‘You’re kidding me.’
‘Why?’
‘That’s my address.’
He checked and his expression changed as he looked at me. ‘You said that your name was Denti, right?’
‘Yes … ’
‘I don’t understand. He was left in the custody and supervision of his employer. It says here Santo Denti. And that’s you.’
3
Ring ring. Ring ring.
‘I’m sorry but now I have to get that,’ the guy said.
He reached for the phone and my world began to melt. It was like watching one image on top of another. There was the office of the halfway house; the guy was sitting at his desk. Behind him there was an empty room with drilling sounds coming out of it. The guy answered the phone. ‘Yes, he’s still here.’ I looked beyond him. Two men were painting the walls; an electrician was pulling wires over a desk. I turned to get out; the door appeared and disappeared like a dream. ‘Signor Denti,’ he called, ‘it’s Father Zurloni.’
I left. A priest walked through me. A woman pushed a baby pram against me and disappeared. I couldn’t move without bumping into people who had the consistency of air. People were dressed for winter, then in tank tops, then overcoats and shorts and umbrellas and sunglasses. They passed like a film in fast-forward stepping over and through one another. And through my body. I was in the present and in the past, the years and days blended into one another.
‘No, please, no.’ I begged. ‘Please.’
The moon and the sun were in the sky. It was dark and then bright. The street was glowing and filled with old and new cars that disappeared behind one another. A multi-coloured plastic bus contorted and became an old orange tram. A lorry parked on top of a group of men digging into the street. They kept working. The signs changed from new to old, from Boutique della Banana to Fruttivendolo, from MailBox Etc. to Cartoleria, from Mediaworld to Elettrodomestici. A newsstand turned into a rusty old kiosk. Lights in building windows turned on and off. Italian flags and peace flags appeared and disappeared. Cranes appeared and levelled a five-storey building and then it was a worksite and then a park where children played. Sun, rain, night, day. A parade of workers filled the streets for a moment, whistling and beating drums.
I put my head in my hands and yelled, ‘Enough!’
Dark. Light. Advertisements went up and were ripped down in the blink of an eye. The mannequin in a shop window went from a coat to a swimsuit and then the window was covered in plastic sheets. Nothing was there long enough for me to get a fix on it. The trees absorbed their leaves and their branches went back into their trunks that began to thin. Sun, rain and night. I concentrated and tried to walk. My shoes changed with every step, boots, moccasins, sandals and multi-coloured Nikes, boots. I tried to jump over a hole where men dressed in jumpsuits were laying blue plastic pipes. I hit the wall of a building. It was solid. Thank God it was solid. I held on to it and closed my eyes. When I reopened them, it was snowing, real snow. My face and hands were cold. It brought me back. That kept me from going crazy. The ghosts disappeared behind the snowflakes, which now began to cover real objects, real people, who lived in reality and not in the memory of the Ad Exec that churned in my brain. Concentrating on what I thought was real or what I hoped was real, I was able to orientate myself in the present.
I had to get out of there.
The police were looking for me and Zurloni knew where I was. Without thinking, I got into a taxi. It was white, not like the yellow ones that danced in and out of my field of vision. I gave him Sally’s address and managed to get a grip on myself along the way. The world outside my window stopped changing. Now I was moving though a single Milan, cold and covered with white.
When I reached my destination I ran to the call centre. Ragiul and his two friends stood at the entrance, watching the snow fall.
‘Where’s Salima?’ I asked.
‘At the Centre. Do you need the keys?’
‘Yes.’
I took them, ran through the alley, and charged through the iron door. I shot up the stairs to the gym. The police had left broken-down doors and smashed glass. Salima, dressed in a karate suit, sat cross-legged in the freezing room. Children mimicked her hand gestures. I grabbed her by the arm. ‘We have to go,’ I said.
She looked at me, confused. ‘Santo, I’m giving a lesson, I still have half an hour left.’
‘We can’t wait, let’s go.’
