“These are for the children of Fabio, the guy that loaned us the delivery van.”
All the evening news shows led with reports of a major operation by the police forces of Padua and Treviso who had arrested a gang of Serbians who were trafficking in counterfeit medicines and fencing stolen gold jewelry. The police raids had resulted in the recovery of two kilos of assorted jewelry from the multimillion-euro robbery committed some time before in a goldsmith’s workshop in Valenza, in the province of Alessandria.
“The cops went shopping,” I snickered. “Almost four kilos of jewelry for wives, girlfriends, mothers-in-law.”
“But what about poor little Pavle?” Max asked sarcastically while he was piling our plates high with gnocchi al ragù he’d made with his own pretty hands. “When the Maronite Lebanese come around to ask him about their gold, hard time in prison is going to get a little bit harder for him . . .”
“That asshole is the kind of guy who comes out on top no matter what,” Beniamino pronounced his opinion. Then he turned to me. “Now, how are you going to screw the Kosovar?”
I poured myself a glass of wine. A red tocai from the Colli Berici. “Not sure. Do you have any ideas?”
The next morning, the Kosovar was playing cards with a few of his minions. “I want to have a word with you.”
He made a gesture and everyone else scattered.
“I brought you the gold,” I said, extending a small bag to him under the table.
“Who the fuck told you to bring it here?” Arben blurted out in annoyance.
He was rapidly trying to think what to do next. His people would ask him what I’d brought to him in the bar, the least secure place in all Padua. And he wasn’t an idiot. The reports of the police sweep in Treviso were front-page news in all the local papers.
“Yesterday they find gold in the hands of those shits the Serbs and this morning you bring a bag of it here to me. Did you bring the cops with you too?”
“No. But the terms of our deal have changed. We thought that Pavle Stojkovic was the mastermind behind Fatjon’s murder; well, we were wrong, and we don’t accuse people of murders they had nothing to do with. And anyway, the police beat us to him.”
The Kosovar looked at me in puzzlement. What I was telling him wasn’t even slightly believable, but right then and there it didn’t much matter.
“We’re giving you the gold, and it’s only half of what we promised; in exchange we need you to go to Agim and tell him that you’re sure that we had nothing to do with his brother’s death. And you’re going to have to be convincing, very convincing, because your job is to get your boss to retract the death sentence that’s out on us.”
I pulled a mini CD out of my overcoat pocket and laid it down next to his glass of beer.
“What’s that?”
“A copy of the audio recording of our chat in the bar in the shopping center the other morning.”
He turned pale. Then a surge of fury made his eyes glaze over as he scrabbled with one hand, grabbing for the jacket pocket that held his switchblade knife.
“Don’t try it,” I hissed, doing all I could to conceal the fear that was clawing at my stomach. “My friends are waiting outside, and they came heavy. You’d never leave here alive.”
He shrieked a sequence of insults in his native tongue; everyone in the bar turned to stare at us.
“Calm down and try to think. We’re not trying to screw you; we just want to be left in peace.”
“Get out; never let me see you around here again.”
I stood up. “One last piece of advice: melt that jewelry down in a hurry. It’s way too easy to identify; and you don’t want to get dragged into the trial alongside the Serbs.”
Then I walked hastily out the door. Rossini emerged from behind a pillar in the portico where he’d been hiding. He’d been lurking there with Max; thanks to the miniature microphone glued to my chest, they’d listened to the whole conversation with Arben. If he’d decided to disembowel me, Beniamino would have been inside the bar to stop him in plenty of time. At least, that was the plan . . .
I lit a cigarette; my hands were trembling. I was really getting sick of all this.
The old smuggler smiled. “And we’re through with another one.”
Once we were back in the car I turned my cell phone back on. There were a dozen messages from Attilio Carini. I called him back.
“Pigsty doesn’t begin to cover it. I had to work miracles to stay out of trouble myself,” he complained.
