The Colombian Mule

by Massimo Carlotto

  The second day, Celegato left home a little after six in the evening. He took the main road for Treviso, floored the accelerator, and in a matter of seconds had vanished.

  The third evening, when he got into his yellow Saab, we switched to Rossini’s car which we had parked nearby. We didn’t want to lose all trace of Celegato two evenings running. He led us to the same bar and the same hotel as the first evening, though this time the girl had jet-black hair.

  The fourth evening, he took the autostrada and headed towards Milan. He exited at Padova West and drove to a little village close to the city’s industrial estate. Then, indicating as he turned, he swung sharp right into the car-park of a private swingers’ club.

  ‘This guy’s got nothing but sex on the mind,’ I snapped. Rossini made himself comfortable, tilting his seat back a little. ‘Well, isn’t he the lucky one! Sylvie’s starting to suspect I have a lover.’

  To our surprise, Celegato left the club a mere twenty minutes later. ‘That’s odd,’ Rossini commented. ‘As an unaccompanied man, it costs you three hundred and fifty thousand lire to get into this joint.’

  We followed Celegato back to Mestre where he picked up the same blonde girl as on the first evening. I gave my associate a nudge. ‘It looks like he didn’t go to that club for sex after all.’

  ‘Right. Starting from tomorrow, we can wait for him there. I’m positive he’ll show up.’

  I smiled with satisfaction. Not so much because we were finally making some headway with our investigations, more because we could at last jettison the stinking fish van. I was sick of going home every night and stuffing all my clothes into a plastic bag to drop off at the cleaners the following morning.

  At La Cuccia, I found Max and Victoria sitting at my table, chatting. Virna intercepted me as I made my way over to join them. ‘She’s been waiting for you for a while. She must have something really major to tell you.’

  ‘Just bring me a drink, please. And don’t make yourself ridiculous.’

  Max handed me the chair and clapped me on the shoulder by way of greeting. Victoria stood up and shook my hand. She was wearing a long knitted dress, low-slung shoes with buckles, and her hair was gathered in a thick plait. As always, she looked absolutely beautiful. She turned to me with a sad, shy smile. ‘I just dropped by to see if there was any news.’

  ‘No, none yet, I’m afraid.’ Glancing up, I caught Virna’s stare and so hurried to add, in a diplomatic tone of voice,

  ‘Don’t trouble yourself to come by, Victoria. The minute we find anything out, we’ll let you know.’

  She leaned her head to one side and tugged at a ringlet that had escaped from her plait and was lying against her neck. ‘I was hoping you had found out something about that man who takes girls to Japan.’

  I decided to close the subject. ‘It turned out to be a false lead. Nobody knows anything about it.’

  Victoria stood up, calmly pulled on her leather coat, and did up the buttons. Another doleful smile and then she left.

  Max poured himself some beer. ‘Corradi’s nights must be hell, lying there and thinking about her.’

  I glanced at Virna, who had taken good care not to bring me the drink I had ordered. ‘I hope Victoria will stay away from now on. My girlfriend doesn’t like having her around.’

  ‘I’ve noticed that. All the same, I wouldn’t bank on Victoria staying away. She confided in me that she can’t bear being all alone in that big empty house. It gives her the jitters. So in the evenings she does the rounds of the nightclubs, looking for someone who can sympathize with her situation . . . She’ll be back.’

  ‘All we need is a prison widow on the edge of a nervous breakdown. Listen, Max, I think we’re onto something. I’ll just get myself a drink and then I’ll tell you all about it.’

  After Max had heard me out, he took a long gulp of beer.

  ‘I reckon you’re right to keep an eye on the swingers’ club. Celegato is acting really strangely. Have you ever been in a swingers’ club?’

  ‘No, I haven’t, but Beniamino told me he has a few times. Apparently there are lots of small, low-lit rooms full of people having sex, any way the mood takes them. Mainly it’s couples. The way it works is that entrance tickets for couples are relatively cheap, about a hundred and fifty thousand lire, whereas men who turn up on their own, like Celegato, have to part with three hundred and fifty thousand each.’

