Things had changed in the police stations of Italy. A policeman couldn’t surf the criminal databases for information without leaving a trace anymore. Carini must necessarily have asked a superior officer for authorization to delve into information on the Serbs. As I clutched the thin file tight, I wondered if he’d mentioned my name. He’d probably just used the usual excuse of an informant, but by then it didn’t really matter anymore. Each of us would play the game according to his own rules and neither would be sticklers about regulations. In the game we were playing, what mattered was to know when to stop, to avoid getting hurt needlessly.
Morena was glowing with happiness when we made the exchange in a large downtown bookstore. Money for information.
“Oh, money just smells so good,” she chirped in a little-girl voice.
“Remember our agreement,” I said as I handed her a folded sheet of paper with the number of my new cell phone. “You stick to your handsome policeman’s ass like a deer tick, and if you have the slightest suspicion that he’s planning to fuck me . . .”
“I sound the alarm. The concept is clear to me.”
“Good.”
She pulled out the Alberta Adams CD. “I brought you a present.”
“Thanks.”
“Maybe when you listen to it you’ll think of me sometimes.”
“I didn’t think you were so romantic.”
“I would have preferred someone like you,” she whispered. “Someone who doesn’t lecture you, someone who never thinks about today, tomorrow, and all that. But at a certain point, a girl has to choose, right?”
“You need a guy like him. There’s no future with a guy like me.”
She took off one glove and stroked my cheek, her eyes glistening.
“I liked you better when you were being the irresistible woman with the heart of stone. That was more exciting.”
She turned on her heel and, muttering an insult, stomped out. I was baffled. I didn’t think I’d said anything offensive, but I sure wasn’t going to talk it over with my friends. They didn’t like Morena, and they’d almost certainly find a reason to point out yet again that I didn’t understand a thing about women.
It was raining, as usual. We hadn’t seen a winter like this in years. It had even snowed once or twice. I opened my umbrella and hurried toward the streetcar stop. I’d get off after just three stops, but I took the streetcar to make sure that no one was following me. I didn’t want to be the one to blow our comfortable hideout. That same morning, Rossini had gone to pick up a nice little “armory” from a delicatessen owner; the guy had inherited two businesses from his father—the deli and a side business of providing weapons for armed robbery teams. Max, on the other hand, was in charge of procuring cloned cell phones and other diabolical electronic devices. If the police searched the apartment, there was everything they’d need to send all three of us to jail for several years.
I hopped off the streetcar at the very next stop, and flagged a taxi. After a short cab ride, I took a bus. The last stretch of road I walked.
Beniamino had scattered pieces of pistol all over the table in the living room. He was cleaning and oiling the guns very intently.
“Those look like antiques,” I mocked.
“Don’t be sacrilegious. They’re two solid and workmanlike Colt .45’s. They’ve been satisfying connoisseurs since 1911.”
“He’s a gun fetishist,” Max laughed. “For instance, he loves the guns that Bruce Willis uses in Last Man Standing. A few years ago he made me watch that movie, twice, on DVD.”
“Okay then, we’re safe. Bruce never loses.”
“You can be sure of that, boy,” Rossini snapped in annoyance.
I pulled the file out of the envelope and laid it on the table, next to a box of bullets. “When you’re done playing with your toys we can take a look at this.”
“Just give me a minute to reassemble them. Which I could do blindfolded, if necessary.”
Less than two minutes. Confident, precise movements. The prospect of Rossini armed reassured his friends and unsettled his enemies. My jokes were just a way of concealing my nervousness. I didn’t like guns, but I knew we needed them. Both Max and I were willing to let Rossini handle the weapons. And get his hands dirty.
The fat man pulled off the blue rubberband and opened the file. The first sheet was blank, expect for a single line at the top of the page.
It was about Greta Gardner: “Unknown.”
Concerning Pavle Stojkovic, there was an abundance of information, though wherever the name of an Italian policeman appeared it had been blocked out in heavy black marker. The biographical section noted that he had been born in Kladovo, eastern Serbia, in May 1950. In 1972 in Belgrade he had married Ivana, the following year Bratislav was born; his second-born was a daughter, Sonja, born in 1980. At the time, Pavle was already a high-ranking officer in the UDBA, the Yugoslavian intelligence service. When the secret police organization was disbanded in the wake of the civil war, he took a post in an unidentified office in the Serbian Defense Ministry.
In the mid-Nineties he had become a consigliere of a criminal family in the capital that then clashed with the crime family of Zeljko Raznatovic, better known as Arkan, the Tiger of the Balkans, and was decimated. Somehow, Pavle miraculously survived the slaughter of the gang chiefs and the mass desertion of the footsoldiers and made his way into hiding. He reappeared in Italy in the spring of 2000, just a few months after the murder of Arkan in the lobby of the Intercontinental Hotel in Belgrade.
He’d been given an Italian visa on a special expedited basis at the request of an official in the Italian Foreign Ministry whose name was obliterated by a thick layer of black ink. Perhaps it was as payment for information secretly provided to the investigators working for the International Criminal Tribunal of the Hague, who were gathering evidence to indict and arrest Slobodan Milosevic, facing charges of crimes against humanity.
In 2001, immediately following the arrest of the former president of Yugoslavia, Stojkovic had founded the Balkan Market, with headquarters in Treviso, the usual import-export company with just two employees: Bozidar Dinic and Vladan Ninkovic.
“Look at them, Hans and Fritz,” I joked. “The bastard even gave his musclemen health insurance.”