“Don’t bust my balls. I saw you on TV. I read about you in the newspapers. You’re the most famous cop in all of Northeast Italy.”
“You promised you’d give me Alshabani, too.”
“Yeah, well, that one didn’t work out so well.”
“You can keep working on it till it does . . .”
“No. It’s time to say goodbye.”
“I decide when that time has come.”
Cops. I closed my eyes and counted to three. Cops are always the same. “You want to play kid games? You want to see who can piss farther, whose dick is longer? Come off it!”
He started laughing and hung up. I took the SIM card out of my cell phone and tossed it out the window. At the next stoplight, I gave the phone to a flower peddler.
“If you want to know the truth,” Rossini snapped, “I don’t like trading favors with the cops. I’d like to avoid that if we can.”
“No, you should really say a prayer to the god of crooked cops,” I shot back argumentatively. “It’s not the way it used to be, when you always knew who you were dealing with and you could just run things without dealing with the police. Your problem these days is getting information, and the cops are the best source available. They gather information, collect it in a central location, and it’s always for sale.”
“Plus,” added the fat man, “all these organized crime families and rings of Mafiosi just use the cops to eliminate their competitors. It’s just one big stew, a pot of marmalade. You can’t make distinctions the way you used to be able to.”
The old smuggler took one hand off the wheel to jangle his bracelets. “That’s exactly the thing. If you want to avoid drowning in this sea of shit, you have to live in the past. Find others who think the way you do and work as an archaeologist of the underworld: smuggling and old-school knockovers. The problem has always been your fucking investigations, Marco. There you are, just stirring shit from dawn to dark. When this mess is over, I really hope you decide to change your line of work.”
He was taking it out on me and me alone, even though Max had been my partner in investigations. Evidently the fat man had talked to him about Fratta Polesine and Irma. This wasn’t the time to talk about such things. Especially because it was the last thing I felt like doing.
“And exactly how does this mess end? We still haven’t talked about how to deal with Greta Gardner.”
“As far as I’m concerned, I’m going to go to Paris, scope out the situation, kill her, and go home to Sylvie.”
“What about you?” I asked Max.
“Maybe we’ve saved our own asses and settled some scores,” he said, looking out the window. “If my presence isn’t truly indispensable, I’d just as soon stay here.”
Old Rossini gripped his arm affectionately. “This is the last act. We’ll do fine just the two of us.”
I pretended to object. “Whoa, whoa, why do you assume I’m coming with you?”
“Because you don’t have a fucking thing to do here.”
Saturday, May 16, 2009
Natalija Dinic, alias Greta Gardner, alias Ivana Biserka, was a beautiful woman. In the xerox of her passport she looked like a pale little blonde. In the flesh, she was a woman that my friend the sax player Maurizio Camardi, an unrivaled connoisseur of beautiful women, would have described admiringly as a “cherry bomb.” She was spectacular, provocative, deeply appealing. According to my calculations, she had to be exactly forty. She looked it and in some sense she flaunted h
er age. But one thing was certain: even men much younger than her would have thrown themselves at her feet.
When we saw her for the first time, we were astounded. Beniamino sat open-mouthed, incapable of making the slightest sound. She looked disturbingly like Sylvie. And there was no mistaking the fact that this had been a conscious choice, pursued single-mindedly, with the assistance of more than one plastic surgeon.
I gathered my courage and finally asked Beniamino: “What really happened?”
He grimaced, shutting his eyes as if a bolt of pain had stabbed through his body. “Before they handed her over to Fatjon Bytyçi, my love was the ‘guest’ of that bitch for a period of preparation. She used violence on Sylvie, she humiliated her and forced her to dance, to wear ridiculous costumes.”
“Sylvie told you this?”
Rossini shook his head. “She won’t talk to me about any of what happened.”
“So how did you find out?”
“The notebook. It’s got graph paper, like the notebooks little children use. There’s a pair of squirrels on the cover. Cute as can be. But read it and it takes you straight to hell. I think it was her shrink’s idea.”
