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The Colombian Mule

Page 12

by Massimo Carlotto


  ‘Don’t keep me waiting too long. I’m short of cash.’

  Rossini smirked. ‘Don’t tell me you’ve already got through that roll you had stashed in the chair leg.’

  La Tía shook her head in disappointment. ‘Searching our room displays a real lack of respect.’

  ‘We’re truly sorry. We didn’t realize we were dealing with such a sensitive flower.’

  The waiter was going from table to table waving a cordless phone and asking the diners if there was a Signor Roberto present. Celegato raised his arm.

  ‘Hola,’ said La Tía.

  ‘The other day, you just vanished.’

  ‘Playing it safe, hombre, that’s all.’

  ‘And today you’re late.’

  ‘Actually, no, I’m not. I’ve decided we’ll do the handover another way.’

  ‘Why? You were the one who wanted the meeting here.’

  ‘And now I want it someplace else. I never met you before and, for all I know, you could have turned up with the drug squad in tow.’

  ‘I’m on my own,’ Celegato snarled.

  ‘So much the better. I left a package at the bar for you. You’ll find it contains a radio-transmitter. Take the autostrada for Mestre and switch it on. Someone will get in touch, don’t worry.’

  Max and I were waiting in the toll plaza. As soon as we saw Celegato’s yellow Saab flash past, closely followed by the cops’ Fiat Ducato, we started tailing them, Max driving my Skoda while I took Beniamino’s car.

  Meanwhile, twenty kilometers away, Rossini was waiting on an overpass.

  I called him on his cell phone. ‘Celegato’s on his way—and he’s not alone.’

  Then I took hold of the radio-transmitter tuned to the one Celegato had picked up at the restaurant.

  ‘Roberto?’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘In a few minutes you’ll come to overpass number thirty-nine. Pull onto the shoulder as soon as you’ve passed it, take the case containing the cash, get out of your car and await further instructions.’

  Celegato did exactly what he had been told, while the Fiat Ducato continued for another 150 meters before pulling over and hiding in an unlit rest area. Max and I stopped our cars a short distance before the overpass and observed the scene through binoculars.

  Celegato walked back along the hard shoulder looking up at the overpass, and stopped the moment he saw Rossini, wearing a balaclava and armed with a hunting rifle, suddenly appear at the railing above him. Using a length of cord, Rossini lowered the small ivory-colored bag containing the cocaine. Celegato took the bag, opened it, produced a switchblade, and pushed it into one of the sachets of coke. He tasted the drug with the tip of his tongue, running it over his gums. He then attached his briefcase to the cord. Rossini hauled up the case, checked its contents, and signaled to Celegato that he was free to go.

  Max drove off to tail Celegato, while I stopped under the overpass to pick up Old Rossini. So far everything had worked like a dream.

  Cars were passing at such speed that nobody could have gotten a clear picture of anything happening on the ground. The overpass trick was getting a bit old, but it was still pretty neat. You could monitor what was going on from above, and if anything went wrong you had a clear escape route. Ever since a series of morons with nothing to do on Saturday nights had taken to hurling rocks onto passing cars, the highways authority had numbered the overpasses. This had made things much easier, enabling us to tell the dealer precisely where to pull up. Max the Memory had come up with a good plan.

  I didn’t have to wait long before I saw Rossini squeezing through a gap in the wire netting he had cut an hour or so earlier. He chucked the rifle and the money on the back seat and removed his balaclava. ‘Move over, I’ll drive,’ he said.

  I was happy to let him take the wheel, and called Max.

  ‘What’s happening?’

  ‘It’s all under control. The van’s doing about a hundred and ten kilometers an hour, so it’s easy to follow. Take over from me in about ten kilometers . . . Hang on a sec . . . they’re slowing down . . . Shit . . . they’re turning off, taking the Cessalto exit.’

  ‘You go straight ahead. We’ll take it from here.’

