There was a discussion between the two men, short and intense. Maione could have repeated it word for word: Tullio wanted to get in to play some cards, and Simoncelli refused to admit him until he’d seen the color of his money. It was obvious that the young man had run through the line of credit that had been extended to him.
Their conversation was starting to break down, the young man was powerfully built and unaccustomed to hearing no, while the gatekeeper was well aware of his job. Then he saw something glitter in the dim light, and Maione decided that it was time to step forward; but the flash of the blade had been enough to persuade the young man to hurry off in evident fear.
The brigadier watched him try a few more doors, receiving an equally firm, if perhaps less violent, refusal each time, and in the end Tullio made his way dejectedly back to the bordello.
Maione went back to Speranzella’s gambling den and, sneaking up behind Simoncelli’s back, whispered from the shadows:
“Hey there, Simonce’, how’s it going?”
The man leapt into the air and emitted a high-pitched shriek, and swung around ready for trouble. He was a slight individual, with a sickly, treacherous appearance, hollow-cheeked, with small darting eyes. He wore a ridiculous tattered tailcoat and a pair of down-at-the-heel shoes. He’d slipped his hand into his inside breast pocket, the same pocket from which Maione had seen him pull the knife earlier.
“Ah, Brigadie’, it’s you, buonasera. You scared me. Listen to the way my heart is racing, try that again and you’ll probably kill me.”
Maione took a step forward, emerging from the shadows.
“And you, to keep your heart a little safer, you have a knife right next to it, eh? Who’s inside, how’s the game going today?”
The man put up both hands, as if to defend himself:
“What game, Brigadie’? You know perfectly well that the only reason I’m standing here is I’m sweet on a girl who lives across the way, not because . . .”
With a quick grab, Maione seized Simoncelli’s wrist and began to squeeze it, without letting the broad smile splashed across his face shrink by so much as a millimeter.
“Sure, of course. She must be quite a pretty girl, because you never move from this spot, you’re here all day long, seven days a week. Must be true love! I’m a romantic at heart, Simonce’, and I want to believe you. Why don’t I wait here with you for awhile, and we can even serenade her together, all right? Start singing, Simonce’, and I’ll come right in behind you.”
The man had turned pale from the pain.
“No, stop, Brigadie’, keep it up and you’ll break my arm! All right, all right, there’s practically no one upstairs, you know that there’s not a lot of activity the week of Easter. Let me go, I’m begging you, Brigadie’. . .”
Maione let go of the arm and, with a disappointed expression, pulled the knife out of Simoncelli’s inside pocket.
“What a pity, and here I was thinking that you really had fallen in love. You see how much your heart’s well-being matters to me? I’d better hold on to this, otherwise you might manage to break your heart with it, where the young lady who lives across the way failed. Though you might get a little assistance from someone else, say the young man who was here earlier. Speaking of which, why don’t you tell me his story? I get all emotional when I hear stories about young people; maybe I’ll even get teary and decide not to throw you in jail today.”
The ex-con was now sweating copiously:
“Who, the son of that lady from the bordello? No, Brigadie’, what are you thinking, he’s just a two-bit chump, he’s no problem. I just wanted to scare him, otherwise he’d have started yammering and there’d be no end to it.”
Maione grabbed the man’s arm again, but this time without squeezing.
“Ah, so that’s the way it is? Then why didn’t you let him go upstairs, if business is so slow? Doesn’t your boss want this sucker’s money, too?”
Simoncelli looked at Maione’s enormous hand on his forearm and decided to tell the truth. And to tell it as quickly as he could.
“No, Brigadie’, that young man doesn’t have any money. In fact, from what I hear, he owes money to everyone in the neighborhood. That’s the way gambling is, you know that, don’t you? When you start to lose, you just keep losing and there’s nothing anyone can do to stop you. So we don’t let him gamble, and neither does anyone else. Otherwise, as time goes by, he’ll just keep digging himself into a deeper and deeper hole.”
Maione acted deeply touched. He gripped the arm again.
“Oh, how lovely to see how conscientious you are, how you take the well-being of the young people to heart. I should nominate you for a medal, they’ll give one to you right away.”
The man sobbed in pain.
“No, no, Brigadie’, I’m begging you . . . Oh, all right, the order is not to let him gamble again unless he brings cash with him and shows it here, at the entrance. And even if he does come with cash, part of it gets taken to cover the old debt. Otherwise, he can’t come in. Even if I have to . . . to beat him silly.”
“And this is what you were going to use to beat him silly, eh?” asked Maione, waving the knife in the man’s face. “I’m tempted to beat you silly, I’m tempted. Now then, Simonce’, listen to me and listen good: if anyone stumbles on this young man in one of these vicoli with any kind of wound, I’ll come and drag you out of your bed and I’ll throw you somewhere that the next time you want to serenade a young lady, you’ll have to wait a good thirty years. Do you follow me, yes or no?”
The man nodded repeatedly, frantically massaging his arm all the while.
“Yes, yes, Brigadie’, I understand. But I can only promise you that I won’t hurt him—what about the others? That guy owes money to a thousand people around here! What can I do, it’s not like I’m his guardian angel, cut me a break!”
