Still, even that way of life eventually turned into a routine. I’d found an equilibrium of sorts, and I could have gone on that way for many years to come, and finally retired. I’d even started laying the groundwork by putting aside some savings. But the death of the Kosovar Mafioso had ruined all that.
At that point, Lugano had wrapped me in its motionless, sleepy, well scrubbed beauty, making the loss of places and things of the past a little easier to take.
Actually, that’s not exactly how it had gone. Virna had played her part: she was my one violation of the basic rules of security. I had felt the urgent need to leave my collection of blues records and CDs in trusted hands. And so I found myself ringing the doorbell of her new house. At first she told me I was an idiot for getting into the kind of trouble that forced me to flee the country. Then she agreed to take care of that important piece of my life. Finally, she slipped a piece of paper with her email address into the pocket of my leather jacket.
Many months later, perched on a bar stool in a five-star hotel, I noticed a woman using a public internet terminal. She was smiling as she typed an email. I hurried home and wrote to Virna from the same address I was using to stay in touch with Max and Beniamino.
She wrote back and said that she’d come to visit me, but that I’d have to trust her and tell her where I was hiding. A couple of weeks later I went to pick her up at the train station. She’d changed. She was even prettier with a big belly.
“Jesus, you’re pregnant!”
“Well, as far as that goes, I’m also married.”
“Who’s the lucky guy?”
“A good man who I want to raise a child with.”
“I still haven’t heard the world ‘love’.”
“You haven’t hugged me yet and you’re already busting my chops?”
“Sorry,” I muttered as I gathered my courage to embrace her. “I’m just a little surprised.”
“I’m tired. Take me home.”
She undressed and lay down on the bed to rest. I walked over and delicately placed my ear against her belly.
Virna ran her fingers through my hair. “Sleeping.”
“How far along are you?”
“Fifth month.”
“Boy or girl?”
“Girl.”
“Happy?”
“Happy.”
“Was it an accident or did you try to have a baby?”
“Time was running out, and getting pregnant at my age is no walk in the park.”
“And you wear yourself out coming to visit old lovers?”
“I just felt like seeing you,” she murmured, snuggling into my arms.
We lay that way, in silence. It was nice, if somewhat disturbing. I knew that she didn’t have the slightest intention of coming back into my life, but she hadn’t shut me out of hers completely. In fact, she’d decided to try to find a little corner of her life just for the two of us. I’d settle for it; it was more than I expected.
After a while she got up and went into the bathroom, and when she came out she was completely nude. I knew that way she had of breathing and nibbling at her lips; I took off my pants. Virna lay down in the middle of the bed, grabbed me by the shoulders, pushed me toward her belly. “You remember how I like it?”
After the birth of her baby, she brought her back to meet me.
“I’d like you to meet Emma.”
“Ciao, Emma,” I muttered uneasily. The open innocence of little children always made me uncomfortable. No one was innocent in my world.
Virna laughed heartily. “You should see yourself . . .”
Later, I watched her nurse Emma. When they left, their scent stayed around for another couple of days to keep me company.
They came back to see me once a month.
“What do you tell your husband?” I asked her during one of her visits.
“Certainly not the truth,” she replied brusquely. “He wouldn’t understand and I don’t want to lose him. I love him. I love you too, Marco, but in a different way. You’re the men of my life.”
“Can I say that I love you?”
“Certainly not. You need to keep that to yourself. You’d ruin everything.”
Right. I never have understood a fucking thing about women.
On the other hand, I hadn’t seen my friends till that very day. It was difficult. We were all in the grip of strong emotions, but we kept ourselves pretty buttoned up at first. We had some important decisions to make. After that, we could drink to our friendship. The alcohol would bring words to the surface that had been tamped down far too long; the time would come to exchange confidences. I couldn’t wait to tell them about Virna.
“I haven’t spent much of my money,” the fat man told Rossini. “If you need some . . .”
“I’ve got some savings,” I tossed in.
