“Storm warnings in your family?” he asked. “You haven’t looked at her once since she walked in the place.”
I snorted. “I love her to death but she is such a pain in the ass.”
“Like every woman on earth,” he said brusquely and changed the subject. “This was a first rate dinner, I have to say, but it won’t get you a special rate. What can I do for you?”
I uttered a name. Nothing more.
“Well, it’s a good thing it’s just a routine assignment,” he commented in a worried voice.
“It is, don’t work yourself up. All I need is for you find a contact who can arrange for me to transmit a message to him in an absolutely secure way. This has nothing to do with politics or even Italy. It has to do with a foreign business opportunity for which I’d get a percentage.”
He caught a whiff of money and his scruples diminished. “How much are you offering? I can’t go by my hourly rate on something like this.”
“Ten thousand.”
We shook hands. “Give me a couple of days.”
I looked up and my eyes met the gaze of the Calabrian, who was watching us curiously. I had no doubt that when the private investigator left the restaurant Giuseppe Palamara’s thug would follow him. I went over to Ding Dong and discreetly slipped him a hundred euros. “What do you want me to do, boss?”
“Beat up a guy.”
“Who?”
I pointed to him. “Wait until he gets away from here.”
“But he’s white!”
“He’s white but he’s done some bad things. I don’t want him to set foot in La Nena again.”
“I’m on it, boss.”
When Roby De Palma came over to the counter to say goodbye, the Calabrian slipped out the door. After a short while Ding Dong came back in and gave me a wink. A few longtime customers walked in and came over to the counter, complaining that my bouncer had beaten down an apparently innocent passerby for no good reason. I treated them to a round of drinks and explained that the guy that had caught the beating was a pusher and that he’d been spotted repeatedly loitering outside a high school that was only a few hundred yars away from the restaurant.
“Then he treated him too gently,” complained one of the customers. “He should have broken his legs. They’re easier to spot if they’re limping.”
“Spinning, baby, spinning,” I ordered in a loud voice, as I shut the front door of our apartment. Martina emerged from the darkness. She was nude. She took both my hands and held them up to her lips.
After she fell into a deep and restorative slumber, from which she wouldn’t awaken until her metabolism had recovered, I got up and went into my office. There I edited the video of Ylenia’s confession into a reliable and marketable product. I created a short audio extract that could prove useful as a first sample.
They waited until I showed up at La Nena. Then they went over to Ding Dong. One of them asked him something and the other stabbed him three times in the belly in quick succession. Typical prison technique. Arm bent upward; short, sharp thrusts. The bouncer walked in from the sidewalk, pressing his hands against the stab wounds. I told him to lay down and told a waiter to get a tablecloth and apply it to stop the hemorrhaging.
The doctor at the emergency room told me Ding Dong was in pretty bad shape and that he was sending him directly into surgery. I called Ding Dong’s mother and then went back to work. I told the police that last night Ding Dong had chased away someone he assumed was a drug dealer. A Maghrebi or a Romanian, I couldn’t remember exactly. While I was talking to the cops one of Palamara’s men came in. It was probably one of the guys who’d attacked Ding Dong. He stood at the bar not six feet away and ordered a Fernet Branca. I didn’t give a fuck about my bouncer. I’d only used him to make sure that they couldn’t follow and identify Roby De Palma, but the Palamaras were starting to take things a little too far.
Then it was my turn to be questioned by reporters. They asked me to pose on the scene of the attack and focused on the bloodstained cobblestones, while I repeated my fairytale about the drug dealer, calling on the public authorities and the police to make sure that the center of town became a safe place for honest citizens again.
In midafternoon the procession of security experts looking for work began. I asked each man one question: “Ever been in jail?”
I hired the only applicant who’d been willing to admit he had and to specify the crime and the time served. The restaurant was suddenly more crowded and profitable than ever. When the doctors reported that Ding Dong was going to pull through I announced it live and Ylenia proposed a toast to a brave man who had risked his life to keep the drug dealers out of our neighborhood. I slipped a thousand euros into an envelope and sent it Ding Dong’s mother. The ’Ndrangheta thug was the last customer to leave the restaurant.
I’d made up my mind to go see Gemma, but Martina called me when I was halfway there. “You need my complete devotion again tonight. I’m ready for you.”
I put up resistance and ventured onto the territory of absolute power: I forced her to dig deep into her most hidden fantasies to see if she could come up with something that would make me want to go back to her. She managed to electrify me.
“I’m benching you for the night,” I told Gemma.
“Oh, King of Hearts, I’ll be so brokenhearted.”
There are powerful men like Sante Brianese. There are others like Giuseppe Palamara. The one I wanted to contact didn’t fit into any clearly defined category. He’d inherited his power and he’d managed to preserve and use it with great skill, nimbly sidestepping the great tidal waves of scandals that had decimated the Italian ruling class. He’d judiciously measured out his own media exposure. Unlike so many others, he made appearances only when he had something important to say, and he always did so with excellent manners and great respect. He’d constructed a reputation as a gentleman at home in the countryside, even though he had homes scattered around the financial capitals of the world, and he’d been one of the first manufacturers to move the family industry offshore, to Romania. He’d never concealed his right-leaning political sympathies but he’d always refused to be lured into pursuing public office. He’d also courteously declined the overtures of Confindustria, Italy’s federation of employers.
