“PLACE YOUR BETS” WERE the first words I heard Angelo Dioguardi say.
I’d entered the smoke-filled room where they were playing poker only because the bar cart was in there, and it held a bottle of Lagavulin.
I knew three of the four players by sight, but not the tall young man with long ruffled blond hair, sideburns, and blue eyes, in front of whom almost all of the chips were piled.
“Holy shit, Angelo, that’s more than a month’s earnings,” grumbled the young lawyer with whom he was battling for the pot. I could see this meant the lawyer earned ten times my own salary.
The young man gave a contrite smile. He looked almost apologetic. He was the only one who wasn’t smoking, and the only one without a glass of whiskey in front of him. I glanced at the table as I poured myself some of the Lagavulin. They were playing a round of Teresina poker. Based on the cards that were shown, the lawyer looked to be the winner. But there was only one card face down that, if it was the fair-haired guy’s, would give him a lead the lawyer couldn’t beat.
I shot him a brief glance, and he sent me back a friendly smile. I left the room without waiting for the lawyer’s decision.
Camilla was waiting for me outside the room. She was the reason I was there that evening. Our host was Paola. I’d met her when she came to the local police station to report the presumed theft of her schnauzer, which had gone missing while it was running around the park. Paola was very pretty, if a little too refined for my taste. I had found her dog for her, which had only been lost and not stolen after all, and then I asked her out for a pizza. Nine times out of ten my rough-edged charm, combined with the badge of rank, did the trick in these situations. But Paola just laughed heartily and added, “I have a very good boyfriend, and I’m very faithful. But I might have a close friend I could introduce you to; she likes men like you, a bit surly and macho. Perhaps you’d like to come over tomorrow evening . . .”
She lived in a luxury apartment in Vigna Clara, one of Rome’s best neighborhoods. The apartment was on the third floor and overlooked a quiet little piazza: open, tree-lined, no noise. It was paid for by her parents in Palermo so she could study in Rome. Her friend Camilla wasn’t bad, except she was a bit of a snob. But during the previous dozen years I’d decided, given I’d lost the one woman who had meant something to me, I’d make do with the sum of the particulars of others. At thirty-two I could manage to think of at least one positive particular in every pretty woman who happened to come within reach. Naturally I’d discovered a long time ago that “the particulars” of a woman are only discovered during sex, when the gestures, the looks, the words, and the sighs manage to be almost truthful.
That wasn’t happening on that particular evening, though. Paola’s friend was spending the night at Paola’s place, so I wasn’t going to get her into bed. Toward midnight I got ready to say good night. As a young police captain, I had to get up at half past six the next morning. I was getting ready to leave when the poker players came back into the living room: three beaten dogs and the fair-haired one with his blue eyes lit up.
“Paola, your boyfriend must have made a pact with the devil,” said the lawyer as he waved good-bye with the others to the evening’s hostess.
The blond guy slumped into the armchair across from mine. Now that he had finished taking them to the cleaners, he was ready to enjoy the bottle of Lagavulin. He poured himself a generous measure and, seeing my glass was empty, filled it without even asking. He raised his glass in a toast. His clothes, his wild hair and five o’clock shadow—everything about him made him seem out of place in that house and with those people. Which meant he was more or less like me, except I was a master in the art of hypocrisy, a true chameleon of the secret intelligence service who had learned how to conceal his contempt, while he was just a kid from the outlying suburbs and the one who was genuinely out of place.
“To this magnificent whiskey and those who appreciate it,” he toasted, displaying the working-class romanesco accent of the outer suburbs.
He offered me a cigarette. He smoked those awful Gitanes without a filter that left tobacco on your tongue and a foul smell everywhere.
“But they taste great,” he said. “And I count them out carefully, no more than ten a day.”
No one in Rome’s elite smoked those cigarettes. Marijuana was in, but plain cigarettes smacked of the slums. Of course, it was clear the fair-haired guy didn’t belong to the elite. I thought that if Paola had chosen him and was so faithful to him, then the guy had to have hidden qualities. And the only ones that I could think of were those you demonstrated in bed.
