Morena was glowing with happiness when we made the exchange in a large downtown bookstore. Money for information.
“Oh, money just smells so good,” she chirped in a little-girl voice.
“Remember our agreement,” I said as I handed her a folded sheet of paper with the number of my new cell phone. “You stick to your handsome policeman’s ass like a deer tick, and if you have the slightest suspicion that he’s planning to fuck me . . .”
“I sound the alarm. The concept is clear to me.”
“Good.”
She pulled out the Alberta Adams CD. “I brought you a present.”
“Thanks.”
“Maybe when you listen to it you’ll think of me sometimes.”
“I didn’t think you were so romantic.”
“I would have preferred someone like you,” she whispered. “Someone who doesn’t lecture you, someone who never thinks about today, tomorrow, and all that. But at a certain point, a girl has to choose, right?”
“You need a guy like him. There’s no future with a guy like me.”
She took off one glove and stroked my cheek, her eyes glistening.
“I liked you better when you were being the irresistible woman with the heart of stone. That was more exciting.”
She turned on her heel and, muttering an insult, stomped out. I was baffled. I didn’t think I’d said anything offensive, but I sure wasn’t going to talk it over with my friends. They didn’t like Morena, and they’d almost certainly find a reason to point out yet again that I didn’t understand a thing about women.
It was raining, as usual. We hadn’t seen a winter like this in years. It had even snowed once or twice. I opened my umbrella and hurried toward the streetcar stop. I’d get off after just three stops, but I took the streetcar to make sure that no one was following me. I didn’t want to be the one to blow our comfortable hideout. That same morning, Rossini had gone to pick up a nice little “armory” from a delicatessen owner; the guy had inherited two businesses from his father—the deli and a side business of providing weapons for armed robbery teams. Max, on the other hand, was in charge of procuring cloned cell phones and other diabolical electronic devices. If the police searched the apartment, there was everything they’d need to send all three of us to jail for several years.
I hopped off the streetcar at the very next stop, and flagged a taxi. After a short cab ride, I took a bus. The last stretch of road I walked.
Beniamino had scattered pieces of pistol all over the table in the living room. He was cleaning and oiling the guns very intently.
“Those look like antiques,” I mocked.
“Don’t be sacrilegious. They’re two solid and workmanlike Colt .45’s. They’ve been satisfying connoisseurs since 1911.”
“He’s a gun fetishist,” Max laughed. “For instance, he loves the guns that Bruce Willis uses in Last Man Standing. A few years ago he made me watch that movie, twice, on DVD.”
“Okay then, we’re safe. Bruce never loses.”
“You can be sure of that, boy,” Rossini snapped in annoyance.
I pulled the file out of the envelope and laid it on the table, next to a box of bullets. “When you’re done playing with your toys we can take a look at this.”
“Just give me a minute to reassemble them. Which I could do blindfolded, if necessary.”
Less than two minutes. Confident, precise movements. The prospect of Rossini armed reassured his friends and unsettled his enemies. My jokes were just a way of concealing my nervousness. I didn’t like guns, but I knew we needed them. Both Max and I were willing to let Rossini handle the weapons. And get his hands dirty.
The fat man pulled off the blue rubberband and opened the file. The first sheet was blank, expect for a single line at the top of the page.
It was about Greta Gardner: “Unknown.”
Concerning Pavle Stojkovic, there was an abundance of information, though wherever the name of an Italian policeman appeared it had been blocked out in heavy black marker. The biographical section noted that he had been born in Kladovo, eastern Serbia, in May 1950. In 1972 in Belgrade he had married Ivana, the following year Bratislav was born; his second-born was a daughter, Sonja, born in 1980. At the time, Pavle was already a high-ranking officer in the UDBA, the Yugoslavian intelligence service. When the secret police organization was disbanded in the wake of the civil war, he took a post in an unidentified office in the Serbian Defense Ministry.
