The theft had generated dismay among the honest citizenry of the city of Padua.
Voices were raised to ask why such a huge quantity of narcotics was being stored at the Institute; after all, for the necessary legal testing, a few grams would have been more than sufficient. Was it possible that there was no safer place in the city?
As chance would have it, the solution was found immediately after the first two parliamentary inquiries; the decision was made to put into effect an “anti-temptation” protocol. From now on, the police would bring in a few grams of evidence to the Insitute of Legal Medicine to test for narcotics and the rest of the confiscated substance, after a few days, would be destroyed in the nearest incinerator.
Of course, the ensuing investigations turned up nothing. Of course—because anyone daring enough to use keypad codes and keys must be perfectly confident that their ass is completely covered, that the risk is nonexistent. There were police sweeps and distractions, midnight interrogations, adroit leaks of “possible arrests in the next few hours.” All the usual things. But it was just so much hot air to fill the mouths of well-informed chatterboxes.
The secondary effect of the theft was, in fact, the arrival in Padua of a handful of desperadoes, as Rossini described them, embarking on a feverish treasure hunt for that trove of narcotics. The scum of the earth, dealers and smugglers who wanted to understand just what had happened, in hopes of getting their talons into that pile of drugs or else to arrange a deal with whoever had taken it: because if they couldn’t get the narcotics, it was equally interesting to get in touch with anyone who had connections with powerful and corrupt insiders.
Northeast Italy was a profitable and flourishing market. The competition, however, was cutthroat. Everyone was playing dirty, at the many different tables. The favorite pastime was to sell out rival gangs to the unfortunate policemen, who were constantly struggling frantically, and pathetically, to track down something—anything. A simple chemical analysis of the local sewage revealed an endemic use of narcotics. Cocaine first and foremost. A snort of energy and excitement before and after work and, just for fun, on the weekend. Otherwise, what a drag it all was; what a chore.
In the back of my mind, I was hoping that the pain in the ass with the big gold ring would be the last desperado to come around busting my chops. I filed the incident away. I thought of it again a few hours later. About ten in the morning the next day, Ramzi, an illegal immigrant from Mali who worked as our janitor, kept knocking at my door until I finally got out of bed. He was a hard-working guy, still struggling to recover from the long journey that had brought him to our nice, welcoming little town. He was about fifty, and at that age it’s crazy to undertake the dangers and discomforts of a trip of that kind. His experience had left him short of breath, with a wheeze that rattled from the depth of his lungs.
In his halting Italian, he managed to convey to me that, just outside La Cuccia’s front door, there was something that I absolutely had to see. I threw a dressing gown over my pajamas and went downstairs to take a look.
“Would you do me a favor and go wake up Max?” I asked Ramzi as I stood looking down at a tangle of wires and a bundle of sticks of dynamite.
“If you ask me, it was the guy with the ring,” I said to the fat man a few minutes later.
“Do you think it could blow up?” he asked in a sleepy voice. “I mean, in the sense that we might be a pair of assholes standing here looking at a bomb that’s about to explode?”
“I have no idea,” I replied. “But from the looks of it, it doesn’t seem all that dangerous.”
The illegal immigrant broke in. “No blasting cap,” he said in French.
Max la Memoria translated and I asked Ramzi how he knew for sure. That’s when we found out that Mali had an army.
“Call Old Rossini,” the fat man recommended before heading back to bed.
The next turn of events was obvious enough. That same evening the guy with the ring came back to the bar. He made himself comfortable in the same chair. But this time I wasn’t alone. Max was at my right, Rossini was at my left.
“The answer’s still no,” I said immediately.
He ignored what I’d just said. He gestured a greeting to my two friends, pulled out another envelope stuffed with cash, and pushed it slowly and deliberately to the center of the table.
“Dynamite and cash,” the fat man commented. “Is that your clever way of convincing us to take your job?”