Max tapped his index finger on another sheet of paper. “This is a note from the police headquarters of Treviso: it says that our friend Pavle is a good guy and nobody should bother him.”
I stubbed out what was left of my cigarette in the ashtray. “That means that the exchanges of favors continued over time, and that Pavle is more than just a gangster.”
“Then why are they letting us fuck him now?” asked Rossini.
“Hard to say,” the fat man replied. “Maybe he’s not so useful anymore as an informer; maybe the cops in Padua couldn’t care less about deals made with him by other cops . . .”
I felt like having a drink, but I looked at the clock and decided to tough it out. “So now we know a lot more about our boy Pavle. But I don’t think we have anything useful for planning out a clear strategy.”
“In fact, we do seem to have run out of ideas,” the fat man admitted. “Either we charge in with our eyes closed and see what happens or we wait until we have more information.”
Rossini jangled his bracelets. “The longer we wait, the easier we are to spot. And once they identify us, they’ll attack us.”
“So what’s our first move?”
The fat man thought about it through one long drag on his cigarette and then, exhaling, looked at me. “It’s your turn. You’re going to go have a chat with Arben Alshabani; we’ll cover your back.”
At ten sharp that evening I pulled open the door of the bar and was engulfed in a flood of heat and the stench of tobacco. In that bar, at least, officially owned by a pair of Moroccan sisters, the law against smoking indoors was not being observed—they evidently figured that if certain people want to get cancer, it’s the least of their problems. I looked around me. Seated at the café tables were representatives of all the specialties of low-level criminal endeavor.
The two sisters were both standing behind the bar, and they were chatting animatedly with a number of customers who were deeply involved in their beers and their panini. True to the classic script directions, no one looked up. I sat down at the one unoccupied table. Given its privileged location, it must have been Alshabani’s usual perch, but there was no sign of the ambitious underboss. To keep from collapsing from the heat, I took off my overcoat and got comfortable at the table. After a few minutes, the younger of the two presumptive owners came over and asked what I’d be having. I ordered an espresso.
I knew that Arben was somewhere in the back, and that he was watching me, ready to duck out the back door if things started looking bad. I pulled a folded-up newspaper out of my pocket and began reading, making a brave pretense of interest in the ongoing political debate within the minority center-right coalition over its inability to agree on an acceptable candidate to run for the office of mayor.
In reality I was just trying to appear relaxed so that I could conquer the Kosovar’s mistrust. Mafiosi are mistrustful by nature. When they wake up every morning the first thing they think about it is how to go out and screw their neighbor, taking special care to sniff out the slightest risk to themselves of falling into the same trap: if they get ripped off, it can lead to a dangerous and uncontrollable drop in their popularity within the shark-infested social network of their crime family. In that sense they lead a difficult life, there’s never a time when they can relax: the real danger is much more likely to come from within than from outside enemies. You never know: one day, without thinking about it, you could say the wrong word at the wrong time, or you could fail to run your businesses as successfully as expected. And when that happens, a slow but ineluctable mechanism begins to operate, relegating you forever at the lowest ranks of your organization. True enough, this can happen in any ordinary corporation. But there, if you’re young enough, you can always quit and go look for another job: that’s not possible in the mafia.
The Kosovar Arben was fully steeped in this general logic—in fact, he embraced it and wallowed in it. As the Carabinieri had correctly surmised, he was ambitious and he wanted to climb rapidly to the highest levels of the criminal organization. His ultimate goal, according to our interpretation of the ambiguous eavesdropping transcripts that we’d been allowed to read in the law offices of Avvocato Criconia, was to replace Florian Tuda, who was in charge of the family operations in Padua. And he’d had some success in that direction: Florian had been arrested during the police sweep that had “decimated” the cocaine dealers who supplied one of the many rings in the more prosperous circles of Padua. That was hardly the end of Florian though: in the mafia, bosses can easily run operations from a jail cell, and Arben could do no more than to flaunt the same prerogatives of power as Tuda.
The organizational strategy of the Kosovars was to absorb existing structures and to control them from behind the scenes. In the city of Padua they had focused on taking over bars and clubs run by the Maghrebi underworld, like the bar I was sitting in pretending to read a newspaper. The sub-Saharan north Africans had been the first generation of foreign organized crime in Padua, and now they had been reduced to the status of messenger boys given their intractable internal divisions and their reluctance to engage in armed warfare.
The day before, under the porticoes of Via San Francesco, we had slipped a couple of banknotes to Morched the Tunisian, trusted purveyor of hashish to Max la Memoria. In exchange, he had explained to us that the Moroccans and the Algerians weren’t pleased with the way things had wound up, and they were planning an insanely reckless move: they wanted to go into business on their own. One of the reasons for their discontent was the heavyhanded approach employed by Arben Alshabani. He would have his enforcers beat street peddlers bloody for the slightest infraction of his rigid rules.
The Kosovar was a perfect model of the kind of Mafioso we’d all had an opportunity to get to know, especially during our stays in Italy’s prisons. He was the most predictable kind, because he was stupid, even though he considered himself to be damned clever. With people like him, we’d always managed to get the upper hand, and that was why we’d organized this meeting via Morched.
“We thought we could bring you into a deal we’re looking at,” the fat man had explained.
The Tunisian eyed us suspiciously. A pair of dark and furtive eyes peered out at us from the depths of the enormous hood of his parka. The rightful owner of that jacket must have been at least three sizes bigger than Morched.
“Either you guys are in trouble or you’re trying to pull something. I don’t have any pull anymore. It’s not like in the old days, when everyone spoke respectfully to Morched when there was something to be resolved . . .”
