Max and I liked our little place, though. For years we’d been sitting in the same old chairs at the same scratched-up desk where we received our clients: people who needed the services of a pair of ex-cons who’d decided to become private investigators. Actually, I’d had the idea in the first place; my partner showed up later. Our destinies intertwined when I decided that I needed someone with a memory like a steel trap and an obsession with keeping files. Then we just seemed to stay in touch. I’d given him half the bar and one of the two apartments I’d built upstairs.
It wasn’t just an impulsive gift to a friend, a gesture of innate generosity. I’d taken his girlfriend to bed, and later she died in my arms, riddled with bullet holes, murdered by gangsters from the Brenta Valley underworld. Just one of the many guilt complexes I seem to collect and can’t bring myself to put out with the trash.
Actually, we weren’t a couple, we were a threesome. The third was a smuggler and armed robber who was pushing sixty. I first met him in prison, when I saved his life. Later, he returned the favor so many times I couldn’t count. His name was Beniamino Rossini, but we called him Old Rossini to distinguish him from his many brothers. He was a good guy to have as a friend. As an enemy, he was very bad news.
La Cuccia wasn’t open for business until ten at night. I knocked on the fat man’s door.
“I’ll bet you’ve dropped by just in time for dinner,” he grunted, pretending to be annoyed.
“I’d be happy with a grilled cheese sandwich,” I said, to get his goat.
“Then you’ve come to the wrong place.”
I followed him into the kitchen.
“Tonight, bigoli con ragù d’anatra,” he informed me, seizing a wooden spoon and wielding it with culinary authority. Long, thick noodles with a duck ragu. “It’s all strictly organic,” he pointed out as he sampled the sauce.
One of my partner’s many personal quirks was his extreme rigidity when it came to cuisine. He was very capable at the stove, even gifted when it came to pots and pans, but he never ventured beyond the bounds of our local regional cuisine, of which he was a scholar and impassioned connoisseur. I’ve never really given much of a damn about food, but the years pass, and you start to run out of new recipes.
Frankly, I was starting to wish his culinary horizons could make a stretch beyond the bounds of Northeast Italy.
He popped the cork on a bottle of red wine from the Colli Berici. We drank a glass as the pasta boiled.
“I’ve invited someone to dinner tomorrow night,” he announced.
“I’ll make sure to stay away,” I reassured him, before asking: “Is she another Lacan-quoting shrink like the last three?”
“No, I seem to have run out of those,” he answered, resentfully. “She’s a substitute teacher, a militant member of the worker’s collective, divorced, no kids.”
“Cute?”
“Not only is she cute,” he exulted. “She smokes, she drinks, she’s not taking a creative writing course, and she doesn’t have a gym membership.”
“Sounds good,” I noted, and felt an urgent need to change the subject.
My girlfriend Virna had dumped me. She told me that she was sick of complaining about the same things over and over, and that I’d never change. Then she’d thrown in a couple of observations that really stung. I hadn’t seen her for months now, and I felt like a lonely loser. I was sad.
“The world is swarming with women. Numerically, they outnumber us men,” was all that Max said—he’d always predicted that it would end badly with Virna.
The fact remained: I still wanted Virna. I was forty-seven years old, I had no intention of looking around for someone else or figuring out a dating strategy. At least, that’s what I still thought that night. I didn’t know that every aspect of my life was about to be turned upside-down. Fate had nothing to do with it. It was the past come back to settle a few old scores that we’d forgotten about. The past: it was going to rip through all our lives with the blind fury of a Force 12 hurricane.
Not a day has gone by since then that I don’t think back to the instant, a few hours later, when the front door of La Cuccia swung open and Beniamino Rossini walked through it. I understood immediately that something was wrong, seriously wrong. His face was gray, his jaw was clenched, his gait was rigid. He let himself collapse into the chair next to me. Max la Memoria came over at the same time: he’d noticed the stricken expression on our friend’s face too.