The guy nodded with satisfaction. “I’m kind of in a hurry,” he explained to Beniamino. “I need results, and quickly.”
The old smuggler sat in silence, and looked at the guy in an apparently offhand manner.
I pulled the first envelope out of the back pocket of my blue jeans and laid it on top of the second envelope. “Now leave, and don’t come back.”
“I wish I could, but I can’t,” he said, with a hint of feigned regret. “I don’t like this bar, you guys don’t like me, I don’t really like you, but as you can imagine, orders are orders, and I don’t give them, I take them. I can’t go back without results.”
“Then why don’t you get busy and ask around?”
“I tried,” he admitted with a sigh. “But I don’t know anyone, and when I got back to my hotel, there was a plainclothes policeman who started asking rude questions. He wanted a thousand euros just to leave me alone.”
“I tell you, you start to miss the cops we had in the old days,” I commented as I lit a cigarette. “These days, the cops are all demanding and arrogant.”
“Why can’t you guys be reasonable?”
“Because we’d be of no use to you,” Max replied in an accommodating tone. “It’s not our area of expertise. We wouldn’t be able to find out a thing.”
“I was given assurances to the contrary.”
“Well, those assurances were crap,” my partner retorted.
The guy fiddled with his ring. It was the first time that I’d noticed him doing that. He must have been pretty upset. Then he waved his index finger jauntily in the air. “Oh well, it’s not really that hard to find blasting caps . . .”
He might have been planning to finish the sentence but Rossini didn’t give him a chance. He jumped to his feet, grabbed the bentwood chair he’d been sitting on, and broke it over the guy’s back. The guy shouted in pain and took to his heels.
You could have cut the silence in the bar with a knife. The astonished, worried expressions of the customers were clear evidence that the incident hadn’t passed unobserved.
Max stood up. “We beg your pardon,” he began in a solemn voice, “but this was a simple disagreement between rivals in love. Nothing serious, we assure you.”
A woman’s voice piped up from the far side of the bar: “Hey Max, if you expect us to buy that big a lie you’d better pick up all our bar tabs.”
I traded a glance with my partner. “Of course,” he said loudly. “Consider it done. And the next round is on the house.”
Amid the laughter and applause of the customers, I heard the same woman’s voice: “You’re a gentleman, Max. I guess we’ll erase this incident from our memories, to try and save the good name of La Cuccia.”
There was a general burst of laughter, and it proved contagious. We all laughed too. It’s nice to laugh. It happens rarely enough. And yet I read somewhere that it’s good for your health.
“Rivals in love . . .” Beniamino muttered indignantly. “Are you trying to make me look like a fool?”
“Couldn’t you wait for him to leave the bar?” the fat man snapped back.
“Calm down, the two of you,” I broke in. “Nothing happened, so let’s just enjoy ourselves, for Christ’s sake.”
Beniamino looked hard at me. “You really think that asshole’s done with us?”
“I sure hope he is. I really don’t want to have to go sleep in a hotel just because he decides to plant some more of his homemade bombs.”
The bastard didn’t use explosives; all he needed wa
s a tank of flammable liquid to completely destroy my 1994 Skoda Felicia, the first model year. Ramzi tried to console me by telling me that, first of all, it was an old car and, second, since I was a wealthy inhabitant of a developed nation, I could just buy myself a better fucking car.
I didn’t waste time explaining that I was fond of my Felicia and that, statistically, that model of Skoda was the least likely to be stopped by the police at roadblocks and random checkpoints. That’s not to say that I always had something to hide or be afraid of, but a quick computer check would always bring up my history as a convicted political criminal. That kind of background check was just the thing to make our jolly local cops, even more close-minded than our local priests, turn against you. Once a terrorist, always a terrorist, at least that’s the way they saw it.
Though I’d never been a terrorist. I’d just provided a place to stay to a fugitive from the law, without asking too many questions. So they threw me into prison for seven long years.