“So, you’re the big winner?” I asked him. He nodded, but showed no interest in pursuing the subject.
“Then you really are lucky. There was only one king left that could have given you a straight. Out of ten possibilities, at least.”
He didn’t say a word. (Only after a good deal of whiskey could I get him to confess that he’d held nothing more than two nines.) “Professional secret,” he said, making it clear he was letting me in on a very special confidence. By then the lawyer was already downstairs and on his way out.
While Paola and Camilla were chatting in the kitchen, Angelo asked what I did for a living.
“Bravo, Michele. At least you’ve got something to get up for every day.”
I shook my head. “In reality, it’s all routine. In a district like this, about the biggest case I’m going to crack is your girlfriend’s missing schnauzer.”
“Oh, you’re the one who found the dog? He smiled and nodded in the direction of the kitchen.
“Camilla’s cute,” I said. “Too bad she’s sleeping here tonight.”
He thought about this for a moment. Then I saw him get up and stagger into the bathroom without even closing the door, followed by the sound of retching and moaning. The girls rushed in, as I did too. He was lying on the bathroom floor, looking pale, having thrown up in the sink.
“Should I call a doctor?” asked Paola, panic in her voice.
“No, no,” he groaned. “Girls, go make some coffee, would you? Michele, stay here a minute.”
Ejected from the bathroom, Paola and Camilla went back to the kitchen, and Angelo winked at me.
“I’m totally fine, but let’s scare them a little more.”
He stuck two fingers down his throat. More retching, and the girls raced back into the bathroom.
“I’m calling a doctor,” said Paola, more concerned than ever.
“No, it’s okay. The worst is over. I’ll take care of him.” I spoke in the same authoritative voice I’d used when she’d come to report her missing schnauzer. Decisive, calm, reassuring. I knew what I was doing.
Angelo went on a good while longer, with more well-feigned sounds of retching and groaning. Then I took him on my shoulders to carry him to Paola’s double bed.
“Christ, you’re heavy,” I said as I put him down.
“You have to suffer at least a little in order to get it . . .” He winked at me again and started to moan softly.
The girls came in with black coffee. Angelo tried it with groans of disgust.
“What should we do?” The girls were hanging around for instructions, subdued now by my air of calm in the face of Angelo’s collapse.
“Let him stay the night,” he said, taking Paola’s hand. “If I feel bad again, at least he’ll be here to help.”
I bravely offered to sleep in the living room with the schnauzer, seeing that Camilla was in the guest room. My gesture was greatly appreciated. Then, later that night, it occurred to Camilla that the dog’s snoring might be bothering me, and so she had me move into her bed.
And that’s how I came to know Angelo Dioguardi.
. . . .
The police station in Vigna Clara was about exciting as a nursing home. In that well-off residential district of Rome, a policeman lived the life of a retiree. Well-ordered streets, beautiful homes, greenery everywhere, its inhabitants all formally educated and having achieved economic success by any means, legal or otherwise: tax evasion, bribery and corruption, carefully controlled contracts. All these were means that the Italians, especially in Rome, had employed since the end of the war as they sought the good life, whatever the cost.
I’d been stationed there for almost two years, thanks to my brother Alberto and his contacts in the Christian Democrats.
“Think of it as time to recuperate, Mike,” he said when I started there. “Take a couple of years to get yourself back together, and then decide what to do with yourself. Time to straighten up.”
As if his younger brother’s previous turbulent thirty-two years could be wiped away. But then Alberto had always been like that. He was an optimist, highly intelligent, forceful—qualities he shared with our father, who left Palermo for Tripoli after World War II.