Rossini lifted his right fist till it covered his face, and then he smashed it violently down onto the tabletop. Heads swiveled the length of the bar and across the big room. Then he slowly turned the fist over and spread his fingers wide. Max and I exchanged a glance. We’d both immediately recognized the ring in his hand. And it was the last thing we’d ever expected to see.
“Where’d you find that?”
“In Sylvie’s car,” he whispered. “Under the front seat,” he added.
I felt a chill run through my veins. In June of 2004, I’d left that same ring under the front seat of someone else’s car. It was a death notice.
“What about Sylvie?”
“She’s gone.”
All three of us were sure she was dead. The man who’d once owned that ring was dead; he’d been murdered and buried next to a highway construction project. Putting the ring in the car was a funeral announcement to the man’s gang. Those are the kind of courtesies gangsters used to extend to one another.
Max gulped down his grappa. “Why take it out on Sylvie?”
Rossini clicked his lighter and carefully moved the flame to the tip of his cigarette. “Maybe they just want to enjoy this. Maybe they started with her so we’d know they’re planning to fuck us one after the other, and take their sweet time doing it.”
“Maybe they just want to get back the body of the guy with the ring,” the fat man shot back.
That made no sense. “Let’s calm down,” I mumbled. “We’re just taking stabs in the dark here.”
“You calm the fuck down,” Rossini barked. “They just murdered my woman.”
“We don’t know that,” I whispered uncertainly.
“I’ve spread the word that I’m trying to track down something very important,” Beniamino told us. “There’s not a drug smuggler working the land routes or the shipping lanes, not a dealer or a Mafioso of any nationality, who hasn’t been told. What more can I do?”
Old Rossini was a beaten man; his voice was hoarse with tension. I pointed a finger at the ceiling to summon our new Pakistani waiter. I couldn’t remember his name. Max had hired him; another in a long line of illegal immigrants, and at the end of the month we’d just have to pay a surcharge on our bribe, to keep from having him tossed out of the country. I told him to bring water and vodka for our friend.
A surreal silence settled over the table, until Beniamino broke in with a phrase that was heavy with truth. “I was crying on the way over here. I was sobbing like a baby . . . Until now, I made other people cry.”
Yeah. We were at a loss. We’d always known exactly what the next move should be. But now we had no idea where to look for Sylvie, because the guy who once wore that ring was nobody, a total stranger to us all, and we’d never bothered to find out who he was. Beniamino had murdered him with a bullet to the head, because he’d tried to drag us into something we wanted no part of. It was self-defense, really. At the time, we were sure that there’d be no consequences. Nothing could have been further from the truth.
I lit a cigarette. It had a metallic taste. I rinsed my mouth with a slurp of Calvados. Rossini reached out and grabbed the pack of cigarettes. “Let’s do something, because I’m about to lose my grip. I don’t want to wreck this bar; I’m kind of fond of it.”
We walked out of La Cuccia and into the cold late-October night, filling our lungs with fresh air, and got into Rossini’s car. At the East Padua tollbooth, we passed a couple of Carabinieri squad cars. The cops would be the last to know about Sylvie’s disappearance, if anybody e
ver decided to tell them—say, someone with a personal interest in doing so. This was underworld business: it was a mathematical certainty that it was going to end badly. No fucking judge, lawyer, or court could do anything to fix this. Somebody was going to die. That was the only thing we knew for sure as the car raced eastward in the night.
We searched for Sylvie for ten days. We looked everywhere. We turned Northeast Italy inside-out like a sock, we twisted arms and cracked knuckles, we interrogated everyone we thought might know something. Old Rossini was a wounded tiger. Whenever Max and I talked to someone, he stood quietly aside, but he was the one they looked at with worried eyes. To look at him was to feel fear. We stepped on toes, we tipped over apple carts, we went straight to the top. Our breaches of etiquette weren’t making us popular.