I couldn’t say why I’d chosen him as a strategic cornerstone for my creative criminality. On the one hand I was pretty certain that someone who steers such a careful path must be no better than all the rest, only smarter, because you just don’t rise to certain levels unless you’re a real son of a bitch. In the best sense of the term, of course. Moreover, he did everything possible to stand out from the crowd, he was painstakingly stylish, and he refused to go along with the standard procedures of his milieu: these things made me feel close to him and even similar to him. I felt sure we’d get along.
Roby De Palma was a man of his word and he secured a meeting for me with a guy in his early sixties, with a creased face and the callused hands of a lifetime of hard manual labor.
“I was told to come talk to you,” he said without preamble, in dialect.
I handed him the CD I’d burned with the audio recording of Ylenia’s voice as she dug a shallow grave for her lover. Just a few choice extracts, enough to give an idea of the quality of the merchandise.
“If he’s interested, he knows how to get in touch with me.”
But I couldn’t manage to get in touch with Nicoletta. I doubted that she had fallen into the Palamaras’ hands. They’d have already withdrawn their siege of La Nena and I’d already be dead, after a long and painful session in which I’d have given up all my secrets.
She was holed up somewhere, trying to live on her savings and make the best of life as it is. She’d never been the same after Isabel’s death. Once again I found myself wishing that wherever she was holed up, it was someplace deep and distant. Outside of the country, ideal
ly. Nicoletta wasn’t the type to go to a monastery; she’d be more likely to head for a resort, where she could scrub her conscience clean with saunas and massages and vigorous sex with the local beefcakes.
“Giorgio, wake up.”
I opened my eyes and looked up at the time projected on the ceiling by my clock radio. “It’s 6 A.M. What the fuck were you thinking?”
“There’s a guy who’s come to pick you up,” Martina explained. “Are you doing renovations or something at the restaurant?”
“Why do you ask?”
“He looks like a workman, I don’t know, a plumber, maybe . . . ”
I leapt to my feet. Now I knew who was waiting for me. I shuffled to the front door in my slippers, where the powerful man’s emissary stood patiently, with his canvas painter’s cap bearing the logo of a major brand of cattle feed in his hand.
“I’ll be there in ten minutes.”
I didn’t have as much time as I would have liked to prepare for such an important meeting, but the surprise scheduling was certainly intentional. When I got into the man’s compact car I tapped my jacket pocket one last time to make sure that I had brought the flash stick with Ylenia’s interview.
I suffered with unruffled resignation through a wordless and lengthy drive, at low cruising speed, to an enormous country estate southwest of Ferrara. The car turned in through a wrought-iron gate and followed a drive leading to an old villa undergoing renovation. There was scaffolding everywhere as well as neat stacks of terracotta bricks and roof tiles. But there were no workers that day. Next to the entrance was a car I’d only seen in photographs. A Maybach 62S—half a million euros’ worth of luxury automobile. A detail that made a good impression on me. A truly refined vehicle isn’t common in the Veneto. Most of the rich people here like them flashy and loud.
An elegant woman of about fifty materialized at the door as if by enchantment. Her slender body was sheathed in a severe black tailored suit; her gray hair was pulled into an evanescent bun.
She smiled as she greeted me with exquisite courtesy, then she asked me to follow her. We walked through a succession of bare, dusty rooms until we reached a gleaming oak door. Considering the effort that the woman clearly expended in opening it, that door concealed a bulletproof armored core. I walked into a large office furnished in ultramodern style, with furniture unlike anything I’d ever seen, in sharp contrast with the collection of icons hanging on the wall.
I was stopped by a young man with “ex-cop” stamped on his face. He did a quick and professional body search.
“Forgive me for taking these precautions, Pellegrini,” said the man who had agreed to meet with me. “You are a former terrorist, after all, and I’ve been in the crosshairs of your comrades in the Veneto for many years now.”
“But it’s been so long,” I objected under my breath.
The bodyguard left the room and we were alone. I sat down on an uncomfortable yellow plastic chair.
“Pardon me if I have nothing to offer you, but this isn’t my house. It belongs to a company and I’m just borrowing it for a couple of hours.”
The message was unmistakable: this meeting never happened, and it would be impossible to prove otherwise.
He knit the fingers of his white, well-manicured hands together. “I listened to the material that you sent me and I want to start by telling you that I’m not interested in buying it or putting it on the market.”
“Then why the fuck did you have someone come to my house and wake me up at six in the morning?” I thought before replying, more judiciously: “But I don’t want to sell it.”
“Then I’m afraid I don’t quite understand.”
I pulled out the flash stick and laid it on the table. “The material, as you call it, is actually a video and it’s much longer, much more articulated, and infinitely more interesting. I just want to make it available to you.”