  When we reached the Cessalto toll plaza, we saw Celegato’s Saab and the white police van parked just the other side of the toll booths. We didn’t want to drive past them so, to gain time, Beniamino pretended he had mislaid his wallet and asked the drowsy tollbooth attendant to bear with him. We saw Stefano Giaroli, the Guardia di Finanza marshal whose flat we had searched, get out of the van, walk over to the Saab, and climb in alongside Celegato. They then got back onto the autostrada, travelling in the opposite direction, heading towards Udine. The van took off along a smaller road to Treviso. We quickly found our money, paid up, and tailed the Saab. We couldn’t get too close, so I kept my eyes riveted on their tail lights, using a pair of twilight-factor luminosity Steiner binoculars that Max had lent me.

  I asked Max to catch up with us. Another car might come in useful. When they left the autostrada at Udine, there was no longer any room for doubt as to their destination.

  Rossini fiddled with his bracelets. ‘They’re heading for Gia­roli’s place for a little nap.’

  I put the binoculars back in their stiff rubber case. ‘This means we’ll have to tail them tomorrow as well.’

  ‘When Max gets here, we’ll dump the rifle and the cash in the Skoda and park it right alongside the Carabinieri headquarters, just to be sure no car radio thieves get any bright ideas. Then the three of us can make ourselves comfortable under Giaroli’s condo and wait till they take off again with the drugs.’

  ‘What if they split up?’

  ‘We follow whoever’s got the coke.’

  It was during Max’s watch, at about six-thirty, that Celegato and Giaroli came out of the main door of the building. Celegato, carrying the canvas bag containing the coke, got into the Saab and moved off. Giaroli followed him in his dark-blue Clio. It was a freezing cold morning and the roads were covered in ice and jammed with cars and trucks. We succeeded in tailing Celegato and Giaroli without drawing attention to ourselves or ever completely losing sight of them.

  From Udine they headed north, and after a few kilometers drove into the village of Tricesimo. For a moment, we had been worried they might be making for the Austrian border. Celegato pulled up outside the village primary school. Giaroli hung back, halting roughly fifty meters from the school, on the opposite side of the road. Max, Rossini and I had no choice but to follow developments from a considerable distance, through the powerful zoom lens on Max’s videocamera. It was just before seven.

  A woman arrived on a bicycle. She stopped next to the yellow Saab, took the canvas bag from Celegato and placed it in the basket on her handlebars, then calmly pushed her bike over to the school gate and unlocked it. Celegato’s Saab then disappeared around a bend, followed by Giaroli in his Clio.

  ‘They’ve gone. They must be using the school janitor as a courier,’ Max remarked as he put the videocamera back in its case. ‘Which means that, unlike us, they must already know exactly where the coke is headed. We’re going to have to keep tracking it, I’m afraid.’

  Old Rossini surveyed our surroundings. ‘There’s no way we can stay here. Tricesimo is just a village and we’d attract attention. And we certainly can’t follow her in a car. We’re going to have to use a bicycle.’

  At that point I asked the wrong question. ‘Which one of us is going to pedal his way through this freezing cold?’

  My two associates turned towards me with an identical smirk.

  ‘Why me? I haven’t been on a bike since I was a kid.’

  ‘You’re the best athlete,’ Beniamino joked. ‘And the youngest,’ Max added. Then they burst out laughing.

  We drove through the village and on to Tarcento where I bought a mou
ntain bike with every imaginable accessory. I rode it a couple of times around the square just to get used to the way it handled. We returned to Tricesimo with the bike in the trunk and, at midday, when the kids came out, I started cycling up and down.

  A quarter of an hour later, the caretaker locked the school gate and got on her bike. I followed her, leaving a distance of about thirty meters between us. She stopped to buy some bread and then headed towards the outskirts of the village. Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed Giaroli’s blue Clio parked up a side road. The woman’s house couldn’t be far off.

  Twenty or thirty meters further on, the woman stopped at an old, tastefully renovated farmhouse surrounded by a large garden. A big, long-haired dog lolloped up to greet her, wagging its tail. She stroked and patted it as she closed the gate behind her.