My tone and expression must have scared her because Sally broke up the class and rushed to the bathroom to change.
‘What’s going on?’ she asked me on the stairs.
‘Salima, I have to get out of here.’
She stopped me on the stairs. ‘Is it the police?’
‘Yes. Please, we have to go.’ She didn’t move. ‘Hurry up.’
I leaned against the wall, confused, frustrated and scared. ‘Sally … I was looking for the wrong man. The one who killed Roveda.’ Max. How many times did I see him sitting there in the guard booth of my building? I thought he was an old man but it was his body that was devastated by disease. The Ad Exec wasn’t like me. He didn’t go there to find him and kick his ass. He had hired him and given him another chance. He was satisfied having him take clean underwear to his father and watching him remove his cap with respect. The Ad Exec was the lucky one who had made it.
‘Now there’s no time for anything. They’re looking for me and I’ve made a mess.’
‘But … ’
‘Sally, my lawyer said that I have to face reality, but I don’t know which one. I can’t trust myself. I see things that aren’t there.’ Maybe even the guy on the bike who tried to kill me was just in my head. Maybe I put the bomb in the computer myself. Why not? I was crazy. ‘You have to help me.’
She was crying. ‘What can I do?’
‘Half of your friends are here illegally, aren’t they? They know how to get in across the border. I need to get out. It should be easy, shouldn’t it?’
‘And me? What about our son?’
‘You’ll be better without me.’
She stood in silence for a moment and then dried her eyes. ‘I can take you to someone but I don’t know if it’ll work. They want money for this kind of thing.’
‘I’ve something left over; I’ll steal for it, if I need to. I know how, and I have nothing to lose.’
‘Santo … ’
‘Please, let’s go.’ For a second I could see her in a dress, smiling at me. I bit the inside of my cheek and I was back in the present.
‘I’ve got to get the car keys,’ she said.
‘OK.’
We went down to the street without speaking. The snow was coming down hard now and I thought that was a good sign. It’d be more difficult to see me with my collar up and a hat pulled down over my eyes. We went inside. Sally went into her room. I decided to check the latest news on the internet. Was my face already there?
There it was. The online news said that the police knew that I was at Villa Serena because a cop had seen my description five minutes after he saw me go in. I read the entire article looking for something that went in my favour but there was nothing. Your luck has run out, Trafficante. (Learn: You’re a Murderer. Learn: You’re Screwed!)
Sally seemed to have disappeared. I got up from the computer and went to see if she needed anything. I saw her face down on the floor. Riccardino was waiting on the bed with a gun in his hand. Half a plastic bottle stuffed with what looked like disks of fabric covered the muzzle. Can you believe it? A homemade silencer. Then he shot me.
4
The speed of a bullet shot from a .22 Beretta Bobcat with a 61mm barrel is 315 metres per second. The velocity of a charge of electricity that runs from a neuron through its axons is about a third the speed. A fraction of a second and your whole life is all a dream as well as memory that lasts forever.
The first bullet hit my left lung.
*
Roveda welcomes me into his villa and seems to be in no rush
to talk. He offers me a drink and then takes me for a stroll through his garden that he tends personally whenever he has the time. We sit at a table under a pergola, the weather is nice, it’s the end of September, but it feels like spring. I can smell the sea and the white rose bush nearby that is beginning to wither. Roveda removes a packet of photos from his pocket and spreads them on the dark wooden table. I look at them. It’s me and Sally.
‘She’s a beautiful woman,’ Roveda says. ‘I imagine a woman like that can make you lose your mind. You’re smart but I’m old and I have more experience.’
‘What do you want?’ I ask, even though I already know.
‘I’d like to redefine our relationship. I think that it would be convenient for both of us.’
*
The second bullet hit my left thigh, a millimetre from my femoral artery.
