He had a point. I extended my hand. “You’ve got a deal.”
He shook it, chuckling. “Just remember that I don’t trust you even a little bit and that you’re never going to be smart enough to rip me off.”
He grabbed the wad of cash. “This is my advance. Now tell me who I’m supposed to tail.”
The waiters and waitresses were all happy to see me. Tortorelli started off on the wrong foot; he hadn’t understood that they had a demanding, exhausting job and deserved to be treated with respect. Things were even worse in the kitchen. I listened and reassured. Then I confronted the bookkeeper.
“Everybody hates you. Nice start.”
He carefully watched the ass of a customer as she walked by and I gave him all the time he wanted because that was a piece of interesting information that might help me get a handle on this guy’s personality.
“Look, Pellegrini, you’re lucky to have me here instead of the Palamaras,” he murmured, barely moving his lips. “I’m just a technician and I like to avoid trouble.”
“Then I don’t see why we should have any problems.”
“I take orders from the Calabrians, just like you do, but I outrank you, and hierarchy in this kind of business is the only way of keeping things organized. No one authorized you to do things your way. You’re going to have to get it into your fucking head that you have to answer for the things you do and you have ask me permission before you do them. Like the employee that you are.”
“Is there anything else?”
“Yes.”
“All right. It won’t happen again, but I want you to quit meddling in the way the place is run.”
“That’s a pity, because more than a few changes are needed in the way you’re operating here.”
He was trying to provoke a reaction and I ignored him. Unintentionally the bookkeeper had just provided me with a useful piece of information: the way the Calabrians had things planned, he was designated to take my place. Tortorelli was ambitious and thought a lot of himself. That much was clear, but nothing else was. He wasn’t even Calabrian. Where the fuck did he fit in?
He made me sit there and answer questions, mostly smart ones, for more than an hour. When he asked me what wine went best with Blue Stilton, I intentionally recommended the worst choice imaginable. Maybe that would teach him to stop busting my balls.
A little before the evening aperitif, Nicoletta came in with the owner of a lingerie shop to quench her thirst with an organic carrot juice. I watched Tortorelli, hoping he might show some interest in her. Not only was he indifferent, he made it clear with a wisecrack that he knew she was in charge of my prostitution ring. Brianese had informed them thoroughly.
At the agreed time, the Russian walked into the restaurant. He drank a spritz and impressed the bookkeeper’s features clearly in his memory. A short while later, Martina and Gemma came in too, and I was forced to introduce them to Tortorelli. The ’Ndrangheta bookkeeper was courteous and gallant and he was delighted to be invited to sit at their table. The restaurant was full and I had to take care of my customers. I made a mental note to grill the ladies later.
An hour or so later I noticed Gemma get up to go the restroom. She was changing, in fact she was even walking differently. Hurtling down into the abyss of my darkest desires was the best thing that could have happened to her. It was a pity that I’d have to go home to Martina that night.
When I replaced Tortorelli at the cash register at dinnertime I did my best to find any evidence of money laundering. I was curious to figure out how it worked. But I couldn’t detect anything out of the ordinary. I spied on him when it was time to shut down the cash register for the night, too, but to no avail.
“Don’t forget: tomorrow morning we have an appointment with your accountant to hand over the management of the books,” he said before leaving for the night. I watched him through the plate glass window as he walked away into the darkness, the daily receipts stuffed into a cheap briefcase. From that night on, he would be responsible for depositing the money in the night depository. He looked like a perfectly harmless beanpole of a man, strolling through the city streets. Downstairs from my apartment I saw Nicoletta sitting in her car and smoking a cigarette. I walked up to the car window.
“Ylenia was furious when she heard that her boss won’t have access to the whores anymore and she cancelled all our agreements. So long, commissionership.”
“Oh, they’d never have kept that promise. Brianese talked to the Calabrians about you, too. You’re too tangled up with me to be kept around.”
“That bastard!” she hissed, flicking her cigarette butt into the street.
“You can say that loud and clear. And you were his accomplice.”
“Don’t start that again, Giorgio.”
“I’ll do exactly the fuck what I want, Nicoletta,” I clarified the point for her. “Listen, what do you think about Tortorelli?”
“I don’t know. I’d have to get to know him a little better.”
”But he’s not going to let you get close enough,” I cut her off brusquely, handing her a sheet of paper with the address of the residential hotel where Brianese and Ylenia had their lovers’ trysts. “Find a way to get me in there. The best thing would be to rent an apartment. Use your brother’s real estate agency, fuck every tenant in the building, but don’t come back empty-handed.”
She clamped another cigarette between her lips. “I put the house up for sale.”
“What for?”
She looked at me as if I’d fallen to earth from some other planet. “I watched a girl being murdered on my couch. Have you already forgotten about that?”
“So now you’re not comfortable in the place?”
“I go there strictly to sleep at night.”
“Move in with Gemma.”
She snorted in annoyance. “That girl has some weird ideas in her head. I’d rather not, thanks.”