  I couldn’t hang around there. Giaroli might see me from where he was parked. Searching for a place from which to keep an eye on the farmhouse I noticed a large abandoned villa a bit further up the hill. I rode up to it, leant the bike against the back wall and climbed in through a window. It was empty and clearly hadn’t been lived in for a long time. I went upstairs and found a room that, using the binoculars Max had given me, provided a clear view over both the farmhouse and Giaroli’s car.

  I called Max, explained the situation, and we agreed to check in every half hour. The intense cold was becoming unbearable and I had to make frequent recourse to a bottle of Calvados that I’d had the foresight to bring along.

  At two-thirty in the afternoon, a red Seat Córdoba pulled up at the farmhouse. A well-built though not particularly tall man got out of the car, unlocked the gate, and crossed the garden. The woman greeted him with a hug and then a kiss on the mouth. He took off his cap and responded with passion. For a fraction of a second, a Guardia di Finanza badge glinted in the sun. I refocused my binoculars on his uniform to discover his rank: he was a marshal. The dog nosed its way between the two lovers and the man patted it. I refocused on the dark-blue Clio. From a reflection inside Giaroli’s car it was clear he was photographing the touching scene.

  I swore through clenched teeth. Things were beginning to make sense. Mixed up in this whole mess, there was now this Guardia di Finanza marshal who at some point had started playing for the other team. This was going to make everything a whole lot more complicated, not just for us but for Corradi too: it was clear he was just an expendable pawn in a game where he didn’t know the rules.

  I was now looking at a cops-on-cops job. If we let ourselves get caught in the crossfire of a special operation involving police and Finanza, it could cost us our freedom, everything. The only sensible thing to do was to beat an orderly retreat and leave Nazzareno to his fate. The trouble was that Beniamino and Max would never agree to that. And nor could I.

  I took a long swig of Calvados and lit a cigarette. I was just so fucking terrified of going back to prison, and wondered what the hell I could do to stave off that fear. ‘Stick it up your ass’ I told myself angrily. I would never make it through another spell in prison but I had known that all along. The day I walked free, I swore I would never go back. But Corradi had never had anything to do with coke trafficking and there was no way he deserved to die in prison just to satisfy a cop’s appetite for revenge. He had been tried and cleared for the killing of the two patrolmen in Caorle and that was that. The cops should stick to the rules. Apart from that, as an investigator, once you’ve taken on a case, you can’t just walk away. Then there was Corradi’s girl: Victoria didn’t deserve to lose her man forever. I had no option. These were the cards I had been dealt and I would have to play them as best I could. To hell with the cops and magistrates.

  Giaroli’s Renault slowly reversed back down the side road. Once again, they obviously knew where the coke was headed from here. All they were doing at this stage was keeping an eye on the situation and gathering some trial evidence.

  The man came back out of the farmhouse, wearing a tracksuit and a pair of sandals. He was carrying a bowl full of food which he put down for the dog. This was his home all right. I took a better look at the buildings. There were signs of recent and costly remodelling. Tuscan terracotta tiles had been used to repave the portico, and the steps had been resurfaced with Verona marble. On the salaries that a school janitor and a Finanza marshal earned, they could never have afforded such luxury.

  I recontacted my colleagues and gave them a description of the marshal’s car, promising to call them again the moment he made a move. I checked the Calvados bottle, counted my cigarettes, and hoped something would happen before too long.

  The marshal stepped out of the house at four o’clock. He had swapped his sandals for a pair of trainers and was now wearing a brightly colored down jacket over his tracksuit. He placed the canvas bag in the trunk of the car and drove away, giving a neighbor a big, friendly wave as he sailed past.

  The marshal was feeling confident. Nobody was going to pull him over and search his car. If he came to a roadblock, he would just flash his badge. Of course, had he known his colleagues were polishing a nice pair of made-to-measure handcuffs for him, he would have been less chirpy. But for now he had no reason to feel under any threat. He was committing the classic mistake all cops make when they turn to crime: they think they’re untouchable, and so start making a whole series of blunders that in the end give them away.

  Bent cops are tolerated by their peers, just as long as they don’t get sloppy, and, above all, provided they never forget they’re in uniform.

