“Yes. But not just that. Have you ever heard of World of Warcraft, Grand Theft Auto, EverQuest . . .” Blume could see by Principe’s face that he hadn’t. “I’ll get Pernazzo to explain once he is in custody,” said Blume. “And now it’s my turn to surprise you: Innocenzi gave me the location of Alleva’s hideout near Civitavecchia. The Holy Ghost is flitting down there as we speak. Along with Paoloni. And God knows how many others.”
Principe set aside the papers. “You sent them . . . Good move, I suppose. I wish I had known first, of course. What do you think they will find there?”
“An empty house, trace evidence. I don’t know. Too little too late, that’s for sure. Nothing that allows us to step back in time and prevent any of the killing.”
“If we could go back in time to prevent murders, we’d both be out of a job,” said Principe. “And how far back would you want to go? To Cain and Abel?”
“I’d settle for last week,” said Blume. His cell phone started ringing. “Or maybe some time before they invented these things.”
38
FRIDAY, AUGUST 27, 12:30 P.M.
HAVING REMAINED DETACHED and efficient while killing Clemente, and having successfully battled down an onrush of nausea at the scene, Angelo Pernazzo was disappointed that he threw up as soon as he arrived home. It was the tension, especially on the drive back, he decided. He wiped the toilet rim with some tissue, filled the bath with tepid water and lay in it for an hour until the water was cold and gray. Then he put all his clothes in the washing machine, poured in bleach and washing powder, and set it at the highest temperature. Whatever did not survive, he would throw out. He put on a pair of elasticized gray tracksuit bottoms, a pair of cotton espadrilles, and a red V-neck Roma football shirt. He ate some Ringo chocolate cream cookies, drank a Diet Coke and felt better.
He wiped down the knife with a rag soaked in pink denatured alcohol, enjoying the smell and the glint. Then he put it on his desk next to his computer. That is where he had always kept it since he bought it at a martial arts shop outside the train station in Ostia, nine months ago. He had impressed them, walking in out of the rain, ignoring all the shit on display, asking for a Ka-Bar Tanto that he knew they would have to order from Japan.
Exactly on time, he took his scheduled twenty-minute sleep. When he awoke, he climbed off the sofa with the same sort of feeling he used to get on his birthday morning, when he knew his mother would be waiting in the kitchen with precisely whatever gift he had asked for. The last gift she had given him was a silver bracelet with his name inscribed on it. This was his first birthday without her, but if Massoni came through on his promise, today Pernazzo would finally get himself a pistol.
He had asked for a Colt Python, but Massoni had laughed at him.
Eventually Massoni agreed to get him a Glock, in exchange for which he wanted Pernazzo to do him a little favor, which was to go to Clemente, tell him to back off, stop disrupting the shows.
“You want me to take him a message from Alleva?” Pernazzo had asked.
“No. Just tell him to back off. Don’t say who the message is from.”
“I could say it was from myself.”
“And how would that work, Angelo? Are you going to threaten the man? Just deliver the message. No source, just a warning. Think you can do that?”
Once Pernazzo had done this favor, Massoni promised, he would get his gun. For fifteen hundred euros. Angelo knew it was five times as much as it was worth, and Massoni knew he knew.
Pernazzo’s first real contact with Massoni had been a fist in the stomach. That was eighteen months ago.
His mother was still dying in her bedroom, and the doorbell had rung. He answered to a massive man with a blue tattoo on his neck. Massoni asked Pernazzo to identify himself and, when Pernazzo did, punched him directly in the solar plexus.
Pernazzo had never received a punch like that. As he lay on the floor, all he could think of was that he needed to breathe in, but couldn’t. The blow had scrambled his thoughts, which re-formed into a single imperative: breathe. His brain started screaming the command, his limbs began to thrash as he tried to obey. Perhaps the worst of it was that he could not make a sound. He lay there jerking, mouth open like a fish, agonizing in total silence. No one had hurt him physically before. Then, finally, the air came whooshing in, making him hoot, gasp, and hoot again. By the time he had finished hooting, he could hear his mother’s anxious voice from the bedroom asking if that was him.