*
Roveda and I argue in his office. We’re making noise so people can hear us outside the door, especially my future father-in-law. But if anyone were to look inside they would have seen Roveda with a bag of cash sitting on his desk while he counted the five hundred-euro notes as he placed them neatly in his Bottega Veneta briefcase.
‘Are you sure that everything’s going to be OK?’ I ask in a lowered voice. ‘Without these, I will have trouble even paying the rent.’
He smiles. ‘No, you don’t have to rent anymore … Renting is for the masses. You have to buy your own house.’ Then he yells, ‘There are going to be some changes here!’ We smile at each other, knowing what kind of changes are coming.
Information always travels two ways. Roveda would give our clients’ competitors an advantage by selling industrial secrets at a high price, but that was only a small part of his business. Roveda thinks big. Roveda invests in the companies that benefit from the inside information he’s selling via his contact in Switzerland. He buys their stock before they go up at the stock exchange. Not directly, but through one of the 300,000 offshore bankers on the island of Tortola. The dummy company of a dummy company. My money will wind up there through intermediaries. Now that we’re partners.
*
The third bullet hit me just above my spleen.
*
Roveda mentions what he defines a ‘small diplomatic problem’. When I get to his house, I discover that it isn’t that small.
The door is open and his body is floating in the pool. I think about the prints that I’d left around the house and the money that I’ll never see again. No one would ever believe that we’d become friends. When I see the fountain pen in a pool of blood, I realise who killed him. I’ve seen it too many times not to recognise it. It’s Riccardino’s pen. That idiot. He was Roveda’s spy, the one who knows everything about me. He took the photographs. I think that if they arrest him he’ll tell them everything he knows. I’ll see this through to the end just like him. I clean and polish, scared that someone will come at any moment before I’ve finished. I got rid of my prints as well as Riccardino’s.
I put his pen in my pocket. If I am to be a suspect then I’ll have to hand it over to the police. It is my life insurance. My get-out-of-jail-free card. I want to hide it in my safe along with everything else I have on Roveda, but when I get home Monica waits for me at the entrance of the building. She doesn’t realise that I’m not myself and I try my best to act natural. I keep thinking about what could happen to me. My head spins. At the first intermission I go to the bathroom to wash my face. I’m shaking.
*
The fourth and fifth bullets wound up in the ceiling because now I was on top of Riccardino, all my weight against him. It was true what they said about a .22, it couldn’t stop a man unless you hit him in the head. I didn’t even know that I had run at him. I only realised it when my face was a centimetre from his. I tore off his glasses and clawed at his eyes. I spat out blood that filled my mouth all over him. I felt no pain, just rage and fury. A pillow caught fire from a spark and I grabbed it and shoved it against his face. I didn’t even feel my skin burning.
Riccardino screamed and dropped the pistol. I kept pushing until the flame became acrid smoke. His hair was burning and his face was blue. He rolled on the floor, trying to breathe. A lung hissed as I inhaled. Blood ran from my stomach, soaking my trousers and drenching my socks. I coughed. A spurt of blood shot out of my mouth and hit the wall. Black spots danced in the air. I was cold. I saw everything as if through the wrong end of binoculars. I crawled next to Sally. She was awake but couldn’t move. One of her pupils was larger than the other. ‘Him … him … ’ she said, faintly pointing to Riccardino.
‘Him,’ I said. I crawled over to him and raised myself to my knees and took his head in my hands. I watched his mouth say please but no words came out. I raised his head and then banged it against the floor again and again and again until I heard bone breaking. Again and again and again. Blood spouted from his neck, and he went into spasms. Before fainting, I dragged myself to the dresser; I took the fountain pen and put it in his pocket.
*
We got married in February as soon as I got out of the hospital in a little church in Ponte di Legno. I had lost fifteen kilos and I looked pretty damn good in my Battistoni suit. Nothing compared to my wife, who was wearing a Carla Pignatelli wedding gown with a two-metre train. We wanted a simple wedding with about a hundred guests and not too many flowers. It was quite moving and when Father Zurloni went through the vows Monica cried and found it difficult to respond. Obviously the reception was held at the Holy Blood Community, where tables lined the main piazza for the occasion, surrounded by white outdoor heaters.