Max raised a hand to halt the flow of words. “Spare us your tale of woe about your career as a pusher. We just want to get in touch with Arben.”
“You’re looking to rip him off. His people will cut my throat.”
“No. We’re just looking to offer him a deal, and you’ll be a thousand euros richer for it.”
Morched rubbed his hands together vigorously. He was still wary, but the money was tempting. “What would I have to do?”
“Go talk to him and tell him that someone you know and trust . . .”
“Which would be you?”
The fat man pointed at me.
“I don’t know him well. I want 1,200 euros.”
Beniamino gestured angrily, irritated at the interruption. “You need to shut up and listen.”
“Hey, take it easy. Can’t a person negotiate anymore? I tell you, the old ways are dying out.”
“Fine, 1,200 euros,” Max broke in. “But my friend has a point. You need to listen now.”
Morched pretended to zip his mouth shut.
“You’ll go to Arben and tell him that a guy you know, Marco Buratti, gave you five thousand euros to buy heroin and cocaine from various suppliers just to test the quality, because he’s planning to buy a couple of kilos of shit.”
The dealer nodded. “So he’ll want to know more and agree to meet the buyer in person.”
“I can see that you catch on fast.”
“There’s better people than Arben in Padua.”
“You mean there are people who are more generous to you than Arben . . . but I only want to deal with him.”
Morched held out his hand, open-palmed, to get the money. “Fine, but don’t come complaining to me when Alshabani rips you off.”
I methodically counted out the bills and on an old bus ticket I’d written a phone number. “Tell the Kosovar that I’ll only agree to meetings in a public place.”
Beniamino had opened his overcoat and let Morched catch a glimpse of the two handguns in the underarm holsters. “I know that times are tough, and five thousand euros is a lot of cash, but if you steal them, or you say the wrong things, I will find you and so help me, I’ll kill you.”
Morched turned toward the fat man. “Have I ever robbed you or disappointed you, friend?”
“No, and that’s why we gave you the money in advance. But up till now I’ve never done a deal for more than two or three hundred euros with you, and maybe you assume that we’re just a bunch of fools.”
The Tunisian threw his arms out in a pose of wounded innocence.
“What kind of world are we living in? You can’t negotiate, you get beaten up, and people threaten to kill you for no good reason. And you know whose fault it really is? It’s your fault. If you Italians hadn’t opened your eastern borders none of this would have happened. Those are bad people, and they’re only going to spoil everything, but you wanted them in at all costs.”
“Tell the Kosovar only about me. You never saw my friends.”
“You know, you’re very complicated, you people? I’m not sure I’d like to work with you guys,” and he wandered off, muttering and gesticulating.
“Did you really have to threaten him?” I asked Rossini as we walked back to the car.
“Maybe not, but he’s a failed gangster, and he’s living in the past.”
“And he’s a pusher,” I thought, remembering how the old smuggler hated drug dealers. In any case, Morched did what he’d been paid to do, and he called me two hours later. A meeting with Arben was scheduled for the morning of the following day in the bar in the Piazza Mazzini where I sat waiting for his majesty Alshabani to deign to come out and talk with me.
I raised my hand and signaled to one of the two Moroccan women to come over; she slowly came out from behind the bar and with some evident annoyance strolled over to my table. I pointed to the door to the back, where a scuffed-up old sign warned that the customers could not enter.
“I know that Arben is in there. Tell him that I’m leaving in two minutes.”
“Why don’t you go in the bathroom and take a piss? Maybe when you come out he’ll be here waiting for you.”
The Kosovar wanted to make sure I wasn’t wearing a microphone, but stepping into the bathroom could mean a knife to the chest or a bullet to the head. The minute the Tunisian said my name, Arben must have remembered the death sentence that hung over my head.
I shook my head. “Two minutes and I’m out of here,” I repeated decisively.
The woman disappeared behind the door. I stood up and took off my jacket. Standing in shirtsleeves, I removed the battery from my cell phone. I could still be hiding a tiny listening device somewhere on my body, but it struck me as a gesture of goodwill. Apparently, that’s how Arben took it. He finally decided to emerge from concealment.
I found myself in the presence of a man who was pretty different from the one I’d seen in the surveillance photographs. His hair wasn’t cropped short anymore, the way most ex-KLA men wore it. Now he wore his hair long, shoulder-length, and he looked younger than thirty-six, the age provided in the notes from his defense lawyer. His close-set eyes and his thin but prominent nose gave him a less than intelligent appearance, but from the way he looked at me I could see I was dealing with someone I should take care not to underestimate.
I glimpsed a flash of cunning in his gaze; it told me that Arben had earned his position as underboss in the field. First in Kosovo, in anti-Serb guerrilla warfare, and later in the family company. He was a cunning, violent guy. I needed to convince him that he could screw me anytime he wanted.
He shook hands and flashed a hearty smile. He turned toward the bar and ordered a beer. The beer was served at blinding speed.
“Morched told me that you’re interested in buying certain merchandise,” he began in a conversational tone.
“No, I’m not,” I interrupted him. “It was just an excuse, a way to get close to you.”
He clenched both fists. “You’re in the wrong place to start cracking wise.”
“I wouldn’t dream of it. I just want to offer you a deal of a different kind.”
“I’m listening.”
“Fatjon Bytyçi. My friends and I had nothing to do with his death.”