Massoni had taken apart the living room, the bedroom, kitchen. He had done it professionally and quietly. Pernazzo saw he had looked in several places where he had hidden money in the past.
“Where is it?” Massoni had asked without even turning round, as Pernazzo staggered in behind him.
“I haven’t got it. You said to have it for this afternoon. It’s still morning.”
“If you don’t have it now, you won’t have it in the afternoon.”
“Yes, I will. I was paid for a Web site. Bank transfer the other day. The money’s in the bank.”
Massoni went over to the door leading into Pernazzo’s mother’s bedroom. As he reached it, he paused and turned around to look at Pernazzo.
“What’s in there?”
“My mother.”
“And maybe the five thousand you owe Alleva? Five thousand eight as it now is.”
“No, it’s not in there. She’s very old. She’s dying.”
Massoni stepped back a little from the door.
“She could have heard that,” he said.
“She’s too doped to know, too much in pain to care.”
Massoni leaned over and practically plucked Pernazzo from the ground. “We’re going to the bank together. I hope for your sake you were telling the truth.”
Pernazzo had been telling the truth. He had been paid five thousand for a Web design, five thousand more for some JavaScript that wasn’t even very good, and a few hundred from another client for some style sheet templates.
His bank balance was eleven thousand euros, of which he owed twenty-two hundred in VAT immediately, and around four thousand more in taxes, payable in a few months. After paying off his fifty-eight-hundred-euro gambling debt to Alleva, he would be unable to cover his tax bill. Unless his mother died first.
Pernazzo came out of the bank that day with sixty-three hundred-euro notes. Massoni was waiting for him. He handed him fifty- eight notes. Massoni counted them three times. Pernazzo allowed him to walk away a bit, then called out. Massoni stopped, walked back over, fists clenched. As he reached him, Pernazzo deftly inserted five one-hundred bills into Massoni’s hand.
“That’s for not going into my mother’s bedroom. I appreciate it.”
Massoni looked at him, closed his fist around the money. He smiled contemptuously at Pernazzo.
Pernazzo smiled back. Massoni could be bought. It took longer than he expected, and he had to pay Massoni off a few times, but eventually, Massoni told him the underdog trick, and together they laid out a plan for placing a large bet against Alleva. Massoni said he would get some other friends involved.
After his bath, he sat by the phone and waited. After an hour and ten minutes, it rang.
“Did you take the message?” said Massoni not wasting time with preliminaries.
“I did,” said Pernazzo. He felt a catch in his throat, and wondered whether he was going to vomit again. But then he realized it was joy rising from his chest. He did not want to vomit: he wanted to sing, roar, laugh. Pernazzo hugged himself in glee.
“Did he say anything?”
Pernazzo thought back. Had Clemente said anything? He could only remember grunts and gasps and those wet sounds at the end.
“No.”
“Shit. If he brings journalists again we’ll have to cancel for months.”
“I don’t think he’ll bring any journalists to the dog fight tomorrow,” said Pernazzo.
“Did he say that?”
“Not exactly. This is shit you can’t explain on the phone.”<
br />
He left the phrase hanging there, but Massoni ignored it. “You got the money?”
“Yes.”
“OK. I’ll be around in an hour.”
Pernazzo sat waiting. Listening to the radio. There was no news of Clemente’s murder. He was scared of what Massoni might do if he found out, but he was dying to tell him, too.
39
FRIDAY, AUGUST 27, 5 P.M.
MASSONI SAT DOWN on a wooden-slat chair near Pernazzo’s desk. The chair let out a sharp crack. Massoni stood up, looked at it, and sat down more slowly. The chair held its own. He put a plastic bag on the floor, and lifted out a gray Puma shoebox, about to give way at the sides.
He slid the box across the floor toward Pernazzo, who had settled on the sofa. It hit something sticky on the floor, fell over and lost its lid. Inside, partly enveloped in a lint cloth, was a colorless Glock 22 that looked like it was fashioned from prison soap. Pernazzo bent down to retrieve it.
