the trip had gone, and said he was sorry that it had been so long and challenging. He seemed to mean what he said.
We were surrounded by old people and mothers telling their children not to get chocolate and whipped cream on their clothing. Everything kept getting more Christmas-y. All around us was glitter and sparkle and blinking lights, making those days seem even more unreal and tragic.
The Serbian gangster ordered a cup of tea and waited to be served without saying a word. He finally began speaking, and just in time: a few seconds longer and Rossini might have lost it and slammed him against the wall.
“We haven’t found out anything about Greta Gardner,” he explained. “But we have learned that a belly dancer, who matches the description of your kidnapped girlfriend, has recently begun performing in a bordello on the outskirts of Grenoble.”
I glanced over at Beniamino’s face. He seemed to be carved out of marble. Stojkovic looked him right in the eye.
“I’m sorry to have to tell you this . . . It’s a very particular sort of place.”
My friend gulped. “A gang bang parlor?”
“I’m afraid so.”
For an instant I could barely breathe. Gang rapes. The men would watch her dance and then, once they were thoroughly excited, take off their pants.
“The address,” Rossini snarled. “Tell me where she is. I’m going to get her back.”
“There’s a problem; I assure you, I had no say in this decision.”
“What’s the problem?”
“I can only give it to you after you do two more trips.”
The smuggler’s mouth snapped open in amazement. He was too appalled to react.
“How can you be so pitiless?” I demanded indignantly.
“This is just business to us, Signore Buratti.”
Max la Memoria broke in. “The agreement was information first, merchandise transported afterwards.”
“In Belgrade they’re worried that if something should happen to Signore Rossini, then the merchandise would not be transported. The value of the merchandise is much greater than that of the woman. I feel sure you can understand our point of view.”
Finally Beniamino found the strength to speak. “In the smuggling business, everyone knows me, they know that I’ve always kept my word. You can’t treat me like this.”
“Yes, we can,” the Serbian cut him off.
“How long do you think she can hold out?”
“That’s not my problem.”
“If she winds up dying, it will certainly become your problem.”
“I appreciate your feelings, but threatening me isn’t a very good idea.”
One of his goons had slipped his right hand into the left sleeve of his heavy jacket. The first one of us who moved would get a knife wound for his trouble. The other one had his hand in the pocket of his overcoat, certainly gripping a pistol.
But Rossini was a desperate man, betrayed and worn out by tension and exhaustion. In a word, dangerous. I felt sure of it when I saw that he was carefully noting the location of the two thugs. He was calculating his odds of managing to hit Stojkovic before they could intervene.
I dug my fingernails into his thigh and shook him. “The kids,” I hissed. “The children.”
“What?” He looked around realized he was in a pastry shop full of innocent people.
He drained his glass of beer at a gulp and gave me a grateful glance.
Now it was my chance to negotiate. “Seven days from today for both trips.”
“I can’t guarantee it.”
“Help us,” I implored. “You’re in charge here.”
He stood up. “I’ll see what I can do.”
He walked out of the shop accompanied by one of his bodyguards. The other one stayed behind with us, sitting and staring at Beniamino. He was going to stand up and leave only once his boss was safe.
A few minutes later, the cell phone rang. Unknown caller. I answered anyway. It was Stojkovic. “Okay, we have a deal in seven days if your friend can leave on his holidays tomorrow morning.”
We walked for a while along the porticoes, in silence, catching our breath.
“You go to Yugoslavia, and Max and I will go to Grenoble to lay the groundwork. We’re going to need a safe house, and we need to check out the escape routes.”
Rossini shook his head. “Greta Gardner would know you were there, and that would spell death for Sylvie.”
“We’d be careful.”
“Beniamino is right,” the fat man broke in. “If she can deliver two envelopes to our door, it means she has someone working for her in the area. There’d be nothing easier than for her to keep us under surveillance.”
I glared at him, but the cat was out of the bag.
“Why did you say two envelopes?” Rossini asked.
“Ask Marco.”
“The second envelope had a picture I chose not to show you. I tore it up.”
“How many?”
“Two.”
He nodded and turned his face toward a shop window, where he pretended to be looking at sets of porcelain. “I’ll ask Luc and Christine to go to Grenoble.”
“Who the fuck are they?” I’d never heard their names.
Luc Autran and Christine Duriez. Husband and wife, and partners on the job. Their specialty was armed robberies. They lived in Marseilles, but they were careful not to pull any of their capers near home. They worked the French provinces and often worked outside the country. Belgium, Spain, and one job in Italy. An armored car in the Turin area. Rossini had come up with the plan.
Their two accomplices, a pair of Portuguese, had been arrested a few months later trying to make off with the take from a robbery at a small bank in Germany. Excellent in terms of execution but no good in terms of planning.
“What about the duo from Marseilles: are they good at planning?”
“They’ve never been caught. They know what they’re doing.”
“I thought you met this Luc in jail.”
“No, I met his uncle there.”