He changed expression. I had caught him by surprise. Until that moment, he was convinced that it was pure chance and my stupidity that had led me trustingly into his clutches. His plan was to pretend to sell me drugs and, when the time came for delivery, kidnap me, steal my money, torture me so that I’d tell him where Max and Beniamino were hiding, and then kill me.
“Why are you coming to tell me about it?”
“Because we know you’ve been looking for us. And not because you wanted to buy us a drink.”
There was no mistaking the effect this had on him. I knew a lot, too much. He tried to find out more. “I still don’t see where there’s a deal in all this.”
“Oh, there’s a deal all right. It’s an opportunity that’ll change your life. What we can give you is the head—on a platter—of the guy who ordered the killing done. Take that back home and you can be a hero for your boss and for the whole family. This could be your chance to take Florian Tuda’s place. And then if you tell your people we had nothing to do with it, we’ll make you rich.”
He shrugged, pretending a complete lack of interest. He needed time to recover from his surprise and to think it over carefully. “I don’t understand if you’re still interested in that certain merchandise.”
“Nope.”
“Then we have nothing more to talk about.”
I stood up. “Think it over, Arben. Opportunities like this one come along once in a lifetime,” I said, leaving a tiny scrap of paper behind me on the tabletop. On it I had written a phone number.
He didn’t move a muscle. He just stood there and stared at me as if I were a piece of furniture. I put on my jacket and then my overcoat and walked out of the bar. I counted my paces as I walked and when I got to fifty I stopped, lit a cigarette, and discreetly took a glance behind me. As I’d imagined, Arben had sent one of his Maghrebi enforcers after me.
I crossed the piazza and turned toward Ponte Molino, before cutting into a bewildering medieval network of narrow streets. The guy had to pick up his speed to avoid losing me and, anxiously working to keep me in sight, he failed to notice Rossini, who was waiting for him, leaning casually against one of the columns supporting a portico. He smacked him hard in the face with the butt of his pistol. Twice. The man went down and lay there on the ground, motionless. I was no longer being followed.
“How’d it go?” asked Beniamino once he’d caught up with me.
“I think Arben swallowed the bait.”
“And his greed will screw him.”
“Let’s hope so.”
We met up with Max la Memoria who was waiting for us at a street corner in another part of town. He was loaded down with shopping bags.
“I feel like making something to eat,” he explained.
We returned to our luxury apartment. The fat man busied himself in the kitchen, Beniamino hurried to his bedroom for yet another of his long and heartbreaking phone calls with Sylvie, and I sat down in front of the television set and started fooling around with the remote control. On one channel that was mostly about music, there was a tedious report on the recent transgressions of Amy Winehouse. I would have preferred to listen to her sing. That girl has a voice I like. Her treatment of Back to Black is just incredible.
I felt like listening to some good blues. I called Edoardo “Catfish” Fassio. He always knows everything that’s happening in the world of the devil’s own music.
“This evening, Claudio Bertolin is playing in an enoteca in Castelfranco Veneto; from what I’ve heard, he may even record the concert.”
“Then I can’t miss it.”
“If you did, it would just be another of your many fuck-ups.”
Max was larding a pork roast of remarkable size. “After a long period of abstinence, I’m going out to hear some good music.”
The fat man looked up from the raw meat. “You talk to Beniamino about it?”
“Was there something scheduled?”
“I know that he wanted to go take a look at Stojkovic’s office and house.”
“No need for three of us. I did my part today when I talked to that human cesspool Arben.”
“Right you are.”
I watched him work for a while. Since the day we first met again in Lugano, we’d never talked about the past.
“I still haven’t worked up the courage to go see what’s taken the place of La Cuccia.”
“Right now, the place is empty. For a while it was the usual sandwich shop, then a sushi bar, but nothing worked out.”
My face lit up. “It’s for sale?”
“I saw an ad in the newspaper a couple of days ago.”
“It’d be nice to buy it again and start over. Once we’re done with this fucked up story, I mean.”
Max grimaced. “I don’t know if I’m up for that, Marco.”
“What do you mean?”
“I think I’ll stay in Fratta Polesine. It’s a good place for me. A lot of great people live there, there’s still a sense of community that you can’t find anywhere these days. For the first time, I feel like I’m surrounded by normal human beings, by friendship and kindness . . . And it’s turning into a base for a lot of good projects.”
“Are you thinking of getting back into politics?”
He smiled. “I’d like to give it a try, for the thousandth time in my life. They’re trying to plunder Northeast Italy once and for all: they’ve got a succession of useless infrastructure projects and major public works that will finish off this part of the world for good. I don’t feel like standing by and doing nothing.”
“I have to admit I didn’t expect this.”
He sighed. “You thought it could all go back to the way it was?”
“No, the thought never passed through my mind. It’s just that I’m not ready for the end of our partnership; I’m not ready for our lives to split up, whatever else happens.”
“We were forced to pick up and leave one day. We lost everything we thought we owned. That’s just what happened.”
“I’m feeling a little lost, Max.”
The fat man pulled open the fridge and uncorked a bottle of prosecco. “Bubbly, boy. You urgently need a pick-me-up.”
“Is there a woman waiting for you in Fratta Polesine?”
“Her name’s Irma. She showed up one day with some of my friends and she hasn’t left since.”
“Do you miss her?”
“I do. A lot.”
I’d never seen the fat man making personal phone calls. “Why don’t you ever call her?”
“I told her I’d come back.”
“Sometimes that’s not enough.”
“I’m sick of mixing this shitty story with things that are good, you know what I mean?”