  ‘It would be a perfect venue for a rendezvous.’

  ‘Or to take delivery of a consignment of coke.’

  ‘Right. But we must also keep an eye on the bar and the hotel where he takes the hookers. He goes there too often . . .’

  ‘I’ll call Rossini tomorrow and suggest he take a closer look. After all, the swingers’ club doesn’t open till nine in the evening.’

  The next day, Rossini turned up just in time for dinner. Max wasn’t in the mood to cook so we had to make do with a simple plate of pasta.

  I grated some Parmesan over my tortiglioni. ‘Did you manage to get that information I asked you about this morning?’

  ‘Yes, I did,’ Rossini said. ‘I dropped in on Toni Vassallo. Do you remember him? When we were in prison in Padova, he was in cell twenty-six.’

  I stopped chewing. ‘Of course I remember him. He’s the guy who got shot in the back by some jeweler and ended up in a wheelchair.’

  Rossini turned to Max. ‘It was really bad luck,’ he recounted. ‘He had been out less than a month and his brother had come up with this job, a real cinch, just to put him back on his feet financially after four years inside. The problem was that the jeweler had a hidden handgun which they failed to discover before emptying out the safe. So there they are outside the store, jumping into the getaway car, when out runs the jeweler and fires three bullets into Toni’s back.’

  ‘So what did Toni tell you?’ I asked. At times I found that Beniamino’s tales of the underworld went on longer than strictly necessary.

  ‘Nowadays he deals in coke and ecstasy. He’s the brains of the organization and his wife does the deliveries. He knows everything there is to know about the drugs market in Mestre and confirmed that both the bar and the hotel used by Celegato are places where drugs are bought and sold. Lately, there has been a spate of arrests and Toni is convinced there’s a well-placed snitch at work.’

  Max opened the fridge, looking for something else to eat.

  ‘What this means is that Celegato is working full-time for the police,’ he remarked, grabbing a salami and a jar of baby artichokes in oil.

  ‘Did Vassallo name Celegato specifically?’ Max enquired.

  ‘Yeah, among others. Obviously, I showed no interest. But he did mention that Celegato is a good purchaser, constantly on the lookout for a channel capable of supplying a kilo of coke at a time.’

  Celegato didn’t show up at the swingers’ club outside Padova that evening or the next. It wasn’t till the third evening that Rossini and I once again saw the yellow Saab convertible pulling into the car-park. We gave him a five-minute start, then followed him in. The club was members-only but it cost nothing to join. All you had to do was hand over some ID, which was diligently photocopied and then filed, the idea being to deter maniacs and serial killers. We had to shell out a huge sum of money to wriggle out of these bureaucratic obligations, on top of the 700,000 lire for our two entrance tickets.

  We split up at the bar and began exploring the various rooms, all of which were semi-lit, comfortably furnished both with beds and with sofas for spectators, and stocked with a vast array of condoms. In the first room I walked into, there was a lady on all fours fellating her husband while a line of gentlemen took turns silently and discreetly to penetrate her from behind. In the second room, two couples were sharing a bed, while a largeish group of men and women looked on.

  A hand gripped my arm. It was Rossini, motioning me to follow him. We went
into a room where two women were fondling one another while their respective companions, both fully dressed in jacket and tie, whispered words of advice and encouragement. From a sofa, Bruno Celegato surveyed the sex-act with an absent-minded gaze. He was listening attentively to what the man sitting next to him, a guy in his mid-thirties with long hair gathered in a ponytail and a week’s beard, was saying to him. My associate and I had seen enough. We left the club and hid in our car.

  Celegato was the first to leave but we didn’t follow him. It was the other guy we were interested in. He emerged about ten minutes later and climbed into a dark blue Renault Clio. He took the autostrada for Venice, followed the Mestre bypass all the way around, then headed for Trieste. Later he turned off for Udine and after a while pulled up outside a flashy condominium complex in a densely populated neighbourhood.