After a few days of cautious tailing, we had established that wherever Greta went, she was accompanied by two women. One of them drove the long black limousine with tinted windows, the other was always next to her, as if she were a bodyguard; sometimes she acted more like a secretary, at other times it seemed as if she were an intimate friend.
The driver was the younger of the two women. She had close-cropped blonde hair, she was petite, and she drove as if she’d had a steering wheel in front of her since she was a baby. Maybe she really had. The other, older woman was a typical Slavic beauty, perhaps a Russian: high cheekbones, long hair, a physique that had been sculpted in a gym, or very likely in the exercise yard of a military barracks. She had a way of moving that is typical of people who use violence professionally. Unlike Greta, who was wore dizzyingly high heels, both women wore rubber-soled flats.
One evening I browbeat Beniamino into phoning Sylvie in my presence. “Ask her!”
“It’s pointless cruelty.”
“We have to know.”
A few minutes later, he was gripping the cell phone, white knuckled. “Was Greta Gardner alone, or were the two women with her?”
Sylvie had burst into a torrent of sobs. Rossini held the phone up to my ear so I could hear her. It was heartbreaking.
“Happy?”
I spent a sleepless night, but I had to know if those two women were her accomplices. The situation demanded it. For the next two days, the old smuggler pretty much refused to speak to me. I took advantage of that to go out at night. I took a walk through the quarter we were in, and found myself outside a theater. Big posters announced a concert: Mauro Palmas would offer a musical portrait of the colors of the mistral wind. Allowing myself to be lulled by the king of winds would only do my heart good; I bought a ticket. It was money well spent. For two hours, the sound of the cantabile lute and the mandola helped me to forget I was in Paris on serious business.
All three women lived together in a luxurious apartment not far from the cathedral of the Madeleine; but the church that Greta attended regularly was Serbian Orthodox, and was dedicated to St. Sava of Serbia. It was in the 18th arrondissement, at number 23, Rue du Simplon. That day in May she was going to be married in that church. Or, perhaps we should say, she had hoped to be married to a certain Vule Lez, age 48, a native of Belgrade. It was enough to type his name into a search engine and it became clear that he was a notorious nationalist gangster.
We were unable to find out anything more than that. We learned very little about her life or her business. She moved around the city and traveled frequently; at times she’d vanish for two or three days at a time. Tailing her was complicated and very dangerous. Paris is patrolled by serious-minded and very aggressive policemen. Hanging around a street door or busy corner for too long meant the police were sure to notice you. When you’re getting ready to kill somebody, it’s the dumbest mistake you can make.
Beniamino and I were living in a little rat’s nest not far from the Gare de Lyon. The long days we’d spent tailing a woman who looked like a clone of Sylvie had been psychologically grueling.
The decision to kill her the day of her wedding had been Beniamino’s. I was against it. I preferred the idea of shooting her as she left her house; I didn’t really care if we had to murder the two other women. They wouldn’t be much of a loss for mankind. But Rossini wanted to administer poetic justice, he wanted an exemplary punishment. He would sneak out from behind the priest in the middle of the wedding ceremony and shoot down Vule and then Greta, in cold blood, at the altar.
That was the plan. We’d developed it as we studied the church down to the finest details. Often there were concerts; choirs singing Byzantine, Serbian, and Russian liturgical chants; we took seats in the last rows of pews, listening distractedly, observing very attentively.
The morning of Friday, May 15 we’d stolen a car on the far side of Paris. It was a light-fingered theft, done on the fly with perfect technique. A woman had parked her small car next to a newsstand, engine running, keys in the ignition. She’d just stepped away for the thirty seconds it took to buy a newspaper. Just as she was paying the newsvendor, she noticed out of the corner of her eye that two figures had climbed into her car. Too late.
We drove to the church and we checked out our escape route. The next day, Beniamino would call me and speak a few words into the phone: “I’m going in now.”