Max was in love. The bandit was in love. What about the Alligator? What about me? “Yeah, I think I understand,” I replied after a little while. “Though I never made those kinds of distinctions.”
“Yeah, but you have a few screws loose.”
“Right, like you don’t . . .”
He pointed at the floor. “I’m the only sane man in this place.”
I gulped down three glassfuls in quick succession. Then I stood up and hugged Max. “I guess it just means I’ll have to come visit you.”
“As long as you don’t ruin my reputation.”
I stood up and put on my jacket. “Can I borrow your car?”
Max tossed me the car keys. “It doesn’t belong to me; treat it nice.”
I walked past Rossini’s room. The door was half open, and I could see him staring out the window, his hands flat against the glass. I decided this wasn’t the right time to bother him; I slipped quietly out of the apartment, gently pulling the front door shut as I stepped out onto the landing.
As soon as I got into the car, a little Korean compact that I was certain belonged to the mysterious Irma, I instinctively pulled open the glove compartment to see if I could find anything that would tell me about her. Then I slammed it brusquely shut. Poking into Max’s love life was really going a bit too far.
I drove over to La Cuccia. I smoked a few cigarettes in the car, parked in front of a green for-sale sign with the name and logo of a real estate agency. It was depressing: shuttered, lightless, abandoned. I called Virna and told her where I was.
“Are you already nursing a bottle of Calvados?”
“No, these days I only drink at night, that is, if three glasses of prosecco in a row don’t count.”
“Why did you call me, Marco?”
“Because I suddenly realized that I’m all alone. And when all this mess is over and I can start living my life again, I’ll have to deal with my solitude and loneliness.”
“I hope you haven’t taken me for just a shoulder you can shed your crocodile tears on.”
“I’d never dream of it,” I lied.
“Because I’ve had it up to here with men who trample everything and everyone in their path like rogue elephants until they hit fifty, and then start tugging at your sleeve and saying they feel sad.”
“Virna, please, don’t think that’s what I’m up to; I haven’t fallen that low.”
“Good, that’s a relief. So, I’m still waiting for you to answer my question: why’d you call?”
“To tell you that I’d like to start looking around for a nice place to live where a very attractive young mama could come spend a few enjoyable hours from time to time with yours truly.”
“And that nice young mama would be me?”
“Right.”
“Then you have to do things the right way and ask for my hand.”
“Is that customary among lovers?”
“Especially among lovers. And you have to swear you’ll be faithful to me.”
“But you’re not faithful to your husband.”
“I need two men; you don’t need two women. Or am I not enough for you? If not, we can just end this conversation right now.”
“Virna, can I ask a question? Are you serious?”
“I certainly am. I have no intention of sharing you with another woman, and I don’t want to discover that I have to spend time with a big cry-baby, which—let’s face it—is exactly what many men your age are.”
“Agreed. I’ll do my best.”
“No, you have to be certain. Give a call when you’ve made up your mind.”
She hung up. What a force of nature.
I couldn’t help it. I was still in love with her, and . . . I liked her. Just thinking about her stirred my baser instincts. I wanted a woman, and if I could, I’d have called Morena. She at least would have pretended to listen to me.
Instead, an hour later, her handsome policeman called me.
“Any news?”
“Nope.”
“Then can you tell me what the fuck you were doing in the bar that the Pe´c Kosovars use as a front? I’m not sure I see how that fits in with our agreement.”
I should have guessed that the place was under surveillance.
“You’ll find out soon.”
“Don’t try to reassure me with bullshit, Buratti, because if there’s anybody who’d be eager to replace the Serbs around here, it’s those fucking Kosovars.”
“My plans include a good fucking-over for Arben Alshabani, too, but first I have to make sure that no one’s tailing me.”
He mulled it over. The stakes were getting more interesting. “Fine. We’ve got a security camera trained on the bar, that’s all.”
“I’m not worried. But you have to relax too.”
He emitted a dubious sigh. “Do I need to remind you what happens if you try to screw me?”
Jesus, what a pain in the ass! This whole thing was based on a card-castle of deceit and threats. “Now you’re starting to annoy me.”
“Whoa, take it easy, friend. You’re the one who came looking for me.”
“Just back off: I don’t need you breathing down my neck.”
“I’m afraid you’re going to have to get used to the idea: I can do whatever I want because I’m the good guy.”
I hung up the phone. Fucking cop.
The one phone call I was anxiously awaiting didn’t come, though. Maybe we’d misjudged Arben. Maybe in the face of such a tough decision, he’d just decided to turn the problem over to the family.
What a shitty day. Nothing was going right. Max and Virna’s words whirled through my mind. Between my legs was a pulsing need for pleasure and tenderness.
Nothing could save me now but the blues. It was still too early to drive to Castelfranco. I went to an out-of-the-way bar on the outskirts of town. It used to be a place where people went to find a little company without spending much money. The place looked the same, but now there were three young Chinese bartenders, two young men and a girl, ordered around sharply by a stern Chinese mother. And the clientele was different, too.
All things considered, that was okay with me. If the old crowd had been there, I’d certainly have wound up entangled in some tawdry one-nighter, and it would have just made me feel worse. I remembered I hadn’t eaten yet; I ordered a panino and a beer. Then a pot of tea. The little café table sat next to the plate-glass window, right across from the bus stop, and I passed a few hours peering out at the serious, preoccupied faces of the passengers. I also saw two women I could have easily fallen in love with.
“Everything okay?” the owner asked me in broken Italian when I went up to the cash register to pay.
