There were two things in life that Copacabana loved unreservedly: the ass of a Brazilian girl, and getting a barbershop shave. He’d married a fine Brazilian ass and, after ten years of marriage, he’d never found another one like it, and that was considering that in all his time in Rio, while running his hotels, he’d enjoyed his fair share.
He would never give up his shave with hot lather and a straight blade, not even in prison, and especially before any meeting with his lawyer. It was a sort of family tradition for him: his father had been a barber, and so had his grandfather before him. Both of them, when he was a youngster and had decided to grow his first goatee, took him aside and remonstrated with him: “Pasqua’, what do you think, is your face like your dick, that you’d let hair grow on it?”
Copacabana laughed at the recollection, as he sat in his cell in Poggioreale Prison, while his trusted barber, Peppe, another convict in his early fifties, was finishing off a sideburn. Peppe was famed throughout the house of detention. He’d stolen a Luca Giordano painting from a museum and shot two security guards. He’d only meant to kneecap them, but the bullets had severed both men’s femoral arteries.
“What do you say, you like it, signo’?”
Copacabana looked at himself in the mirror. Peppe knew what he was doing, he had to admit it.
“But I haven’t seen your cousin lately,” Peppe went on, “the kid with the red hair.”
“Eh, no, he can’t come anymore. Health problems.”
“What kind?”
“Problems with his feet…” said Copacabana. “Now do the other sideburn.” And he handed back the mirror and returned to the shave and his own personal thoughts. They’d caught Agostino ’o Cerino, and he hadn’t been replaced yet. It had happened before, couriers had been picked up or rubbed out, but usually in no more than twenty-four hours they were promptly replaced, as a sign of unaltered trust. Not this time, though. Micione’s message was unmistakable: Copacabana’s wife, Fernanda, was not going to become the queen of Forcella, and he, Don Pasquale Sarnataro aka Copacabana, was going to rot in his cell in Poggioreale. End of relationship. That’s why he’d requested an urgent meeting with his lawyer. He hadn’t had time to prepare for the meeting, and that meant he was going to have to improvise. Copacabana didn’t really know how to improvise, though.
“Counselor, things aren’t going well,” Copacabana said. “I need to get out. Once again half the city is shooting at the other half, and if we don’t get rid of the paranzas, we’re going to wind up like a firecracker with a wet fuse. They’re all rabid animals, we just need to put them out of their misery, one after the other.” This was the first time he’d told his lawyer the way things stood, without camouflaging his meaning or couching his terms in disguises and half measures.
The lawyer didn’t appreciate the straight talk: “Signor Sarnataro, I’m afraid I must warn you that if you continue to speak to me in these terms, I’ll be forced to withdraw my services as your legal counsel. I fully realize just how tough life can be behind bars, but I don’t subscribe to a single word of what you’ve just told me. If you wanted a Camorrista lawyer, you could have found a hundred thousand of them. I am working strictly on the legal aspects of your trial. And let me point out, while we’re on the subject, that the fact that you haven’t been subjected to the forty-one bis regime isn’t merely a victory: it’s an absolute triumph of the lawyer’s profession. If you can only impose a measure of self-discipline, then we’ll also be able to take care of this trial, and you won’t be forced to sit in this cell until you’re a bent and feeble old man.”
Copacabana leaped from his seat, the few hairs that still dotted his balding cranium pointing in all directions. He started shouting at the lawyer, explaining that half the judges in the country checked into and out of his hotels, along with all the political kingpins of the right, the left, the up, the down, who knelt down before him to ask him for votes. They were all friends of his, all listed, with their phone numbers, in his address book, and if he owed a speck of gratitude to anyone or anything for having been spared the sheer torture of the forty-one bis regime, what he owed it to was his own fucking address book. He was ready to eat that lawyer alive, swallow him whole, but a guard had stepped in to take him back to his cell. “Courts are just so much theater,” said Copacabana as he was being led through the steel-reinforced door to his wing of the prison, “but the script is written elsewhere. You have to believe that, if you want to be a good actor!”
He returned to his cell even more desperate and terrified than before. He started smacking the walls with open-handed blows, as if he were beating the whole prison of Poggioreale. No one looked out from any of the neighboring cells, not even when Copacabana started yelling that he was a big-time businessman who had transformed a village in Brazil into the Naples of South America. “I was born to appreciate beauty,” he ranted. “There are butchers to take care of the business of killing.”
Peppe. He needed Peppe. It had only been a few hours since his shave, but when he ran his hand over his cheek, he could already feel a faint fuzz starting to sprout. Plus, Peppe had always appreciated his thoughts about beauty.
“Your skin is looking irritated, Don Pasqua’,” Peppe said to him, before tossing the cape over his chest and fastening it around his neck.
“Will you put a hot towel on my face?” asked Copacabana, and the young man replied that he’d be glad to. “You’re just too good-hearted, signo’, you’ve never killed anyone, and these people take advantage. Don Pasquale, you simply fly too high, too close to the sun.”
“Truer words were never spoken,” said Copacabana, and he shut his eyes and settled back to enjoy the warmth on his cheeks. “How many years do you still have in here?” he asked.
“Another twenty, signo’, the road is long,” Peppe replied.
“At least you’re behind bars because you were searching for beauty.”
“What beauty? They would have paid me four million for a Luca Giordano…”
And with his straight razor, he slit Copacabana’s carotid artery. The man who had guided Peppe’s hand on the day of the theft in the museum had today guided his hand directly onto Copacabana’s throat. And that man was Micione.