I’d drive out of the parking lot in the Rue du Mont Cenis and turn right down Rue du Simplon. Then I’d pick up Beniamino as he left the church in the aftermath of the double murder, and turn left onto Rue des Poissonniers; another left in Rue des Amiraux, and finally a right turn onto the Boulevard Ornano, which I’d take all the way up to the Metro station of Porte de Clignancourt. There we’d disappear into the endless underground of Paris.
And in fact that part of the plan worked beautifully. Rossini fucked up everything else.
I waited for him outside the church. I had arrived half a minute early, and I heard a single distinct pistol shot. Beniamino came running out of the church, both pistols leveled. Except for his sunglasses, he was dressed in white from head to foot. He got into the back seat and I took off, tires screeching.
“What the fuck happened?”
“I killed him,” he replied as he began changing his clothes. “They had just been pronounced man and wife.”
“What about Greta?”
“She got down on her knees and covered her face with her veil.”
“What did you do then?”
“I just couldn’t bring myself to pull the trigger.”
“But why, Beniamino? Why the fuck did you let that whore trick you again?”
My eyes blurred from the anger and disappointment; I came within inches of broadsiding a taxi. “You know what happens now? They’re going to start looking for us again. We’re back where we fucking started, back where we were at the beginning of 2006.”
“I thought I was looking at Sylvie, kneeling there in the church,” he confessed in a whisper.
We abandoned the car, discarded our clothes and pistols in a trashcan, and descended into the tunnels of the Paris Metro system.
The evening news shows and morning papers gave considerable play to the reports of the murder at the altar. But neither the widowed newlywed nor the very few wedding guests spoke to the press, and the media circus soon broke down the big top and moved on, dismissing the killing as a feud between Serbian factions: the dead man’s criminal record helped to make that version of the facts more believable.
I phoned Max. “Despite everything, the sun is still shining.”
“Here too. It’s nice and warm.”
“Where are you?”
“At the Chiosco, with Pape, Giorgio, and Walter from Cagliari.”
“So you’ve had a spectacular meal.�
��
“Oh, yes. Marzia was cooking.”
“I hear a tremendous racket. How many of you are there?”
“About fifty. It’s the annual banquet of the Union of Rationalists, Atheists, and Agnostics.”
I didn’t think I’d ever heard of the organization in question, but I didn’t want to start asking questions. I said nothing.
The fat man cleared his throat. “I don’t know whether to be pissed off or concerned. In any case, I’m not happy.”
“For what it’s worth, there are extenuating circumstances.”
He sighed loudly. “I think there’s more to it than that. He’s made her a widow twice now, and her anger and grief will make her very, very dangerous. We know perfectly well what she’s capable of doing . . .”
“So?”
“So the old man couldn’t help but know that when he had her in front of him in the church.”
Instead of leaving Paris, we continued to follow Greta. We watched the funeral from a safe distance, too, and I couldn’t help but admire the sober elegance of her small black hat. It was exactly the same style as the one worn by Ceca, Arkan’s widow, the day of his funeral.
A few days later we saw her go into a restaurant on Rue de la Reine. She was no longer dressed in mourning. The driver remained in the car, the other woman sat at her side. The restaurant was small and their table was next to the front window. Sitting with them was a man with the distinctive appearance and demeanor of a professional soldier.
I felt a rush of shivers running down my back. “She’s hiring him to wipe us out.”
Beniamino shrugged. “I’d bet he’s the guy who kidnapped Sylvie.”
The tone of voice with which he said those words triggered my first suspicions. “By the way: what did Sylvie say about the fact that you spared the life of the woman who had her kidnapped and held her captive in a gang bang parlor?”
“Well, she didn’t insult me the way you did . . . She said that every cloud has a silver lining, and that we could take advantage of the situation to dismantle the network of this organization and rescue the women who are trapped in its coils.”
Bandit Love Page 16