In the mid-Nineties he had become a consigliere of a criminal family in the capital that then clashed with the crime family of Zeljko Raznatovic, better known as Arkan, the Tiger of the Balkans, and was decimated. Somehow, Pavle miraculously survived the slaughter of the gang chiefs and the mass desertion of the footsoldiers and made his way into hiding. He reappeared in Italy in the spring of 2000, just a few months after the murder of Arkan in the lobby of the Intercontinental Hotel in Belgrade.
He’d been given an Italian visa on a special expedited basis at the request of an official in the Italian Foreign Ministry whose name was obliterated by a thick layer of black ink. Perhaps it was as payment for information secretly provided to the investigators working for the International Criminal Tribunal of the Hague, who were gathering evidence to indict and arrest Slobodan Milosevic, facing charges of crimes against humanity.
In 2001, immediately following the arrest of the former president of Yugoslavia, Stojkovic had founded the Balkan Market, with headquarters in Treviso, the usual import-export company with just two employees: Bozidar Dinic and Vladan Ninkovic.
“Look at them, Hans and Fritz,” I joked. “The bastard even gave his musclemen health insurance.”
Max tapped his index finger on another sheet of paper. “This is a note from the police headquarters of Treviso: it says that our friend Pavle is a good guy and nobody should bother him.”
I stubbed out what was left of my cigarette in the ashtray. “That means that the exchanges of favors continued over time, and that Pavle is more than just a gangster.”
“Then why are they letting us fuck him now?” asked Rossini.
“Hard to say,” the fat man replied. “Maybe he’s not so useful anymore as an informer; maybe the cops in Padua couldn’t care less about deals made with him by other cops . . .”
I felt like having a drink, but I looked at the clock and decided to tough it out. “So now we know a lot more about our boy Pavle. But I don’t think we have anything useful for planning out a clear strategy.”
“In fact, we do seem to have run out of ideas,” the fat man admitted. “Either we charge in with our eyes closed and see what happens or we wait until we have more information.”
Rossini jangled his bracelets. “The longer we wait, the easier we are to spot. And once they identify us, they’ll attack us.”
“So what’s our first move?”
The fat man thought about it through one long drag on his cigarette and then, exhaling, looked at me. “It’s your turn. You’re going to go have a chat with Arben Alshabani; we’ll cover your back.”
At ten sharp that evening I pulled open the door of the bar and was engulfed in a flood of heat and the stench of tobacco. In that bar, at least, officially owned by a pair of Moroccan sisters, the law against smoking indoors was not being observed—they evidently figured that if certain people want to get cancer, it’s the least of their problems. I looked around me. Seated at the café tables were representatives of all the specialties of low-level criminal endeavor.
The two sisters were both standing behind the bar, and they were chatting animatedly with a number of customers who were deeply involved in their beers and their panini. True to the classic script directions, no one looked up. I sat down at the one unoccupied table. Given its privileged location, it must have been Alshabani’s usual perch, but there was no sign of the ambitious underboss. To keep from collapsing from the heat, I took off my overcoat and got comfortable at the table. After a few minutes, the younger of the two presumptive owne
rs came over and asked what I’d be having. I ordered an espresso.
I knew that Arben was somewhere in the back, and that he was watching me, ready to duck out the back door if things started looking bad. I pulled a folded-up newspaper out of my pocket and began reading, making a brave pretense of interest in the ongoing political debate within the minority center-right coalition over its inability to agree on an acceptable candidate to run for the office of mayor.
In reality I was just trying to appear relaxed so that I could conquer the Kosovar’s mistrust. Mafiosi are mistrustful by nature. When they wake up every morning the first thing they think about it is how to go out and screw their neighbor, taking special care to sniff out the slightest risk to themselves of falling into the same trap: if they get ripped off, it can lead to a dangerous and uncontrollable drop in their popularity within the shark-infested social network of their crime family. In that sense they lead a difficult life, there’s never a time when they can relax: the real danger is much more likely to come from within than from outside enemies. You never know: one day, without thinking about it, you could say the wrong word at the wrong time, or you could fail to run your businesses as successfully as expected. And when that happens, a slow but ineluctable mechanism begins to operate, relegating you forever at the lowest ranks of your organization. True enough, this can happen in any ordinary corporation. But there, if you’re young enough, you can always quit and go look for another job: that’s not possible in the mafia.