Massoni did not move a muscle.
Basically, Pernazzo was disappointed. The weapon did not look impressive. It did not even look real. He really did not want to part with fifteen bright green hundred-euro notes for this thing.
He picked it up. It was even lighter than he had imagined. With a sudden sense of panic, he wondered if it might not be a fake, and Massoni was brimming with silent laughter right now, dying to tell his friends about selling a toy gun for one and a half grand. Casually, he checked it. It looked real enough. He had read that all you had to do with a Glock was pull the strange double trigger.
“The money’s there, on the desk,” said Pernazzo. He watched as Massoni looked over, saw the envelope, and beside the envelope the magnificent knife. Now there was a real weapon. “Be back in a moment.”
Pernazzo took his gun, went to the kitchen and examined it more carefully. It was real. He exerted tiny pressure on the safety catch and trigger mechanism, and felt it begin to travel back. That’s all it would take. Then he opened the refrigerator, came back in with two tumblers and a one-and-a-half-liter plastic bottle of Fanta, his favorite drink.
“Want some?”
“No,” said Massoni.
Pernazzo twisted open the top, enjoyed the hiss and the gassy orange whiff, then poured himself a full glass. He put the glasses on the desk. The money was gone; the knife was in a different position.
He drank down his glass, holding the Glock by his side, in a natural way. He put down his glass, picked up the plastic bottle and carried it over to the sofa, and crammed it into the corner so that half of it was protruding from below the velveteen brown cushion. He leaned over, placed the barrel of the pistol right against the plastic and, as he had read he was supposed to do, squeezed rather than pulled the trigger.
The gun went click.
“You didn’t like your Fanta?” said Massoni.
Pernazzo kept his back turned. He could feel himself beginning to shake. He tried to modulate his voice, but the words came out vibrating with emotion. “The gun you sold me doesn’t even work!”
“It’s not loaded,” said Massoni. “Look.”
Pernazzo had to turn around now. He set a look of indifference on his face as he did so, but the grin on Massoni’s face almost made him lose it.
Massoni was holding out both hands. In one was a magazine clip, in the other a red and gray box.
“Bullets,” said Massoni. “Here.” His huge hand beckoned Pernazzo to give him back the pistol. Pernazzo thought about it, then surrendered the weapon.
Massoni popped out the magazine, inserted the new one, shook the box. “These are forty-caliber cartridges.” He opened the box, plucked out snub-nosed bullets and began pressing them into the empty magazine with his fat thumb. “Like this. Easy, see?”
“Just put them on the desk.”
Massoni did as asked, and said, “You’ve got to tell me what that move with the Fanta was about.”
“Give me back my gun first.”
Massoni held out the weapon, and Pernazzo snatched it. He let it hang in the air for a few seconds, its square-shaped barrel pointing causally toward Massoni’s crotch, kneecaps.
Eventually Massoni noticed, and said, “Careful.”
Pernazzo went back to the sofa. The weapon in his hand felt better balanced.
“Why do you want to shoot the bottle?” insisted Massoni.
“I want to test it.”
Massoni scraped his neck tattoo with his forefinger.
“Test what?”
“The Glock!”
“Against the Fanta, it is going to win.”
“The bottle is a silencer. You put the barrel up against a full plastic bottle and fire, it muffles the sound.”
Massoni pulled his head back in disbelief. “Who told you that?”
“None of your business.”
“You want to shoot that bottle on the sofa?”
Pernazzo began to raise the weapon slightly so that it was aiming at Massoni’s barge-like shoe.
“Yeah.”
“You’ll cover the whole place in fizzy orange.”
“That’s obvious,” said Pernazzo.
“Yeah, but you’ll blow a hole in the sofa, too.”
“So?”
“I don’t get it. Those are forty-caliber cartridges. You’ll probably smash a hole in the wall or floor, too, and the noise would be just as loud.”
“No, it won’t. The bottle will silence it.”
“No way. Not a forty-caliber in a closed room. You ever used a pistol in an enclosed space?”