“That wasn’t a suggestion, Nicoletta. I just gave you an order.”
She started the engine and drove off without saying goodbye. Tortorelli was right about the importance of hierarchies. There were hierarchies for letting off your frustrations, too. Tortorelli took advantage of my subordinate status, and I did the same thing to Nicoletta. And to Martina. And to Gemma. They were essential to my survival. Only the person at the bottom of the pyramid is completely and irremediably fucked. That’s why it’s so important to find your proper place in the world. Whatever the cost.
Martina asked me if for just one night we could skip the ritual of the creams and ointments.
“Why?”
”I just want to lie here on the bed holding you,” she replied in a quavering voice. “I’ve been so unhappy.”
I did as she asked. “There’s no other woman. Just business.”
She hugged me tight. “The important thing is that you’re here with me.”
”Let’s talk a little,” I suggested, knowing that would make her happy.
I deftly steered her toward the subject that interested me. “How’s your father?”
”Worse all the time.”
”I’m sorry to hear that,” I said with a sigh. “I’ve given a lot of thought to this matter. After all, his illness is having serious repercussions on your mother’s and your sisters’ lives. I think it’s only right to try to do something to make things easier for them.”
She propped herself up on her elbow to look at me. “What do you mean?”
”I talked to a client of mine who’s a doctor. I asked him to find out the name of the best medical center in Europe for this condition and he told me about a clinic in Lahnstein, Germany. Apparently they’re miracle workers.”
”That would be wonderful.”
”I’ll pay for everything and you and your mother could take your father to Germany. There are residential hotels that rent apartments for t
he patients’ families.”
Martina was deeply moved, and I mentally said a word of thanks to the Internet. I’d had no idea how to get Martina out of harm’s way, but then it occurred to me that maybe I could take advantage of her father’s sickness. I goggled the word “Alzheimer’s” and looked around for a clinic somewhere in the deepest countryside. I found it in a little town in Rhineland-Palatinate.
”But we’d have to be apart for such a long time. At least a month, if not longer,” she said in a worried voice. “You have so much work to do with La Nena . . . ”
I put a finger against her lips. “Hush. You’re just worried that I might sleep with other women. We already had that conversation a while ago, or am I mistaken?” I snapped out in a harsh voice.
”No, you’re not mistaken.”
“And what did you promise me?”
“That I would try to be strong.”
I gave her a kiss. “You know that I love only you, baby doll of mine.”
I moved away from her in the bed and tried to get comfortable and fall asleep. That wasn’t what Martina was expecting, and it would upset her, but only a little. The next morning she’d try to find out if something she’d said or done had made me mad. I’d be intentionally evasive and then I’d pretend to take umbrage. An excellent way to start the day before dealing with that asshole the bookkeeper.
As we left my accountant’s office, Tortorelli informed me that I would be changing all my suppliers. He pulled a list of the new suppliers out of his inside jacket pocket. I’d never heard of any of them.
“But are they good suppliers?” I asked naïvely.
“From our point of view they’re the very best suppliers, Pellegrini.”
“If the quality of the restaurant declines, we all stand to lose.”
“No, actually only you do,” he replied in a flat voice. “Because you’ll look like an asshole who doesn’t know how to run his own place. As far as we’re concerned, if we lose customers and have to reduce expenses and staff, that’s better.”
He forced me to cross the street and drink an espresso in a café run by the Chinese. It was practically empty except for a couple behind the counter, an Asian playing a slot machine for losers, and a table full of little old men playing cards.
He pointed to the serial number on the receipt. “These guys don’t even pretend to have turnover or customers,” he explained. “They launder a million euros with the clear understanding that they’re going to lose thirty percent. Six months later they let the Italians take over management again and the bar starts operating normally again. We don’t work that way, and at the very most we take a loss of fifteen percent. But we more than make that back by investing the money we’ve laundered in the public works sector.”
“I’m not sure I understand exactly what you mean.”
“Talking to you is just a waste of time, Pellegrini. The important thing is that you understand that we aren’t the Chinese mob and that laundering money is both an art and a science.”
We went back to La Nena and in just a few hours I realized for the first time that I’d become a marionette. A sense of shame began to wash over me and I felt an intolerable wave of embarrassment. My one slender reed of hope lay in the natural acceleration of events that crime creates in the routine progress of life. For eleven years nothing noteworthy had happened. Then a series of events, beginning with Brianese stealing two million euros from me, had made negative changes in my life that trended toward its ultimate destruction. It was only a matter of time. But now my “criminal” reaction would trigger a new and unpredictable acceleration of events. That was my science, and killing was my art. I sighed and secretly hoped that I’d soon have an opportunity to show Tortorelli the precision and beauty of what I knew how to do.
Something important happened the following day, when I got a phone call from an officer at my bank who specialized in investments. He wanted to compliment me on the steady growth of revenue, which was growing by about a thousand euros a day. He asked if we could meet to examine a financial plan.
