Gang of Lovers

by Massimo Carlotto

  The restaurateur possessed a sick gift of the gab that allowed him to render interesting even a story steeped in needless cruelty.

  I felt the need to recap what he’d said, just to be sure I’d understood correctly. “Are you saying that you let two psychopaths slaughter a young university professor and bury his body in an unmarked grave, just so you could punish his wealthy lover for refusing to pay the ransom?”

  “Exactly,” he said in the voice of a wise elder statesman. “Di Lello was a miserable chump, a coward willing to sell out completely in exchange to save his skin and safeguard his secret.”

  “Just like you,” I broke in. “You’ve done the same thing all your life, even now you’re ready to let three people die as long as your miserable life is spared.”

  “Why, what language, Buratti!” he said derisively. “So you aren’t the amoeba I always took you for. The difference between me and Di Lello is that in his situation I’d have come out alive and stronger than ever for one simple reason: I always land on my feet.”

  Rossini pulled pack the lever on his pump-action shotgun to load a cartridge filled with pellets normally used to hunt wild boar. A sinister sound that for a brief moment succeeded in wiping the arrogant expression off Pellegrini’s face. The man picked up his cell phone and alerted Togno of his imminent arrival.

  The flunky’s jaw dropped in astonishment when he found himself facing a gun aimed at the center of his chest. He turned to look at his boss who quickly reassured him: “Keep calm, Federico, I’ve made a deal with these gentlemen.”

  But Togno wasn’t completely stupid. “What kind of a deal could you have made with Buratti?” he asked, pointing at me.

  Rossini slipped his hand into his jacket, pulled out the pistol equipped with a silencer, and aimed it at the ex-carabiniere’s forehead. “Where are the other two?” he asked in a relaxed voice.

  “In the cellar workshop.”

  The old bandit pulled the trigger and Togno flopped down onto the floor without a sound. For the first time I glimpsed a gleam of admiring concern in the look on handsome Giorgio’s face. Now he realized that Rossini was more than just a legend from a bygone age.

  “Lead the way,” I ordered.

  He walked ahead of us with a confident gait, and when we reached the underground room that had once served as a workshop we found ourselves face to face with an absurdist scene, worthy of a pair of brutes like the Centra brothers. The hostage was wearing nothing but a pair of rubber boots that were far too large for her. She was holding a broom and trying to clean the floor while the two kidnappers pelted her with a ridiculous array of objects along with a barrage of laughter and insults.

  “That’s enough,” Rossini barked. “On your knees, with your hands on your heads. You too, Pellegrini.”

  The three men did as they were told. The owners of the house, in heavy dialect, started peppering their boss with questions. He tried in vain to calm them down. Rossini was forced to intervene, distributing blows with the butt of the rifle.

  I took care of the woman. I draped an old blanket over her and accompanied her to a bathroom upstairs. In one room I found her clothing and a purse and I took them to her, telling her she was free to get dressed.

  She moved slowly, as if she was having a hard time recovering the ability to do familiar things. I urged her to hurry. She looked up at me. “Are you like them?”

  I seized her hand. “No, Signora. We’re taking you home.”

  “Are you from the police?”

  “This is a secret operation,” I whispered in a voice dripping with complicity. “You can’t tell a soul.”

  She nodded. “Don’t worry. I’ve been keeping secrets all my life.”

  “I’ll be back in a few minutes, but you need to stay right where you are, understood?”

  “You’re going to kill those two monsters, aren’t you?”

  I closed the door and went downstairs. Rossini was smoking, his gun trained on the three men.

  “Did you question them?” I asked.

  “I’ve seen more than enough,” he replied. “How is the woman?”

  “She seems tough. In time, she’ll recover.”

  Beniamino stepped over to one of the brothers and placed the muzzle of his gun at the back of his head. “Where’s the gun you used to shoot my friend?”

  The man pointed to a drawer in a worktable. I opened it and among an assortment of tools I found the .22 caliber pistol that had wounded Max. I handed it to Rossini, who checked the clip. He removed all the bullets but two. Then he told handsome Giorgio to stand up and come closer.

  “You can kill these two troglodytes,” he told him as he removed his handcuffs. “They disgust me too much. Only you could have gone into business with this kind of filth.”

  “Don’t you think they’re worth a couple of your famous bracelets?” Pellegrini asked, hefting the weapon and doing nothing to conceal the fact that just now he was weighing the possibility of playing this hand in a radically different way.

  “Just try it,” Rossini challenged him. “I’m ready for you. If I kill you in self-defense that won’t mean breaking our deal.”

  “Your fucking pathetic rules,” he muttered as he turned away. He cocked the gun and fired a shot into the back of Toni’s head, then turned and shot Furio.

  “There, all done,” huffed handsome Giorgio as he wiped off his fingerprints with a handkerchief.

  I grabbed Beniamino’s arm and put my lips close to his ear: “Kill him,” I whispered.

  “No.”

  “He doesn’t deserve this respect.”

  “That’s enough, we gave him our word,” Beniamino cut me off. Then he turned to Pellegrini who was watching us, suspiciously: “Now get rid of the bodies.”