I needed to find another Skoda Felicia in good condition. I figured I’d ask Paolino Valentini, a guitarist I knew who was as crazy about that model of car as I was—though for different reasons.
Rossini showed up around sunset. “I’m going to have kill him,” he mused as he stood looking at the charred remains of my Felicia.
“Do you really have to do it?”
“We were perfectly polite. Good manners aren’t enough. If word gets around, there’ll be people lining up to use us as doormats.”
I tried to lock eyes with Max, but he just shrugged.
Another gold bracelet would join others dangling from Beniamino’s wrist. Each of those bracelets is his way of brandishing a scalp. Or else of keeping count, I never was sure which. It always struck me as too touchy a subject to ask about openly.
I had my doubts. Serious doubts. “Let’s just throw a scare into him and see how it goes.”
The smuggler grimaced dubiously. “I don’t think it’d work. Maybe he’s too dumb to die.”
The guy came back for the third night running. He walked up cautiously, his eyes on Old Rossini’s hands.
I showed him the two envelopes full of cash. “My Felicia is worth these two plus another,” I hissed furiously.
“No problem.”
“We may have a lead,” Max lied.
“I’m listening,” the guy said, hopefully.
“First we need to know what you’re really interested in. The drugs? The thieves? The mastermind?”
“I can’t tell you that.”
“You can’t tell or you don’t know?” I asked, provoking, suggesting he was just a hired thug.
“You just worry about finding out all you can. I’ll worry about what interests me,” he snapped peevishly.
“Well, that’s not the way this thing works,” the fat man put in. “We may, and I reiterate, we just may have found out where some of the heroin wound up. What we can do is take you to see the dealers who are selling it off, and then you can do what you want to fill in the blanks. That part’s up to you.”
“Okay. When can I meet them?”
“Tomorrow evening.”
We arranged to meet just outside of Mestre, toward the airport, but before he left, I made sure he paid me a full refund on the loss of my car.
“He seems like a fake,” I said as I counted the bills under the table.
“Why?” asked Rossini.
“He keeps pulling out envelopes full of cash, he knows how to get explosives and timers, he knows how to torch a car, but he still strikes me as a moron,” I explained. “He just acts dumb. I have a problem believing that he swallowed the story we fed him tonight.”
Rossini shrugged. “These days, you meet all kinds. Real professionals are few and far between. Anyway we’ll find out soon enough. If he shows up, and if he shows up alone, then he’s a real idiot.”
“He might be, and his bosses might not.”
“Yeah, well, they’ll find out that it’s a bad idea to keep bothering us.”
The guy with the ring turned out to be a real amateur. He showed up, on time and without bodyguards, in an absolutely deserted part of the countryside, where bulldozers had just turned the landscape into a dusty plateau, where a section of superhighway overpass was going to be built, with pylons and on-ramps. Just another piece of the monumental infrastructure that the governor of the region was assembling so that posterity would remember him as an enlightened statesman.
The minute the guy stepped out of his car, Rossini had a pistol barrel pressed tightly against his forehead; he led the guy over to the brink of a deep ditch. It was roomy enough for two more corpses, just in case he’d decided to bring some muscle with him. That of course had been the farsighted Beniamino’s idea. Neither Max nor I would have dreamed of going to the bother and the effort of shoveling out any more dirt than we were sure we would need: count the corpses, then dig the grave.
“This could be yours,” the old smuggler whispered. “If you disappear, if you never show your face around here again, well, we might leave it empty.”
In response, the guy just jammed his elbow hard into Beniamino’s belly. Beniamino’s trigger finger snapped down on the trigger. A bullet tore into the idiot’s temple. He was dead before his knees hit the ground.
Rossini stood there gasping for a few seconds. “I’ve never seen anyone try so hard to get murdered.”
The fact that we were sure we were dealing with a dangerous amateur lulled us into overconfidence. We didn’t waste any time going through his pockets or rifling through the car. I drove his car all the way to Vicenza myself. Then, as a thoughtful gesture, we left the ring inside, so that his friends, bosses, or accomplices could be sure that he had been eliminated.