“Explain what you mean.”
“As you must have realized, the information concerns the Honorable Brianese and his vast network of clientelism and personal interests. Unfortunately, he’s gone completely out of control and I’ve been a victim of his dirty dealings.”
I told him about the fake investment in Dubai and the arrival of the Calabrians in response to my efforts to get back my two million euros. I told him about Tortorelli, his disappearance, and the way the Palamaras had been persecuting me.
He reached out, picked up the flash stick, and inserted it in the USB port of his PC. A few seconds later, Ylenia’s voice emerged from the speakers.
“These statements were extorted under torture,” he noted with some disappointment.
“I kind of lost my head,” I admitted. “In any case, every word of Signorina Mazzonetto’s statement is pure gold.”
He watched the video from start to finish without moving a muscle. He pulled out the flash stick and gave it back to me. “You see, Signor Pellegrini, the very foundation of the Veneto rests on a clearly defined bloc of power, made up of the various manufacturers’ associations, the Padanos, the party in which Brianese is so active, and responsible sectors of the trade unions. None of them really likes any of the others, but what cements the alliance into place is the fact that they each need the others. Do you follow me?”
I nodded, but the truth was I didn’t have the slightest idea of what all that political folderol had to do with my money and the Palamaras.
“The situation in this country is fluid, but there will never be any real change in the Veneto, for the simple reason that no one is capable of modifying reality itself. There won’t be any dramatic scandals like the ones that blight our unfortunate Italy, nor will there be any sweeping judicial investigations. Of any kind. We’ll soon see a series of adjustments in the equilibrium between the Padanos and their allies due to internal issues that are going to result in a schism in the Northern Italian political front. These issues are going to be exacerbated by a number of minor judicial investigations that will single out regional officers suspected of financial crimes.”
“I’m confused,” I interrupted with a sense of unease. “I’m not sure what you’re driving at.”
“I was simply explaining to you why Brianese is untouchable and irreplaceable. I can also tell you confidentially that he’s going to be appointed a cabinet minister.”
“But I have no intention of trying to hurt him,” I retorted.
“Then you misspoke a few minutes ago when you referred to the Honorable Brianese’s ‘dirty dealings,’ am I right?”
I changed course instantly. “I only want him to go back to frequenting my establishment. La Nena will be at his complete disposal for all future election campaigns, but I’m not willing to be murdered just to get him off the hook, nor am I willing to let him steal my money.”
“That’s quite understandable.”
I picked up the flash stick. “Well, do you want this or not?”
“If you insist in your determination to put it into my hands, courtesy demands at the very least that I accept it,” he explained. “What use I may choose to make of it is none of your business.”
He went back to his computer and I sat there like an idiot. I stood up, mumbled a farewell, and left the room. The woman with her hair in a bun walked me back to the car as if I were the King of Spain.
After a while, that long wordless return journey got on my nerves. “Is he always such an asshole?” I blurted out.
The driver laughed heartily. “His father was worse,” he confided in dialect.
I was so furious and humiliated that I stayed away from the restaurant and from Martina and Gemma as well. I knew I was in a dangerous mood. I got in my car and drove aimlessly from one province to another, through an infinite network of bypasses, highways, bridges, and overpasses. Every so often I stopped to look at the landscape or the traffic. I’d finished high school and a few years of college. I’d
grown up in an educated family. In other words, I wasn’t a certified asshole but that’s what I felt like. I couldn’t decipher the meaning of the messages that the man I so admired had tossed offhandedly in my direction. All I knew was that right then and there, I felt like kicking him in the ass.
My cell phone rang. Caller unavailable. “It’s Nicoletta. I heard you wanted to talk to me.”
“Yeah. There are some people looking for you. You’ve absolutely got to disappear.”
“Should I be afraid?”
“Very afraid. If they catch you they’ll kill you.”
“I’m not ready to leave. I need a few more days to wrap up some things.”
“Then you’re going to have to worry about me catching you before they do, because I can’t run the risk of having you talk.”
That scared her. “I have a friend who lives in New Zealand. I’ll get a flight tomorrow.”
“Get back in touch in six months and I’ll let you know if it’s safe to come back.”
Had I made the right decision by letting her live? It certainly hadn’t been prudent, but the conditions for her survival had been established by the intrinsic dynamics of criminal creativity. Attending her funeral was the last thing I could afford to do right now. And I really couldn’t go out and dig another shallow grave in the little graveyard I’d created on Brianese’s estate.
At the end of a dull day Ylenia showed up with a shopping bag made of organic cotton, filled with cash. “Fifty thousand euros a month till the debt is paid off.”
“Has something happened that I don’t know about?”
“It was Sante’s decision,” she replied. “I’d also like to ask you to be so kind as to come up with a menu and an estimate for a bridal shower.”
“Who’s the lucky girl?”
“I am.”
“Who’s the guy?”
“His name is Franco, you don’t know him.”
“And how did you meet him?”
She told me where he worked and everything became clear. “Another one of Sante’s decisions, I assume?”
At the End of a Dull Day Page 16