Maione dusted off his arm, making a show of being gentle.
“I warned you, don’t tell me I didn’t. Happy Easter, Simonce’. Try not to ruin your holidays.”
At police headquarters, after Maione reported back to Ricciardi on the outcome of his tail, the commissario asked him:
“What do you think, does the mother know everything about her son’s situation? The risks he’s running, the fact that he’s still trying to gamble?”
The brigadier shrugged.
“I couldn’t say, Commissa’. I think she knows that her son has debts, but she might not know just how big they are. Certainly, that young man isn’t in good shape; if you ask me, he’s bound to catch a serious beating at the very least, it’s just a matter of time. The good news is, from the information I’ve gathered, seeing that he’s playing in low-end gambling dens and he’s young, it must not be huge sums: those people don’t extend much credit to a young guy.”
“Maybe, but there’s still the fact of the bordello behind him. Everyone knows that it’s a high-end house, and so they assume that sooner or later the mother is going to cover her son’s debts; but actually, according to what Bambinella told you, she’s not even keeping up with what she owes to the tradesmen. And if Viper had decided to leave, it would have been a serious problem for Il Paradiso.”
Maione retorted:
“Sure, but why kill her? Wouldn’t that mean losing her all the same?”
“I’m not entirely convinced. So many people have demanded the speedy reopening of the brothel; maybe there are more people patronizing the place now, just to see where the murder took place. You know, the mind works in mysterious ways sometimes. We should think about all the different leads, I think we’re missing something.”
XXXI
Bianca Palumbo.
Who is she, Bianca Palumbo? Or who was she, actually. If she ever really existed.
Lily thought back to the moment when that strange green-eyed police commissario had asked her her real name. She thought b
ack to it as she draped the silk garment over her ample breasts, those enormous white breasts that had changed her identity.
Because it was when she was thirteen, when her breasts became so prominent, that she had stopped being Bianca Palumbo, the little girl from Porta Nolana who played with the pigeons and the rag doll in the garret apartment where she lived with her mother and eight siblings. Ever since that time that a fruit vendor passed by with his cart when she was out wandering through the vicoli, killing time, and asked her if she wanted a ride.
There weren’t, after all, that many possible futures for a little girl from Porta Nolana; not if she was nice to look at, with blond hair, a cute nose, and huge breasts. She hadn’t really done much worse than plenty of other girls just like her.
She left her bedroom, without looking down the hallway, and headed over to the little balcony that overlooked the drawing room. Amedeo, the pianist, was rapidly riffing over the keyboard, playing a fast-paced rhythmic jazz piece: the music he loved best, though Madame would have preferred more waltzes and tangos and less of “that negro music” that tended to rub Fascists the wrong way; but it wasn’t as if the Fascists were flocking to Il Paradiso. They liked more unpretentious places, where nobody would glare at you if you just wanted to guffaw loudly, if you had too much to drink, or if you had a hard time keeping your hands to yourself.
Amedeo looked lovingly at the butler Armando, who returned the look as he went sailing past with a full tray balanced on one hand. Lily decided it was the height of irony that the only real love affair in that house of love without love should have been a love affair between two men. Amedeo and Armando had secretly been together for years, they spent all the time together that they could, they were terribly sweet when they were together and terribly shy around everyone else.
Just as it had been for most of the past two days, the drawing room was packed. Viper dead had brought in more customers than had Viper alive: who would have thought? The regulars had been joined by people who wanted to see and know, to breathe the air in a place where blood, along with all the other usual fluids, had been spilled.
To tell the truth, Lily thought as she swiveled her hips in front of all those open mouths, there hadn’t been any blood. It was a pillow that had choked off Viper’s breath. That’s all. And that was ironic in its way, too, wasn’t it? A whore killed with one of the tools of her trade: a pillow. You had to laugh.
Whatever the details, you couldn’t keep the crowds away. Perhaps gawking at death was just one among many perversions. Or finding out more about it.
Out of the crowd she selected as her first customer a tall dark-haired young man with a narrow mustache. Perhaps that apparent shyness, that bewildered expression concealed a pleasurable surprise. In any case, he wasn’t here, she’d seen that immediately.
For that matter, he never went through the drawing room. He knew the merchandise by heart, he had no need to look at the display. And he was willing to pay a premium, in order to pick first and exclusively.
That’s what Lily had liked about him, at first. His decisiveness, his confidence, the way he knew what he wanted and how to get it. And then, in the bedroom, he turned into the opposite: weak, trembling, and then strong at the right moment.
As she stood waiting for the young man, whose hands were unsteady, to complete the transaction with Madame, she feigned an eagerness that she certainly didn’t feel. She remembered what the madam had told her at the first brothel where she’d ever worked, when she was just sixteen: you have to practice your art, and you can’t refuse any of the guests. Be cordial and accommodating; remember that your sole objective is to make sure they come back, and come back asking for you by name. Figure out what they want and give it to them, without putting up any resistance: act as if you’re having the best sex of your life, moan, sigh, squirm and kick, ask for mercy, compliment them on their size and their vigor. Pretend to come, more than once, and make sure you come when they do; don’t ever come for real, keep your wits about you, but do pretend. And since you’re so young, tell them that you’re here because of a terrible misfortune, because you were ruined by an old man, that you were pure as a lily. You’ll see, the madam told her, that screwing is only one of the reasons we’re here. Your pleasure is not one of them.