The Kosovar Arben was fully steeped in this general logic—in fact, he embraced it and wallowed in it. As the Carabinieri had correctly surmised, he was ambitious and he wanted to climb rapidly to the highest levels of the criminal organization. His ultimate goal, according to our interpretation of the ambiguous eavesdropping transcripts that we’d been allowed to read in the law offices of Avvocato Criconia, was to replace Florian Tuda, who was in charge of the family operations in Padua. And he’d had some success in that direction: Florian had been arrested during the police sweep that had “decimated” the cocaine dealers who supplied one of the many rings in the more prosperous circles of Padua. That was hardly the end of Florian though: in the mafia, bosses can easily run operations from a jail cell, and Arben could do no more than to flaunt the same prerogatives of power as Tuda.
The organizational strategy of the Kosovars was to absorb existing structures and to control them from behind the scenes. In the city of Padua they had focused on taking over bars and clubs run by the Maghrebi underworld, like the bar I was sitting in pretending to read a newspaper. The sub-Saharan north Africans had been the first generation of foreign organized crime in Padua, and now they had been reduced to the status of messenger boys given their intractable internal divisions and their reluctance to engage in armed warfare.
The day before, under the porticoes of Via San Francesco, we had slipped a couple of banknotes to Morched the Tunisian, trusted purveyor of hashish to Max la Memoria. In exchange, he had explained to us that the Moroccans and the Algerians weren’t pleased with the way things had wound up, and they were planning an insanely reckless move: they wanted to go into business on their own. One of the reasons for their discontent was the heavyhanded approach employed by Arben Alshabani. He would have his enforcers beat street peddlers bloody for the slightest infraction of his rigid rules.
The Kosovar was a perfect model of the kind of Mafioso we’d all had an opportunity to get to know, especially during our stays in Italy’s prisons. He was the most predictable kind, because he was stupid, even though he considered himself to be damned clever. With people like him, we’d always managed to get the upper hand, and that was why we’d organized this meeting via Morched.
“We thought we could bring you into a deal we’re looking at,” the fat man had explained.
The Tunisian eyed us suspiciously. A pair of dark and furtive eyes peered out at us from the depths of the enormous hood of his parka. The rightful owner of that jacket must have been at least three sizes bigger than Morched.
“Either you guys are in trouble or you’re trying to pull something. I don’t have any pull anymore. It’s not like in the old days, when everyone spoke respectfully to Morched when there was something to be resolved . . .”
Max raised a hand to halt the flow of words. “Spare us your tale of woe about your career as a pusher. We just want to get in touch with Arben.”
“You’re looking to rip him off. His people will cut my throat.”
“No. We’re just looking to offer him a deal, and you’ll be a thousand euros richer for it.”
Morched rubbed his hands together vigorously. He was still wary, but the money was tempting. “What would I have to do?”
“Go talk to him and tell him that someone you know and trust . . .”
“Which would be you?”
The fat man pointed at me.
“I don’t know him well. I want 1,200 euros.”
Beniamino gestured angrily, irritated at the interruption. “You need to shut up and listen.”
“Hey, take it easy. Can’t a person negotiate anymore? I tell you, the old ways are dying out.”
“Fine, 1,200 euros,” Max broke in. “But my friend has a point. You need to listen now.”
Morched pretended to zip his mouth shut.
“You’ll go to Arben and tell him that a guy you know, Marco Buratti, gave you five thousand euros to buy heroin and cocaine from various suppliers just to test the quality, because he’s planning to buy a couple of kilos of shit.”
