When we walked into the bar the first thing I noticed was that Rudy Scanferla was behind the bar, intently drying glasses, alone, with a grim expression on his face. It didn’t take long to figure out why. There were two guys sitting at our usual table. I traded a quick glance with my partner.
“Cops,” he whispered.
Old timers. White hair, faces with all the marks left by years of night shifts and early wakeup calls. Days punctuated by coffee and cigarettes. One of the pair waved us over. He had an immaculately trimmed snow-white goatee.
He came straight to the point. “You’ve been asking a lot of people a lot of questions. Now we want to know why.”
“Did the top brass send you, or is this a personal initiative?” I asked.
“Buratti, don’t be an asshole, answer my partner’s question,” the other cop cut in.
“I don’t have anything to tell your partner.”
“You know how tough we can make life for you.”
I looked over at the fat man. Now it was his turn. “There’s a lawyer who thinks that . . .”
“Shut up!” I shouted.
“No, you shut up!” the cop with the goatee snapped at me.
“As I was saying,” Max went on, “there’s a lawyer who hired us because he has a client who claims that he knows who did the burglary at the Institute of Legal Medicine. But before he takes him into court, he wants to make sure he doesn’t wind up looking like an asshole.”
“And just who is this drug dealer?” the other cop asked.
Oh, the fat man was good . . . My partner trotted out the first and last name of a Turkish courier who’d been arrested a few months earlier with five kilos of heroin. The two cops eased up visibly.
“That’s crap,” the cop with the white goatee declared, stroking his whiskers with one hand.
He took a pause to light a cigarette and then resumed his attack. “But you guys are looking for one specific cop, aren’t you?”
“The Turk said that he’s the mole,” the fat man tossed out.
A smile of satisfaction glimmered briefly on the lips of both cops. Now they were sure that we were lost in the weeds. They got to their feet.
“Forget about this business,” the cop with the white goatee said threateningly. “And that’s not advice. It’s an order.”
They left the bar without closing the door behind them.
“They came in around halfway through the evening,” said Rudy, coming out from behind the bar to go shut the front door. “They just took seats at your table without ordering anything and sat there, glaring at the customers. In less than twenty minutes, the place was empty.”
“Don’t worry about it. They’re not coming back.”
“Well, who do you think they were?” I asked my partner. “Carabinieri, treasury, state police?”
“I really don’t know. I’ve never seen them before, and that’s already a piece of information.”
“Yeah, me neither. And I thought I knew every old-school cop around.”
For thirty-six hours nothing happened. Rossini called every so often to find out if there was news; his tone of voice clearly betrayed a mounting tension and distress.
I was listening to the nasal voice of Percy Mayfield singing You Don’t Exist No More when the ring tone of my cell phone cut through the notes of the blues.
“Ten grand—take it or leave it,” Morena blurted over the phone.
I snapped the phone shut in her face. We were certainly willing to spend any amount of money to find out something—anything—about what had happened to Sylvie, but I knew Morena far too well. If I didn’t hold up my end of the negotiating process in a respectable manner, she’d feel free to name any sum that came into her mind.
She called back ten minutes later. “I found the cop you’re looking for.”
“That makes you the seventh person just today,” I lied.
“But I’m the only one who has the right name.”
“At that price, no deal.”
“I told you I wasn’t cheap.”
“Call me back when you land on planet Earth.”
“Don’t hang up on me . . .”
“Why, do we have something else to talk about?”
“We could talk about whether we do or don’t over dinner.”
A restaurant for cokeheads. The cooking was barely passable, the interior was discreet, elegant, and decorated like a box of bonbons; the clientele was made up of ambitious social climbers, male and female, who’d probably all had a few lines before dinner. I knew the owner. He’d spent a few years in prison for dealing drugs. Then he’d decided to get smart; he’d started the restaurant so he could peddle drugs in blessed peace. No one busted his chops because he paid the right people on time. He didn’t even have to provide information; he just handed over three envelopes stuffed with cash to three different uniforms who came in to pick them up at regular intervals. Of course, among the customers were quite a few names that counted in Padua. As I walked in I noticed a couple of tables where more-or-less legal negotiations were being concluded, another three or four tables with illicit couples enjoying their dinners, and last of all, her, the queen of informers, looking at me with a smile.
“Have I ever told you how badly you dress?” she asked as I sat down at her table.
“More than once.”
“You really look like an illegal immigrant, from one of the eastern bloc countries . . .”
“Once you told me that I dressed like an African.”
“You were wearing a purple silk shirt, darling . . .”
She was dressed to turn heads, and heads were turning. I looked at her with frank appreciation, laying on a series of open expressions of lust that made her laugh with gusto.
“If I reached out under the table I bet I’d find something very hard to the touch,” she said mischievously.
“A well-bred lady like yourself would never do anything of the sort.”
Another laugh. The waitress came over with the menus. She was a mulatta. Almost certainly Cuban. She was cute and curvaceous, as required by the style of the restaurant. When we ordered, Morena demanded that the proprietor choose the wine. And of course an expensive bottle was brought to the table, the usual wine “constructed” by some fashionable enologist or other, with a pointlessly high proof.