A Sicilian from the lower middle class, Papa studied engineering in Rome and became a wealthy businessman in Libya, one of the few who was able to steer through the murky waters of Italian politics, granting it the absolute minimum attention possible and using it only when necessary. And in order to marry the daughter of Libya’s biggest Italian landowner, Papa was willing to become the most dedicated of Catholics from conviction and for convenience in order to get into the right circles, and he was willing to do business with Jews on the one hand, Arabs on the other, and Westerners with both hands together.
Alberto shared some of my father’s skills, but he was a better person by far: sensitive, well-adjusted, generous, and even-handed. A model son. In complete contrast, I was the one who, right from the beginning, hated my school run by the Christian Brothers, and spent all my time with a Diana 50 air rifle, shooting turtledoves from a three hundred feet away. I was the one who only passed his exams each year because Commendatore Balistreri was a big shot in Libya.
My troubled childhood was spent serving as an altar boy with a priest who couldn’t keep his hands to himself and fighting with the Arab and Italian boys my age. I grew into a lonely, turbulent, and angry adolescent. I devoured Homer, Nietzsche, and the early works of Mussolini. No calculated decisions or compromises: only honor, action, courage. My path was clearly marked: at seventeen, I left behind me the first dead in a Cairo shaken by the Six Days War; at eighteen, I killed my first lion in Tanzania. At nineteen, I was plotting against Gaddafi, who had just taken power. At twenty, I claimed the right to decide on the death penalty for those who were traitors.
Then Rome and college. By 1970, I’d even managed to pass a few classes. Over time I made the natural progression from the Movimento Sociale Italiano to the ultra-right extra-parliamentary Ordine Nuovo, with its two-bladed Fascist ax and SS motto “My honor is loyalty.” Three years spent clashing with the Reds—posting manifestos by night, days spent attending fiery meetings. Then, at the end of 1973, a Christian Democrat minister ordered the Ordine Nuovo to disband and had its leaders arrested. An act of madness that let loose dozens of youths, some too young and naive to see the distinction between conflict and the abyss. While many of my friends chose armed conflict, killing enemies, I paused to reflect. I understood they were moving toward bombing ordinary people, collaborating with common thugs, betraying our ideals, and so I agreed to help the secret intelligence service stop them. After four years of being a chameleon, working undercover for the security forces, it was still plausible that I was on the side of the good people who were preventing massacres of the innocent. Then, in 1978, the Red Brigades seized Aldo Moro and right-wing criminality joined forces with left-wing terrorism. Intelligence was ignored. Aldo Moro was assassinated. I protested, and my cover was blown. At that point I could have continued and ended up in a block of cement at the bottom of the sea, or else I could renounce changing the world and ask my brother for help.
It was my brother, Ingegnere Alberto Balistreri, who brought me back from the edge of the precipice. The Minister of the Interior owed him a favor. So I managed to obtain a philosophy degree, using my credits from the early 1970s and taking some more classes. Then they let me join the police, and I passed the exam to become police captain. In 1980 I received my first posting in Vigna Clara, one of Rome’s quietest neighborhoods.
But at night I wanted to get away from that false Rome and keep my distance from the rich and their neighborhoods and the historic center, where the city’s chaos and decadence were on display. I rented a studio in Garbatella, a working-class quarter built by Mussolini, where apartments cost very little in those days and true Romans took the cool spring air sitting outside the cheap bistros that served the best food and wine in the city.
In fact, I dedicated myself to the only real passion I had left: women. Any woman, of whatever kind, race, or age, so long as she was good-looking and didn’t waste my time with the usual runaround. I was voracious; I wasn’t looking for friendship, intrigue, or protection. They lasted so little time that I didn’t take the trouble to learn their names. I only needed to know them in the most thorough way possible, something not too difficult for a young good-looking police officer of a certain rank. Hic et nunc was the way for Michele Balistreri; nothing of sin, confession, regret. I was one of the elite—those the world doesn’t understand, those who don’t give a damn what the world thinks of them. Nor what God thinks, either.