  “You don’t seriously think that I’m going to go and dig three graves,” he objected with a certain vehemence.

  “Figure it out,” I retorted. “This garbage is all yours.”

  We got the lady and left the house. As we walked past Togno’s corpse she asked me whether the brothers were dead. She seemed reassured when I told her they were no longer among the living. On the way home, I urged her again not to say anything to anyone, repeating that her silence was fundamental to our safety.

  “Whoever you are, I’m grateful to you,” she murmured. “All I want now is to forget.”

  When we got there, Beniamino got out and opened the door for her. Then he gave her a hug and whispered something that brought tears to her eyes.

  “What did you say to her?” I asked later, on the way home.

  “That not all men are like Pellegrini, Togno, or worse still, the Centra brothers,” he replied. “And that her lover’s love would help her to heal.”

  “As always, you know what to do,” I complimented him.

  “Words that were as necessary as they were empty,” he retorted bitterly. “When a woman is subjected to that level of violence it’s difficult if not impossible to turn the page. Look at what happened to my Sylvie.”

  And he burst into tears of despair.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  I tidied up with the most effective cleanser available to me: fire. Furio and Toni kept plenty of highly flammable products around the house that they had once used for custom production of dentures. Before dousing the corpses, I poured a certain amount into the mouths of those mental defectives to fuel the combustion, after having stripped the house of all its cash and valuables; not that I needed them, but there was no point in sacrificing them to the flames. I also had a good time setting up a scene for the cops, dragging Togno into the cellar workshop and putting a pistol in his hand. They’d find it melted with whatever remained of his bones and they’d play around with the hypotheses and conjectures that detectives and journalists enjoy so much. After dreaming up a “scientifically” reliable reconstruction they’d wonder: “Bu
t who murdered the murderer?” and the case would run aground once and for all on that question.

  I, on the other hand, would be featured on one of those shows that had speculated for so many months about Professor Guido Di Lello’s disappearance. Only I was alive and he was buried in the vegetable garden behind the house I was about to burn. “Whatever became of the respected restaurateur with the shadowy past?”

  Let them ask. They’d never find me.

  They’d question Martina and Gemma, and the two of them would act crushed and incredulous. Right, my women. I pulled my cell phone out of my jacket pocket and called my wife.

  “Let me talk to Gemma,” were my only words of farewell.

  “Can we come home?” she asked as soon as she got her hands on the cell phone.

  “Certainly. The house belongs to you, and so does La Nena.”

  “I don’t understand. What do you mean?”

  “I mean that starting tomorrow you’re going to be running the restaurant,” I replied. “And watch out if you let things start to slide. I’m going to be keeping an eye on you and if you fail to do as I say I’ll come back and make you pay.”

  “We’re hardly capable.”

  “I’m giving you an order, Gemma.”

  “Sorry, King of Hearts, sorry,” she hastened to say. “We won’t disappoint you, I swear.”

  “I’d have taken you with me, but Buratti wouldn’t let me.”

  “That bastard,” she snarled angrily.

  “With him just pretend that you’re happy to have me out of your lives. Act grateful.”

  “All right. I’ll do what you say. But will we ever live together again?”

  “Certainly. But only if you save yourselves for me. No men, no women, and Martina must follow her usual programs.”

  “How could you ever doubt it, Giorgio?”

  I hung up. The conversation was becoming as annoying as it was maudlin. Those two idiots would remain faithful to me for all time and someday I’d be able to consider the idea, for fun or out of necessity, of coming back to reclaim what had once been mine. But not before wiping Buratti, Rossini, and Max the Memory off the face of the earth. I could have hired a team of killers and resolved the problem in a reasonably short time frame. But the plan that I’d come up with in case of that partial defeat, and which now obliged me to skulk off the field, meant I’d have to work my way up to the big finale. I intended to kill those operetta gangsters, but only after breaking them and annihilating them and proving to them that declaring their stupid war against me hadn’t done a bit of good, that it had, if anything, only claimed innocent victims.

  I rummaged through Federico’s pockets in search of the keys to his car. I held the flame of a lighter close to an alcohol-soaked rag, which I then tossed onto the corpses on the landing of the stairwell. A blast of heat encouraged me to hurry toward the exit.

  I grabbed the bag that had everything I’d need to rise again, and I changed cars. I drove to the Brescia train station where I left the car unlocked, with the keys in the ignition in the hope that someone might steal it. While waiting for the first train to Milan I ate breakfast but soon bitterly regretted it. The pastries and cappuccino were terrible. The baked goods were frozen and drenched in palm oil. The milk was reconstituted from powder shipped from Germany. The only thing fresh and Italian about it was the water that had been added. La Nena had spoiled me, but I’d find a solution to that too. I hadn’t suffered all this to give up the little things that make life enjoyable.

  At the central station in Milan, I bought the ticket that would take me to my final destination: Basel. There I knew a person who would house me in a secure location until I was absolutely certain that I could move freely. That person wouldn’t be a bit happy to see me, much less to have to interact with me for a while. But she was in no position to turn me away.