After a while I got bored with staring at her tits, placed on generous display by her plunging neckline. “Well?”
“I know the name of the cop who sold your name to the guy who was looking for information about the burglary.”
The time had come to find out whether Morena was telling the truth. “There’s just one thing I don’t understand,” I said in a thoughtful tone of voice. “If the cops wanted to whitewash the case in a hurry, why suggest the name of the one private investigator who might be able to find something out?”
“Maybe because he knew that you don’t get mixed up with drugs and his real objective was to get you in trouble.”
I looked up sharply from my food. She really did know who it was. I cocked my head to one side. “Ten thousand, take it or leave it,” she reiterated in a sugary sweet little voice.
“I’ll take it.”
She raised her glass. “Let’s drink to our agreement.”
“Tell me the name.”
“Did you bring the money with you?”
I slapped my chest with my right hand, over my heart. “It’s right here.”
“We’ll do this my way,” she announced. “We’re going to finish dinner, then you take me home and, far from spying eyes, we’ll make the trade.”
“Don’t you trust me?”
“That’s not it. It’s that I like having you by the balls.” When she saw the irritated expression on my face, she added: “Oh come on, let me have my fun for once.”
As always, when you’re in a burning hurry, the service was painfully slow. Morena got up twice to go snort a line of coke in a closet positioned strategically between the doors of the men
’s and women’s toilets. The proprietor’s wife took care of setting up the lines and providing disposable short plastic straws, though some customers brought their own straws, made of silver. The luxuries indulged in by people the police can’t touch.
I finally succeeded in paying the check and dragging my informer out of the restaurant. She shrieked in horror at the sight of my Skoda Felicia.
“Why don’t you buy a new car?” she wailed.
“Because I like this one,” I replied brusquely. “If you prefer, I can call you a cab.”
Morena lived in the center of town, in a big apartment building that might have been nice in the Sixties, but was now a horror to behold. She pulled a remote out of her purse and buzzed open the door to the underground garage. “No one will bother us down there.”
I stopped my car in front of the private parking garage marked ‘7’. Morena unzipped my down parka, slipped a hand into the inside breast pocket of my blazer, and felt the envelope full of cash. After caressing my chest, she reached out, seized my chin, and kissed me.
“I’m in kind of a hurry to get that name,” I said politely.
She started unfastening the belt on my trousers. “You really never listen. This time we’re doing it my way.”
I gave in. And it wasn’t very difficult. “This isn’t the most comfortable place,” was my sole objection.
She opened the door of the car and got out, rummaging through her purse for the keys to the garage. A few seconds later, we were embracing in the dark. When she turned around and placed both hands on the wall and spread her legs wide, I hiked up her skirt and ran both my hands over her firm smooth ass. Then I lowered her panties to her ankles.
“Hurry up, Alligator,” she urged. “I’m giving you a special price: just five hundred euros.”
I stopped cold and she burst out laughing. “I’m joking, darling.” She reached around, seized my cock, and guided it inside her. “Go slow,” she said. “I want to enjoy this.”
Beniamino and Max were waiting impatiently in my apartment. I’d called them the minute I left Morena’s garage, after swearing to myself that I would never breathe a word about fucking her.
“De Angelis,” I hissed the minute I set foot in the living room. “Arnaldo De Angelis.”
“Wasn’t he the cop that was implicated in that perjury case?” asked the fat man, true to his moniker. “When was it, 1998?”
“No, 1999,” I corrected him.
De Angelis was a police detective who had decided to accuse an ex-convict of assaulting him in a deserted parking structure, fabricating the details out of whole cloth. Two shoves and a back-handed smack across the face that would have placed the defendant at a suspicious time and location, allowing the detective to shoehorn him into a much more serious set of charges: receiving and fencing stolen goods. This charming little set-piece was worth five solid years in terms of prison time. And since the detective needed a witness to prop up his fabrication, he asked a fellow cop to swear a false affidavit. I had been hired by the ex-convict’s defense team, and I had little trouble discovering that the other cop had been out grocery shopping in a supermarket with his wife and kids.
I wanted to defuse things amicably, so I waited for De Angelis at his usual bar and showed him a photograph of his friend pushing a shopping cart down the frozen foods aisle, taken from the security camera feed, with a nice time stamp in the corner. The detective dropped charges, the defense lawyer got his client acquitted on the stolen merchandise rap. But evidently De Angelis still had it in for me, and he’d been patiently waiting for the first opportunity to pay me back: it took five full years for that opportunity to roll around. Patience and determination. Those are typical qualities of old school cops. He had retired about a year ago, Morena told me. She gave me his current address, too.
It was an expensive apartment building in a park-like setting just outside of town. Ten minutes by bike from the center of Padua. But the retired detective liked to walk. Actually he liked to run. The following morning, despite the biting chill in the air, we saw him emerge at eight sharp and trot away down the tree-lined lanes of his elegant neighborhood, dressed in a designer track suit. Precisely half an hour of aerobic exercise later, he made a quick stop at the newsstand and stepped into the café. We decided that I’d confront him, alone, as he stepped out of the café.