“Thanks. I’ve decided to put together a gang. I’ve got a tip on a knockover that’ll take care of us for a long, long time,” Rossini announced.
“What do you mean ‘us’? We’re not armed robbers. We never have been.”
“Well, this time you’ll make a stretch, unarmed, of course,” Beniamino shot back. “There’s so much money in play here that we could really take care of all our debts once and for all. Nowadays everything’s so damned expensive.”
I exchanged glances with Max. After 737 days of devoting all his energy and time to Sylvie, Old Rossini had made up his mind to wage war against the bastards who had made us dance like marionettes and then forced us into hiding. He hadn’t exaggerated his determination, he’d spoken prudently and cautiously, but he had clearly referred to a vendetta as the sole possible form of justice.
To talk about returning our lives to normal was excessive, especially considering that we’d murdered the heir to a mafia family. There was no getting around their code of honor.
“Is it worth it?” I wondered aloud. “Does it make sense to risk losing more than we already have?”
Rossini shrugged. “You may have a point, but Sylvie has been screaming in her sleep for two years now, and I can’t even touch her with the tip of my little finger. I can’t imagine living like this without making sure that everyone that had anything to do with her kidnapping pays for what they did.”
“Beirut isn’t just a hop, skip, and a jump,” I objected. “What are you going to do with Sylvie?”
“I have her blessing. She wants me to kill off her nightmares.”
It all made perfect sense. I turned to the fat man. “What about you?”
“We’re friends, aren’t we? That alone is reason enough, but no matter what, it makes sense to take this thing to its logical conclusion, because sooner or later they’ll fuck us anyway.”
“What do you mean?”
“On February 17 of this year, Kosovo unilaterally proclaimed independence. It’s a farce packaged with ribbons and a bow for world public opinion. In fact, now the mafia can enjoy greater freedom, and greater protection, and in the past few months it has established itself more securely in Northeast Italy. In other words, before it’s all over, they’ll have accumulated the resources and the contacts to track us down.”
I lit a cigarette and handed the pack to Beniamino. “Max hasn’t been wasting his time.”
“I felt sure of it. The only one who’s been twiddling his thumbs is you.”
“Let me guess,” I said. “After the robbery of the century we’re all going to work together to track down the mysterious Greta Gardner?”
Old Rossini shifted uneasily in his chair. “Before being sold to that animal Fatjon Bytyçi, it was Sylvie’s misfortune to meet La Gardner in the flesh. She refused to tell me the details, but the meeting wasn’t pleasant.”
I gave up. “Look, I’m baffled here. Why would a woman with ties to the Serbian intelligence services sell a woman to a Kosovar Mafioso?”
“We’ll have to ask Pavle Stojkovic about that, someday,” replied the fat man, extracting a laptop computer from a bag. “Pavle Stojkovic and Gre
ta are certainly in cahoots, but the Kosovars have no idea that they are responsible for the murder of Fatjon Bytyçi.”
“How can you be sure of that?”
“Because now the boundary with eastern Europe is controlled by a cartel. Aside from the Croatians, the Bulgarians, the Hungarians, the Romanians, the Turks, and the Russians, now they’re part of it too, just part of a big happy family of international mafias.”
“So they finally found grounds for an agreement,” Rossini commented.
Max explained that they had been forced into it. On the one hand because the superhighway between the eastern border and Padua carries on a daily basis most of the illegal merchandise entering and leaving Italy. That made it indispensable to control the traffic to avoid losing shipments or having to hand out too many bribes. On the other hand, shortly thereafter the Italian government would pass a law making it a crime to be an illegal, undocumented immigrant: anyone who wanted to try to make money in Italy would be obliged to turn to the various structures organized by the various mafias. And in this sector the Kosovars were way ahead of everyone else. They had already set up travel agencies that, for the moderate fee of 3,500 euros, provided fake German tourist visas that were valid for the entire Schengen Area. For another 8,000 euros, they could put together fake marriages and, if you could afford it, they could purchase the complicity of a cooperative official.