One Bulgarian, who ran a prostitution ring and knew every way you could transport a woman across the border—entering Italy or leaving it, voluntarily or against her will—finally ran out of patience and openly insulted us. He told us to quit wasting his time. Beniamino came to see him in the middle of the night; he jammed the barrel of his pistol against the Bulgarian’s forehead. He sat smoking a cigarette in silence, staring at the white wall of the bedroom. The white-slaver, certain he was about to be murdered, couldn’t take it. He passed out and hit the floor with a thud. So Old Rossini got up to leave. It was only then that he noticed the terrified woman, motionless, under the feather quilt.
“Things can’t go on like this,” I said after a tense meal in a restaurant in Udine. “Much more and they’ll start shooting at us.”
“I like being shot at,” Beniamino snapped.
“You’ve gone off your gimbals,” I said softly. “And who wouldn’t? What we have to decide now is whether we want to self-destruct or find out what really happened to Sylvie.”
“I’m not sure I see what you’re saying,” Rossini snapped at me.
I chose my words cautiously. “I just don’t think it makes sense to keep looking for her like this. She’s not anywhere around here. Either she’s dead or they’ve taken her somewhere else, far away.”
“Marco has a point,” Max broke in. “We have to go back to the guy with the ring, and start over from there. We have to figure out who he is—who he was—and, step by step, figure out who’s behind this.”
“If we do that, we’re sitting ducks,” Rossini objected.
I sighed. “We always have been. Before they took Sylvie, and ever since. If they’d wanted to kill us, they could have done it easily. Our anger wouldn’t have stopped them.”
“They have something else in mind,” the fat man added.
Beniamino stared at me, thinking about what I’d said. “I’m tired,” he admitted. “Give me a couple of days to recover.”
We went back to Punta Sabbioni, where he had lived with his beloved, but he refused to set foot in that handsome empty villa. He asked us to take him down to the marina. He cast off the lines and revved the engines of the deep-sea speedboat that he used for his smuggling operations, and headed out to open waters. He was probably going to hole up in some inlet on the Dalmatian coast, and recalculate his relationship to life. Then he’d come back—ready to take things to the limit.
“I’m hungry,” the fat man announced. “Let’s go get some seafood.”
“Shouldn’t we head back? We can be home in an hour, and we could just make a plate of pasta.”
Max wagged his index finger at me for emphasis. “Each of us has a different way of letting off steam,” he said. “Beniamino has his speedboat, you have your blues and your Calvados, and I have food. I’m a fat compulsive overeater, and now I want to fill my belly, in proportion to the grief and the pain in the ass that this whole episode has been causing me . . .”
I raised my hands in surrender. “Fine, fine. Do you know how intolerable you can be when you take that tone?”
He gave me a sly sidelong smile. “Yeah? And to think I’ve mellowed with age. You should have heard me when I was a slim young leader of the student movement.”
Aperitif, antipasto, pasta, entrée, side dishes, dessert, espresso. It wasn’t until we were sipping our grappas that Max decided that the time had come to untangle the threads of the events that had turned Sylvie into the target of a vendetta.
“It was a mistake to bury that guy before we could find out exactly who he was,” he began.
“Old Rossini was a little too hot-tempered,” I conceded. “Still, the guy clearly wanted to use us, fuck us, and then dump us.”
“Do you have any idea of where we can start digging to figure out this mess?”
“I’ve thought about it,” I admitted. “And I asked myself: How did he hear about us? Who gave him our names?”
“Your name,” the fat guy corrected me. “I remember perfectly that the day he walked into La Cuccia, he asked for you. ‘I’m looking for the Alligator.’ That’s exactly what he said.”
Thursday, April 1, 2004
Max was right. The guy had asked for the Alligator. They’d called me that ever since my time at university, when I sang vocals in a group called the Old Red Alligators. I wound up in prison, the group fell apart, I lost my voice, but the name stuck with me, and the blues, in spite of everything, continued to exist.
Whenever I wondered if the blues had died forever, I’d call my favorite blues-jay, Edoardo “Catfish” Fassio, and he’d provide me with reassurance in the form of compilations of new blues musicians, some Italian, some not, and “a few kick-ass classics.”