I materialized at his elbow. He recognized me immediately but continued walking. “Expensive neighborhood, top-floor apartment, doorman building,” I greeted him in a cheerful voice. “Life is good on a detective’s retirement plan.”
He looked younger. He was fit and still a pretty good-looking man. He was tall with a handsome face and a full head of dark brown hair. Maybe some of that dark brown hair color was chemically enhanced, but at least he’d had the good taste not to dye it the strange Doberman pattern that so many Italian politicians seemed to be favoring lately.
He looked around cautiously. “What do you want, Buratti?”
“One evening, a couple of years ago, you extorted cash from a guy, a foreigner, who was asking around about the theft of narcotics from the Institute of Legal Medicine.”
He lengthened his stride. “Leave me alone.”
I hurried past him and wheeled around to block his path. “And you gave him my name,” I went on. “He came to my bar and when I told him that I wouldn’t work for him, he started acting tough, because that’s what you told him to do, right?”
He threw up his hands. “I wanted to have a little fun with you. So?” he snapped. “You made me look like an asshole that time, and I just thought I’d return the favor. So I sent you that jerk. And now, two years later, you come busting my chops about it?”
“I just want to know who that guy is.”
“I don’t know who he is.”
“Wrong. You’d never have pulled those moves with a total stranger.”
He tried acting menacing. “I can still cause you a world of trouble.”
“Yeah, so can I,” I shot back. “Or else, in two minutes, you can be rid of me forever.”
He puffed his cheeks in annoyance. “You have no idea how much I dislike you, Buratti.”
“Well, you’re not the love of my life either.”
“He’s Swiss,” the retired detective began. “He’s a lone operator, but one report said that he was an informer for the Serbian police.”
Another spy. “What do the Serbs have to do with the stolen narcotics?”
“You’ve got me there. I have no idea,” he muttered as he resumed walking toward his apartment building.
“And you never felt curious enough to try to find out?”
“No. Even if I had, I could never have tracked him down. We don’t have very good relations with those people, you know.”
The Serbs, the meanest, toughest survivors of the former Yugoslavia. All the others were sugar candies in comparison. “What’s his name?” I practically shouted. “What was he called?”
De Angelis couldn’t remember, but he suggested that I go rummage through the old registers of a certain hotel.
“Look for a couple.”
“He wasn’t alone?”
“No. There was a woman with him. A nice piece of ass.”
We waited till that night. Hotel desk clerks on the night shift tend to be much more tractable, and the empty lobbies help to lead them into temptation. They were painful hours. My friends made me repeat my conversation with the retired detective over and over again, dissecting it word by word. The involvement of the Belgrade police promised nothing good. It just made the whole story look more tangled than before.
At two in the morning I rang the hotel’s front door intercom. A thirty-five-year-old Maghrebi buzzed me in. He wasn’t very happy that I’d roused him at that hour.
“We don’t have any vacancies,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
“I’m not looking for a room,” I explained. “I’d like to talk to you.”
He nodded resignedly. “Everyone wants to
talk to me, and it’s always at two in the morning,” he complained. “Carabinieri want information about certain guests, whores want to bring customers into their room without registering names, drug dealers want me to take bags up to rooms . . . What do you want?”
“I want to check an old register.”
“How much you willing to pay?”
I pulled out a 200 euro note.
He sighed. “I make 700 euros a month.”
“Then this will come in handy.”
“No question about it,” he said as he took the banknote from my fingers. “Come in, follow me.”
Half an hour later I left the hotel, turning to shake hands with the desk clerk at the door. I shivered as I walked out into the chilly air of that November night. I lit a cigarette and glared into the headlights of Beniamino’s car; he had pulled away from the sidewalk and was moving slowly forward.
“His name was Pierre Allain, the woman was Greta Gardner,” I announced as I handed Max the xeroxes of the two passports.
“Names that smell fake a mile away,” the fat man snapped. “How the fuck can someone be named Greta Gardner?”
My partner’s instincts were sound as usual. The passports were fakes. Another blind alley. Wasted money, precious time gone forever, and Sylvie further and further away. After another forty-eight hours of trying to find any clue or lead, we were forced to give up in despair. It had been exactly twenty-one days since she’d been kidnapped.
“Now what do I do?” Rossini wondered aloud. “Do I go home and tell myself, ‘Tomorrow’s another day,’ or some such bullshit?”
Max and I stood there wordlessly. Just then, there was nothing anyone could have said. Beniamino left without saying goodbye. The fat man stood up and poured himself a healthy dollop of grappa.
“Alcohol. That’s what we need right now.”
I grabbed the bottle of Calvados by the neck, even though it was too early for me to start drinking. I tossed back the first glass at a gulp. I was in a hurry to get stunned.
After my third glass of Calvados I collapsed onto the sofa and pointed the remote control at the stereo. I pushed play and pumped the volume to maximum. The voice of Jimmy Witherspoon exploded from the speakers, with the first lines of Money’s Gettin’ Cheaper.
Bandit Love Page 5