“And we’re going to let the Kosovars know that Stojkovic is not a trustworthy partner?”
“We’ll take that possibility into consideration when the time is right,” the fat man replied. “First we have to figure out what they know about us.”
“I don’t think that we can just go and ask them what they know.”
Max smiled. “We won’t need to.”
Rossini went into the kitchen to make some coffee. He came back with a tray in his hand and another question in mind. “Why did they clean up the crime scene in Corenc, and bring the corpses back to Pe´c just in time for the funerals?”
“Evidently they couldn’t ruin the territory for themselves by revealing their presence.”
“Or else they were ashamed to let the corpse of the godfather’s son be found in a gang bang parlor,” the fat man objected. “From what I’ve been able to find out, Fatjon was a fucking sadist with women. In Mitrovica, during the massacre of the ethnic Serbian minority, he was involved in a lot of war crimes. This might be the reason he was sent out of the country. After all, he didn’t count much in the family politics.”
I stepped out to buy something for dinner in a rosticceria that specialized in delicacies from southern Italy, where I usually did my shopping for pasta and fresh cheeses.
“Well, we have some guests with a healthy appetite today,” the shopowner observed. If she’d had any idea of the topics of conversation during our meal, she would have certainly learned to keep her nose out of other people’s business.
After the antipasto we decided to discuss the first part of our plan: the robbery that would provide us with the money we’d need to take on our enemies, or to flee even further away if things turned ugly.
“As I was saying,” Beniamino began, “I’ve decided to start a gang. I’ve contacted Luc and Christine and two Germans I met in Beirut.”
“Target?”
“A goldsmith’s workshop in the province of Alessandria, north of Genoa. The safe is a piggy bank for a gang of Lebanese Maronite drug dealers. They’ll only report the gold that they’re legally holding. If it all goes smoothly, our cut should be about three million euros.”
“That fucking safe will be tough to get into . . .”
“But we have a mole, an inside man. The managing director of the company.”
I drained off my glass of red wine. “We’re not going to find a gang of wise guys on our tail after we pull off the job, are we? If the Maronites suspect he’s involved, they’ll put the screws to him and he’ll talk.”
Old Rossini grinned. “But they’ll never know about us. They don’t even know we exist.”
“This job comes straight from the Druses?”
“That’s right.”
Max suggested an added detail. “It might be nice to put out word that the mastermind behind the robbery is Pavle Stojkovic.”
“When do you plan to pull off the job?”
“January 19th. That’s a Monday.”
I looked at my friends in horror, “That’s less than twenty days, and we don’t have the slightest idea of what we’ll do afterwards.”
“I’m leaving for Beirut in three days. Sylvie is waiting for me; we’re going to celebrate New Year’s together. We’ll have plenty of time to develop a solid plan.”
The fat man didn’t blink. He rolled a slice of prosciutto around a sun-dried tomato packed in oil. He slowly chewed and then shook his head. “There’s nothing you can do about it: Italian cooking doesn’t work when you try to blend weird tastes and flavors.”
Then he leveled his index finger at me. “I’m doing the cooking on the night of the 31st.”
“I figured you were heading back to Fratta Polesine.”
“I wish. They know how to celebrate there. But I think we have some planning to do.”
Padua, Tuesday, February 10, 2009
Walking through my home town like an illegal immigrant. It was an odd feeling. From time to time I’d cross paths with people I’d known all my life. They wouldn’t give me a second glance. For that matter, though, it was practically impossible to recognize me. I’d cut my hair short and grown a stylish little goatee, I was wearing a pair of fake eyeglasses, and I had radically changed my style of dress.
In Verona I’d walked into a pretty expensive boutique. While talking with the sales clerk, I pointed to a fifty-year-old gentleman with a wealthy appearance and said: “I want to dress like him.”