Everyone in the community came out. The press said that it could have been in the Guinness Book of World Records. We were given two antique Rolex watches with our names and the community’s logo engraved on the cases. We spent our honeymoon in the Australian outback. Two weeks on horseback, just the two of us in the wild. We never talked about Sally. We had both decided that it was a part of the past. I never saw her again after that night.
Sally lost the baby because of the fight with Riccardino and she refused any help from me. The cheques that I sent to her came back. I learned later that she had left Milan. She never forgave me for what had happened at her place. Riccardino was already dead when the police and the ambulance came. No one doubted that it was self-defence. When they found the fountain pen with Mariano Roveda’s DNA all charges against me were dropped. The police found hundreds of photos of me at Riccardino’s home as well as instructions on how to make a bomb, along with silencers that he had learned how to make from the internet. He had been obsessed with me ever since I had become his boss despite his seniority within the company.
If I hadn’t been so fixated on Max … Poor Max, poor bastard who will keep washing floors and parking my car as long as his health will allow him, I’d have understood that Riccardino was my nemesis. We had discussed projects at my apartment on weekends and sometimes he stayed over. We went to the same gym, and he was there at the start of my relationship with Sally. He had access to Ustoni knives because he was also part of the project. He also knew exactly where Pippo parked his motorcycle.
Roveda’s murder wasn’t part of the plan; he loved him like a father. Killing me would’ve been enough. He’d waited almost a week with his bomb. When Roveda told him (at my request) that he’d have to start looking for a new job, Riccardino was resentful. He’d spent two years gathering information for Roveda on my colleagues and myself, and I’m sure he expected to be compensated differently. Seeing me come to work with that fountain pen in my pocket must have made him lose it. In his sick mind he probably thought that I was toying with him.
With the real murderer caught, my reputation bounced back quickly. Those who had painted me a madman discovered I was a hero, a man who had been in deep shit but who had come out clean in the end.
A client even asked me to become a spokesperson for their line of cosmetics when I could barely stand on my feet. The Clean Truth.
Spillo retracted hi
s statement and said that it was Riccardino who had bought the phone records. My new lawyer concurred. He also compensated Oreste for his troubles.
My father died while I was in the hospital over Christmas. He had never regained consciousness after the last time I saw him. As I couldn’t move, I didn’t feel guilty about missing the funeral.
Monica’s father had an accident in May. At a party hosted by B&M, the olive from his martini went down the wrong way. A waiter saved him with the Heimlich manoeuvre, but his brain was oxygen-deprived for so long that he suffered cerebral damage. Since then my father-in-law has been unable to speak or control the left side of his body. Every now and then he comes into the agency in a wheelchair pushed by his nurse. He looks out with sad, watery eyes at an empire he had possessed for only a few days before losing it forever.
And Trafficante? Trafficante hasn’t disappeared. He’s still there, inside me where he always was. But he’s more reasonable now than when I was twenty. Sometimes I miss him. I loved his way of looking at the world, but life goes on. In my professional opinion, speaking as someone who’s learned how to sell anything and everything at the highest price, there’s no market for regrets.
After what happened to my father-in-law, B&M’s board of directors had to find a new CEO.
Guess who they chose.
1 It is actually a prayer by Chiara Lubich, but Santo, that slob, doesn’t know (Author’s note).
Table of Contents
Day One - 1
Day One - 2
Day One - 3
Day Two - 1
Day Two - 2
Day Two - 3
Day Two - 4
Day Two - 5
Day Two - 6
Day Two - 7
Day Two - 8
Day Three
Day Three - 2
Day Three - 3
Day Three - 4
Day Three - 5
Day Four
Day Four - 2
Day Four - 3
Day Four - 4
Day Four - 5
Day Five
In a Heartbeat Page 22