“Yes, just fine, but I could never become a regular customer of your bar. You see, watching one busload of people after another go by is deeply disturbing, and not the sort of thing I need at this particular point in my life.”
The whole time I was talking, she never stopped smiling and nodding with patient resignation. All she wanted from me was a yes or a no. She hadn’t understood a single word I’d said.
During the time I was in Switzerland, they had been busy building: new roads, roundabouts, and on-ramps. It was all just to get the semitrailers loaded with merchandise in and out more efficiently. Now, with the recession, traffic had declined. Still, I saved only about ten minutes. People were coming home from work, and there were cars everywhere you looked.
The first piece that Claudio Bertolin sang was The Blues Is a Lonely Road. I was unable to listen to the entire rendition of the second piece, Have Been Down to Hell, because my cellphone started buzzing annoyingly in my jacket pocket.
It was Arben. I reluctantly left the club. The bastard might as well have done it on purpose.
“We can discuss it,” he said.
“Okay. Let’s meet tomorrow morning at eleven in the shopping center on Viale Venezia. There’s a bar on the ground floor.”
“I would have expected something a little quieter, a little more out of the way.”
Right, where you can kill some one in peace and quiet, with out-of-the-way comfort, I thought. “No offense, but I like my bars crowded and centrally located.”
“Fine, but you have to give me a chance to check everything out, make sure you’re clean.”
“No problem.”
I called Max. They were parked out front of the Serbian gangster’s villa, and they were bored to tears. I gave him the good news.
“Then enjoy the rest of your evening. From tomorrow on we’re on lockdown.”
Two guitars, a bass, drums, harmonica, and vocals. Nine songs, plus the old standard Every Day I Have the Blues. It was a great concert. I went over and congratulated Bertolin, who had played a number of times at La Cuccia. I found him chatting with another Venetian bluesman, Marco Ballestracci. Marco gave me a copy of his latest CD, Wimmen ’n’ Devils.
They asked why I’d closed my club. I fed them a plausible lie, and went over to the bar and ordered a Calvados. To my delight, I found they served Alligators.
I decided I’d have a single drink and I ordered a slice of cake.
“What kind?” asked a waitress in her early twenties, pointing to an overbrimming pastry trolley.
“You decide. I don’t eat a lot of sweets, but I need to soak up a fair amount of alcohol.”
“Then you’ll need a double helping of chestnut cream tart,” she decreed with the confidence of an expert. “Pastry dough soaks up alcohol like a sponge.”
At last, I was happy. The blues were flowing through my veins like a healthful transfusion. The day had finally taken a turn for the better toward the end. But there was no one I knew there, and I missed the conversations at La Cuccia. I left before another wave of gloom could wash over me. When I got in the car, I slipped in the CD I’d just been given and pumped up the volume. Baby Please Set a Date, an old piece by Elmore James, exploded from the speakers.
I hadn’t picked the bar in the shopping center at random. A former political prisoner I’d met in jail worked there. When he finally got out of prison, after about fifteen years inside, the woman he’d slept with the night before his arrest was out front, waiting for him. Other bandits, other loves. He couldn’t do much with his engineering degree after all that time. So, now that the one purpose of his life was to take care of his wife and his baby daughter, born exactly nine months after his release from prison, he took a job as a waiter.
When we asked him to do us that favor, he agreed. No hesitation, no questions. He wasn’t a guy with a faulty memory.
I arrived by cab and walked into the bar through a side entrance. Arben was already there, waiting for me. Arms crossed, watchful gaze. He gestured for me to follow him into the public restroom. We checked the stalls to make sure they were empty, and we searched one another for listening devices. We went back out into the bar, and I invited him to choose a table to sit at. Just one more piece of evidence of my good faith. Max had already sat down while we were in the bathroom, and with a pair of earphones and the daily sports pages, he looked like just another slacker with nothing to do. I tried to figure out who was there to protect the Mafioso, but none of the faces looked especially suspicious. If in fact he planned to accept our offer, he couldn’t run the risk of showing up with bodyguards.
The waiter came over immediately and, of course, gave no sign of having ever met me. The Kosovar ordered a beer.
I asked for a cappuccino and a croissant. Arben wanted to begin negotiations immediately, but I told him it was better to wait for our orders to arrive, so that we wouldn’t be interrupted. The real reason, though, was that the miniature microphone and recording device that would spell his downfall was hidden in the cardboard napkin dispenser, and I needed it to be brought to the table, on a tray, along with our orders, and placed in the middle of the table before anyone said a word.
The ex-convict played a perfect attentive waiter, and Arben, relaxed at last, swallowed a gulp of beer before asking me to explain the details of the deal.
“As I told you, we have nothing to do with the murder of Fatjon Bytyçi. To prove that, we can hand over to you the mastermind and we can give you the names of two of the actual killers. If you agree to persuade your people not to take revenge on us, we’ll give you ten kilos of gold jewelry.”
“You know too much about Fatjon’s murder. It’s hard to believe you had nothing to do with it.”
I finished chewing my mouthful of croissant. Unhurriedly, savoring it. I wanted him to believe that I wasn’t afraid of him. I wanted him to think I was stupid, not that I was tough.
“We’ve had two years to investigate, and we found out who did it. What we couldn’t figure out was who fingered us for it.”
He shrugged. “It was Agim, the younger brother. He came back to Pe´c with Fatjon’s body, and told everyone that his older brother had been killed in a car crash. But inside the family, they knew that Fatjon had been killed over a woman. He’d stolen her from an Italian, and the Italian tracked him down, with the help of two friends, and he finally managed to find him somewhere in France. He made him pay for it in blood.”