  He vanished into the main entrance of the building and a couple of minutes later a light went on at a window on the first floor. It was a real stroke of luck to discover the precise location of his apartment so rapidly.

  ‘He’s a flatfoot,’ Rossini declared.

  ‘He certainly looks like one.’

  ‘What shall we do?’

  ‘Tomorrow morning we wait for him and when he goes out, we follow him. Then we double back here and take a look at his apartment.’

  Old Rossini smoothed his moustache. ‘It won’t be easy. These condos have porters. Besides, the lock on his door may not be so easy to pick.’

  ‘Okay. But we have to know who this guy is and what he’s up to with Celegato. Celegato’s contacts with the cops in Mestre should be more than sufficient if all he’s doing is snitching. He only has to phone them or meet them in some dark alley. Where’s the sense of them meeting up in a swingers’ club in Padova and then one driving home to Mestre and the other to Udine? Something else is going on here. Maybe this guy isn’t a cop.’

  ‘He’s a cop all right. I’m certain of it.’ Rossini looked at the digital clock on the dash. ‘We’d better get a move on. We’ve barely got time to get to my place, pick up the tools, and get back here.’

  At seven-thirty in the morning, the road where the presumed cop lived was bustling with people opening shops, leaving for work or taking their children to school. We slipped into a bar just opposite the condo’s main entrance. We ordered a lavish breakfast and hoped the guy was an early riser.

  He didn’t disappoint us. He walked out of the condo on the dot of nine. In one hand he was carrying a stiff leather suitcase, in the other a dark blue bag of the kind filling stations used to give away for free. He drove straight to the autostrada, but this time followed the signs for Trieste. He then took the Ronchi dei Legionari exit and we followed him all the way to the parking lot of a small airfield. Then we watched as he boarded a ten-seater air-taxi bound for Rome.

  ‘What a nice man,’ Rossini chuckled. ‘He’s leaving us all the time we need to check out his apartment at our leisure.’

  ‘We’ll go in tonight. That way we won’t have to worry about the porters.’

  We wandered from one bar to another, then from a restaurant to a cinema, till finally night fell. By eleven o’clock the streets were cold and deserted. It took Rossini all of thirty seconds to open the condo’s main door. Our steps along the corridor were muffled by the carpeting and drowned by the sounds of voices and TV sets from other apartments.

  Breaking into the apartment itself took rather longer. Rossini had brought with him a set of picklocks designed and constructed by one of the most sophisticated house-breakers in Rome. He pulled on a pair of latex gloves and set about his work with meticulous care. We didn’t want the occupant to notice we had broken in. The apparently flimsy lock raised our suspicions—it almost seemed an invitation to burglary. Maybe the place was alarmed or there were some James Bond-type traps left lying around, or a hair on the top of the door, or a matchstick in the doorjamb that would give us away.

  A tinny little sound told us the lock had yielded. Rossini slowly opened the door and shone a torch around the room to see if there was an alarm liable to go off and force us to make a hasty getaway. But he didn’t see anything and nothing happened, so we went in and closed the door behind us.

  We checked that all the shutters were down and then Beniamino switched on the light. We found ourselves standing in the middle of a spacious one-room apartment, complete with kitchenette. The decor was devoid of taste and the furniture consisted of a bed, a couple of drab chairs, a bedside cabinet and a wardrobe.

  We studied every detail with the greatest of care. Conducting a thorough search without leaving any trace of your presence requires patience and skill. This was not, however, our first time and we knew what to do. I opened the wardrobe and began to check through trouser and jacket pockets. The cop—if he was a cop—was certainly the untidy sort. I turned out half-empty packets of cigarettes, lighters, cinema tickets, and scraps of paper with phone numbers that I carefully copied out. In the middle of a pile of blankets, I discovered a little wooden box containing oil and pull-throughs for cleaning a gun. The drawers contained shirts and underwear of average quality, the kind of clothes worn by people on a state salary. A drug dealer could afford much better.