  Then one day I’d move to Lugano and start gradually inching closer to the Signora Oriana Pozzi Vitali. The detailed accounts I’d had from the late, lamented Professor Di Lello would allow me to buzz around her, court her, become irresistibly charming to her. I wouldn’t give her a moment’s peace and, if that path didn’t seem viable, I’d set my sights on her daughter, her friend, her housekeeper, her cook. On anyone, so long as they could get me into her good graces, into her life.

  She would be the first to pay. After all, she’d sent those two-bit mercenaries after me. She’d paid them to hunt me down. The bill I was going to give her would be a particularly expensive one.

  That thought triggered a painful erection. I needed to work it out, but I was going to have to wait until that night. My soon-to-be hostess in Basel would do everything she could to fend me off because she knew that I’d force her to engage in certain practices that she found unseemly. I, on the other hand, enjoyed them immensely, and the preferences of one’s guests, as we know, are sacred.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Inspector Campagna only managed to get into the house that the papers and TV stations had dubbed “the house of the three corpses” after the forensics squad had wrapped up its work. The building hadn’t suffered structural damage, but the three bodies, still unidentified, had really been burned thoroughly. Campagna, however, was certain that one of the bodies belonged to Federico Togno and the other two to the owners, the Centra brothers, whom the neighbors described as good, hardworking people, if a bit taciturn.

  This was strictly an intuition based on the confirmed disappearance of Togno himself, his wife, and the proprietor of the restaurant La Nena, Giorgio Pellegrini. The waitstaff was certain that something serious had happened because he had left no instructions and nothing like that had ever happened before. His cell phone had been found in his house and his wife, who’d been vacationing in Asiago with a girlfriend, said that she was completely in the dark as far as her spouse’s movements went.

  In Giulio’s mind there was no doubt that all these events were linked and that they’d emerged from the illegal investigation conducted by Marco Buratti into the kidnapping of Guido Di Lello.

  He searched house and workshop from top to bottom, but the only impression that he gathered was that Toni and Furio must have been a couple of freaks, given the impressive number of pornographic magazines and movies.

  When he emerged, he had to struggle to choke back a panic attack that was about to knock him to the ground, an attack triggered by the wave of rage at having been used by that fool Buratti.

  After regaining control of his breathing, he called him.

  “How’s it going, Alligator?” he started out in a friendly voice.

  “Just fine. How are you?”

  “Damned worried about the fate of our local vino novello,” Campagna replied, working himself up. “I don’t drink it myself because I’m horrified at the thought that the vinification takes place with the aid of carbonic maceration. Do you know how that works?”

  “No, but I’m sure you’re about to explain it,” Buratti replied, resigned.

  “Whole bunches of grapes are placed in a stainless steel tank and exposed to a carbon dioxide-rich atmosphere. Chemistry, modern technology . . . you tell me what that has to do with the age-old art of winemaking. But that aside, the problem is that in Italy the law allows vintners to make it with just 30 percent novello grapes and the rest with standard wine. And that undermines the reputation of Italian wine because in Japan, for instance, they drink only Beaujolais Nouveau, which is 100 percent novello grapes.”

  “And all this keeps you up at night,” the Alligator said, needling him.

  “No, what’s really pissing me off is your silence and unless you start talking right now I am personally going to see to it that you wind up in another kind of stainless steel tank, better known as prison.”

  “You really have a nasty personality, Campagna.”

  “And you’re a dangerous man,” the cop shot back angrily. “What’s g
oing to tip the scales of justice when I march you into a courtroom to be tried for the crimes you’ve committed?”

  “Why don’t we just drink a glass together first and have a healthy exchange of views on the subject?”

  The inspector named the same bar in the Vicenza shopping center where Buratti had met Gemma and Martina.

  Buratti understood that Campagna knew more than he should, but it still might be nothing more than a coincidence. “I was there recently,” he said cautiously.

  “I know that,” the inspector replied. “The security cameras got footage of you from every conceivable angle, but I’d still like to know what you were talking about with the wife of the now missing Giorgio Pellegrini and her girlfriend.”

  “Missing? Really?” Buratti asked, surprised.

  “Stop being an asshole,” the cop said. “Let’s meet at Livio’s place in half an hour.”

  “Why do you always pick the worst bars in the Veneto?”

  “Evidently you’ve been gone for a while. Now it’s run by a couple of second-generation Chinese who speak our dialect. A splendid example of the integration we’re all in favor of,” he said before hanging up.

  Campagna was the first to arrive and he took up his post. The couple behind the bar knew him and served him an excellent Sauvignon from Trentino that the policeman had demanded they keep in stock, or else he’d shut the place down. A short while later that shameless scoundrel Buratti made his entrance.

  “I’m really pissed off,” Campagna reiterated when the Alligator took a seat across from him. “And I want to walk out of here with a version of events that’s going to keep lots of conscientious cops and carabinieri from having to waste time searching for the truth of a case to which you already know the solution. You get it?”

  The ex-blues singer nodded. “I can supply you with the answers you’re looking for but I’m not giving you any information about my own investigation.”

  The cop started to lose it. “Your investigation? Policemen do investigations, at best you gather gossip from the underworld you live in.”