As Alberto used to say to me, and I used to echo, this was only a moment to reflect, a little bit of rest, sailing slowly along a quiet river, carried along by a gentle current. After the turbulent years I’d experienced, this was exactly what I needed: solitude, a cushy day job, eating well, screwing a lot, playing poker, thinking about nothing at all. It was a delicate balance between pleasure and boredom. No emotional ties. Love was a country where it had rained salt, and it had turned into a desert.
But I told myself over and over I would leave as soon as I could. I’d never become a senile old cop, stuck at a desk and serving a cowardly and corrupt state. I’d go back to Africa to hunt lions and leopards, far from false and sanctimonious Italy. Far from everything I detested. Far from the battles I had lost.
. . . .
A few days after our first encounter, Dioguardi readily agreed to play poker with me and two of my friends in the police. This was odd, because we’d only just met and I myself would never have risked putting my money on the table with three strangers who knew each other well. But, as I came to find out, Dioguardi was the opposite of me in many ways—and one was being able to trust his neighbor.
We played until two in the morning in the back room of a piano bar near Piazza di Spagna. In less than half an hour, I realized he was a world-class player. He had technique, imagination and daring. After two hours he’d won a pile of money. Then, in the following hour, he lost more than half of what he’d won.
“You lost on purpose,” I said, after the other two had left.
He shook his head, embarrassed.
“I was doing a few experiments, things I could use to improve. I do it when I’m winning comfortably.”
“As in a preseason friendly game against a bunch of amateurs.”
He smiled. He admitted that he played rarely, and only then with wealthy old boys. He won a lot of money, but he was a little ashamed of it and never boasted. I discovered later that he donated all his winnings to charity. His fabulous bluffs in the game were little sins for him, something that—along with his Catholic ethics—was nothing to be proud of.
We went into the crowded bar. A group of young men were singing to the piano music, led by a beautiful black woman.
As soon as she spotted him, she called out, “Angelo, Angelo, come over here!”
He tried to wave her away, but she kept calling him. In the end he went over and the girl pressed his lips to hers. I saw him blush and step back. Then she raised his arm, as if declaring him the winner, and turned to the crowd.
“This is my friend Angelo, the best undiscovered vocalist in Rome, who will now sing for us.”
In the field of singing, too, he was in a class by himself. He performed every song the crowd requested and ended with a rendition of “My Way” almost worthy of Sinatra himself. After his performance, he introduced me to the woman, then left us alone just long enough for me to get her phone number. He’d figured me out.
It was after three when we left.
“Michele, let’s go to Ostia.”
“Ostia? It’s January. What would we do at the beach?”
“There’s a little bakery there. At six they bring out the best pastries anywhere near Rome.”
He wanted to talk. Me too. This was really strange because, over the years, my desire to socialize with other men had worn off. We went in his beat-up Fiat 500, and half an hour later we were parked on the promenade. The stars were out. It was cold, but there was no wind. We opened the windows to smoke. The sea was a millpond; we could smell the sea air and hear the waves lapping a few yards away from us. There was nobody around.
Unlike me, Angelo was always willing to talk about himself. He was born poor in a Rome where everyone except his parents was getting rich, some legally and some less so. He’d grown up in the poorest area of Rome. He was the son of a small-time singer and a fortuneteller, two starving wannabe artists who later moved to the country; two failures, at least by societal standards, both dead from cirrhosis of the liver when Angelo was still a teenager. But he said they had both given him a great deal. His vocalist father had given him his singing voice, and from his fortunetelling mother he learned to bluff and think on his feet.
In time he had gained two things: a well-off girlfriend, Paola, who worshipped him and would marry him within the year, and a small real estate business, thanks to her uncle, Cardinal Alessandrini. The cardinal was just over fifty and was responsible for arranging housing for the thousands of priests and nuns who came to Rome to study or else a few days of pilgrimage and sightseeing. The Vatican owned hundreds of convents, hostels, and apartments and their running had been entrusted to Angelo Dioguardi who, although he’d given up on his education, was a good Catholic and was obviously to be the husband of the Cardinal’s niece. Although Angelo was manifestly unsuited to an office job, he applied himself with dedication and energy—exactly the opposite of how I handled my employment. And he was the opposite of me when it came to women, too. He knew a lot of them, but he never took advantage because of his unshakeable loyalty to Paola. In love, he was an idealist in search of the single perfect relationship. This would turn out to be the ideal situation for someone like me, who was always on the prowl: Angelo drew them in, and I closed the deal.