It was April Fool’s Day, and ever since I’d gotten out of bed I’d been on the lookout for the idiotic pranks of Max la Memoria. Max likes to play tricks. I don’t like to have tricks played on me. Given my thin skin, being the butt of a prank on the first of April would have made me lose my temper, I think.
But the guy who sat down at my table caught me by surprise—and sure enough, I lost my temper. The first thing I noticed was the huge gold ring on his left ring-finger. The flat part of the ring had an engraving that might, at first sight, have been a cross. He was about forty-five, with a lean physique, though it must have been a while since he worked out. Long black collar-length hair, dark Italian designer suit, French shirt.
“So you’re the Alligator.” He spoke perfect Italian, but he was certainly a foreigner. A quick glance at his shoes persuaded me I’d guessed right. I tried unsuccessfully to guess his accent.
“Did you hear what I said?” he went on, arrogantly.
I held up the glass I was nursing in one hand. “This is called an Alligator,” I explained. “Seven parts Calvados, three parts Drambuie, plenty of crushed ice, and a slice of green apple to nibble on when you’re done, to console yourself that the glass is empty. My friend Danilo Argiolas, owner of the Libarium in Cagliari, created it.”
He smiled tolerantly. “Are you done with the bullshit?”
“I haven’t even gotten started,” I shot back, thinking to myself that the guy wasn’t just your standard-issue asshole. Still, I couldn’t quite tell from his face what he was. A cop, a made man, a hired gun, a member of the intelligence services—difficult to say. I figured it was best to keep playing stupid. That day, I nailed the part to perfection.
“From today on, you’re working for me.”
“Finally, some good news,” I blurted out. “I was just sitting here feeling moody and wondering when my prince would come.”
“Maybe you’d like a little kiss to wake you up?”
“Which fairytale are we in? I’m having trouble keeping track.”
He shook his head. “I’m hiring you to investigate the narcotics heist at the Institute of Legal Medicine.”
“You’ve come to the wrong place.”
Same smile as before. He really didn’t have a lot of variations on his theme. “You and the two guys you work with can just start talking to people, asking around, until you find out who took that pile of narcotics. You’ll be well paid, of course.”
He pulled out the usual envelope s
tuffed with cash from the inner pocket of his jacket and dropped it with a thump in the middle of the table. I glanced at it carelessly.
“I just told you that you came to the wrong place.”
“I know all about you. You’re the right man for the job.”
“Then you must know that I don’t mess around with drugs.”
“This time you’re going to make an exception.”
“Why would I do that?”
“Because nobody turns down a good job,” he replied. “Especially if the prospective client might turn nasty.”
“Beat it!” I hissed.
“You don’t believe me, do you?” he asked, disappointed.
“That’s not it. The thing is this: I’m not going to work for you. Do you understand me?”
He stood up. “You’ll hear from me again.”
As he turned to go, I reminded him to take the envelope of cash on the table.
“Oh, there’s no hurry,” he said. “We’ll see each other again soon.”
I watched him leave. He didn’t look back. He walked with a confident, loose gait. He was the most dangerous of all the desperadoes who had come out of the woodwork in the past few weeks, trying to hire me to track down the trove of narcotics stolen from a high-security, armor-plated storeroom in the cellar of the Department of Forensic Toxicology. The answer had been the same for all of them. I don’t mess around with drugs. In any way, shape, or form. Every so often, I smoke a healthy, organic joint. That’s all. The world of narcotics is rotten in every sense of the world. Staying clear of it was just common sense. In any case, from the newspaper accounts, that case smelled like bad, bad news.
In the hours between the night of March 16 and the early morning of March 17, someone entered the Institute, punched in the code to deactivate the alarm system connected to the armored door, which was wired to contact a private security service, and used a key to open the lock—which had been replaced just the previous week. Whoever it was then made off with fifty kilograms of heroin, cocaine, and various tablets, capsules, and pills, without even bothering to glance at 127 kilos of high-quality hashish.
Bandit Love Page 2