I sat up and listened carefully. This version had some interesting modifications. “How was he killed?”
“You really don’t know?”
“I don’t have the slightest idea.”
“He was in a car, going home after a night out. They ambushed him in the open countryside. They killed Fatjon as well as his bodyguards.”
“I don’t understand why this Agim wouldn’t have told the truth.”
“Fatjon was a widower, but he was about to remarry. He was going to marry the daughter of the capo of another family.”
So the true story of the gang bang parlor of Corenc had been concealed from everyone, even the members of the mafia family. Fatjon’s father, the boss, and Agim wanted to make sure that nobody knew that the man who had been next in line to inferit the mafia empire of Pe´c, and who was about to establish an alliance with another mafia clan by marriage, was a depraved son of a bitch.
“So now Agim is going to marry the girl, right?”
“That’s right. And together, the two clans will be much more powerful, but that’s none of your business. Here’s what I want to know: if I do agree to cooperate, how would the deal work?”
“It’d be very simple. We arrange a meeting, we hand over to you the mastermind, the names of the killers, and the gold. Just half the gold, of course. You’ll get the rest when you prove to us that we no longer have a problem.”
“So you and your friends are going to bring me the mastermind, giftwrapped with a bow on?”
“That’s right, as a goodwill gesture. You can do what you want with him. Ship him home to Agim Bytyçi as a wedding present, or shoot him in the head.”
He snickered. “You guys sure want to save your own skins.”
“We know that you have a code of honor, and no one escapes it.”
Pride broadened his smile. “Yeah, but I want all the gold. Otherwise you guys’ll try to cheat me, say that we never had a deal.”
Good old Arben, I thought. He’d already decided to kill us, so he knew he’d never see the second half of the gold unless he persuaded us to hand it all over immediately.
“Out of the question.”
He stared at me, uncertain whether to try to argue or just settle for what he’d been offered.
I shook my head. “Don’t push me on this. For that matter, I’m coming back to Padua to live, so there’s no reason for me to try to trick you.”
He had to let it go. Maybe he was mulling over the idea of postponing our executions so that he could lay his hands on all the loot.
“And I guess you wouldn’t consider telling me the name of the mastermind.”
“If I tell you, you’ll just go get him on your own.”
“This time I name the place.”
“Fair enough. But it has to be in this part of town.”
“No problem.” He drained off the last of his beer and added: “Next time you beat up one of my men, make sure he’s not a Kosovar.”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“Your friend broke a piece-of-shit Moroccan’s jaw. That’s not serious, but if you ever do anything of the sort to one of our people, get ready for a world of pain.”
“That’s pretty rough talk for two guys about to do business together.”
“It’s better to be clear from the beginning.”
“That’s fine. Let’s just be clear that anyone who tails us does so at the risk of personal injury.”
He gave me a hard glare. I could see in his eyes just how much pleasure he would take in murdering me. “Okay. Each of us has said what we needed to.”
I let him leave first. A couple of minute later I stood up and left the bar, heading in the opposite direction. Max followed in my footsteps. As he strolled past the little table where I’d been sitting, he snagged the napkin-holder and came after me.
“The recording is clear as a bell,” he said later, as we drove off together.
“It’ll be a pleasure to screw that guy,” I snapped. “He was sitting there talking to me, and the whole time he was thinking about how he could kill me. It was like being locked in a glass case with a rattlesnake.”
“Now let’s get ready for our second move.”
“How many moves do you expect in this match?”
“Three. If it all works according to plan.”
We drove to Treviso where we hooked up with Old Rossini, who had been staked out, maintaining an uninterrupted surveillance of Pavle Stojkovic since the night before. His eyes were red-rimmed and a scratchy white stubble covered his face. The car reeked of cigarettes and exhaustion. Max got in and sat in the passenger seat, next to Beniamino; I got in back.
“We can forget about trying to bust in on him in his nice country villa. The two enforcers live with him, he has guard dogs and a security system,” he explained, pointing to an unsightly suburban apartment building. “You see the two plate-glass windows on the ground floor? That’s the office of Balkan Market, and it’s connected to the cellar warehouse by an internal staircase.”
“His bodyguards?”
“They’re with him every minute of the day.”
“Anyone else?”
“A secretary. I thought I saw her go in this morning. When I called to check, a woman’s voice answered.”
“There must be someone in the warehouse.”
“No. This morning I saw a couple of delivery vans arrive and leave, and Bozidar opened and closed the gates.”
“What kind of car?”
“A black Mercedes, as usual It’s parked in an underground garage. No way of getting to it.”
“It doesn’t look good to me,” I said. “Maybe we should call Luc and Christine or the two Germans.”
“No!” Beniamino hissed.
“If you want to get in there without getting badly hurt, you’re going to need people who know how to handle a weapon. You can’t do it by yourself.”
“Oh, yes I can.”
I leaned forward and said to Old Rossini: “You wouldn’t by any chance be thinking of a convenient shootout where, after the smoke clears, all the bad guys are left lying on the ground, their chests riddled with bullets?”
He smacked the steering wheel angrily, his bracelets jangling. “Sometimes you can be a real asshole.”
“Maybe so, but you know how these things can be. You knock on the door with the best intentions, but the other guy refuses to cooperate, he thinks he can get away with it, he tries to pull a slick move, and in the end, you have no choice but to start shooting.”
He lit another in a seemingly endless series of cigarettes. “That won’t happen.”