That’s how I discovered that the bookkeeper was adding money to the day’s take before taking it to the night depository. More or less thirty thousand euros a month. More money was coming in through the network of suppliers. It added up to about a million or 1.5 million euros a year. He must have other resources, otherwise it made no sense to take over a restaurant and put a man there full time.
But the interesting fact was that Tortorelli had a vault somewhere he was getting cash out of. And the first thing that occurred to me is that vaults are made to be filled up and then emptied.
Mikhail got in touch four days later, in the afternoon. Gulping uncomfortably, afraid to face Tortorelli’s sardonic smirk, I was forced to ask the bookkeeper for permission to leave the restaurant.
“What could you possibly have to do that’s so important?” the bastard took pleasure in asking.
“Family problems.”
“Ah, if the family’s involved go right ahread, but be back in time for dinner. I don’t feel like getting stuck here.”
As I was pulling onto the highway it started to rain and, shortly thereafter, to hail. I sped up in search of a bridge to take shelter under. A few miles at 100 mph and I found one, but it was too late to save the body from dents. I got back in the car and drove on, indifferent to the pelting ice pellets. My former lawyer or the Palamaras would pay for the bodywork.
The service plaza was more crowded than usual. As soon as I parked the Russian pulled open the passenger side door and sat down beside me.
“A luxury vehicle is only beautiful if it’s immaculate,” he launched into a philosophical riff. “Otherwise it’s a blight on the landscape. It triggers a Russian’s inborn melancholy.”
I rubbed my eyes. “You have something more interesting to tell me, don’t you, Mikhail?”
He smiled. “Tortorelli comes from Pero, on the outskirts of Milan,” he began. “He has no criminal record, he owned a food services company that went bankrupt three years ago. He’s divorced, and he has two high-school-aged boys. His ex-wife is in a new relationship with a local small businessman.”
“You got this information from the deputy commissioner of police who offers protection to the two Neapolitan ex-hookers you work for.”
“I called in a favor,” he admitted.
“It doesn’t strike me as particularly valuable.”
“Well, it’s useful to put our man into context,” he hedged in self-justification. “He lives in a suite in a hotel operated by a company with ties to the Palamaras.”
“Which one?”
“The Negresco Palace.”
I knew the place. It opened for business recently, all glass and cement. A nondescript four-star hotel on the outskirts of town, not far from the highway. A number of them had been springing up recently, after the expansion of the trade fair’s exhibition space. I wondered if the Calabrians’ vault was there.
“The bookkeeper spends all his time in your restaurant,” the Russian went on. “I followed him at night and in the morning. It wasn’t hard. He’s definitely a creature of habit. When he leaves La Nena he walks to Piazza Vittoria di Lepanto and catches a cab from there to the Negresco Palace. In the morning, he takes a cab back to the piazza, does a few errands, and then goes to work.”
“Doesn’t he ever have sex?”
“He calls out and has whores sent up to his hotel room.”
“That’s all? You didn’t find anything else?” I asked in disappointment.
“There’s only one odd detail,” said the Russian, finally coming to the point. “Every Monday the cab that picks him up in the piazza is from a limo service.”
“A limo service,” I echoed him. “Not a medallion cab, a private service.”
Mikhail’s lips twisted into a sardonic smile that reminded me, for just a second,
of a French actor. “It’s always the same driver, and he always has the same car, a Lexus sedan with a gray metallic finish. But here’s the thing: the car drives all the way here from Milan, just to take Tortorelli to his hotel.”
“How do you know?”
“I followed him. He dropped off the bookkeeper and went right back to the limo company office.”
“You know what I think? I think that driver is so generous that he just makes the rounds of the various Tortorellis and gives each of them a big fat envelope full of cash.”
“You think?”
I told him about the unprecedented steady growth in turnover at La Nena. “You remember when you asked if I’d decided to rip off the ’Ndrangheta? Well, the way things are going, it’s starting to look like a distinct possibility.”
“Then you’re going to need a renegade with big square balls, as you Italians like to say.” The sly smile had reappeared on his face.
“I’ll bet you’ve found me one.”
He stuck his hand out the window and waved it as if he was signaling to someone. A few seconds later the rear door opened and a man got into the car. I looked up into the rearview mirror.
“Hey, asshole,” I shouted. “Get out of my car.”
The Russian put a hand on my arm. “It’s him.”
I jerked around to get a better look at him. “But he’s black.”
“My name is Hissène and I’m African. I come from Chad,” he corrected me in excellent Italian, spoken with a strong French accent.
“It’s a pleasure to meet you, but I still don’t understand what the fuck you’re doing in my car.”
The Chadian opened the door and spoke to Mikhail. “I think the two of you may need to talk things over. Why don’t I wait outside?”
“Why were you so rude to him?” the Russian scolded me.
“Because this is the Veneto and even the traffic cops are on the hunt for illegal immigrants,” I answered indignantly. “He’s just the right color to attract plenty of the kind of attention we definitely don’t want.”
At the End of a Dull Day Page 10