The dealer nodded. “So he’ll want to know more and agree to meet the buyer in person.”
“I can see that you catch on fast.”
“There’s better people than Arben in Padua.”
“You mean there are people who are more generous to you than Arben . . . but I only want to deal with him.”
Morched held out his hand, open-palmed, to get the money. “Fine, but don’t come complaining to me when Alshabani rips you off.”
I methodically counted out the bills and on an old bus ticket I’d written a phone number. “Tell the Kosovar that I’ll only agree to meetings in a public place.”
Beniamino had opened his overcoat and let Morched catch a glimpse of the two handguns in the underarm holsters. “I know that times are tough, and five thousand euros is a lot of cash, but if you steal them, or you say the wrong things, I will find you and so help me, I’ll kill you.”
Morched turned toward the fat man. “Have I ever robbed you or disappointed you, friend?”
“No, and that’s why we gave you the money in advance. But up till now I’ve never done a deal for more than two or three hundred euros with you, and maybe you assume that we’re just a bunch of fools.”
The Tunisian threw his arms out in a pose of wounded innocence.
“What kind of world are we living in? You can’t negotiate, you get beaten up, and people threaten to kill you for no good reason. And you know whose fault it really is? It’s your fault. If you Italians hadn’t opened your eastern borders none of this would have happened. Those are bad people, and they’re only going to spoil everything, but you wanted them in at all costs.”
“Tell the Kosovar only about me. You never saw my friends.”
“You know, you’re very complicated, you people? I’m not sure I’d like to work with you guys,” and he wandered off, muttering and gesticulating.
“Did you really have to threaten him?” I asked Rossini as we walked back to the car.
“Maybe not, but he’s a failed gangster, and he’s living in the past.”
“And he’s a pusher,” I thought, remembering how the old smuggler hated drug dealers. In any case, Morched did what he’d been paid to do, and he called me two hours later. A meeting with Arben was scheduled for the morning of the following day in the bar in the Piazza Mazzini where I sat waiting for his majesty Alshabani to deign to come out and talk with me.
I raised my hand and signaled to one of the two Moroccan women to co
me over; she slowly came out from behind the bar and with some evident annoyance strolled over to my table. I pointed to the door to the back, where a scuffed-up old sign warned that the customers could not enter.
“I know that Arben is in there. Tell him that I’m leaving in two minutes.”
“Why don’t you go in the bathroom and take a piss? Maybe when you come out he’ll be here waiting for you.”
The Kosovar wanted to make sure I wasn’t wearing a microphone, but stepping into the bathroom could mean a knife to the chest or a bullet to the head. The minute the Tunisian said my name, Arben must have remembered the death sentence that hung over my head.
I shook my head. “Two minutes and I’m out of here,” I repeated decisively.
The woman disappeared behind the door. I stood up and took off my jacket. Standing in shirtsleeves, I removed the battery from my cell phone. I could still be hiding a tiny listening device somewhere on my body, but it struck me as a gesture of goodwill. Apparently, that’s how Arben took it. He finally decided to emerge from concealment.
I found myself in the presence of a man who was pretty different from the one I’d seen in the surveillance photographs. His hair wasn’t cropped short anymore, the way most ex-KLA men wore it. Now he wore his hair long, shoulder-length, and he looked younger than thirty-six, the age provided in the notes from his defense lawyer. His close-set eyes and his thin but prominent nose gave him a less than intelligent appearance, but from the way he looked at me I could see I was dealing with someone I should take care not to underestimate.
I glimpsed a flash of cunning in his gaze; it told me that Arben had earned his position as underboss in the field. First in Kosovo, in anti-Serb guerrilla warfare, and later in the family company. He was a cunning, violent guy. I needed to convince him that he could screw me anytime he wanted.
He shook hands and flashed a hearty smile. He turned toward the bar and ordered a beer. The beer was served at blinding speed.
“Morched told me that you’re interested in buying certain merchandise,” he began in a conversational tone.
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