LIX

What a mess, eh? Yeah. A real mess.

Forgive me if I receive you surrounded by shit. Then again, it strikes me as appropriate, because I’ve been in deep shit for a while now. For such a long time; you can’t even imagine.

I’m tired. I’m going to pieces, really. You can see, I drink. I’ve always been a drinker when times were tough: I lose my senses, my mind gets free of its chains, and I start to fly somewhere else, far from problems that have no solution.

I was expecting you, yes. I guess I really should have come to you. But as long as there was hope that we might come out of this in one piece, it was my duty to wait, don’t you think?

I’m not just responsible for myself, you know. I have a son. I have a little man who’s going to grow up and when he does, he’ll ask me to explain what I’m leaving him and why. It’s not like I’m alone in the world. Do you have children of your own? You don’t, do you? Then you couldn’t understand.

The checks. Where did you find them? Unbelievable, the way things come around. They’re for three million eight hundred thousand, those checks. And that’s not all of them; there are others out there, in other people’s hands. The signature is the same on them all, the signature that you read to your great surprise on the drafts: Cerchia SpA, Chief Administrator. In capital letters.

You talk about the economic crisis, what a nice big mouthful of a term: economic crisis. But you can’t even begin to imagine what an economic crisis really is, since you all collect your miserable little salaries at the end of the month anyway; at worst you’ll have to do without your usual week at the beach, or maybe you’ll be forced to miss an installment on your mortgage. If it took the rest of your life, you wouldn’t be able to understand what an economic crisis really means, for someone like me. If you count the salesmen I have more than five hundred employees here, and another three hundred in the other plant, outside of the country. I’m responsible for the livelihood of thousands of people. And I haven’t gotten a good night’s sleep in three years. I’m too busy searching for solutions I don’t have.

Because it starts so slowly that you don’t even notice it happening. People who owe you money drag out the payments, people you owe money to are asking for payments early; the price of raw materials goes up, but only a little, and the price of the product you sell has to drop if you want to keep selling, but only by a little. And the next thing you know, you need a line of credit. Just a small one.

Then the situation gets out of hand, but it takes months before you realize. Months. And by then it’s too late. The bank officers, who used to line up outside your office, stop taking your calls. And after a while they start lining up outside your office again, but for a different reason.

Then there’s them.

They don’t try to collect their debts with notarized forms and certified letters, you know. They come and get you, and you’re there one day, gone the next, because there’s only one thing they can’t afford: for word to get out that somebody got away with not paying.

Hunt them down, instead of hunting down good people. Wipe them off the face of the earth, and free us of the temptation to go to them. Because after the first time, you can’t stop. It’s worse than cocaine. Worse than alcohol. Worse than anything.

Hope. What screws you is hope. The damn hope that keeps making you think you can get out quick, that everything is going to get back on track, the way it was before.

My father-in-law was a loan shark his whole life. They call it finance; but it’s the same thing. When I thought of this idea, I convinced myself that, in a way, I’d be seeing that justice was done, forcing them to give back their ill-gotten gains. A fucking Robin Hood, that’s what I felt like. I thought to myself: It’ll take me a couple of days and then I’ll take care of everything. I couldn’t see any other solutions. Do you think that if I’d had another way, any other way at all, to get out of the bind I was in, I would have gotten myself mixed up in this? No, I wouldn’t have. I’d never have done this.

My father-in-law, you see, ruined my life.

Maybe I should say that my wife ruined it, even if I think it was really him. Because she’s like him, she has the same horrible personality, the same bitchy attitudes, and she’s also shallow and stupid. Marry a girl from home, the saying goes, your wives and your oxen should come from your own hometown; I should have listened to the proverb.

But she was pretty, and she was the daughter of a famous tycoon. It seemed like the right move on my way up the mountain. Instead, in order to try to keep up, to rise to her level, I just kept trying to grow, grow, grow, making investments, buying land. Growing, even when the right thing to do was stop. I should have known, but there he was, always bigger than me, always stronger, and we’d even given my son his name.

My son.

I love him, you know that? I love him more than anything else. I love him so much it kills me.

So why did I do this? I know that’s what you’re wondering, and from your petty perspectives as wage earners, it’s incomprehensible. But I did it because it was the only way. Believe me, if I’d gone to him and told him, old man, listen to me, I’m flat on my ass, old man, help me, do you think he would have lifted a finger? Do you think that when that whore of a daughter of his brought her lover home and kicked me out of the house, sent me far away from my son, he stood up for me? No, he did not.

The old man only has one weakness. For my little boy.

He’s my weakness, too, you know. Wasn’t it for him that I was trying to get back on my feet? Isn’t it him, his estate, his future that I was trying to rescue? I’m his hero, you know. His great hero. We always say to each other that I’m his giant, and he’s my little king.

It seemed fair for him to pitch in. For him to do his part. It wouldn’t last long, just a couple of days at the most. I got in touch with his old babysitter, a smart girl, smart and tough. I explained, I told her what I needed; there was a guy, a man from back home, who could help her. I promised her money, airplane tickets, new IDs, a new life. Aren’t we all looking for that, for a new life? Don’t we all want a chance to start over? Maybe that’s what the economic crisis really means. A change. Not enough money, and the need for a change.

I told him, I told Dodo. I told him Lena would come by to pick him up, and that he should go with her. He was to tell no one, before or after, otherwise they’d get mad at me, at his papà. My little man knows how to keep a secret, you know. He’s a smart boy. Then I promised him that right afterward I’d come get him. It was going to be a way to get him to come stay with me for good. No one would be able to separate us again after that.

I prepared for it. I planned it out. I knew our assets would be immediately frozen: It wouldn’t seem strange that I was unable to pay the ransom. I also knew that when they froze our accounts, they wouldn’t check into the size of them, so no one would notice that there was nothing in there to freeze, neither in my personal nor in my corporate accounts.

I decided that it wouldn’t seem so strange if they demanded a ransom from the old man. He’s still famous in this fucked-up city, fucked-up person that he is. I planned it out. I prepared for it.

I gave Lena a phone and a piece of paper with what needed to be said in the phone calls. I told her she shouldn’t do the talking, that someone might recognize her voice; to pretend that she’d been kidnapped with Dodo, so he wouldn’t be afraid. I think about him, you know, about my son. I’m his father, I have to think about him.

We came up with a schedule, Lena’s guy and me. A big brainless beast of a man. I was supposed to call him at preestablished intervals to make sure everything was going according to plan.

I fucked up, though: The phone I gave Lena, the one I was calling them on, is in my company’s name. So when you told me about the wiretaps I lost it.

You see, I’m not a fool. I know perfectly well that you don’t have anything solid on me. Just a few postdated checks, a series of clues that, unless you catch Lena, you can’t prove. It wouldn’t have made any sense for me to spill everything. I’m not a fool.

It’s just that, listen, I have a problem. A problem that I’m sure you can help me solve.

They’re not answering their phone anymore. I’m a day behind according to the schedule we’d agreed on, and I called the minute I saw you arrive, from behind the shutter. I understood that it didn’t make sense to worry about wiretaps anymore. I wanted to tell them to run away and just leave Dodo there so I could go and get him: I promised him I’d come.

But now they’re not answering anymore, and I don’t know why.

And I need to know where the fuck they’re holding Dodo. Because just to be safe, I made sure they never told me: You never know, I might have blurted something out by mistake.

So, please, can you help me?

Can you take me to my little boy?