  ‘He’s moving. Heading for Udine,’ I told Max.

  ‘Okay. Slip out the back. We’ll pick you up on the corner of the road that runs parallel.’

  Rossini stopped the car just long enough for me to clamber aboard. ‘Let’s just hope we don’t lose him,’ he grumbled.

  We caught up with the marshal’s Seat a few kilometers further on, near the turning for Pagnacco. He was driving carefully, staying within the speed limit. After Udine, he followed the main road for Gorizia, turning off at San Giovanni al Natisone. As he passed a filling station, the cops’ Fiat Ducato suddenly appeared out of nowhere and started following him. The marshal drove on until Corno di Rosazzo, a little village close to the Slovenian border, famous for its excellent wines. He continued through the village center and then swung through a gate and into the grounds of a small villa surrounded by vineyards. The van drove further up the hill before turning into the drive of a farmhouse.

  Rossini smoothed his moustache. ‘That’s their monitoring base. This operation must have been going on a while. The marshal is in tight with a sizeable outfit, otherwise his colleagues would already have arrested him.’

  Night fell very suddenly and we needed to get closer to the villa. I had an idea. ‘We could try going through the vineyards.’

  Max shook his head. ‘The cops would pick us up with their infra-red binoculars.’

  Rossini pointed to wood of beech trees just outside the cops’ line of vision. ‘From those trees we’ll be able to keep an eye on the gate and the front door.’

  We were forced to make a long detour through the fields but it was worth it. Old Rossini had calculated right. It was a safe position with an excellent view. We began to spy on the villa using our binoculars and videocamera. Two Alsatian dogs were roaming around the garden, without ever attempting to go out of the gate: this meant they were trained and dangerous. The landlord clearly didn’t like intruders.

  In the distance, we saw the headlights of a car approaching. A black BMW with Croatian plates pulled up alongside the marshal’s red Seat. Three men got out. The front door of the villa opened and a man strode towards them, whistling at the dogs, calling them to heel. The four men greeted one another and remained in the light of the porch just long enough for us to get a good look at their faces.

  ‘They look like old acquaintances,’ Rossini commented.

  ‘I recognize three of them,’ I said. �
�Apart from Bruno Celegato, I can make out Ennio Silvestrin and Alcide Boscaro. Veterans of the old Brenta Mafia. Even back then, they were involved in drugs. But I don’t know who the other guy is, the one dressed like a ladies’ man.’

  Rossini cackled, apparently pretty pleased with himself.

  ‘Gentlemen, let me present Vlatko Kupreskic, the Croatian chemist. He’s freelance, works for whoever pays best. He has refined heroin for Russians, Chechens, Calabresi . . .’

  The door closed and the men disappeared from view. I lowered my binoculars. ‘What the fuck is a chemist doing in a coke trafficking ring?’

  Max lit a cigarette. ‘I’ll tell you exactly what he’s doing. What we’re looking at is a drugs factory. In that villa they’re manufacturing ecstasy, or rather super-ecstasy: sulphur, cocaine, amphetamine and caffeine. A bomb of a psycho-stimulant. And a kilo of coke is enough to make quite a few tabs of that stuff.’

  ‘It’s the latest thing,’ Beniamino added, ‘with a market price of fifty thousand lire a tab.’

  Max pointed at the farmhouse where the cops were camped out. ‘The way they’re going about things, it looks to me like they’re intending to blow the whole organization apart.’

  ‘Fine,’ I said sourly. ‘The problem is, what the hell do we do now?’

  We drove back to Udine and picked up my Skoda. Then we headed for Jesolo. Rossini and Max were in Rossini’s car a couple of kilometers ahead of me. Max had his cell phone at the ready to contact me if there were any police roadblocks, but there weren’t.

  La Tía was happy to get her hands on the money. She and Aisa were getting ready to go out. ‘You’ll excuse us if we don’t hang around but I have a meeting with a new client.’

  A look of mock disappointment flitted across Rossini’s face.

  ‘Such a pity! We were really hoping to invite you two ladies to dinner and then take you dancing all night.’

 

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