And that was it. The next day, we’d already forgotten it ever happened. No remorse. We’d done everything we could to drive it into his head that he’d picked the wrong people.
Of the three envelopes stuffed with cash, we used one to buy me a new Felicia. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find a first year model and I had to settle for a 1996 Skoda Felicia. We used the second envelope to get Ramzi medical treatment and legal immigrant status. And we put the third envelope into the letterbox of an association devoted to rescuing and rehabilitating streetwalkers. Most prostitutes are victims of the white slave trade, and they live in an atmosphere of terror and incessant violence. We had an abiding respect and admiration for the volunteers who went out every night to try to persuade prostitutes to break free.
The months that followed were untroubled. The only big news in the year 2004 was the fact that Sylvie came home in early December. We celebrated at La Cuccia. She danced for us, and it was an unforgettable night. Old Rossini was the happiest man on earth.
He whispered: “She showed up at my door, and said: ‘I’ve come home to my bandit.’” Overcome with emotion, he wrapped his arms around me.
Tuesday, November 14, 2006,
two weeks after Sylvie’s kidnapping
Max la Memoria walked into my apartment without knocking, wrapped in a garishly colored dressing gown.
He had a light-green file folder under one arm. “Nothing adds up in this narcotics heist,” he said flatly. “Even the amount and the types of narcotics keep changing.”
“What do you mean?”
“At first, they reported that forty-four kilos of narcotics was missing from the storeroom: thirty kilos of heroin, ten kilos of coke, and four kilos of amphetamines, ecstasy, and other assorted pills. But I found a written response from the deputy minister for internal affairs to a parliamentary inquiry in June 2004; there it says that forty-nine kilos of heroin were stolen, along with six kilos of coke and another couple of kilos of hash.”
“That’s a discrepancy of something like thirteen kilos. That’s a lot,” I commented, tossing a cigarette butt into the fireplace.
The fat man flopped onto the couch. “You want to know what I think?”
“I do,” I answered. “You haven’t come out of your
study for the past two days.”
He ran his fingers through his unkempt hair. “The thieves wanted the heroin.”
“Someone hired them to do it. They had the contacts to move the product and they reached out and found someone willing to help them get inside.”
Max handed me a newspaper clipping. “I’m not convinced that this job was about selling drugs.”
I started skimming the article. The headline read: “Evidence Stolen, Acquittal in View?” I glanced at the date: July 3, 2004.
“They may be guilty, but there’s a good chance the defendants will go free anyway. That’s the unlikely outcome of the trial for the spectacular heist of narcotics from the Institute of Legal Medicine. There is a risk that the people who were peddling those narcotics will be acquitted and released . . . The district attorney’s office is willing to negotiate a plea bargain, but according to reports from well-informed sources, the lawyers of those charged are opting for an abbreviated trial. No appeals. All or nothing . . .”
“Usually the couriers are just mules, and they cut them loose if they get caught,” I answered, doubtfully. “I’ve never heard of a drug cartel putting together such a complicated plan to get a low-level transporter out of trouble.”
“Maybe they weren’t so ‘low-level,’ or maybe there’s something else going on here.”
“That may be. But I don’t see how any of this can help us identify the guy with the ring and find out what happened to Sylvie.”
When I said her name, I felt my stomach seize up, the way it always did in those days and weeks. The mystery shrouding her fate lured my mind toward territories infested with impossibly violent nightmares. A beautiful woman, a vendetta . . . there were all the ingredients, and I couldn’t keep from thinking ugly thoughts.
“You’re not listening,” the fat man admonished me.
“Sorry, I just can’t help thinking—”
Max held up a hand to silence me. “Let’s make a deal, Marco: let’s pretend this is just another case, or we’re not going to be able to hold it together. And we’ve got to stay on track, we can’t afford to lose it.”
Bandit Love Page 3