The sales clerk was about sixty; he’d been doing this work for more than forty years. He looked me up and down carefully and said: “Too late. You’ll never pull it off. But if we lower our sights a little and restrict our ambitions, we might achieve something vaguely similar and just barely acceptable.”
He was right. I felt uncomfortable in a jacket and tie, and it wasn’t just a matter of habit.
As I was leaving the store, he asked me to recite the combinations of colors and fabrics, and I got every one of them wrong. He shook his head resignedly and wished me good luck.
I’d never spent that much money on clothing in my life, but I could easily have afforded to buy everything in the shop. The robbery had brought us vast wealth: 511 kilograms of gold: well over 16,000 troy ounces. Luckily, since there had been seven of us, we managed to clean out the entire vault full of gold. The job was as quick and easy as the narcotics heist at the Institute of Legal Medicine. We had the security codes so we were able to deactivate the alarms, sneak into the workshop in the middle of the night, and conceal ourselves in the bathrooms. There we waited for the morning arrival of the employees and the owner with the keys to the vault, which could only be unlocked at 9 am.
“Don’t do this to me,” he’d implored us, collapsing to his knees.
Beniamino, Luc, Christine, and the two Germans had worked swiftly and methodically like the professionals that they were; they even remembered to utter a few words in Serbian from time to time, for the benefit of the wide-eyed, presumably wide-eared robbery victims. Max and I, in contrast, proved with our ham-fisted ineptitude that we were not cut out for armed robberies.
Less than twelve hours later Beniamino had roared out of the port of Livorno, heading briskly for France, where the Druses were expecting him. They would arrange to forward the gold in batches to the various fences and middlemen.
Our French and German accomplices had accompanied him to cover his back, just in case the Lebanese decided to start playing dirty. When there’s that much money at stake, people are unpredictable. Missing from the massive shipment of swag was eleven kilograms of finished gold jewelry, about 350 ounces, which we had assigned to o
ther purposes. That was to remain a secret.
There were only three people in town who knew I’d come back. Rudy Scanferla, the one-time manager of La Cuccia, whom I’d greeted with a hug and a fat envelope stuffed with cash and the news that he was about to leave for an extended holiday, and that he would be turning his apartment over to me.
Then Virna, of course. I waited for her in the street outside her apartment. I remembered her saying that when the weather was nice enough, she took Emma for a mid-morning walk. That day there was a pale winter sun.
“Good morning, lovely ladies.”
She stared at me, open-mouthed. “Have you come back so they can murder you?”
“If I had, I certainly would be wearing my boots,” I replied, pointing to my lace-up suede oxfords. “You know that my will states clearly that I am to be laid to rest in my cowboy boots.”
She was smiling again. “I’m not sure I like you like this. You’re too different.”
“Without my clothes on, I look a lot more like the old Marco.”
“Do you feel like a roll in a warm bed with me?”
“Yes, please, as soon as possible.”
“How dangerous are you?”
I held out both hands, palms up. “I couldn’t say.”
She pointed to her daughter, who was trying to grab a teddy bear that was strapped to the stroller. “Come back sometime when you’re out of this mess.”
I nodded resignedly. “Can I tell you you’re beautiful?”
“If we weren’t right outside my house, I’d kiss you. I really feel like it.”
“So do I.”
“Now get out of here.”
“Enjoy your walk, my lovely ladies,” I said aloud before turning and walking away.
The third person who knew I was back in town was Avvocato Bonotto, and I had an appointment to meet him for lunch that same day. He was a lawyer who had hired me freqently. We both knew that we could trust one another.
We’d arranged to meet for lunch at Donna Irene in Piazzale Pontecorvo. Ubaldo, the owner, used to run a bar that I frequented. He gave me a quick sharp glance as I walked into the place, but if he recognized me, he gave no sign of it. He accompanied me to the table where Bonotto was already comfortably seated, enjoying the wait with a glass of bubbly prosecco.
Bandit Love Page 9