“Are you really completely faithful to Paola?” I asked. I was expecting him to give a speech on love in reply, but Angelo surprised me.
“She’s beautiful, kind, smart, rich, and the niece of a cardinal who gave me a job, and I’m a poverty-stricken nobody who didn’t finish school. I can only be thankful; I’ve no right even to desire anyone else.”
We were still there at dawn. We got out to stretch our legs. The bakery was closed, but the lights were on and it was emanating a yeasty smell. I took a cigarette from my second pack. I offered him one, seeing as he’d finished all his.
“No thanks, Michele. A pack of Gitanes every two days and no more.”
“You’re too strict with yourself, Angelo. You should let yourself go once in a while.”
He ran a hand through his wavy blond hair, then pointed to the water.
“How about a dip?”
“Are you crazy? It’s January and dawn.”
“You won’t feel cold once you’re in. And it’ll give you a perfect appetite.”
That’s exactly what he said—a perfect appetite. He switched on the Fiat’s headlights and directed them toward the few yards of sand that separated us from the water. A minute later he was stripped down to his briefs.
“Come on, let yourself go, Michele,” he said.
Then he ran to the water and dove in. I saw him swimming furiously in the beam of the headlights. I don’t know what came over me—something I hadn’t felt for many years. A minute later I was in the water, too. The cold took my breath away, but the more I swam to warm myself up, the more I felt a joy I’d forgotten, brazen, irresistible, that took over my whole body.
As promised, the pastries, still warm from the oven, were perfect.
. . . .
So I began to get to know Angelo better. Underneath that affectionate, sunny, and angelic face lay a heart left on its own too soon and seeking a safe and permanent harbor. Love and work were a refuge for him. No strange ambitions, no adventures: a more or less regular life. No more than ten Gitanes a day, no more than a couple of glasses of whiskey. That way he stayed clear-headed when he played poker. Every time we went into one of Rome’s piano bars—something we did often in the following months—the same thing happened. The singer knew Angelo and called him on stage. The female singers always tried to take him home, but he was incorruptible. In this he was truly my opposite, or perhaps he was what I could have been. Angelo was unassailable.
He laid down strict rules for us when it came to poker. Spots were limited to a certain number, and at the end of the evening the jackpot was divided according to the number of chips we had. He almost always won, and the few times he lost I was sure he’d lost on purpose, just as he’d done during our first game. In the beginning we played with my brother, Alberto, and another engineer, a colleague of his. They tried to persuade Angelo to use their high salaries and stocks and shares to bankrupt a casino but, ever in line with his Catholic morality, Angelo wouldn’t do it.
We saw each other almost every evening. The standard routine was pizza for four: myself, Angelo, Paola, and my girlfriend of the moment. Then came a short stroll through Trastevere. We’d stop for a smoke, and drink one last beer in the splendid piazza by the church of Santa Maria. At that point, there was a choice: either I went off with my girlfriend or, with Paola’s blessing, Angelo and I would say good-bye to the two of them and ride around Rome in my Duetto or his Fiat 500. (This usually happened when I was no longer interested in sex with that night’s companion.) We would stay in the car and talk. Unending icy winter nights with the windows down to let out the smoke. Warm spring nights when we squashed the first mosquitoes. Our conversations ranged from chat about sports and politics to deeper existential problems. Despite not having finished school, Angelo was a great debater and could defend his Christian vision of the world divided between good and evil.
We were inseparable on those magical metaphysical nights that filled our lives for no apparent reason whatsoever.