As Lily took the young man’s hand, she went on remembering. Since then, since those words, there had been plenty of men. Lily’d never had to work very hard to keep from enjoying herself; nor to find her way easily and directly to her customers’ hearts. She listened to the ones who wanted to talk, and there were plenty of them; they were the most remunerative because they’d buy hours of her time just to tell her the tangled, boring stories of their lives, stretched out on their backs on the bed, pants unbuttoned, staring at the ceiling; she’d wait for the ones who couldn’t seem to get an erection, letting them know that the secret of their impotence would never leave that room; she’d masturbate, pretending to rise to peaks of pleasure, with cucumbers or walking sticks, while old men with sagging guts and gold-framed spectacles watched her from the armchairs where they sat, jaws agape.
After just a year, there was no trace of Bianca Palumbo. Only Lily still existed, the whore with enormous breasts and no heart at all, who never lost her head and snorted impatiently at the love stories recounted by her tenderhearted colleagues. Anything but love, she thought to herself. The worst kind of back luck, the curse that never quits.
After closing the door behind her, she undid her silk gown and let it fall to the floor. The young man stared at her open-mouthed, unable to tear his eyes away from those magnificent mammaries, firm and erect in spite of their size. She led him to the sink and began unbuttoning his trousers.
When she met Enzo, she hadn’t been at Il Paradiso long. She was one of fifteen or so girls, and she assumed she’d be sent away shortly. Instead he had found her, selected her, and made it clear to Madame, with cold hard cash, that he didn’t want her shipped away from the cathouse with the other girls two weeks later.
They’d hit it off immediately. She’d had plenty of men like him before, men who were accustomed to giving orders, wealthy and powerful, but who turned back into children in the bedroom, eager to play: she didn’t care if what they wanted was a couple of sharp smacks or a cigarette burn on the thigh. Actually, to tell the truth, it was the only part of the whole thing she truly enjoyed; those bastards deserved it. But he wasn’t like that. He was looking for a different place—a mountain peak, the bottom of the ocean. For him, pain was something to say, a way of speaking. And Lily had discovered that she was built the same way. Exactly the same way.
She extracted the young man’s flaccid penis and turned on the water, murmuring reassuring words. He’d never once taken his eyes off her breasts.
She’d heard about it from some of the older whores, but she’d never believed it: they said you could find someone you’d be willing to pay, instead of being paid. Not because he was so handsome, which she didn’t care about a bit, nor out of tenderness, a sentiment she’d never experienced; it was actually about the sex. Lily enjoyed it, with Ventrone. It was as if he somehow knew how to push all her most deeply hidden buttons of pleasure, the buttons Lily didn’t even know she had; and he quivered with pleasure every time that she, suddenly, surprised him with a bite or a pinch, smiling at her in gratitude.
She washed the young man’s penis and then dried it. No sign of an erection.
With him, in an absurd and cerebral way, Lily was making love. She had become his slave, just as he had become hers. It struck her as almost inconceivable that Ventrone should pay to make her happy. She’d found a series of variants that drove him wild: objects, positions. He had awoken in her an unsuspected and marvelous creativity.
Until.
Until she arrived.
Viper.
The young man looked her in the face, for the first time.
“Are you the one who found her?
Someone told me that it was you.”
Lily’d never understood what it was that Ventrone had found in Viper’s bedroom that she couldn’t give him. All it took was one day of feeling under the weather, and she had lost him: he’d asked to try “that pretty one,” the woman he’d heard so much about, and he’d never come back to her again, save intermittently, when Viper had refused to open her legs for him.
Lily hadn’t asked him a thing. It would have been an admission of weakness, a flaw in that strong will that he so loved. Still, she couldn’t imagine what it could be, and so one rainy morning, she’d asked Viper, as they were applying nail polish and smoking while waiting for Il Paradiso to open for business. That slut had replied: maybe one day I’ll teach you.
Now he’d stopped coming to Il Paradiso.
He hadn’t been there for two days now. Not since the thing had happened.
But Lily knew that he’d come back to her eventually. She wouldn’t make the mistake of going to look for him, all she had to do was wait. He’d come back. Now that the spell had been broken, now that Viper would never ensnare him again, faking the things that to her came naturally.
And when he came back, she’d look him in the eyes, and everything would become clear. After all, she’d done it for him. And only for him. And an act of love like that could hardly go unnoticed.
Because it was in his eyes that she had seen his terror. His terror at what had happened. His terror at seeing her dead.
Dead.
God, what a bitch Viper could be. It really is true, a woman can work as a whore or she can be a whore: and the two things aren’t the same.
But now she was dead. She was cold and motionless, in a casket, underground, with a black tongue sticking out of that lovely pink rosebud of a mouth.
“Yes,” she told the young man. “I’m the one who found her.”
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