Pernazzo looked at the large shape of Massoni, colorless against the bright window. His hand ached in sympathy with his imagination, which foresaw the Glock in his hand and himself standing in front of Massoni sprawled on the floor as he retrieved the money.
Massoni shrugged, “Whatever you want to think. Tell me about Clemente. Did you tell him we were watching him, his wife, his kid?”
“Yes.”
“Did he say anything?”
“No.”
“I don’t even believe you went to his house,” said Massoni. “He probably wasn’t even in. Or maybe you chickened out when he answered the door. It doesn’t matter. We’ll find a proper way of persuading him.”
“I killed him,” said Pernazzo. “I got in and I killed the bastard. With that knife on the table, the one you just touched.”
Massoni moved away from the window, and the sunlight struck Pernazzo between the eyes, disorienting him and giving a strobe-light effect to Massoni’s movements. One moment he was at the window, next moment he seemed to have got across the floor in a single jerking movement and was standing in front of Pernazzo. He balled Pernazzo’s shirt in his fist, drew their faces together, then relaxed and said, “No. You’re kidding. In your dreams you killed a man.”
“That’s his bag there,” said Pernazzo pointing to a gray backpack near the desk.
“What’s in it?”
“Nothing. I used it for my clothes.”
“No, you didn’t. This isn’t some fantasy game.”
“I killed him. You’ll hear. It’ll be on TV and the radio.”
“No way,” said Massoni. “I was just messing with your head sending you there. You think we need you as messenger boy?”
“You couldn’t afford to go there yourself. It was too risky, so you sent me.”
“If we wanted to harm the guy, we’d have sent a real person. Jesus, you’re serious? How did you get in?”
“The building door downstairs was open, then I just knocked on his apartment door. He opened.”
“And you—what—you burst in and stabbed him?”
“A guy was delivering groceries. He had gone upstairs, left two boxes there. When the dog lover opened, he thought I was the grocery boy. Made it easier. Except I had to wait till I was sure the real grocery boy wasn’t going to knock on the door.”
“He was on his own?”
“Yes.”
“Thank Christ for small mercies. Do you know whose
daughter he’s fucking? That’s why I couldn’t do it . . . Have you any idea what you’ve just done? What was so hard about dropping a few hints, like I said? I should—I should shoot you right now.”
But Massoni made no move to extract a weapon. Maybe he was not armed. Pernazzo tightened his grip on his own.
“I need to phone Alleva,” said Massoni. “This is unbelievable.”
“So phone him. It’s about time you and he started taking me seriously.”
Massoni pulled out a small folding cell phone, and stared at it doubt-fully. Pernazzo wondered how he managed to push fewer than ten buttons at a time with his sausage fingers.
Massoni eventually made his call. “Yeah, I know, unbelievable,” Pernazzo heard him say. He used the word three times.
When he had finished, he looked at Pernazzo and shook his head slowly from side to side—a gesture of admiring disbelief, Pernazzo felt.
“Are we going to see Alleva?”
“No. First, we check that this is true. You stay here. Don’t move from this house.”
“What about our bet for tomorrow night—the underdog fight?”
Massoni ran his hand through the hedgehog hair of his head. “You expect the dog fight to go ahead? After Clemente has been killed? The whole operation will close for months now.”
“Shit, I hadn’t thought about that,” said Pernazzo.
“Alleva’s going to hold you responsible for lost income. But that’s the least of your worries now.”
“We can do the underdog bet some other time, then,” said Pernazzo.
“Sure we can, Angelo. Sooner or later you’re going to be a big winner.”
“And you. You get thirty percent.”
“How could I forget?” said Massoni. “Stay in, remember? Answer the door to visitors. It’ll be me or maybe Alleva.”
He left.
Pernazzo spent the rest of the day monitoring the news. At eight, he took a scheduled twenty-minute nap and dreamed about his mother, as he did every night since the night he had helped her to die. He dreamed about Clemente, and he dreamed about the girl with the sleek hair running barefoot. He had met her in Second Life, or when he was in primary school. He couldn’t remember.
THE DOGS of ROME Page 31