I tapped the fat man on the shoulder. “What do you think?”
“Beniamino knows what he’s doing. And the less we know about it, the better.”
The Serbian gangster’s bodyguards were veterans of a long and bloody civil war. They were also young and fast. But I would never have dreamed of bringing up any of those points. Rossini was still a legend, even at age sixty. Or sixty-two . . . He’d always been kind of vague about exactly how old he was, like an aging actress.
“I bow to the wishes of the majority,” I said, playfully, to cut the tension. “Now what do we do?”
“We sit here, bored out of our skulls, waiting to figure out when the time is ripe to go pay a visit on our old friend Pavle.”
“You don’t think that three men sitting in a parked car might be a little obvious?”
Rossini rapped his knuckles on the window. “Smoked glass. You can’t see a fucking thing from outside.”
After a while it started raining.
“There’s been more rain this year than I can remember,” I muttered.
Rossini and the fat man exchanged a glance and burst out laughing.
“What? What did I say?”
“You really went senile living in Lugano. Now you’re starting to comment on the weather, like an old guy on a park bench. This is Beniamino, and I’m Max. We’re not old guys sitting on a park bench next to you.”
They had a point. They were my only real friends. But I was still uncomfortable about what the fat man had said to me the day before. I felt weird, as if I’d lost my way in a network of streets that I knew like the back of my hand.
“Yesterday I spent three hours sitting in a bar run by a Chinese family watching people get on and off of buses.”
“Now that’s the Marco I know,” the old smuggler broke in, as he continued to snicker. “You’re the only guy I know who could waste so much time on such futile bullshit.”
“Futile? Now I can offer you the benefit of my pearls of wisdom about life.”
“I’d bet money we’re going to hear all about it.”
“You’d be grateful to me as long as you live.”
At 12:45 on the dot, the three Serbians and the secretary came out of the building. Pavle Stojkovic walked ahead, accompanied by a woman aged somewhere between 35 and 40. She was tall, she had long black hair, and she was dressed in a somewhat ostentatious style. Bozidar and Vladan followed a few yards behind them. They walked about 150 feet and stepped into a bar that served quick lunches.
“Secretary and lover,” Rossini decided.
“Did they arrive together?” I asked.
“No. The woman arrived shortly after him.”
“We should do what we can to keep her out of this.”
“That may not be possible.”
“One more fucking problem,” I muttered. I was sick of sitting in a parked car with the windows rolled up.
Max craned his neck to look back at me. “Don’t nag, Marco. You know we wouldn’t hurt a hair on her head.”
Forty-five minutes later, they went back into the offices of the Balkan Market. Same formation.
Between 2 and 5 o’clock, two more delivery vans pulled up, completely unmarked. Each stayed less than twenty minutes.
Half an hour later, the Mercedes revved up the ramp from the cellar parking area and pulled up to the front door. By the light of a streetlamp, we saw that only the bodyguards were in the car. Pavle and his secretary came out an hour later. She took care of locking the door and turning on the security system. Then the woman got into an expensive sports car. The Serb waved goodbye with a smile.
I looked at my watch. “Six thirty on the dot.”
“These people are methodical,” said Max. “Everything to the minute, every blessed day they do the same things at the same time. We could sit here for a year watching them: nothing would change.”
“The delivery vans,” Beniamino mumbled. “Three of them this morning, two more this afternoon. We’ll use one of them to get in.”
The next morning we followed the first van when it pulled out from the underground ramp at the Balkan Market. It pulled onto the highway and didn’t get off until the first exit for Verona. It led us to an ordinary-looking industrial shed way out in the countryside.
“I have to say I’d love to know what kind of ‘Balkan merchandise’ Pavle Stojkovic’s company sells.”
Rossini shrugged. “I don’t have the slightest idea. You can’t even tell who delivers and who picks up the merchandise.”
“If it’s illegal, it means that our friend has more than one guardian angel. What cop wouldn’t want to know a little more about an import-export firm called Balkan Market?”
“Maybe the police have a surveillance camera on the place, like they do on Arben Alshabani’s bar.”
Rossini snapped his fingers. “I hadn’t thought of that. Maybe we should be a little more careful.”
We were basically going to just lower our heads and charge in: we didn’t have a real plan, we didn’t even have a vague idea of what we might be running into.
We went back to Treviso after lunch. Max insisted on getting off the highway near Vicenza, where he knew a good little trattoria.
That afternoon no vans pulled up to the Balkan Market. Otherwise, everything went exactly like the day before.
“Let’s try following them,” I suggested when I saw Pavle getting into the Mercedes.
Rossini wasn’t convinced. “If they spot us, it’ll fuck everything up.”
“Maybe they’re going to do some grocery shopping.”
“Oh, can you just see someone like Stojkovic pushing a shopping cart in a supermarket?”
“He has to eat.”
“His housekeeper takes care of it,” Beniamino snapped. “We need to focus on the delivery vans.”
It took us four days to figure out that the van that showed up at the warehouse most frequently was a light-blue Renault.
The van would drive down the ramp and stop in front of the door, under the vigilant lens of a videocamera. After a couple of minutes, one of the goons would open the door and let the van drive in. The driver was a young man with long hair and a series of tiny earrings piercing his right ear. He lived with his wife and two children not far from Montebelluna and he drove all over the Veneto region making deliveries. He didn’t look like a gangster; he probably had nothing to do with any criminal activity. All the same, we were going to have bust into his life rather roughly.
It happened the day that we decided to go ahead and settle some scores with that bastard Pavle Stojkovic.