  Rossini had finished with the bathroom and was now struggling with the drawer of a bedside cabinet. It was a matter of going through the picklocks until one worked. The drawer turned out to contain some odds and ends and a handful of love letters from a woman called Carla who wrote from Mantova. The envelopes were all addressed to Maresciallo Stefano Giaroli at the headquarters of the Guardia di Finanza—the enforcement arm of the Ministry of Economics and Finance—in Rome. I checked the dates. The most recent was postmarked just ten days earlier. I handed it to Beniamino. ‘This marshal reeks of some kind of special agency,’ he remarked. ‘There’s something major going on.’

  ‘Yeah. I wouldn’t mind betting he’s a member of GOA, the Gruppo Operativo Anti-Droga. They run by far the best anti-narcotics operations in Italy.’

  The following morning I dropped in at Renato Bonotto’s law firm. I asked him for some more money, explaining that the investigation was turning into a bottomless pit. He opened a drawer and pulled out the standard yellow envelope.

  Bonotto jotted the sum down in his desk-diary. ‘I imagine you’ve not come to see me just for the money.’

  ‘You’re right. Our investigations have been making some progress but we don’t much like what we’ve been finding out. We’re now convinced that Celegato is a pawn in a much bigger game, involving men from the Guardia di Finanza headquarters in Rome. If we’re right about this, Corradi was put behind bars so that his one-time buddy Celegato remained free to continue working undisturbed as a police informant. To complete the picture that’s emerging, though, I need to know how your talk with the magistrate in charge of the investigation went.’

  Bonotto had stared me straight in the eye throughout, carefully weighing each of my words. ‘Well, the attitude of the state investigators is rather odd, Buratti. And I’m not just referring to that lazy-assed, Judge Pisano. Yesterday, at the Public Prosecutor’s office, I ran into Nunziante and Captain Annetta from Finanza. I came away with the distinct impression that they don’t really give a shit. Pardon the vulgarity. As far as they’re concerned, the investigation is done and dusted. They haven’t the slightest intention of sanctioning any further enquiries. Corradi is guilty because he was caught red-handed and Arías Cuevas has died, bequeathing nothing but a bunch of statements that do my client no favors at all. All the investigators are doing is kicking their heels until it’s time for Corradi to be arraigned.’

  I ran a hand through my hair. ‘Do you realize we’re getting mixed up in a special operation run from Rome by the combined forces of the state police and the Guardia di Finanza?’

  ‘Yes, I do. And my professional advice to you is to drop your investigation the moment you see any real danger of breaking the law.’ />
  I got up and made for the door.

  ‘Right now I can’t see what the hell a defense lawyer is supposed to do in a case of this kind,’ Bonotto said bitterly.

  ‘The law is nothing but a cover for the petty vendettas and back-stabbing of a collection of state spooks.’

  I turned round. ‘Listen, Avvocato. You are the one person who can get Corradi out of prison. If things work out right, you’ll end up with a freshly shuffled deck of cards in your hand. And then it’ll be up to you to play the right ones. That’s what lawyers are for.’

  Max the Memory had a plan. He laid it before us after a lunch that was both elaborate and hard to digest.

  I poured myself some more coffee and spiked it with an ample quantity of Calvados. ‘I don’t like it,’ I protested. ‘It’s too dangerous. The cops used on special operations are the brightest and the best trained. Any attempt to stitch them up could land all three of us back behind bars.’

  ‘Fine. Then we’d better just abandon Corradi to his fate,’ Max fumed.

  Rossini smoothed his moustache. He was fizzing with excitement. I was outnumbered yet again. ‘Well, personally, I think it’s an excellent plan,’ he said, giggling like a ten-year old. ‘It’ll be a real pleasure to hammer some super-spooks.’

  I shook my head in exasperation. ‘You’re mad, the pair of you.’

  Max took my face between his hands. ‘Marco, these bastards frame or clear people just as they see fit and to hell with the law. The same lousy bunch that fucked us all over, our entire generation.’

  ‘So?’

  He let go of my face. ‘So, for once in our lives, we get even with them.’

  Signora Gianna welcomed us with a smirk. ‘So you’ve come back to see that pair of dykes again, have you?’